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Enhancing Undergraduate Education at IU Bloomington

Provost's Task Force
Final Report

April 2009

The teaching of undergraduates is the core activity of Indiana University Bloomington; excellence in undergraduate education is essential to the identity, revenue, and aspirations of the campus. To enhance that excellence, IU Bloomington should adopt a fresh approach focused on two key goals:

  1. Changing the culture of undergraduate education

  2. Making it easier for undergraduates to take full advantage of academic opportunity

To reach these goals, we offer recommendations in thirteen areas:

Together, these recommendations can substantially enhance teaching and learning on the Bloomington campus. At a critical time for higher education, they also offer an opportunity to claim national leadership with a distinctive reputation for undergraduate excellence in a large research university setting.

Task Force History and Charge

Our task force was created by Provost Karen Hanson in December 2008. Convening us for our first meeting, she asked the group to examine undergraduate education on the Bloomington campus and to make recommendations enhancing its excellence. Further, she asked us to help define the work of the newly-created position of Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education (VPUE). Encouraging the task force to range widely, she requested our report by the end of the spring semester, 2009.

After the December meeting, the group met weekly and divided into subcommittees devoted to particular topics. All of us joined in reviewing the many reports of similar committees at other universities, collecting data on the Bloomington campus, interviewing administrators, faculty, staff, and students, and exchanging experiences and ideas with one another.

Undergraduate Education and the University

Our work has reinforced for us that undergraduate education is critical to the campus and the university. The teaching of undergraduates remains the core activity of the campus, without which the rest of IU Bloomington's mission—graduate education, research, athletics, and outreach—would not exist. Undergraduates constitute the largest group on campus. Undergraduate tuition is the largest source of campus revenue. Undergraduate degree recipients make up the largest body of campus alumni. In part for these reasons, undergraduate education is fundamental to the identity of IU Bloomington and of the university.

These are obvious truths, but they need restating. Like other major universities, IU has emphasized its identity as a "research" university in the last generation. This has been a reasonable strategy: research is a basic activity of this campus, as well as others; the research excellence of IU deserves to be better known; and the campus has needed to expand its research funding and facilities. Yet there have been some unintended—and unnecessary—costs to this strategy. The undergraduate mission of the campus has been de-emphasized and often taken for granted. In some quarters, undergraduate education seems a lesser activity, incompatible with research.

We reject this notion, which rests on the false assumption that the campus must make an either-or choice between privileging research or undergraduate education. Instead, we believe that the two are mutually reinforcing, that excellent undergraduate teaching and learning will support, not inhibit, the campus's quest for research excellence. As a number of interviewees have observed to us, the research universities with whom we wish to compete almost uniformly pride themselves on offering outstanding undergraduate education. They do so, not simply because of ample resources, but more basically because they understand that undergraduate teaching and learning are critical to their reputations. As a result, these institutions reject the either-or logic that research and undergraduate education are incompatible: their leadership in American higher education stems from the confidence that their administration and their faculty can sustain both research and teaching excellence on their campuses.

We believe that this campus should move forward with the same confidence to enhance undergraduate education at IU Bloomington. The benefits are clear. First, and most basically, better education is an evident benefit to the tens of thousands of undergraduate students on campus. As at other institutions, improved undergraduate instruction is also a means of strengthening the whole campus: a greater reputation for excellent undergraduate teaching and learning will attract better undergraduate students and in turn better faculty and better graduate students, and ultimately more research funding and philanthropic donations. If we neglect the role of undergraduate education, IU Bloomington will not realize its ambitions as a research university.

The current economic crisis offers a particularly opportune moment to act on this understanding. More than ever, Americans are carefully weighing the huge investment they must make to earn undergraduate degrees. After years of using large undergraduate tuition increases to subsidize the development of their campuses, American universities face heightened scrutiny about the costs and benefits of undergraduate education. In this context of skepticism and doubt, IU Bloomington has a great opportunity to claim national leadership by forging a distinctive reputation for undergraduate excellence in a large university setting.

The Limits of Reform

There are many suggestions for how to proceed. Inspired in part by the Bowen Commission report of 1997, a great wave of undergraduate educational initiatives has swept across the country in the last decade. Although different colleges and universities have pursued reform in different ways, a common set of practices has emerged. Echoing the Bowen report, institutions have tried to narrow the gap between research and teaching by incorporating undergraduates in faculty research outside the traditional classroom.

