Despite years of opposition from the UO Senate and Faculty Union over costs, refusal to share documents and plans, and constant ridicule from at least one real philosopher, soon after his hiring President Scholz signed on with a consulting company to take charge of tracking faculty for tenure and promotion.
Of course that’s not the way the overpaid PR flacks that Scholz and Provost Chris Long have hired to help them relate to faculty spin it. Long’s post here:
Background
After years of background research, campus listening tours, evaluation of potential systems, and project development, UO launched a request for proposals (RFP) process in Spring 2023. The requirements of the RFP were created by a 40+ person advisory group of faculty, staff, and administrators. The RFP process was competitive and included public demonstrations of the vendor systems. An evaluation team selected Digital Science as our vendor based on the system’s capacity to manage major reviews and the ability to capture and highlight faculty activity and achievement. Digital Science also offers project management support and a solid change management strategy.
Project Update
The Office of the Provost is in the implementation stage of a software platform to manage faculty reviews starting in 2025-2026. This system will collect faculty activity (in the usual scholarship, teaching, and service categories) and will be used manage the various review and promotion workflows.
The platform is called Symplectic Elements (or Elements for short), and OtP is working in partnership with Information Services, UO Libraries, Institutional Research, Human Resources, and the Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation during the current academic year, and consulting with an Academic Advisory Group of academic leaders and personnel support staff from each school and college as well as major academic and research units.
Current work is to establish data feeds from HR, from Banner records of teaching, and from OVPRI’s external funding records as well as harvesting data from third party databases, which index scholarship and grant activity. We are also building workflows to digitally manage our major reviews processes.
Main project aims are to streamline the review process and to give a consistent platform to highlight faculty effort and accomplishment. If you have questions or would like more information about Elements, please contact Hal Sadofsky and Katy Krieger. You can also attend Katy’s weekly office hours Friday from 9-10 a.m. on Zoom to ask questions or receive more information on the project.
Sounds great. Let’s replace some unproductive Ass Deans with some cheap software.
So who will Provost Long fire?
Let’s replace some unproductive Ass Deans with some cheap software.
.
Except…it’s not cheap $oftware.