How to write better assignments (and learn more, too)

I'm sharing a link today entitled "How Students Can Write Better Assignments" from UnknownProfessor on the blog "Financial Rounds".  It's a couple of years old, almost, but I don't think these types of things really go out of date.

Enjoy.

"UnknownProfessor" cites his inspiration as "The Unknown Comic" from The Gong Show.  Here's a sample of that guy's work.

Hey, students: Prereqs matter! Don't leave home without them...

In grading my summer course midterms, I'm starting to again see how prereqs make the difference.  In my financial policy class, for example, I can determine who has taken the prerequisite course and who isn't by simply looking at the midterm scores.  One person obviously got credit for taking an undergrad class many years ago, so they had no clue about some of the material and how it fit together.  Several other students came straight from a STEM background and have no clue how accounting and econ and finance work.  Even though they may know their fields, they aren't prepared to cultivate an understanding of financial economics at the firm level without a lot of remediation on their part.  In financial statements analysis the undergrads are better prepared in many ways because they at least know what they don't know (and have one Intermediate Accounting under their belts).

Unfortunately, this isn't a new trend, and summer course grade distributions just seem to get worse and worse each year.  Ultimately the burden lies with the student, and those who are willing to prepare reap the benefits every time.  Summer is tough enough as it is.

The Great Sell Out: Faculty leadership at UHCL continues to sell out by the numbers, enabling abusive administrators

Sunlight is the best disinfectant, so here we go...

[Note: This was written back in the Spring of 2015, and little has changed just because it's summer.]

Last semester [Fall 2014] saw the latest salvo in a growing trend at Bayou U. - the faculty senate leadership threatened several times to "end run" faculty on governance committees in order to get some changes that they wanted.  Or, rather, that the university administrators wanted.  For the first time in a long time, Faculty Senate Executive Committee (FSEC) has started setting the agenda by siding with administrators without even really trying to conceal it, without any shame.  They're now working proactively to undermine legitimate faculty concerns.

I guess we should have seen it coming.  Last spring in Faculty Assembly we saw a faculty climate survey where the faculty leadership swept all of the free-form comments received under the rug.  It was done to "protect anonymity."  Sure.  So... once again nothing controversial came out of it - we got some generalities back from the folks who did the analysis.  The most important thing was that nothing shocking came out of it.  All of the faculty here are happy and in line ... and the exceptional faculty who keep leaving were really happy here, too...

We're FSEC, let's make up university policy as we go!

Last year in senate we had two members of faculty leadership completely do an end-run around a senate committee on faculty workload policy, to the extent that their version had already been shopped around for administrative approval before bringing it to senate as an alternative to the committee's document that represented months of effort.  Go back and read that again if it isn't clear.

It's tough to sell out pre-emptively, but I think that's what we're looking at there. A reactionary sell-out.  Finally an "ad hoc" committee was created in order to solicit input on the workload issue, which nobody really thought needed major changes in the first place (except administrators).  (Flashback:  We got an "ad hoc" committee on proctoring in order to kill that issue at the university level, starting in summer of 2011 - that led to the School of Business confrontation that I outlined here last spring.  That university-level committee has not produced any results as of Feb. 2015, and it remains bogged down with legal questions that School of Business answered for itself and its students in December of 2013.)

In Fall 2014 a similar "end run" was tried regarding a proposed accessibility policy - the threat was that a different committee would get to look at it if the university Curriculum and Teaching committee (C and T) didn't pass it, or that a whole new committee would be created in order to review such things.  See, there are folks on the Curriculum and Teaching committee (myself included) who actually read things and think through the consequences of passing new and unnecessary regulations.  We actually read the proposals put before us and consider whether all constituencies have been consulted appropriately.  

For example, when a School of Education counseling undergraduate program was proposed the committee had concerns about demand and whether the counseling faculty had worked closely with the psychology faculty in HSH in order to make sure that there wouldn't be damage to other programs.  Then we heard that this was different from psychological counseling - it was DRUG counseling, and HSH didn't have any programs like that.  There still was no demand for the program described, other than some vagaries.  We asked, again, for details of the analysis that was done in the School of Education in support of this proposal and we were told to pound sand - basically, the proposing faculty member said that since the coordinating board didn't require such things the committee couldn't ask for it either.  After the SoE faculty on the committee and other members got bullied enough in-house we eventually sent it up to senate, but before C and T voted on it there was talk of passing it off to "some other committee."  Well, in UHCL's shared governance system there is only ONE committee that looks at new programs and minor proposals, etc.  That would be C and T.  Creating another committee, although it's become the norm for this senate leadership to circumvent the system, would still be "highly irregular" in shared governance terms.  .  

