DeKALB | President Doug Baker will finalize changes to 236 administrative programs from Program Prioritization Nov. 28.

His feedback on the task force reports will be released as the President’s Progress Report. Baker’s recommendations are final, unless it involves NIU’s budget, which will then need approval from the Board of Trustees, Provost Lisa Freeman said.

Program Prioritization used task forces to create reports that review 223 academic programs and 236 administrative programs to influence the allocation of university funds. The reports were based on narratives submitted by program leaders in November, according to an April 26 Northern Star article.

Freeman said where Baker disagrees with the task force recommendations, the task force didn’t have all the knowledge necessary to know the recommendations wouldn’t work.

“There is not a lot of disagreement [between the task force recommendations and Baker’s feedback],” Freeman said. “There are places where the president asks a program to work with another program or to think about a particular idea. The places where there’s blatant disagreement are mostly places where there was a misunderstanding by the task force or something significant has changed since the task force recommendations were issued.”

Political Science Professor Matthew Streb and Chris McCord, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, are monitoring the process of the implementation of administrative program changes to make sure IT platforms and personnel matters necessary to track what comes out of Program Prioritization are established.

“On the administration side, we really didn’t have the comparable infrastructure to take the recommendations forward,” Freeman said. “We knew that we would be building that ship essentially while we’re sailing it, and so we added some crew. President Baker is still the captain.”

Eventually, Freeman said NIU’s goal is to become self-sustaining and remove Streb and McCord from monitoring Program Prioritization by the end of the year.

Freeman will issue an academic action plan to show the progress made on the academic program task force reports Nov. 28, as mentioned during a Board of Trustees meeting Thursday in Altgeld Hall.

Spokesperson Joe King said Baker declined to comment on the report.

Hiring for faculty

NIU has 60 pre-approved searches to hire new tenure-track faculty members to start in Fiscal Year 2018.

Of the 60 searches, 40 of them were authorized as a result of the Program Prioritization process. The remaining searches worked with Program Prioritization and already had searches in the works, such as faculty searches for the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Freeman said.

“We feel that we probably will be able to make most of these hires as long as we have some continued budget from the state,” Freeman said.