January 14, 2025
Dear Academic Affairs Faculty and Staff,
Thank you again for your continuing involvement in the Transformation 2028 (T28) initiative within the Division of Academic Affairs. In particular, I thank the FACs and CACs for their thoughtful and comprehensive deliberations in an expedited timeframe during an already busy time of the year. Everyone鈥檚 sustained participation and feedback continue to shape this critical work. Thank you all!
After thoroughly reviewing the most recent survey responses, advisory committee minutes, and other submitted materials, we have created a new configuration that reflects much of the feedback received. Overall, the Gold model was preferred by most advisory committees and responders; therefore, this new configuration builds upon the Gold model and includes as many suggestions as possible to reach our goal of reducing the costs of our administrative structures.
Specifically, this model retains many of our current academic colleges鈥 organizations. Maintaining as much continuity and autonomy as possible was a clear request from you. While keeping current college structures together as much as possible, we have created alignments among many of the colleges so that their administrative leadership is shared. For example, you will see 3 colleges that are focused on health care and health professions have been grouped together to share administrators. Although each of these colleges will retain a dean, they will share many of the other leadership roles, staff functions, and resources among them. Sharing leadership, staff functions, and resources will be a key factor in reaching our budget goals and will net approximately $1.5 million in savings each year. (You can see additional detail on how we calculated these savings under the 鈥淗ow to read the model鈥 page on the website.)
The next step in the T28 process is for you to comment on this new reconfiguration which is located on our . Our tool will be open on our website and I encourage you to continue to tell us the opportunities and challenges associated with this reconfiguration. Our faculty and college advisory committees will again deliberate on this model and provide feedback by January 28, 2025 to their deans.
Using the feedback received, we will then present a reconfiguration to Faculty Senate at the February 10th meeting for their consideration.
After presenting to Faculty Senate, we will begin consultation with you on how to reduce costs throughout our other colleges (i.e., Honors, Graduate, University) and units within Academic Affairs.
I want to thank you again for your participation in this important work to date. Your input continues to remain critical to this process, so please let us know your thoughts.
Best regards,
Melody
Melody Tankersley, PhD
Executive Vice President and Provost
Division of Academic Affairs