Colleges and universities have also sought to enrich undergraduate education by offering more small seminars, experiential learning, and internship opportunities. Given the broad interest in globalization, institutions have tried to internationalize the curriculum and promote study abroad. Given advances in technology, campuses have explored new means of "delivering" instruction, including classroom computers, websites, online chat rooms and tests, podcasts, and online courses.

In addition, many colleges and universities have focused on the last stages of undergraduates' careers. "Capstone" courses aim to synthesize students' experiences in their majors. Responding in part to external pressure, some institutions have instituted forms of assessment to measure what students have learned in their careers.

Reform has also singled out two groups of undergraduates: those "at risk" students least likely to graduate; and so-called "high-end" students most likely to have attractive offers of admission from competing institutions. The result has been a variety of programs intended to increase retention of at-risk students and a proliferation of separate honors programs and colleges intended to appeal to sought-after applicants and their parents.

Thanks to these initiatives, the wave of reform has accomplished a great deal across the country and in Bloomington: new programs, new practices, and new research have invigorated undergraduate education in many ways. But as the gains of reform have become apparent, its limitations have become clear, too.

Despite the popularity of the Bowen report, the vast majority of undergraduates continue to have little involvement in faculty research: the divide between undergraduate education and research remains about as wide as ever. As well, reform has mostly avoided the large lecture courses that are the core educational experience of the majority of undergraduates at research universities.

There are more supplements than ever to big classes: freshmen seminars, internships, and semesters abroad. Yet on the whole, large classes remain basic to undergraduate education and basically unchanged. While many universities try to offer more small classes to honors students, most institutions cannot afford to offer those classes to the full range of undergraduates. And many undergraduates cannot afford to pay for internships and semesters abroad.

Reform has also sidestepped the two bargains that structure much of undergraduate education on large university campuses.

First, there is the deal between administrators and faculty that productive researchers won't have to spend too much time in undergraduate classrooms, particularly not in large introductory classes at the lower level. The effort to place undergraduates in faculty research projects, laudable as it is, represents an admission that students have to go to the faculty in labs and libraries because faculty are not going to the students in lecture halls.

Second, there is the implicit bargain between teachers and undergraduates: students will demand only so much of their instructors, if the instructors demand only so much of them. That arrangement produces higher grades and better teaching evaluations, but not necessarily the best-prepared alumni for the ever-more competitive struggle of globalized white-collar work.

It is not surprising, then, that for all of the progress locally and nationally, there is persistent dissatisfaction with the state of undergraduate education. In Bloomington, the recent student VOICE report eloquently expressed the concerns of undergraduates. Privately, faculty members continue to complain about the quality of the undergraduate classroom experience. Publicly, the university still struggles with a reputation, deserved or not, as a leading "party school."

A New Course

Rather than keep following the reform movement, IU Bloomington should chart a new course. Having reaped the benefits of reform, the campus should address reform's critical oversights. We need to find ways to change the bargains that limit faculty involvement and student aspiration. We need to improve the educational experience of the majority of undergraduates who don't get special help and who take large courses.

A new course must acknowledge the constraints and advantages of the Bloomington campus. Reporting at this uncertain economic moment, we know that the resources available for undergraduate education are not about to increase dramatically, if at all. We don't see this reality as a matter of despair or disappointment. There are a few places where the campus should be prepared to make prudent investments in critical innovations. But the key questions confronting the campus are not a matter of boosting budgets: they a matter of working smarter and more efficiently; and they are a matter of changing assumptions about the interests and aspirations of students, instructors, staff, and administrators.

A new course must also respect the decentralization and diversity of IU Bloomington. Undergraduate education on the campus is far from monolithic. Together, academic regulations and budgetary practices give schools and colleges considerable independence to pursue different approaches to educating undergraduates. In turn, faculty members have substantial freedom to manage their classrooms as they see fit. We don't believe this decentralization and diversity is problematic: a source of strength and innovation, it provides an almost matchless range of opportunities for undergraduates.

Accordingly, we have decided not to try to formulate a "one-size-fits-all" definition of excellence in undergraduate education. Rather than attempt to define an ideal form that undergraduate teaching and learning should take, we have concentrated on identifying the contexts, both material and cultural, in which students, instructors, staff, and administrators can combine to create educational excellence. We have looked for ways to make it easier for all these partners to excel; for teachers, staff, and administrators to create and innovate, and for undergraduate students to achieve at the highest levels.

