Don Bantz: Self-Evaluation: 2007-08

My fifth year as provost was a remarkably busy, challenging, yet productive year. We completed the decanal accreditation self-study, initiated faculty collective bargaining, responded to ongoing external pressures (planned and implemented a new MEd program within a one-year time frame and began planning for the new Performance Agreement contract with the state), welcomed three new curriculum deans, completed a ten successful faculty searches, an external Library Dean search, and relocated our offices to Seminar II to accommodate the Evans Library building construction. We made substantive progress on our strategic plan priorities e.g., strategic enrollment, sustainability, diversity, and fund-raising. Winter and spring quarters were seasons of discontent as anti-war protests and a student sit-in tore at the fabric of our community.

The Self-Study http://www2.evergreen.edu/wikis/selfstudy/index.php?title=Evergreen_Self_Study_Wiki

The Self-Study was an enormous undertaking. The provost’s staff did an incredible job- Dan was the diligent and persistent master of the mysterious and shape-shifting Wiki, Julie the coordinator extraordinaire, Laura the insightful data wizard/translator, Spencer-our student worker-was terrific, and John McLain added his word-smith talent. A special thanks to Matt Smith, who gave up a year of teaching to serve as the lead writer and to the eight key-point persons, each of whom wrote a chapter of the report- John Carmichael, Rita Pougiales, Paul Smith, Lee Lyttle/Sarah Pedersen, John Hurley/Collin Orr, and Steve Hunter. I wrote Standard One for the Self-Study, a portion of which is relevant and included here:

The mission is prominent in college publications but, more importantly, it has sustained an ongoing faculty conversation at the heart of the Self-Study i.e., what it means to be a "public" "interdisciplinary" "liberal arts" "college." This faculty conversation is occurring at the same time the Washington Higher Education Coordinating Board's (HECB) Master Plan calls for a significant increase in baccalaureate degree production to align with state workforce needs…The process of developing and reinforcing the mission and goals of the college over the past several years has allowed the faculty and administration to think hard about what the college is and to create a vocabulary that allows us to articulate the college's mission in a way that can be understood by external agencies.

Evergreen's Master In Teaching (MIT) accreditation visit in October 2007 was a case study of this challenge and demonstrates how an ability to clearly articulate our goals helps the college achieve strong career preparation in the context of a liberal arts education. The Professional Educator Standards board (PESB) accreditation standards were geared for graduate professional schools of education, including strict standards for centralized assessment and clear expectations that programs demonstrate "positive impact on student learning." There were clear cross-cultural communication issues at play between the accreditation team and Evergreen during the entire four-day visit as Evergreen simply did not fit the standard teach-to-the-test mold. Gradually, as they met with various stakeholder groups on campus and in the community, the team began to translate and ultimately to understand. At the exit interview, the accreditation team leader indicated that the MIT program met all of the accreditation standards and cited the program as exemplary in six areas. They stated that Evergreen was one of the few programs in the state that met all of the strict Section 2 standards which include learner expectations, an assessment system, use of data for program improvement and positive impact on student learning. They complimented the staff and the faculty for the design and delivery of a teacher educator program that turns out well-trained educators as evidenced by the team’s interviews with local school superintendents, principals, teachers, and MIT graduates. Evergreen's ongoing challenge, as evidenced by the MIT accreditation visit, is to retain its founding mandate, its mission, and its distinctive interdisciplinary liberal arts competence while complying with increased regulatory and accountability requirements.

The Self-Study affirms and clarifies Evergreen’s mission and strategic initiatives, asserts that we excel at reflective thinking, provides evidence thereof, and presents a comprehensive narrative of our culture, history, and pedagogy.  The concluding chapter, a synopsis of the report, speaks to our challenges, successes, and tensions and maintains that “Evergreen is still Evergreen.” The Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities will send an accreditation team to visit campus on October 6-8, 2008.  I look forward to a similar conversation with them.    

