Road Map to Premier update, fall 2021

Re-aiming the Road Map efforts continue, and at the Sept. 30 meeting of the Road Map Steering Committee, President Harvey Stenger asked the group if, after almost 10 years of strategic planning, does the Road Map really matter? Is it helpful?

“I always look for signs that it’s working and we had two signs recently that showed it’s definitely working,” he said. “I would directly point to our U.S. News & World Report ranking movement to the fact that we care about planning,” he said, referring to how the campus has managed through COVID.

“We were the first SUNY to refund everyone, the only one to require every student be tested before moving into their residence halls and decisions like that turned into the highest retention rate we’ve ever had for first-year students. We had an intention to our plan.”

The second sign, Stenger said, is that Binghamton has had the highest growth rate of any SUNY campus in the past 10 years (25.7%), and is still the most selective of all of the campuses in the system with the highest average SAT scores for incoming students. “We had a plan to grow and we did that,” Stenger said.

The remaining time for the meeting was spent on a “deep dive” into Strategic Priority 1: Engage in path-breaking graduate education, research, scholarship and creative activities that shape the world, which is co-chaired by Vice President for Research Bahgat Sammakia and Professor of History Howard Brown.

SP 1 has four goals, the first two that rely on the National Science Foundation for its metrics, said Sammakia.

“For Goal A: Binghamton University is nationally recognized for outstanding doctoral education, we selected an achievable metric based on the latest available data,” Sammakia said. The new metric is based on the campus ranking in the NSF Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED) and the target is to achieve the top 80 by 2025.

Goal B: Binghamton University has a research, scholarship and creative activities profile of a premier public university, will also use a new metric from the NSF Higher Education Research and Development ranking by total research and development expenditures, Sammakia said. ”The University’s expenditures in 2019 were down from 2019,” he added, “but we added a percentile of faculty salaries and we think we can go higher. The target is to remain in the top 50.”

Goal C: Binghamton University has a collaborative culture for research, scholarship and creative production has been difficult to set a metric for because the campus no longer has access to Academic Analytics, said SP1 committee member Curtis Kendrick, dean of the Libraries. The new metric is to measure collaborations among faculty based on journal articles, conference proceedings, books and federal grants.

“We’re not experts in measuring collaboration, so we put a small task force together that saw that we have a built-in source of collaboration at the University through the Transdisciplinary Areas of Excellence seed grant program,” Kendrick said. “We sent out a survey to about 300 who have gone through that process over the years to get their perspective to try to understand from active collaborators if we a culture of collaboration. We tried to get at key indicators of successful collaboration. We included some open-ended questions as well to get a sense of reflections on the current state of collaboration and how to improve it.”

There have been a few different rounds of the survey and now the group plans to send it out to about 100 individuals.

“This is a smart idea,” Stenger said. “We’ve been looking for an answer to this for eight years.”

Goal D: Binghamton University has a transformational impact on society through the University’s research, scholarship, creative activities and doctoral education. The metric for this is $10 million per year in commercialization with discussion of additional measurements.

Natalija Mijatovic, professor of art and design and a member of the SP1 committee, said that, for the first time, fine and performing arts will be included in measuring the University’s impact on society for this goal.

“I generated conversations with the fine and performing arts departments and each has a very diverse set of disciplines,” she said. “We need to be very specific about setting up goals because it is so hard to find one metric that applies to all these very diverse disciplines.

“All of these disciplines have national associations and arts have a global audience, so we need to fine-turn our guidelines,” Mijatovic said. “One of the problems we have is the annual faculty report.”

Mijatovic the SP1 committee recommends revising the faculty report to would allow fine arts and performance faculty to indicate whether a presentation/performance is at the national or international level, with a target of a 20% increase in activities at national and international venues by 2026.

“Our research has great visibility for our campus,” she said. “If we are able to get this one metric right, I think it will be a very good start.”

There was discussion about how to revise the annual faculty report and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost Donald Nieman pledged to work with the fine and performing arts to make it happen, including the possibility of purchasing a software package for the reports moving forward. It will require some thought and some funding.

Brown then turned the discussion to benchmarking our peers, noting that the NSF HERD data provided the basis for the last deep dive, based on a certain cohort .

“This group doesn’t really tell us enough about where we want to go as an institution in terms of R&D expenditures, so we recommend adopting an alternative cohort and focusing on preserving that standing of being a public university, R1 institution and one under 25,000,” he said. “We chose these definition because a couple of institutions have recently gone over 25000, leaving about 15 institutions that meet our criteria and our academic reputation is higher than theirs, at the moment.”

SP1 thinks this should be the basis for comparative data in the future, Brown said. “If we compared ourselves against privates of the same criteria, they are more similar to us.”

With the prior cohort, we were by definition at the bottom, Stenger noted. “This is a more aspirational way of choosing where we want to be, but we don’t want people to think we’re like some of these schools that we are something different, but it looks right to compare against this new group. How we draw the line from a public of this scale to a private of this scale is important.”

“We want to ask the question what they are doing that we can do so we can catch up to them,” Sammakia said. “I love the idea of competing with the best, but we must think about the pragmatic side of can we do what is needed?”

“We’re also talking about reputation,” Brown said. “It’s somewhat bizarre how they compile some of these rankings, but reputation is a large factor in our standing so we started to focus on it. It the recent found of Road Map funding, we got two positions to raise the research profile of faculty, one focused on videos and websites, and one focused on improving the digital profiles of faculty. It’s one way we are trying to move that needle.

Sammakia wrapped up the SP1 report with a review of the Strategic Planning for Research Enterprise Evolution (SPREE) initiative, which was formed “at what we thought was end of COVID,” he said. “We wanted a group of faculty representing the whole campus that could form teams and be ready to respond quickly to calls for proposals in areas we are interested in.

“Four areas were identified that cover most of the work happening on campus and of likely interest to funding areas,” Sammakia said. “We’re now in final SPREE activities so we can compete for proposals as they arise. Any government agencies are not likely to fund anything that doesn’t address one of these areas. If you cannot cover these areas in your proposal, you won’t get funded. We’re now ready to start submitting proposals in these areas.”

Each of the other SPs gave very brief updates:

SP 2: Academic Assessment Day has been very well received. About 1,500 alerts of concern, including for about 500 first-year students, have been received so the University can help them. Faculty are asked to continue to raise alerts for students as necessary. In addition, the SP changed its metrics and set standards higher. Two new positions have been created to help with its initiatives.

SP 3: The University won the 2021 HEED Award and proposals have been received for the work, lift, thrive recruitment video. There was also a suggestion for a new kind of graphic/chart to use on the Road Map website to demonstrate progress on metrics.

SP 4: Worked with the Professional Staff Senate to survey staff as a start to measuring staff engagement with the community. 73.6% of respondents said they contribute their time to the community. The collaborator will be up and running soon to showcase the great work faculty and staff are doing in engagement. Renee Barber was hired, supported by the Road Map, to do assessment and help with the Collaboratory. We do have a handout that if you could help us get the word out to faculty, some really good programs that due to Road Map funding can provide faculty support to be engaged.

SP 5: With requested Road Map funding for a planned giving program, a company was brought in to help us and coach our team. As a result, a $1.5 million gift has come in. In addition, a grad student was hired as a data analyst and he is getting his feet wet to help with modeling of alumni giving. We expect some results by the spring.

SP 6: No update.