When the shared governance system was revised in 2006 (I was there) the administration at the time conspired to stack all of the shared governance committees with administrators and their direct reports.  Consequently, faculty are terribly outnumbered on every shared governance committee, except one.  That one is C and T, the single arm of the senate that gets to review everything that could deal with 1) curriculum, or 2) teaching, prior to passing it to a senate vote. Because of this we have to consider all of the ramifications of a particular action, not just those that impact us personally (although in the accessibility instance my main problems were with the online QA procedure and how it has been and will be applied by non-faculty evaluators).  When C and T had questions about a re-do of the university's online course policy, the one that passed University Council on Valentine's Day 2013, a separate "ad hoc" committee was formed for that one (online courses), too, and then a special committee was formed for the accessibility policy, separately.  Both were really created in order to make sure that one or the other ended up bullying online faculty through the QA policy and the online programs office.  After all, if they can bully online faculty enough then those courses might end up being designed to be easier than other classes at the university.

What now?

The latest "thing" is that FSEC has taken upon itself, without any prompting from anyone else (in faculty, that is) to ask whether we need to redesign the Faculty Senate Constitution, again.  It was last done in 2006, along with the rest of UHCL Shared Governance, and the resulting structure, unfortunately, still means that questions of academic importance (curriculum, teaching, admissions policy, class sizes) have to go through senate.  That's what "shared governance" means, or at least that's what it means to accreditation agencies such as SACS, our regional accreditor.  SACS looks for UHCL to have a shared governance process where faculty rule on curriculum and teaching matters and pass that on to the full senate for a vote, and when we stop having this process it might generate some questions at the accreditation level.

We had a faculty climate survey last spring that said nothing about changing the senate constitution to reduce faculty input.  In fact, I think the concerns outlined indicated that faculty thought we should have a louder voice in governance.  We had a faculty retreat this past fall that didn't mention changing the faculty senate constitution either - if this had been enough of an issue you'd think we would have heard something about it before.  Meanwhile, the things we have heard about, such as the lack of communication between faculty and administration (or, rather, administrators' steamrolling of faculty on every little decision, such as the recent changes to parking administration) go unanswered.  The lack of accountability of FSEC to that stands out.  Instead of feathering their beds with administrative favor, they should be working to fix the huge rift between administrators and faculty at this institution.  I guess it's just easier to sell out.

Conflicts of Interest (see Wikipedia) - some really good examples

It's probably just coincidence, but it turns out that several members of our Faculty Senate Executive Committee were up for promotion to full professor this year.  And the rumor is that others plan to go up for full professor next year or the year after.  For administrators, promoting someone to full professor is a highly-subjective process, and it's no surprise that many academics never achieve that rank after long careers in the trenches.  For our faculty, promotion to full professor represents a pre-tax pay increase of $8,000 per year, and since most merit raises are based on percentages of base pay, such a promotion will have an even larger impact on future pay increases.  It's understandable that such things are important to people, but it's very hard to understand why otherwise intelligent and thoughtful people cannot foresee the problems that can follow a faculty leadership capitulation to administrative whim.

The nominal sum of $8,000 at least allows us to put a price on things.  How much was that worth?  $8,000.  Easy.

Other faculty are motivated in less-than-obvious ways.  But the motivations and levers are there nonetheless.  Perhaps someone needs university support behind a grant or two, or maybe someone's program is always vulnerable to competition from other schools or scrutiny from the coordinating board for being too small.  Those type of favors are worth something too.  Conflicts of interest and undue influence opportunities abound in academia at every level.

Incentives are Relative

I don't begrudge administrators their positions or their jobs (but they volunteered to be administrators, that's true).  They're in a tough spot.  At UHCL the top administrative concern is to increase enrollment.  To this end administrators could:  manipulate admission standards (for example, enrolling foreign graduate students who haven't really completed an undergraduate degree or sufficient English language training); force faculty to lower standards by moving programs online or increasing class sizes (often these go hand in hand, as we've found); offer increasing financial aid to marginal students without concern for their academic records (transfer scholarships); compromise the long-term reputational capital of the university's programs by limiting what faculty can use as tools in the classroom (the proctoring of online courses, for example) or tacitly encouraging academic collusion and cheating; bullying untenured faculty into making tradeoffs that are unhealthy for students and the curriculum (writing assignments in a 70-seat intro survey class, for example).