Collective Bargaining

While I cannot disclose much about the faculty collective bargaining negotiations, I can report that-to date-it has been a civil and productive discussion. Both sides have put Evergreen core values at the forefront and, while we are just now getting into the tough issues and the crux of the contract, I remain hopeful that we will reach an agreement during fall quarter. Whatever the contract looks like, it appears that we may need to re-tool the faculty handbook to include only those issues that remain outside of the union contract.  The Self-Study speaks to the Evergreen’s creative tensions that have never been resolved e.g., the tension between community and faculty autonomy has always been a challenge at Evergreen i.e., how to honor faculty autonomy while maintaining faculty accountability for their collective responsibilities to staff the curriculum including first-year seats. The contract must address these tensions and create more precise behaviors, procedures, and rules for both parties. The imposition of rules implies monitoring and enforcement thereof, and from management’s viewpoint, we hope the contract will include clear, simple-to-administer policies that minimize the need for increased administrative oversight.

The External Authoring Environment

Simultaneously, as we negotiate a faculty collective bargaining contract, we must negotiate a Performance Agreement with the state of Washington per new legislation and do so within an extremely short time frame in the context of a pending economic downturn and the lack of clear direction from the authorizing authorities (legislature, OFM, HECB) to define the scope, content, and form of these respective performance agreements.  We witnessed the precursor to this new environment when we were directed by our “external authorizing environment” in December, 2006 to add new enrollments to our 07-09 budget request and to add them in “high-demand[1]” areas which for us meant teacher education and health sciences.  It was a major undertaking for a primarily undergraduate institution to plan, obtain approvals, staff-up, and deliver a new graduate curriculum within a one-year time frame and to balance the professional requirements with our liberal arts mission and core values, but we did. Walter Niemiec, Sherry Walton, Magda Costantino, and John McLain did the heavy-lifting for us and remarkably we will be admitting our first MEd class this summer and may even meet our enrollment target in the first year.       

Faculty Hiring

We had another busy year of faculty hiring with eleven successful hires.  During my five-year tenure as provost, we have processed approximately 3,000 applications for 41 continuing faculty positions (an average of 70 applicants per position), interviewed some 125 faculty, and made 41 continuing faculty hires.  This has always been one of the most satisfying aspects of the job and I am happy to report that the future of the college is in good hands.  The faculty hires and disciplines, by planning unit/venue, are shown at the end of this report for the period 2003-04 to 2007-08.  According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the percentage of Evergreen’s faculty of color (25%) far exceeds the other Washington public baccalaureates (the closest 4-year baccalaureate is UW at 14%) and is second only to Heritage College at 26%.  http://chronicle.com/premium/stats/race/2007/index.php   After five years, all but one of the above 41 hires are still at Evergreen. I acknowledge Rita Pougiales (and Jan Sharkey)   for her work as faculty Hiring Dean as she leaves the deanery and returns to the faculty. In late spring, the Hiring Priorities DTF completed its work and presented its list of priorities for the next two years which was approved by the faculty.   

Two distinct and reoccurring themes emerge during my interviews with faculty candidates over the years, cited by them as major factors in their decision to accept the position.  First, they invariable say that Evergreen students are the most engaged, inquisitive, and involved they have ever seen. Second, they are impressed with the collegiality of Evergreen faculty and how much they enjoy and are enthused about their work and their love of teaching within our interdisciplinary learning community environment.  I interpret these observations as two key indicators of Evergreen’s success as an educational institution and keep them at the forefront of my decision-making processes.

Strategic Priorities

During the past three years we have completed the Strategic Plan (05-07), the Campus Master Plan (06-07), and the decanal Accreditation Self-Study (07-08). The Strategic Plan was utilized to guide budget priorities for the 2007-09 biennium and again to formulate the 2009-11 budget request.  It was also used to craft “dashboard” indicators or metrics to assess progress towards the strategic plan priorities on an annual basis and the Vice Presidents used the Strategic Plan to determine the biennial budget priorities in 05-07 and again to guide the budget process for 09-11. The Campus Master Plan drove the capital budget request and, for the first time, we linked our capital budget requests to private fund raising for the Center for Creative and Applied Media (CCAM) e.g., we secured matching money from OFM and an additional legislative appropriation which- combined with money re-directed from the capital minor works program, a commitment from college reserves, and private fund raising-secured the funding to construct and equip the Center. In the next biennium, we will again leverage capital public funds with private fund raising to complete the farm/greenhouse/agriculture lab/sustainability initiatives.