In the same spirit, we have also avoided solutions that require compulsion, particularly by the campus administration. It is tempting to try to force the particular changes that we would like to see adopted at IU Bloomington. But most struggles to change the rules would be divisive, largely unsuccessful, and ultimately counterproductive. In the end, undergraduate education will improve mainly because the different parties conclude that improvement serves their interests. If they come to that conclusion, the rules will change as needed.

What follows, then, is a series of practical steps intended both to change the culture of undergraduate education and to make it easier for undergraduates to take full advantage of the wealth of academic opportunities on this campus.

Speaking about Undergraduate Education

The transformation of campus culture is a complex, long-term project, but it can start with some simple steps.

First, the campus should change how and how often it speaks about undergraduate education. In particular, campus leaders should more regularly underscore the centrality of excellent undergraduate education for the goals of the campus. Good things have been said, but they bear repeating.

Second, the news releases featured on the IU Bloomington campus home page and given to the media should also reinforce the message of undergraduate excellence. The university publicizes books published and grants gained much more often than instructor innovation and student success in the classroom. There are exciting things going on in classrooms across the Bloomington campus; it should be a matter of course to give them the publicity they deserve

Third, the campus should also change the way it identifies faculty members. In publicizing research accomplishments and public outreach, news releases and other statements should routinely indicate what courses faculty members teach. Even subordinate clauses can help drive home the point that research and undergraduate teaching are both basic to faculty careers.

Fourth, the mission statements of all schools and colleges that teach undergraduates should have an explicit statement about the importance of undergraduate education and their commitment to their undergraduate students.

This is not an exhaustive list: there are other settings in which IU Bloomington speaks about undergraduate education. Special publicity campaigns may be useful, but ultimately, the campus most needs to change its standard public discourse, the way that it regularly conveys its values to students, faculty, alumni, legislators, and the state.

Speaking to Applicants and Freshmen

In addition to altering its communications with the range of university constituencies, the campus needs especially to change the way it speaks directly to undergraduates. Above all, faculty, staff, and administrators should state more clearly and consistently that IU Bloomington has high expectations and that its goal is the best possible education. This message needs to reach students powerfully as they initially engage with the university as applicants and as matriculating freshmen.

First, the campus should change the application process to underscore that IU Bloomington asks a good deal of its students. Unlike many peer institutions, IU Bloomington does not require an essay from all applicants, but only from those who seek scholarship aid or admission to honors-level programs. In asking less of applicants, the campus implicitly sends the message that admission to IU Bloomington is not worth as much as at other institutions. The omission of the essay also implicitly conveys the idea that the campus does not value the distinctiveness of each student but sees him or her as a set of quantifiable, more impersonal attributes.

The personal expression of applicants should make a difference: an essay should be required of all applicants; that essay should not be used only to make scholarship and honors decisions. To the concern that it would cost the Office of Admissions more money to evaluate applicants' essays, we say that the investment will be worthwhile: it will help produce a better freshman class, in part because new students will have clarified their own commitments and will be better prepared for how much will be asked of them at IU Bloomington. The cost can be reduced or effectively eliminated if Admissions calls on instructors, administrators, and staff to serve as volunteer evaluators.

Second, Red Carpet days, other recruitment events, and recruitment fliers and other pieces should explicitly and consistently convey the message of excellence and expectations to prospective undergraduates. There are some fine examples of marketing literature, which can serve as models. In addition, more full-time, research-active tenured faculty should be called upon to speak at Red Carpet days and other recruitment events. Other members of the campus community participate in the recruitment; more of the tenured faculty should be willing to play a role, particularly in persuading the best applicants that they will find academic fulfillment in the classroom at IU Bloomington.

Third, the academic message of the Welcome Week orientation for freshmen requires similar refocusing. Welcome Week does a superb job of introducing new students and their families to many aspects of IU Bloomington. Dependent on input and participation from the campus, the orientation program understandably reflects the inconsistencies of the broader campus approach to undergraduate education. We believe the academic component of orientation, including the wording of the IU Promise and the content of academic presentations to students and their families, should more plainly convey the campus's belief in challenging undergraduates and asking much of them in return. Like Red Carpet Day and other recruitment events, Welcome Week should make more use of tenured faculty members to present this message and to underscore the commitment of faculty to undergraduate education.

Fourth, the VPUE should be charged with responsibility for working with admissions, recruitment, and orientation personnel to ensure the consistency of the campus's academic message to applicants, freshmen, and their parents.

