McRobbie approves 3 academic committees to analyze academics, Old Crescent buildings

IU President Michael McRobbie announced last week the creation of three new academic committees. McRobbie first spoke of the committees in his State of the University address in February.

The new committees are the New Academic Directions Committee, the University Steering Committee and the Old Crescent Academic Working Group.

“The idea is to bring up the academic program of the University to make sure that our academic programs, both in the structure and discipline, and in the way we do teaching and learning, represent the best, most contemporary, most effective methods that we have available,” Vice President for University Regional Affairs, Planning and Policy John Applegate said.

The New Academic Directions Committee is to be co-chaired by Provost and Executive Vice President Karen Hanson and IU-Purdue University Indianapolis Chancellor Charles Bantz.

The committee’s task is to look at changing the approach and organization of academic missions, Applegate said.

“Our goal is to make sure that we have programs that students now and in the future are interested in, and that we also make all the University programs work more effectively for students, and finally we have to do all that in a more efficient way,” Bantz said.

The committee will gather information from the Bloomington and IUPUI campuses by getting input from deans of schools and departments and asking advice from the Bloomington student body president on how to most effectively reach out to students.

“We’re going to do a lot of data gathering before we begin analyzing the material,” Bantz said.

McRobbie also asked each IU campus to establish and set up a New Directions in Learning Committee to understand how technology affects student success.

“It asks the questions not about the way we’re organized but the way we conduct education at IU,” Applegate said. “They can set up the committees kind of however they want as not to reinvent wheels or duplicate existing efforts.”

The Steering Committee is to be chaired by Applegate and will plan a conference next spring to review the initial ideas of all the committees.

“A conference will bring together the various campus committees to share ideas of best practices and learn from each other,” Applegate said.

The Old Crescent Academic Working Group will focus on the buildings around Kirkwood Avenue including Franklin, Owen, Maxwell Halls and others.

Many of these buildings have administrative offices and aren’t often used by students.

The group will try to seek alternatives to make this area busier and more useful.

“The committee is just looking at alternatives,” Deputy Vice President of Capital Projects and Facilities and committee member Paul Sullivan said. “Look at different things we could do to make that area more student oriented during all times of the day.”