University Academic Planning Council Updates

This is a long-overdue update for the University Academic Planning Council.  The UAPC is one of the last bodies that reviews academic programs and long-range plans before final approval by the Provost, Chancellor, and Faculty Senate. The UAPC is chaired by the Provost, and has as voting members the Dean of the Graduate School, an administrator chosen by the Provost (current the Dean of L&S), a representative from the University Committee (the executive committee of the Faculty Senate), 5 more faculty members, a representative from the Academic Staff Executive Committee, and a non-voting student representative. The Chancellor is officially a member, but by tradition does not attend the meetings.

In a nutshell, if you don’t want to read all what we do in Faculty Policy and Procedures (FP&P), we approve the creation, modification, and elimination of certificates, majors, centers, and departments, as well as reviewing campus wide academic issues. Almost everything we review starts elsewhere in the University, and is approved by another body like a school’s Academic Planning Council or the Graduate School Faculty Executive Committee. Some of our approvals are the final step in a process, but for others, things are passed on to the Faculty Senate and/or the Board of Regents.  For a complete overview of the review process, see this document.

Much of what we’ve done this year hasn’t been terribly exciting, so I’m not going to give a blow-by-blow recap of everything we did. September and October were mostly Automatic Consent items, or discontinuing programs that haven’t had students or faculty in many years.

The November and December meetings involved discussion of what at first blush would seem to be an issue of great importance to students: the discontinuation of the Departments of Anatomy and Physiology in the Medical School, and the creation of the Department of Cell and Regenerative Medicine, and the Department of Neuroscience. In actuality, from a student perspective, this is less of a change than you’d expect: none of the courses will change, and it’s primarily a change to faculty tenure homes to better coordinate research and recruiting efforts.

In January, we accepted a report from a subcommittee on revising the guidelines for Center and Institute lifecycles. Centers are administrative structures that faculty and staff can create to better coordinate their work. They can be simple “letterhead centers” that have no physical shape, or large enterprises like the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery.  Our revised guidelines better spell out what a Center needs to include in its proposals, add new processes to help us evaluate Centers during their lifecycle, and require all Centers to plan for their eventual dissolution or evolution. I’m especially excited to have worked on this piece during the 2009-10 academic year.

The February meeting was probably the one that will be of most interest to campus: we approved the addition of two new majors, one in Environmental Studies and one in Environment Sciences. To quote and paraphrase the Environmental Studies proposal, consider this about the UW  - we are the associated with

“John Muir, who helped define modern understandings of wilderness and national parks that have ever after shaped people’s understandings of the American landscape; Frederick Jackson Turner, who crafted a “frontier thesis” that focused on relationships with land as a defining feature of the American historical experience; Charles Richard Van Hise, the university president who, with Governor Robert M. LaFollette, conceived the Wisconsin Idea  and who also authored the first textbook on natural resource conservation in American history; F. H. King, the College of Agriculture professor who saw in China’s “farmers of forty centuries” a vision of sustainable agriculture that remains inspiring to this day; John Curtis, who redefined the field of plant ecology and produced a classic book on the vegetation of Wisconsin; Gaylord Nelson, the founder of Earth Day; and many, many others. Perhaps the single most influential expression of this Wisconsin environmental tradition is the wildlife ecologist Aldo Leopold, whose A Sand County Almanac remains one of the most important books about conservation and the environment ever written by an American…. And yet, oddly enough, this great environmental university has never offered an undergraduate major in environmental studies.

We are offering two, conceptually related, but different majors. A logical question to ask is “why two majors”, and the proposers have developed a document that answers exactly that.

The Environmental Studies major is unique in a new way: it is only possible to major in Environmental Studies by combining it with another major – in fact, the goal of the program is that ANY other major can be paired with Environmental Studies, “in order to gain a broadly integrative understanding of the complex interconnections and relationships that any sophisticated understanding of environmental problems entails.” In short: Environmental Studies cannot be done for its own sake, but has to be part of a larger education.

I cannot recommend strongly enough that everyone take a few moments to read the Environmental Studies proposal.  It is not at all dry bureaucratic requirements; it’s actually an uplifting celebration of a broad liberal education.

-Erik Paulson