An Academic Roadmap

IU Bloomington can't simply speak differently about expectations without also making it easier for students to meet them. At present, undergraduates—freshmen, in particular—face critical obstacles in exploring and understanding the increasing array of academic disciplines and sub-disciplines represented on campus. The university celebrates the proliferation of knowledge, the spread of interdisciplinarity, and the creation of new schools, departments, and programs; but administrators and faculty seldom consider how confusing the academic terrain of IU Bloomington has become.

Undergraduates are poorly equipped to find their way. Typically, their high-school education did not introduce them to many, perhaps even most of the academic fields represented on campus. Academic units do offer descriptions of their curricula, but these documents do not consistently convey what a given field of academic inquiry is about, why it matters, and how it equips undergraduates for life in general and careers in particular.

Moreover, these introductions are scattered across offices and the web; there is no single, convenient place a student can turn if she wants systematically to understand the creation and distribution of knowledge at IU Bloomington.

The bulletins of individual schools are useful, but they are typically weighted towards dry recitation of requirements rather than clear and inspiring explanations of their basic intellectual purposes and methods. And of course, it takes a collection of these bulletins to make a complete academic accounting of IU Bloomington. The annual University Division Online Guide does offer a kind of one-stop intellectual shopping for undergraduates, but, like the Orientation Week, it is dependent on the quality of submissions from the different academic units. Rather than a holistic introduction to academic issues and intellectual life on campus, the Online Guide offers a serial listing of different, isolated specialties.

We believe that the VPUE should oversee the creation of a vivid, easy-to-find, easy-to-use online academic roadmap for undergraduates, an intellectual equivalent to the OneStart system with its single portal for campus services. This site should take on the challenge of explaining what intellectual life on this campus is about, how the academic missions of the different schools relate to one another, and how different disciplines and fields approach the world and prepare their students for it. To ensure the uniform quality of this site, the VPUE should establish criteria for the submissions offered by the academic units. But the content should come from the units' tenure-line faculty, who are working at the cutting edge of their fields.

An Information Clearinghouse

The lack of information about academic fields reflects a broader shortage of accessible information about undergraduate education in general. It is too difficult for students, faculty, staff, and administrators to find and share knowledge about classes and teaching across the campus. This problem of information is one of the major constraints on undergraduate education at IU Bloomington.

We believe that the more informed all parties are, the better teaching and learning can become. More fundamentally, greater openness about conditions and practices will help change the culture of undergraduate education.

Accordingly, the campus should establish and publicize an online clearinghouse for information about undergraduate education at IU. There is a great deal of data available already, but it is not conveniently laid out in places where member of the campus community will look. For instance, few students and faculty know about the Registrar's Grade Distribution Database, which tracks the grading patterns of individual instructors, departments, and schools. Similarly, the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Program (SOTL) has now sparked faculty innovation for a decade, but the results of that work are poorly known.

A single undergraduate education website could point to the Registrar's Grade Distribution Database and the University Division Planner and other UDIV resources, showcase the findings of SOTL, and also host new initiatives. For instance, students and faculty might find a mutually agreeable way to report the results of student course evaluations. Faculty from different units might use the site to share successful classroom techniques.

In addition, the Provost should implement a reporting system to gather detailed, substantive, current data from all academic units. Information should include the percentage of courses and students taught by tenure-line faculty, the extent of faculty-mentored student research projects, the specific skills developed in majors, the contribution of particular majors to the goals of undergraduate education on the campus, and so on. There are too many possibilities to lay out here, but the basic premise is clear: a visible, unified website is basic to improving the culture and practice of undergraduate education at IU Bloomington.

Restructuring Advising

Improved access to information should in turn make it easier for undergraduates to make more informed and more satisfying academic choices. But those choices are also crucially dependent on the counsel of academic advisors. There are many excellent advisors on the Bloomington campus; and there are many undergraduates who work effectively and happily with them. But as the student VOICE report documents at length, academic advising at IU Bloomington also provokes a great deal of criticism.

In many units, there is a shortage of advising: the ratio of students to advisors can reach as high as 500:1. Many students feel that advising is narrowly focused on the selection of courses for the next semester rather than on the development of their long-term academic, career, and life goals. Some students also feel that advisors working in a particular department or school do not know enough about academic opportunities and requirements elsewhere on the campus. At the same time, students believe that advisors in University Division do not know enough about the opportunities and requirements of particular departments and schools. Students with multiple majors or minors find themselves shuttling inefficiently from one advisor to another in order to learn what they need to do to meet requirements in different programs. For their part, some advisors feel that students do not prepare adequately for advising appointments and want simply to be told what to take.