When our recent 4-year programs were put together the administration decided that the basic microecon and macroecon classes would be used for Social Science and other assessment for state-mandated learning outcomes (5 areas total).  This type of assessment would require writing (and re-writing) of assignments, when normally those courses are taught in large sections that don't use writing assignments of any type.  Over time we've moved consistently to larger sections in most undergrad econ classes, and the norm is to teach these new classes that way as well.  The econ faculty had little input (if any) to the assessment decision, and instead it was handed down from on high.  When the unit chair recently questioned the feasibility of having writing assessment in large sections (just as implementation was being coordinated), she was publicly cursed and screamed at by her boss and called "unreasonable," even though it wasn't seen as unreasonable to ask faculty to collect writing assessment in a 2000-level economics core requirement with 70 students or more.  The ones doing  all of the screaming have a conflict of interest in this matter - enrollment at any cost is the agenda, regardless of the harm that it might do to the university's standards, reputation or programs, or of the harm to student learning and outcomes.  Reasonable people acknowledge that writing is better learned in smaller classes, with lots of feedback, and that writing in econ classes of 40+ isn't to be considered reasonable.

Administrators are put in place to achieve certain things.  In this case, it's obvious that they're trying to grow programs and enrollment.  That's reasonable.  We must keep in mind, though, that they also have objectives that conflict with the long-term interests of the university.  For example, one of our current senior administrators has actively sought higher-level jobs off campus by publicizing the number of online program initiations he has presided over or caused to be created on our campus.  He's been a finalist for these positions at least twice that faculty know of, and in each case he's touted the fact that faculty re-tooled programs for online delivery while he was here.  This individual has repeatedly talked of "quality online programs" in public comments, and yet did everything possible for several years to prevent faculty from having a proctoring solution in online courses.  It wasn't until it was a problem with regulators that he was forced to back off.

Their objectives as administrators can be considered reasonable up until those objectives conflict with the mission of the university and the long-term outcomes for students.  Making changes that undermine the reputation of the university on behalf of administrative vitae is unethical, especially when those administrators have no intention of staying with the university and watching their disasters unfold.

For administrators to influence faculty leadership and trade favors and promotion to get their way should be expected.  We should plan for it.  And believe it or not the academic system HAS planned for it.  How?  Faculty have jobs to do as well.  And one of our jobs, one of the things we're responsible for, is maintaining an effective academic curriculum and effective standards.  It's expected of us by every constituency you can identify and ask.  It's our responsibility to keep control of those things that administrators would fritter away, such as admission standards, faculty-to-student ratios, class sizes, prerequisite enforcement, academic integrity enforcement.

Students and parents don't choose a university because they love and respect the administrators.  It's all about faculty (and staff - especially those folks who interact with students).  Faculty are the face of the organization, and we can make or break its image.

Just as the legislative branch of our federal government is in place with the purpose of providing checks and balances for executive power at that level, the faculty (content experts) are in place to challenge and check administrative power (bureaucratic experts) at the university level.  And the mechanism of tenure is in place to make sure that this balance happens, because administrators will always control purse strings.  Without tenure, administrators would have free reign over academic policies.  We can see this in academic situations where tenure isn't the norm.

The trouble comes, as in our case, when faculty members refuse to recognize their responsibility to academic standards.  Or, when they sell out for a few more pieces of silver.  When they decide that it's better to go along in order to get along to be comfortable.  That may be a good strategy in some cases, but here it has only led to a further winnowing of faculty legitimacy and power.  The opposition, it seems, doesn't understand what "compromise" means.  That's how they continue to co-opt faculty at every opportunity.  Given their obvious intellectual challenges we should expect bullying to be their go-to strategy.  Plus, they've got the short-term purse strings that they can bully with, too.

But faculty takes too long to get things done; faculty gets in the way of university decisions!