Salaries are a top strategic priority.  We completed the Exempt Compensation Plan and will implement the first phase by September 1 2008 towards a long range goal.  Evergreen continues to deepen and strengthen its sustainability and diversity work.  The sustainability task force evolved into a more permanent institutionalized structure with operational budget support for a coordinator. The President and Vice Presidents combined with the grass root efforts, inter-divisional collaboration across all four divisions. This effort has brought together students, faculty, staff, and community in a remarkable collaborative effort. We are in the process of cultivating congressional support for the Curriculum for the Bioregion project.  Increased recognition for our work is one indicator of progress.  Three recent examples: AASE (Runner up); The Daily Green (#3 of top 12 green campus), Grist magazine (top 15 green campuses).  It’s not nearly enough, we have a long way to go to reach zero waste and carbon neutrality, but we are making progress every year.  Indicators of our diversity work include: the diversity series speakers/texts were more prominent in our curriculum; retention rates for students of color are as good as for other Evergreen students; the support for low-income, disabled, and first generation students has increased, faculty diversity (above) continues to remain strong, the President charged a standing committee on diversity and equity, Academics added summer institutes on race, disability and diversity and our NSF S-STEM biochemistry grant is reaching the underrepresented students we intended it to reach: students of color (38.5%), low income (69.2% below poverty; 69.2% Pell recipients), first generation (38.5%), female (53.8%) and its participants are persisting at enviable rates in biochemistry studies (76.9%), in STEM fields (92.3%), and at the college (92.3%) and despite their traditionally underrepresented backgrounds in college and in STEM studies, the scholarship participants are exceeding by large margins the persistence rates of Evergreen’s total biochemistry cohort.

Despite softening enrollments throughout Washington state, Evergreen’s fall 2008 enrollments were up and we are poised to admit the largest freshmen class in our history. Our Strategic Enrollment Plan-and the implementation thereof through the work of Enrollment Services and the Strategic Enrollment Group-was quite successful. Except for the elite colleges and universities, enrollment management may be the biggest issue facing higher education nationwide, especially in the northeast and midwest, absent new-and massive-federal investments. The influx of freshmen means that we must put increased emphasis on our first-year and lower division programs. The First Year DTF report included 42 recommendations several of which were implemented in 2007-08 including the Beginning the Journey (now called Community Connections) program.  A cross divisional work group (Academics and Students Affairs) met to prioritize the recommendations to include 1) a vision/implementation plan, 2) better collaboration between the two divisions, 3) a coordinator, and 4) assessment of reading, writing, and quantitative reasoning skills. Faculty are actively working on a First Year Cohort structure to begin in fall 2009 and experimenting with peer mentors for 2008-09.   

Three proposals emerged from the Curricular Visions DTF and are in various stages of implementation: 1) First Year Cohort to improve the First Year Student Experience 2) Fields of Study to better articulate and translate Evergreen’s unique curriculum to prospective students on the college’s web site, and 3) Thematic Planning areas to deepen faculty commitments to interdisciplinary programs.

The Provost’s desk

As provost, I supervise, mentor, coach, and evaluate twenty-six deans, directors, and professional staff (eight Academic Deans, four Graduate Program Directors, six Public Service Center Directors, two off-campus Directors, and six professional staff). This encompasses a wide span of graduate professional, undergraduate liberal arts, and off-site culturally distinct programs. Given our system of rotating deans and directors, team-building is an integral and ongoing part of the work and it is a joy to be surrounded by so many gifted people.  I now find myself as the “senior” provost in terms of tenure for the six public baccalaureates institutions in Washington and assuming an increasing leadership role in the Inter-institutional Committee of Academic Officers (ICAO) and statewide higher education policy development.

Over the past four years, Academics managed an average of 51 grants and $3.5 million per year.  We expanded the Enduring Legacies program (Reservation-Based-Program) to include two new statewide partners (Antioch and Northwest Indian College) to reach-back and strengthen the K-12 pipeline as a result of Gates Foundation funding who joined our original funder, Lumina Foundation. A new NSF grant will continue the ongoing development of culturally relevant case studies curriculum for the program. The Tacoma campus welcomed a new director, Artee Young, and has a strong cadre of continuing faculty and a commitment to deepen their curriculum in several new areas. Our public service centers were quite active this year, far too much to report in this document. A few highlights; The Longhouse continues its Native arts re-granting activities with support from the Ford Foundation; the Evergreen Center for Educational Improvement added the MEd program to their repertoire, the Labor Center’s new legislative appropriation enabled them to add two new labor educator/field organizer positions one focusing on unions and immigrant workers the other on union and community women. The Center for Community Based Learning and Action extended their reach into the community and the curriculum and assumed oversight of the Gateways program. The Northwest Indian Applied Research Institute celebrated an historic event i.e., the signatures of 44 nations on the United League of Indigenous Nations Treaty to establish an international political and economic alliance. The Washington Center deepened its national work on learning communities and interdisciplinary assessment.

