Recommendations from these committees need to be taken seriously. As is the case with staff recommendations, if recommendations from faculty are not followed, there needs to be timely and clear feedback about the reasons why. Any information about limits or parameters of the change process needs to be communicated to all faculty early in the process rather than after recommendations have been made. Faculty need to be given sufficient time for their deliberations, but there still should be deadlines. Deadlines should be worked out with the faculty leadership.
Assessment needs to be a part of any change process.
Although task forces which study the need for change and how to implement change have a limited life, there needs to be some ongoing body whose responsibility it is to monitor change. Data to evaluate change needs to be based on some comparative pretest data and some criteria of change, e.g., percentage of costs reduced or percent of increase in retention. The result is a matrix with four cells of communication activity and five with decision-making. We will use this as a vehicle to address serious questions we have had at Tabor regarding who decides what. We will attempt to get agreement on the matrix and examples that would fit in each cell.