That's just silly.  Faculty didn't stop the recent Downward Expansion program, and it's considered a rousing success (but it will be expensive in the long term).  Faculty didn't stand in the way of the several Bachelor of Applied Sciences "completer" programs begun in the last few years (IT, healthcare, criminal justice, to name a few).  Faculty input didn't get in the way of the Nursing program, which was pushed through and set up in Pearland virtually overnight and with little faculty discussion or questions. [Edit:  And has turned out to be a disaster.] Faculty senate committees have completed work on the PsyD program, the BAS programs and reviewed accessibility policy and Quality Assurance policy (online courses) several times and provided crucial input.  To say that the current senate structure is flawed is simply naive.

When budget cuts loomed over Texas universities a few years ago, the shared governance process received and reviewed dozens and dozens of public comments (mostly anonymous) about how to cut costs in the university in the most efficient manner.  This dialog kept things from getting out of hand and reassured everyone that layoffs would be an absolute "last resort."

Faculty hasn't had any input into the marketing of the university, or the space allocation of the university in years - so no one can say that faculty held anything up.  Faculty certainly didn't stand in the way of the recent parking system "upgrade" at the university, nor did we get in the way of HEAF funds being used to build a building for Bayou 5-0 (complete with their very own holding cell, sauna and weight room (ok, I made the sauna part up)).  Heck, we didn't even give anyone a vote of "no confidence" for cutting faculty out of those decisions hook, line and sinker.

How can anyone argue that faculty are a hindrance to governance when we haven't even impeached or voted "no confidence" on anyone yet?  Insanity.  Given what we've had to put up with thus far, I think things have been quite tame.  I guess that demonstrates the efficacy of the tame approach.

UHCL School of Business is reaffirmed by AACSB

I neglected to mention, last month, that we had been notified by Dean Cummings that AACSB has closed out our conditional status.  We've been reaffirmed.  The press release here clears things up a bit:

"AACSB Accreditation is the hallmark of excellence in business and accounting education, and has been earned by less than 5 percent of the world’s business programs. Today, there are 727 business schools in 48 countries and territories that have earned AACSB Accreditation. Similarly, 182 institutions hold an additional specialized AACSB Accreditation for their accounting programs.

 “It takes a great deal of commitment and determination to earn and maintain AACSB Accreditation,” said Robert D. Reid, executive vice president and chief accreditation officer of AACSB International. “Business schools must not only meet specific standards of excellence, but their deans, faculty and professional staff must make a commitment to ongoing continuous improvement to ensure that the institution will continue to deliver the highest quality of education to students.”

No official paper has been distributed yet, but you can bet that after the last fiasco (ultimately involving the state attorney general's office) we'll have that in our hands as soon as it's available.

One more thing:  Our business school never lost accreditation.  I heard last week that the rumor was going around that our accreditation got pulled.  That's not true.  We were told by the accreditation body that we had some things to fix.  We fixed those things (mainly proctoring).  Now we're getting ready for the NEXT accreditation visit in 2018 by updating assurance of learning and "closing the loop."

Keywords:  accreditation, UHCL, AACSB, continuing review, proctoring

UHCL: How is Shared Governance like Jumbo Shrimp?

Well, it appears that the New Constitution is still rolling along, although now we'll get an "ad hoc committee" to review the changes and figure out how to implement it.  Once all the furor dies down, next year, this committee will recommend it to the full faculty for a vote.  

What changes does it make?  Well, for starters it adds four more senators from each of the four schools, for a total of 48 senators, which is almost a quarter of the total university faculty.  (In case your algebra bone is failing you, that means we started with 8 faculty from each school).  Then it allows for a couple of librarians, and anyone considered "full-time" and not just tenured or tenure-track folks would be eligible to serve on senate.  The only "senate-eligible" folks now are tenure or tenure-track, and one of our problems is that we have too many untenured junior faculty on senate now.  I can't imagine how expanding the group will work out...

The New Constitution rebuilds all of the senate committees, and it also divides up Curriculum and  Teaching into two committees, one for undergrad decisions and one for grad decisions, and allows the grad committee to decide who is "graduate faculty."  Administrators now sit on these two committees, presumably so they can report back to other administrators about who the troublemakers are (without the faculty lackeys having to do all of it for them).

Keep in mind that we're being sold all this because "this is how everyone else does it" - see argumentum ad populum .  We're also being told that all of the new committees will enhance communication with administration and allow faculty to regain control of things such as the calendar and the catalog.