More than any other issue, advising underscores the pitfalls of a decentralized approach to undergraduate education. Individual units have made seemingly rational, calculated investments in advising, but overall undergraduates do not have enough convenient, reliable counsel about the options they have in and out of their home department or school. It is clear to us that this is one place where the campus must step in.

First, the campus should commit more resources to advising. The Provost's Office has recently increased funds for advising; that is a good first step toward the fuller commitment required.

Second, the Provost or the VPUE should lead a discussion with the schools and colleges about the optimal balance between advisors employed by a single unit and those employed by the campus.

Third, administrators, advisors, and faculty must clarify the purpose of advising: should it be more focused on developing students' understanding of their long-term goals?

Fourth, the campus should also re-examine the advising process itself. Nationally, academic advising has evolved substantially in recent years; it is worth considering how closely advising at IU Bloomington follows best prevailing practices across the country.

Fifth, advisors should be able to participate more fully in the academic life of their units and of the campus—to attend relevant faculty meetings, visit classes, and serve on committees such as this one. Whatever the focus of advising, and whatever the location of advisors, it is clear that the campus must help advisors to learn more about academic options and opportunities across IU Bloomington.

Sixth, the process of sharing information and educating advisors needs to become more formal, regularized, and convenient. At present, the campus and individual units rely too much on the informal contacts between advisors and on the work of the Bloomington Advisors Council.

Seventh, along with more formal organization, the system of advising needs better technology. It should be possible for advisors to enter information on their advising sessions into the Student Information System, so that this useful data can be shared and accessed—for instance, by the multiple advisors of students with multiple majors.

These and other changes will not succeed unless the campus and the units re-examine and re-value the job of advisor. There is too little attention to the careers of advisors; they are not rewarded adequately as they gain invaluable experience and excel. As a result, morale declines, too many advisors are lost to better offers in other units, and continuity suffers.

Eighth, then, the campus and the units should work with advisors to professionalize advising. In recent years, the campus has made great strides in systematizing the positions of non-tenure-line faculty so that they have fairer terms of employment and a clear career path; the same should now be done for academic advisors. So, the campus should re-examine the criteria for hiring advisors. Newly hired advisors should receive more and better training, not only in the curriculum but also in the lives and challenges of students. Experienced, successful advisors should have the rank of Senior Advisor and, while continuing to advise students, should also help train and mentor junior colleagues. Like other professionals and faculty at IU Bloomington, advisors should have a fair system of evaluation focused on improving the quality of their professional development, working conditions, and advice to students.

Last, the campus and the units should encourage faculty to play a larger role in mentoring students. Advisors know degree requirements in ways that most faculty members do not. But advisors should not be expected to shoulder the full burden of helping students understand their long-term goals and options. Many faculty members already provide important mentoring; more of their colleagues should now be urged to join them.

Encouraging Teaching

Faculty and other instructors, in turn, deserve more help in developing their roles as mentors and classroom teachers. We have noted above some of the ways that the campus can urge and document innovation in undergraduate education, but the individual department or school remains the key setting for the encouragement of teaching.

Across the campus, particular units have established enviable programs for training and mentoring beginning teachers, conducting peer review, sharing best practices and new ideas, and celebrating classroom accomplishment. Looking closely at classroom outcomes, these kinds of programs can also assess how well units are attaining their goals.

Such unit-level programs are particularly important for untenured colleagues—graduate students, lecturers, clinical ranks faculty, and others—who play such a major role in teaching undergraduates. All these groups manage heavy teaching loads without the freedom and resources typically enjoyed by tenure-line faculty. It is imperative, then, that they have the support of their units in developing as teachers.

There are some outstanding programs that blend workshops and credit-bearing courses to train graduate students as associate instructors; the best of them help these beginning teachers learn the essential professional skill of juggling teaching, research, and service commitments. All graduate students deserve this kind of help. Similarly, some units do an especially good job of providing mentoring for lecturers and assistant professors; all untenured faculty should have this kind of support.

Beyond immediate, specific benefits for instruction, learning, and assessment, unit-level programs signal the importance of undergraduate education and therefore help spur the transformation of campus culture.

