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Decentralization Tendencies by Deans (Related Software Overview)

Gary Martin, Ed.D. Professor and Assistant Dean University of the Pacific February 23, 2005

Abstract

A survey was conducted with business, education, and engineering deans across the country which revealed a surprising prevalence in decentralized approaches to development, new-student recruitment, career services support, and even record-keeping for enrolled student. A specific comprehensive software package for academic deans and department chairs is outlined which allows academic administrators to track students, alumni, faculty, staff, advisory boards, outreach schools, student recruits, experiential education employers, and school co-op and internship placements.

Introduction

Deans and department chairs are movers and shakers who frequently spur and oversee a wide range of peripheral or support responsibilities for their given programs, including outreach for new students, development of funds and resources, maintenance of current student and alumni records, and even running small-scale career centers and human resources offices. Universities tend to frown on decentralized practices and record- keeping systems in these areas, especially when they are in addition to centralized systems. Such decentralization is viewed as a duplication of efforts which tends to lack the same quality control. In spite of these policies and opinions, deans and chairs often reportedly pursue such practices as much as possible.

The University of the Pacific (Pacific) is a small university with about 6,000 students. The campus has centralized admissions, registration, human resources, career services, and development offices. The university supports decentralized experiential education offices in several academic units including our School of Engineering and Computer Science (SOECS). In spite of all the centralized operations, we (i.e., the SOECS) perform extensive data tracking which seeks to complement these primary centralized campus offices. To support this activity, we migrated to an extensive, comprehensive database system to support and tie all of these functions together.

This paper will first reveal the results of a survey sent to business, education, and engineering deans across the country for the purpose of ascertaining a more empirically based grasp of the extent these academic administrators actually engage themselves and their staffs in these support functions. The balance of this paper will describe the above

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Martin, G. (2005, June), Decentralization Tendencies By Deans Paper presented at 2005 Annual Conference, Portland, Oregon. 10.18260/1-2--14320