Ultimately, the result will be a weaker voice for faculty.  More untenured folks in senate means a weaker senate, and more committees certainly won't speed things up any or take any power away from the administrators that already wield it.  Senate will have the opportunity to change senate bylaws at any time, by itself, without a vote of the faculty.  That should work out well.

How did we get to this point?  As I mentioned last month it's all about bullying and conflict of interest.  John Lennon said "Follow the money" and that's good to remember here, too, although some senate folks clearly just want to go along to get along so that the bullying of faculty by administrators will stop.  Given the history of the gang currently running the show at UHCL, it's unlikely that they have some hidden leadership talent stashed away someplace.  They've been so successful with bullying and outright intimidation thus far, why change now?

Big changes coming to shared governance at UHCL? Not likely.

Not really.  It's the same old stuff that's happened over and over before, it's just called something new this time.

Students: This will be meaningless to you because it's all inside baseball.  It might be fun to read, and if you plan to work in state government then it might be something to pay attention to.  This type of bureaucratic sinkhole comes up over and over in government agencies, and that's not likely to end anytime soon.  Petty bureaucrats get a little bit of budgeting power... same story, different day.  (Maybe if they could make the trains run on time it would all work out in the end.)

So... where do we start?  UHCL is required by SACS and other accrediting bodies to have a system of Shared Governance in which the various constituencies and stakeholder groups from within the university have a part in making decisions.  I know that sounds kind of obvious, but I state it here to remind people that functional shared governance is required by accrediting bodies.  For good reason.

Bullying, on the other hand, is frowned upon by accrediting bodies.  Especially systematic and long-term, pervasive bullying and abuse.  Those things don't work out well for anyone in the end.

The latest boondoggle at the university involves the continued co-opting of the Faculty Senate Executive Committee.  This is the group of folks at the top of the official faculty hierarchy, and they set the agenda for faculty senate meetings and other faculty events during the year.  These are the folks who chair the various shared governance committees across the university and the committees within and appointed by the senate itself.  They spend a great deal of time grinding away on this stuff every year and I've done it plenty and I don't envy them a bit.

The particular committee at the university level that reviews, investigates and passes along new programs and degrees to faculty senate is called Curriculum and Teaching.  All new programs are supposed to go before Curriculum and Teaching (CandT) and get approval before moving ahead to the vote in the Senate - that's how it was designed, I was there when it happened and that's what the documents online say.  That's the charge of the committee, and that's why it's called "Curriculum and Teaching."  Well, last semester CandT didn't like a new degree program proposal by one college at the university because it appeared to be redundant - there was another degree in a different college that already did what was being proposed (well, I might add, but that's just my opinion).  The first time we saw it we sent it back for more info, and we asked that the proposing faculty work with the existing faculty in the other school to determine what was wrong with the new plan and try to fix it.  When the proposal came back again nothing had been done, but at least both sides agreed to sit down and talk with us.  CandT shelved it again.  Why?  Because it was redundant.  Still redundant.

The sit-downs didn't really happen, and the proposing faculty just decided to ignore the requests for information and bully faculty on the committee instead.  How did they learn to do that?

Ultimately CandT sent it to senate, and the full senate failed to pass it.  It was a very poorly done proposal, and the people involved refused to answer questions and/or build consensus beforehand.  Plus, they wanted to train undergrads to do something that undergrads aren't supposed to be doing (according to the APA).

Evidently that program is finding a way to move forward without CandT.  I don't know at this point whether there's another committee that will look at it, or whether it will just go straight to senate, or if it will simply bypass the faculty altogether.  The only reason that I bring it up is that this type of thing isn't a new phenomenon.  During my time in senate I've seen plenty of programs (degrees) ramrodded through in this manner simply because one administrator or another wanted it to happen without faculty concerns being addressed.  The history of some of these new programs hasn't really been that glowing, either.

Another topic that's come up lately is the university-level committee designed to find solutions promoting academic integrity in online programs (specifically because professors had been told by the university administration that we couldn't proctor online exams). There's more about all of this proctoring stuff in a big post from last spring, and I'll refer you there for details.  It's worth your time if you've followed along this far.  The online proctoring committee was created by senate in Summer 2011.  The committee met several times and discussed everyone's concerns (the committee had reps from the dean of students' office, enrollment management, university computing, human resources, and various faculty, one or two from each school, a couple of students, etc., everyone except someone from housekeeping and the grounds crew, it seemed).  The committee's activity wasn't rushed - there was no reason to rush, after all, unless this was a widespread problem, and administrators assured everyone that it wasn't a widespread problem.

