A Letter from Dr. Jake Bucher

“Normalizing Change and Evaluating Evolution”

I’d like to continue drawing your attention to the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm (IPP), and use this month’s letter to focus on the principle of “evaluation.” While the IPP uses this principle to discuss the evaluation of learning and self-evaluation, I’ll borrow it to discuss an evaluation of where we are after a period of consistent change – specifically to evaluate that notion of consistent change. Higher Education has long benefitted from change being episodic, usually triggered by something specific – but always with a fixed beginning and end (so much so that Higher Education research on change is dominated by theories of “change management” that assume a beginning/end to change). Now, however, Higher Education is experiencing the same reality of other industries/sectors – the reality that change is constant. The firm cycles, the fixed (and arguably antiquated) processes, and the assumed inevitabilities are no longer our reality. Change fatigue is very real and impactful on us all, but is made more manageable with a paradigm shift away from thinking “we’ll get back to normal” towards a mindset that “normal” is a continuous state of evolution and adaptability. Much of our forthcoming Senior Leader strategic and operation work is positioning Regis to be able to evolve and adapt, but the importance of our collective cultural work to achieve the aforementioned paradigm shift cannot be understated.

The above is an attempted (and brief) evaluation of higher education and our place in it, and there are ongoing evaluations throughout/across Regis. We recently completed a 360-evaluation of three members of Academic and Student Affairs leadership, and will complete evaluations for the remaining three in the spring. Senior Leadership will undergo a similar 360-evaluation in the spring. I shared at the recent Town Hall an update evaluating the progress of the Academic and Student Affairs strategic plan. We are on schedule, or ahead schedule, across all action items, with the exception of two areas. One (program optimization) that is slightly delayed but in progress, and one (harmonizing the enrollment plan with the academic and student affairs plan) that is not technically delayed – but has not made satisfactory progress. We are currently engaged in specific interventions and are excited for forthcoming gains in that area.

Finally, there is the evaluation of our work, work that takes a variety of forms and thus has a variety of outcomes. Retention and graduation rates are often used as one way to evaluate our quality and/or success with students. We are working on better understanding and better projecting these numbers, and I recently met with the Board of Trustees to discuss “predicted graduation” rates as an important evaluation of our success with students. Measuring our graduation rates compared to predicted graduation rates will give us actual insight into how well we fulfill our mission of transformative education. Other institutions are graduating students who would graduate anywhere, we need to evaluate ourselves on how we’re serving students who the analytics suggest won’t graduate.

If we allow ourselves to evaluate our viability and sustainability based on the lack of changes (i.e. the framing that stability is the main indicator of success), then we are setting ourselves up for perceived failure as even the most financially endowed institutions are now forced into this reality of constant change. If, instead, we consider viability and sustainability based on our ability to navigate changes, that is both a fair evaluation and one with realistic outcomes that we can control.