In closing, a few comments from my perspective re: the seasons of discontent. I am personally thankful for students’ courage to protest the war, the increasing disparity of wealth, and to stand for social justice.  Many expressed concern that the rhetoric felt more hostile this year. Perhaps it was because the stakes were so high or that the frustrations felt by many us as citizens during the past eight years, combined with the reading material assigned by our faculty, heightened the sense of urgency. I appreciate the willingness of those who put their entire body-mind-spirit into their activism but remain conflicted by faculty who counseled students to break the law or deliberately violate college policies.  While I appreciate the sentiments of challenging “unjust laws,” as a college official, I must enforce them. Evergreen has been extremely supportive of this principle of Academic freedom but courts have clearly ruled that Academic freedom is not paramount in the case of public records requests and I remain convinced that public disclosure laws protect citizens from the abuse of power.  Similarly, I was disheartened at attempts to silence voices (shouting down opponents in public fora, stealing Cooper Point Journals off the newsstands) and blatant truthiness on the part of some students.  As an educator I do not agree that these means justify the ends sought.  I am however pleased that Evergreen’s tradition as an oppositional culture (see Self-Study) is alive and well as is our hallmark- a willingness to engage and dialogue on difficult issues and to learn from the experience. I say, to those individuals both internally and externally who judge us harshly and critically, that this year has been a remarkable learning experience for all parties. We still have much to do, as a community, to foster meaningful dialogue in the upcoming year. And we are up to the task, let Evergreen be Evergreen.  

Faculty Hires   

Kevin Francis, Philosophy of Science (SI)

Mark Harrison, Theater (EWS)

Tony Zaragoza, Pol. Econ. of Racism (SPBC)

Glenn Landrum, Business: Quant. (SPBC)

LydiaMcKinstry, Organic Chemistry (SI)

2004-05

Steve Scheuerell, Eco-Agriculture (ES)

Dylan Fischer, Forest Ecology (ES)

Alison Styring, Mammalogy/Ornithology (ES)

Rachel Hastings, Math/Linguistics (SI)

Paul McMillin, Reference Librarian

Anita Lenges, Math Educator (MIT)

Maria Bastaki, Environmental Health (MES)

Elizabeth Williamson, Renaissance Lit. (CTL)

Lara Evans, Art History (EA)

Zoltan Grossman, Nat. Am. Studies (NAWIPS)

Julia Zay Digital Media (EA)

Amy Gould, Public Administration (MPA)

2005-06

Kathleen Eamon, Philosophy (CTL)

Paul McCreary, Math (Tacoma)

Nelson Pizarro, Business (SPBC)

Karen Gaul, Sustainability Studies (ES)    

Ben Simon, Health Science (SI)

Mike Paros, Health Science (SI)

Jules Unsel, Reference Librarian

Clarissa Dirks, Biology (SI)

Matt Hamon, Photography/Visual Arts (EA)

Janet Mobus, Business (SPBC) 

Bruce Davies, Tribal Government (MPA)

06-07

Krishna Chowdary, Physics and Applied Mathematics (SI)

Chauncey Herbison, African-American Studies (CTL)

Mingxia Li, Biomedical Health (Tacoma)

Rob Smurr, Russian History (CTL)

Eric Stein, Cultural Anthropology (CTL)

07-08

Nancy Anderson, Public Health (EWS)

Ulrike Krotscheck, Classics (CTL)

Rob Esposito, Modern Dance (EA)

Grace Huerta, ESL (MEd)

Zoe Van Schyndel, Business (SPBC)

Gregg Sapp, Library Dean

Jon Davies, Literacy (MIT)

Jennifer Gerend, Land Use (ES)

Savina Chowdhury, Feminist Econ. (SPBC)

David Shaw, Business (SPBC)

Diego Agosta, Spanish (CTL)

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