Introduction

AAUP State
of the University Survey

Introduction
(2000)

In years past, AAUP evaluated the
President, the Vice-president, and the Division Heads. In 1997 Faculty
Senate voted to perform evaluations of those offices. AAUP supports this
decision and the promise of the Faculty Senate to obtain this important
information, which allows AAUP to shift its focus to a larger arena­University
policies and procedures as a whole.

The recent periods of change and,
yes, even upheaval in some cases, have impacted all of us in the academic
community at Truman. With the approval of the new core and implementation
of the new Master Plan, we needed to put many new courses, programs, and
processes in place. In the midst of all this, we executed and finalized
the search for a permanent Vice-president of Academic Affairs.

The preponderance of responsibility
for implementing this large number of virtually simultaneous initiatives
fell directly upon the faculty. As such, the membership of AAUP felt it
appropriate and necessary to begin conducting a State of the University
Survey to assess faculty approval of and satisfaction with a number
of the initiatives and other relevant topics.

In developing the instrument, the
membership attempted to identify the issues most relevant to faculty. Keeping
the instrument brief constituted a further goal, primarily aimed at enhancing
the probability of faculty response. We feel we succeeded in both cases.
The large number of faculty responding for the past three years supports
this contention.

Each of the areas identified on the
survey represents a complex and multifaceted issue. The logic used in constructing
these items began with the assumption that, if any of the parts comprising
the whole function below par, the whole fails to work/produce at optimal
capacity, i.e., it is not the best possible. Hence, each item includes
the most important indicators of success in the targeted area. This makes
each item multifaceted, just like the topic being assessed. A very high
rating reflects an issue where all or most facets function optimally. To
the extent the respondent believes any one of the components fails to measure
up, the rating becomes less favorable. Thus a very low rating reflects
the belief that most or all facets function poorly. In this way, we assess
the major issues with some measure of brevity.

While any one component of a given
topic area potentially provides a separate item yielding meaningful information,
we suspected the three to four page survey resulting from such a listing
would elicit many fewer faculty respondents, thereby affording a more constricted
picture of faculty opinion. We wanted instead to maximize participation,
so we went for brievity and obtained a global measure of each topic area.
While the results fail to provide information about which particular part
or parts of a target area faculty approved or disapproved, they do offer
a measure of what faculty, on average, generally think about each issue.

Our original goal of providing faculty
a forum to express their opinions about the state of the University remains
intact. We believe that the relatively large return rate over the three
year history of the survey verifies the need for such a forum, and that
the data obtained represent the current attitudes and beliefs of a large
number of faculty at Truman regarding the components that comprise our
academic environment. Providing essentially the same survey for three consecutive
years allows us the advantage of a perspective from which to measure progress
or lack of progress on these key issues and concerns. We encourage you
to study the data and discuss the results with each other.