Accordingly, all academic units at IU Bloomington should develop programs for encouraging teaching by tenure-line faculty, instructors, and graduate students alike.

To help stimulate the development of such programs, the online information clearinghouse should systematically collect data on successful programs that can serve as models for innovation in other units.

Reviewing Teaching

In tandem with the creation of teaching programs, academic units should also strengthen the formal review of teaching. Undergraduates' teaching evaluations, valuable as they are, should never be the sole basis for assessing the quality of any instructor. Careful peer appraisal of syllabi and class sessions is an indispensable component of any meaningful system of review.

As in other areas of undergraduate education, there is a striking diversity of practices across the campus. Some units do an excellent job of monitoring the work of associate instructors; some units ensure that tenured faculty regularly visit the classes of untenured colleagues; in at least one instance, however, tenured faculty apparently seldom visit the classes of untenured colleagues.

Accordingly, the campus should require that all academic units review the teaching of their non-tenured faculty each year. Undertaken by tenure-line faculty, the review should include assessment of syllabi, a classroom visit or visits, discussion with the instructor, and a written report filed with the unit.

Teaching, Tenure, and Promotion

The role of teaching in tenure and promotion decisions has provoked considerable discussion. Some members of the taskforce believe that a candidate's success as a teacher should play a larger part in determining whether he or she earns tenure and promotion at IU Bloomington. But we are mindful that different units place differing amounts of weight on teaching and research: a one-size-fits-all tenure or promotion criterion would fail. We are mindful, too, that it would be extremely difficult to establish an objective, widely-accepted definition of what constitutes outstanding teaching.

That said, we are reminded that the campus requires at least "satisfactory" teaching of all candidates for tenure and promotion and calls for candidates to document their teaching with "evidence drawn from such sources as the collective judgment of students, of student counselors, and of colleagues who have visited the candidate's classes or who have been closely associated with his or her teaching as supervisor or in some other capacity, or who have taught the same students in subsequent courses documentation of teaching."

First, we believe that the campus should enforce the existing standard of "satisfactory" teaching for tenure and promotion in all cases.

Second, the campus should require candidates and their units to submit both student evaluations and the results of peer review.

Third, the campus should require schools and colleges to solicit outside evaluations of candidates' teaching before the departmental consideration of their dossiers. It has long been standard practice to solicit outside evaluations of candidates' research; it is reasonable to follow the same procedure in assessing satisfactory teaching. While research evaluations typically come from candidates' disciplinary colleagues at other institutions, teaching evaluations should come from senior IU Bloomington colleagues, including distinguished and titled faculty, outside candidates' units, and should entail more than a summary of a single classroom visit.

Large Classes

As noted above, the academic reform movement has tended to divert attention from the big lecture class rather than focus on how to improve it. Partly as a result, academia knows relatively little about large classes of 50 or more students, and much of what we think we know seems to be based on unverified assumptions. At IU Bloomington, such classes are a staple of undergraduate education in most units. Yet the campus typically seems embarrassed by its lecture courses. Speaking to admitted applicants and their parents, admissions staff members try to minimize the chances a student will end up in a big lecture.

There are clearly problems with big classes at IU Bloomington. Although they can be difficult to teach, such courses, particularly those at the introductory level, are often staffed with non-tenure-line instructors. Still, it is clear that there are good things going on in many large classes; at the least there are big lectures that rank among the most popular and memorable courses on campus.

We believe that IU Bloomington should stop ignoring or apologizing for big classes. Instead, the campus should move aggressively to improve them and make IU Bloomington a national leader in innovative approaches to this common form of undergraduate learning.

First, the VPUE should convene a working group, composed of experienced faculty from different units, to explore the problems and promise of large classes, study relevant research, consult undergraduate students, identify and share best practices, and develop recommendations for improving staffing, classrooms, technologies, teaching techniques, and so on.

Second, the campus should implement the recommendations of the working group by supporting ambitious proposals for improving student learning in large courses.

Third, if the working group proves fruitful, the VPUE should establish a standing committee to monitor changes and facilitate further improvement.

Fourth, units should make successful large classes larger and provide incentives for senior faculty to create new ones. Aside from the direct benefits to students, this practice will free up other instructors to offer more small courses. Particularly as the campus enters a period of new economic constraints, it seems highly unlikely that the overall ratio of students to faculty will decline: the only way to increase the number of small course settings is to increase the efficiency of large classes.