The first year we met with a couple of online proctor providers, and discussed ways to determine the identity of students when they logged in for tests, etc.  The next year some BUS faculty got our dean to agree to a pilot study, and so a handful of hand-picked BUS faculty started using ProctorU.com as a proctoring test.  The university committee wanted to do the same thing - run some pilots with the various providers to see what worked.  And we should do enough to make it fair and representative, so it might take a few semesters.  Unfortunately, UH System legal didn't like one or more of the contracts from the providers, and so the committee met a few times that second year to talk about that and see what could be done.  Nothing was done.  BUS moved ahead because it had an accreditation visit coming up, but the university committee did nothing.

I will contend that "doing nothing" was the committee's function.  I firmly believe that the university-level committee (that I was on) was convened simply to delay decisions until the administrators who were against proctoring and accountability in online classes could figure out a way to get in front of it again.  Given the university committee's results (we're in Year 4 now if I'm counting right) it's obvious to see that its objective has been met - there is still no university-wide proctoring or accountability agenda.

Meanwhile, the BUS "pilot" moved ahead.  The university initially volunteered to pay for students who needed strictly online exams, and faculty were "granted" the right to offer local students on-campus tests.  After several confrontations, BUS has decided to implement proctoring in all of its online courses (again, see earlier posts for the full skinny on this) and students have to pay for proctoring if they need to take exams off-campus.

Where were we?  We have a university committee that's supposed to provide solutions for online test cheating issues, and it's done nothing in 3+ years.  So let's create a NEW committee.  Someone in the administration doesn't like the composition of the old committee (even though it achieved the objective that administrators designed it for) so they prod FSEC to come up with a new one.

Just like CandT.  Wow.

And the absolute latest issue is the proposed "accessibility policy."  Some folks at the university level have decided that all documents must be "accessible."  As it's currently written that might mean that faculty have to change textbooks to reader-accessible e-versions or even have full transcripts for any podcasts that we do (in anticipation of someone needing those transcripts, maybe, at some indeterminate time down the road).  Once again, those folks who won't have to change anything to comply with the policy aren't up in arms about it, but those of us who teach online (and a few who don't) see this as a potential screaming academic freedom issue as well as a big waste of time.  The reasoning?  "It's the law."  Have we seen other schools in the UH System put out new accessibility policies with this type of impact?  Nope.  Nor will we see that either.  UT?  A and M?  Nope.

The accessibility policy didn't pass in senate because faculty don't trust administrators.  I have no doubt that this policy will go around senate in some manner to be implemented.

We're not talking about "rogue faculty" here folks, just people who are trying to do our jobs right.  Those of us who have asked for change, and for our opinions to be taken seriously, are just trying to move things forward in a responsible way.  We made enough noise that staff expansions at the expense of faculty were reconsidered, but only at considerable personal cost.  Loud voices got some transparency on budget cuts and allocations a few years ago.  Some of us got proctoring instituted in the business school, but only at considerable personal cost.  And it's gotten to the point that so few people in the university really pay attention and understand the issues that even faculty leadership is fully compromised now.  Why?  Because they don't perceive any consequences to themselves in the short term?  They lack imagination?  Do they enjoy being doormats and abdicating their responsibility to exercise their own judgement on these things?

I gave up tilting at windmills a while ago (things such as how many adjuncts v. full-timers we have, summer pay, etc.) and decided that I would only get riled up over things that had important effects on students and their outcomes (and things I can hope to change).  Unfortunately, all the rest of this noise is yet again making it difficult for some faculty to focus on students and employers and the community at a crucial time in UHCL's history.  

The worst part, I guess, is that all of these folks are adults, and they should know better.  That's the hardest thing to understand.

Online education in the UH System, an update

Students have asked me about the "UH Online" discussion that's been taking place over the last year or so since the UH-Victoria MBA announced that it would be leaving Sugarland.  Well, I can only tell you what I've been told by smarter people: the proposal is on the desk of the system chancellor at this point.  Evidently the systems proposed by the outside consultants would end up looking like what we already have (individual schools with individual strengths and links to programs within) and so there wouldn't be much cost savings there.  That's probably true - since faculty have to be involved in order to call something "education" then I guess online education will still be expensive when done correctly.  It's the last part that's most important.