- Establish explicit Board and President priorities
- Reflect established priorities in all schedules, plans, and budgets
- Clarify college’s mission and concentrate on offerings and services consistent with that
mission - Reduce level of expenditures on “non-mission” areas, at least to a break-even point
- Encourage better student attendance if funding is linked to enrollment
- Investigate lower-cost course delivery options
- Establish decision-making process that delineates authorities and accountabilities
- Institute comprehensive and ongoing review process to assess program priorities
effectiveness, and operations - Define decision-making chain of command to be followed during financial crisis
- Develop and implement incentives for departments to share resources
- Establish a minimum size for instructional departments; consolidate those below the minimum size
- Cut level of travel
- Promote better cross-utilization of personnel
- Eliminate or consolidate duplicative functions
- Develop optimal mix of full-time and part-time faculty
- Offer no new tenure track appointments for a limited time period (e.g., six months or one year)
- Review workloads to ensure that full-time employees are assigned full work loads
- Undertake a zero-based approach to determining staffing requirements
- Review all lawsuits and legal costs to contain legal/case/settlement costs
- Discontinue or decrease paying for administrators and faculty to go to conferences
- Restrict employee parties
There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, learning and failure. - General Colin L. Powell, The Black Collegian
Policies are developed over decades at colleges and universities. With time, they become onerous to stay on top of. They warrant periodic reviews regarding their relevancy, particularly given changing times, economic circumstances, and strategic importance.
ReplyDeleteThese Policy Making ideas focus on setting priorities linked to mission, focusing on high-priority issues at the Board level, expediting decision-making, improving budgeting, and allocating resources appropriately.