Our interpretation of the major issues and concerns that resulted in this recommendation:

This recommendation is directed to the president and the SBOE. We can do nothing directly to act on this recommendation.

The basic thrust of comments that refer to this recommendation is three-fold, but all of it has to do with responsibilities and accountability.

1. We need to a clear overall policy statement, easily explicable to an outside observer or a new member of the faculty, on how the entire assessment, program review, planning, and budgeting cycle works. This must be both transparent and interconnected at each level: departmental, college, and university. We need to know when things are to be done, by whom, and what consequences will occur (enforced by whom) if these things are not done.
2. Closely related to point number one: We need to have a more public sense of how the budgeting process work and how it is linked to assessment, program review, and strategic planning.
1. 2.1 A particular concern: we must know how decisions about allocation of resources for graduate education are made.
2. 2.2 A particular concern: we must have a better understanding of how our continuing education operations articulate with other units on campus and who is responsible for seeing to it that this articulation works.
3. We need to have evaluation processes in place that are clearly explained, that are equitable across departmental and college lines, and that have a clear relationship to decisions on tenure and promotion.

How this recommendation links to other recommendations?

This recommendation is implicated in Recommendations 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 9, 10.

What has already been done to address this Recommendation:

[We could list here are changes in IR and our development of a new assessment handbook, but seem my comment below.]

What activities are currently underway?

[We could list here the work we are doing on assessment, program review, and faculty evaluation, but see my comment below.]

What needs to be done to meet this recommendation?

Put together a recommendation to the president on oversight responsibilities, with particular attention to how the assessment, review, evaluation, and planning processes can be linked allocation of resources; this recommendation will be a condensed report on what we have recommended/accomplished in our work on recommendations 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 9, 10. We will present this recommendation to the president by the end of August with a further recommendation that he share our comments with the SBOE.