College of Arts & Sciences
Dean’s Response to Self Study Report of the
Department of Political Science
January 15, 2007
The report of the Department of Political Science and the Chair’s response to it provide an excellent foundation for the academic review process. We thank the Chair, Dr. William Downs, and the department for their efforts, and we especially commend the self study committee and its chair, Dr. Allison Calhoun-Brown, for the considerable thought and time they devoted to this important process.
Academic program review provides us with an opportunity to highlight a department’s major accomplishments, set goals, and focus attention on current concerns and challenges. This is the department’s second cycle of review. Its first review, completed in 2000, resulted in an ambitious list of goals and the provision of resources to help meet them. We are pleased to note that the department met many of its goals. Since the last review, the department has grown from 15 to 19 tenure track faculty members and now has two Professors. Faculty have substantially increased their research productivity, an accomplishment that was rapidly registered in a dramatic rise in ranking from 320th to 112th in the Hix (2004) study. Simultaneously, the department’s instructional programs have strengthen and grown. We are especially impressed with the refinements that have occurred at the undergraduate level, including the formation and success of department sponsored extracurricular teams and its receipt of the Provost’s 2006 Instructional Effectiveness Award.
The upcoming visit by the external review team provides the department and the Dean’s Office with an excellent opportunity to review the progress of the Department and to sharpen our vision for its future. To this end, we will focus here on the goals and objectives put forward by the department in its self study and leave decisions about new resources until the action plan is formulated during later steps in the program review process. In general, the Dean’s Office is pleased with the direction that is plotted in the department’s goals and objectives and agrees with many of the recommendations in the report. In particular, we strongly support the plans to focus on improving the graduate program, with particular emphasis on the Ph.D. program. Focusing on enhancing the scholarly productivity of the faculty and increasing external funding for research and scholarship are also important targets in the context of the graduate program goal. Further, we support the refinement of the undergraduate major. We also note that the college has been trying to address the faculty salary issues in Political Science and in the college as a whole within the constraints of the University of System of Georgia, and we are cautiously optimistic that the university will find a way and the resources to continue to make market equity adjustments to base salaries. Finally, we fully agree that the department faces serious space constraints, and we are actively working with the university to plan for more and better space for the department.
In addition to the issues mentioned above, we would like to focus on three matters where we think that further information and analysis would be particularly useful as we plan for the department’s future. We hope that the external review team will be able to help us gain greater clarity concerning these concerns.
First, we strongly agree that the Department should refine its graduate program The self-study report details some of the concerns, particularly related to graduate stipends and course offerings. In addition to these concerns, we encourage the department to consider how they might prioritize the different concentrations and faculty expertise with respect to graduate programs, particularly the Ph.D. It will be helpful to us if the reviewers examine the program’s areas of concentration and help us plot a trajectory for the graduate program over the next five years.
Second, we too are concerned about theclass size at the lower and upper undergraduate level. It would be helpful to examine the diversity of classes taught in order to better understand the situation. Then, it would be important to explore a variety of models for instructional delivery to address this issue. Here again the external reviewers’ guidance could be of great assistance.
Third, we would welcome the external reviewers’ assessment of what the department will need to do and what resources it will need to receive in order to consolidate its recent gains and continue to improve the quality of its instructional and research programs.
The Dean’s Office again congratulates the Department on its development since the last academic program review, and thanks the Department of Political Science for this report. Its progress bodes well for the future. The Dean’s Office looks forward to the external reviewers’ visit and to working with the Department on an action plan that will make their goals achievable in the next five years.
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Lauren B. Adamson, Dean
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MaryAnn Romski, Associate Dean