Fifth, the campus should change the way it talks about big lectures and present them as a positive force for undergraduate learning. To that end, the campus should heavily publicize the findings and innovations flowing from the working group.

Teaching and Research

One way to invigorate large classes, both advanced and introductory, would be to have them incorporate more research. As noted, it is proving difficult to include very many undergraduates in faculty research projects undertaken outside of regular classes. The best, most efficient way to integrate research and undergraduate education would be to put more active faculty researchers in the classroom and encourage them to find new means of incorporating the research process into exciting undergraduate courses.

Accordingly we recommend that the Provost begin a dialogue with the deans and with the Alliance of Distinguished and Titled Professors about the role of research faculty in the undergraduate classroom.

Second, the campus should join the schools and colleges in providing seed money for imaginative projects that bring faculty research and the research process into the classroom.

The Major

For most students, the pursuit of one or more academic majors defines the last years of their undergraduate careers. The range of majors at IU Bloomington epitomizes the striking diversity of undergraduate education on this campus: even within a single school, majors differ not only in disciplinary content and approach but also in pedagogy and credit hours.

Not surprisingly, then, it is difficult to generalize about the state of the major at IU Bloomington. It is difficult, as well, to resist the temptation to try to define the form and content of an ideal major. Many of us feel, for instance, that all IU Bloomington undergraduates should receive more training in writing as part of any major they choose. But we are mindful, again, of the near-impossibility of producing prescriptions that can adequately cover all students in all majors. Instead, our focus here, as elsewhere, is on the contexts in which instructors and students can achieve excellence.

On one hand, students face daunting obstacles in changing majors from one school to another, or in pursuing majors in different schools simultaneously. As the student VOICE report notes, campus academic units seem to experience a kind of "silo-effect." While the leadership of the university preaches interdisciplinarity and intellectual boundary-crossing, the schools and colleges don't consistently practice those virtues when it comes to undergraduate education. We are concerned that early degree requirements in a school or college can be so specialized that students who wish to change to a major in another unit are unable to do so because not enough of their early credits are transferable to their new academic home. As freshmen increasingly enter IU Bloomington directly admitted to an academic unit, it is particularly important that they be able to change majors if their interests change.

On the other hand, we have heard in some cases that students' majors aren't challenging enough. It is clear that many undergraduates must meet rigorous requirements in completing a major. But rigor is very hard to measure; for instance, it isn't simply a matter of credit hours. We do wonder whether some majors require enough credits of work at the most advanced level. Do juniors and seniors get enough time together in smaller, research-intensive courses that are the true payoff for the years of introductory work? Do seniors have a meaningful capstone experience such as a thesis or other major project? More broadly, we believe it is worth exploring whether many undergraduates' careers have become "front-loaded": those students work hard to gain early or regular admission to a school or major; once accepted, they may not have to work quite as hard again.

The increasing number of undergraduates with double and even triple majors is a further indication that majors may not be challenging enough. Certainly, double- and triple-majoring underscores students' energy and ambition and suggests that they know the importance of interdisciplinarity or at least multidisciplinarity. Yet these students can presumably undertake multiple majors because a single major isn't as demanding or time-consuming as it might be.

Accordingly, the Provost and the VPUE should initiate a campus dialogue about the major and encourage academic units to reconsider this critical aspect of undergraduate education. We don't believe the campus should undertake a difficult and divisive attempt to mandate greater rigor; in the end, this is an issue that individual schools, colleges, and departments should be left to explore and resolve in their own way. But the campus should be sure that juniors and seniors have a challenging academic conclusion to their undergraduate careers.

Second, the VPUE should work with the schools and colleges to make it easier for students to change majors from one unit to another or to pursue majors in different units simultaneously. It is critical that the General Education, Common Ground policy ensure that undergraduates' early requirements are transferable. An effective campus policy on this issue will usefully emphasize the schools' and colleges' common interest and identity as part of Indiana University.

Third, students should be expected to draw on the academic roadmap, the information clearinghouse, and the counsel of their advisors and faculty mentors to make informed choices about majors.

Senior Faculty

Many of the recommendations above depend on increased involvement from senior faculty members. While undergraduate education is truly a communal endeavor on the Bloomington campus, it has become clear to us that crucial change won't occur without faculty participation. At point after point, the core issues are academic matters controlled by senior faculty members.

