Peter,

Thanks for your kind words. I'm fine with posting and forwarding this. Thanks for doing this. Maureen

Thanks, again, Peter for taking so much time to meet with me last Friday. The conversation was incredibly helpful to me.

A lot has been happening at OIT regarding TGEC and I need to bring you all up to date.

After my meeting with Peter on Friday I realized I needed to try to pull all the loose ends together (e-mails, website postings, etc) to try to get a coherent picture of what's happening with TGEC. I work better when I can put the world into diagrams or matrices so I spent Saturday compiling information, including info from Colorado about their "guaranteed transfer" program.

After sorting out all that info, I decided (right or wrong) that we have no choice but to meet the needs of our stakeholders in whatever we do. I see the stakeholders as the Governor, the Board, our institutions, our faculty, and of course, our students. (These are not in order of importance!) I also decided I have been confusing product (the transfer certificate) with process (how do we design it conceptually and how do we fill in the details that give it life?) so I tried to address each one separately.

Product: the certificate itself JBAC proposed in its 3-30-04 draft that this transfer certificate be modeled after the (failed) AA/OT which has 55 credits of gen ed. Those 55 credits do not work for OIT because they overspecify certain areas (like humanities and social science). Since most of our degrees do not have many (or any) free electives, those credits are lost. Not "better" or "faster" as the students do spend "more" tuition dollars to take "more" credits once they arrive at OIT.

I then mapped those 55 credits against the gen ed requirements of each of our 7 campuses (as best I could figure them out from the OUS website) and it was clear that it doesn't work for any of us. So, I looked for an alternative model to propose to our Provost and President before they had a chance to move out unknowingly and possibly endorse the 55-credit certificate if it came up in discussion.

What emerged was a 36-credit certificate modeled after Colorado's. Thirty-six credits is the minimum number for an OUS "product" to be called a certificate. So, since the word "certificate" has been used freely, I thought it appropriate to start with the minimum credits needed for an OUS certificate. I took a stab at "populating" those 36 credits based on the MINIMUM number of credits any one of our schools requires in a category. For example, if OSU requires only 6 humanities credits in its gen ed then I plugged in 6 credits into my matrix. This resulted in a certificate that did not force additional gen ed credits onto any campus. (Following the Colorado model, and some of the correspondence in Oregon, each campus would be free to add its own requirements on top of the "common core certificate" so OIT could still maintain its 9 humanities credits, etc.) My intent was to satisfy the mandate of designing a transfer certificate.

Process: I met with President Dow and Provost Woodall yesterday morning for 30 minutes to discuss this with them in advance of our 2 PM faculty/administrators general meeting. They asked me to present what I had developed ("Oh, take about 10 minutes or so....") They also said they had talked with our Senate Exec the day before about forming a campus committee to advise and be involved in this issue and asked me to chair it. I agreed.

My presentation to faculty/administrators briefly discussed what I mentioned above then moved ahead to discuss process and timelines. I said we needed a concept for our President and Provost to take to their June meetings, involving both product and process. I discussed Peter's idea about the October meetings on the campuses but emphasized that decisions were likely going to be made over the summer so we couldn't just wait for fall. We needed to work together immediately to get our ideas out in the June meetings through our President and Provost. I closed by saying this must be a faculty-driven, faculty-led process because, after all, curriculum belongs to the faculty; it is ours.

At the end of my presentation I reminded everyone of the OIT core values that we formalized after a lengthy process in 2001:

• 1. Oregon Institute of Technology endeavors to provide a high quality technological education.
• 2. Oregon Institute of Technology is a student-centered institution.

I closed by quoting from the "Related Guiding Principles") of our core values statement: "OIT must take seriously its educational mission, and in some cases defend OIT in particular and the academy in general against unreasonable influence from external constituencies. This does not imply academic arrogance or an "ivory tower" mentality. However, as educators we do know quite a bit about the business of education, and in many cases we are the authority, not others. As an institution, we need to claim that authority without apology, while being responsive to the legitimate needs of our stakeholders."

I sure wish the words in the preceding paragraph were mine but they really inspired me to think hard about what we're doing.

We now have an announced OIT committee of potential faculty (I've sent out an e-mail to confirm their willingness to serve) plus our Registrar. One faculty member heads our internal Gen Ed review committee; another is our Assessment Coordinator. I'm trying to get a meeting organized for this Friday.

My plan is to gather ideas around the certificate itself and the process we would like to engage in as faculty to make the details work for our campus and our students. To me it is imperative that each campus maintain control over its gen ed (as well as the rest of its curriculum). Locking in a certificate with fewer rather than more credits will give us that breathing room. So far, our President and Provost seem on board with this idea but I don't know how our new committee will want to proceed. I'm hoping they'll agree, too, because I firmly believe that if the campuses don't come up with a certificate that works for us, the Board or the Legislature will come up with one and we'll get stuck living with the consequences. I am convinced we need to be extremely proactive here.

One strongly positive note for me was the e-mail sent out by our Provost to the "Task Force on Core" (as he called it) closes by saying: "Thanks in advance for your work on this issue. As Maureen pointed out, the curriculum belongs to the faculty, so a faculty group must grapple with this issue for our university." Yeah! I am so pleased to see that in (cyber)writing.

My plan is to hold a first meeting this Friday, draft a paper for the Provost over the weekend (he wants a few paragraphs and bullets but he'll accept 2-3 pages), re-convene our committee to review/revise it next week and have it completed by May 25th. I would also like to share my draft and final document with you, the IFS-TGEC subcommittee, to be sure I'm not leading OIT in the wrong direction from a broader faculty perspective. Next week is going to be very long for me....

I'm attaching the Word document that contains my "presentation" from yesterday. I did not have time to share all the slides at our meeting (and some may seem cryptic to you) but at least you'll know where I'm at (and can help me correct the table describing your gen ed if I've goofed on that).

Anyway, long e-mail but a lot has been happening.

Maureen