The campus can change the way it talks about undergraduate education and facilitate such initiatives as the academic roadmap, the information clearinghouse, and the large class working group; advisors can help students clarify their goals and find the right classes. But the roadmap, the clearinghouse, improved mentoring, enhanced peer review of teaching, stronger recruitment and orientation, better large classes, and more demanding majors all require the input, effort, expertise, and creativity of senior faculty members.

Other groups cannot take their place. We want undergraduates to become more ambitious, active, and demanding, but they need help; they cannot be expected to lead the transformation of a campus that is so complex and so new to them. We also cannot expect to foist responsibility for academic change on graduate student teachers finding their way in the classroom for the first time, on lecturers and clinical ranks faculty struggling with heavy teaching loads and working without the security of tenure, or on junior faculty, also without tenure, trying to establish themselves simultaneously as teachers, researchers, and citizens on an unfamiliar campus.

Only senior faculty members have the security, accomplishments, experience, and freedom to carry out vital academic change. Moreover, their example is crucial to the transformation of campus culture: if the most accomplished and most favored academic figures visibly value undergraduate education, then gradually junior colleagues and undergraduates will, too.

We do not believe that senior faculty members need to make draconian changes in their working lives in order to reform undergraduate education. No individual tenured professor has to take up all the activities described above or carry out the same ones each year: there are plenty of opportunities from which to choose.

Moreover, senior faculty members hardly have to shoulder the burden of undergraduate reform alone. What they do need to do is to become informed enough through their participation that they can meaningfully counsel campus leaders, academic advisors, admissions and orientation staff, and direct the work of junior colleagues, lecturers, clinical ranks faculty, and graduate students.

This effort does entail a change in the way some senior faculty members conceive of their job. As we have argued above, the belief that faculty must devote themselves either to research or to teaching is un-ambitious and counterproductive. Like senior faculty at the best American universities, they should take it as a matter of course that they can excel in research and still play pivotal roles in undergraduate education. Many senior faculty members at IU Bloomington already conceive of their work in this way. We believe that more can and should follow their example.

We also believe that it is in their interest to do so. As argued above, IU Bloomington will not achieve its research goals without first-rate undergraduate education and the benefits it brings: better undergraduate students, better graduate students, and better faculty. We would add to that list, too, better reputation.

Even as individual units strive to improve their rankings, IU Bloomington's overall standing has stagnated or edged downward. That is clearly the case with the highly influential US News rankings of universities: IU Bloomington now stands 71st. A strategy focused on research alone will not allow the campus to rival higher-ranked institutions whose reputations rest on excellence in both research and undergraduate education.

The Provost's Office

While it is logical for senior faculty members to involve themselves more fully in undergraduate teaching and learning, they need encouragement from campus leadership. This report lays out a substantially larger formal role for the Provost and the VPUE in undergraduate education. Yet it is perhaps just as important for the Provost's Office to engage in a vigorous, ongoing discussion with senior faculty and unit leaders.

We recommend, first, that the Provost's Office ensure the consistent academic message of excellence and expectations across campus communication and organizations.

Second, the VPUE should ensure undergraduates' access to opportunity by initiating and overseeing the Academic Roadmap, the Information Clearinghouse, the restructuring of advising, the large class initiative, and the evaluation of the major.

Third, the Provost's Office should make clear the kind of faculty careers that the university values and start a dialogue with senior faculty, including the Alliance of Distinguished and Titled Professors, and with the deans of schools and colleges, about their role in undergraduate education.

In the long run, both formal programs and vigorous persuasion are necessary to change the culture and practice of undergraduate education at IU Bloomington.

Task Force

Chair: Michael McGerr, Paul V. McNutt Professor of History
Tim Bartley, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology
Jocelyn Bowie, Director of Communications and Marketing, College of Arts and Sciences
Matthew Burkhart, undergraduate student, Kelley School of Business
Jillian Deluna, undergraduate student, College of Arts and Sciences
Dennis Groth, Associate Professor and Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies, School of Informatics
Matthew Guterl, Associate Professor, African-American and African Diaspora Studies Department, and Director, American Studies
Cheryl Haium, Administrative Assistant, 21st Century Scholars Program
Jane Rogan, Associate Director and Academic Specialist, Liberal Arts and Management Program
Joshua Rosenberger, graduate student, School of Health, Physical Education, and Recreation
Colleen Ryan-Scheutz, Associate Professor and Director of Italian Language Instruction, Department of French and Italian
Olaf Sporns, Professor and Associate Department Chair, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences

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