Annual Departmental Planning (ADP)

As first articulated in the Town Hall (October 29, 2024), the primary goal of ADP is to build departmental capacities for identifying and enacting changes that will lead to a better, more equitable, and more sustainable use of our resources. ADP is being built as a collaborative process, informed by standardized, well-vetted, well-understood, readily-available data, that we do with clear guidelines on a regular schedule. 

In 2024-2025, the faculty steering committee is Rachel Cole and Moriah Bostian. They are involved in all ADP meetings, consult in all planning and decision-making, and are specifically charged with outreach to chairs, directors, and the broader faculty as we build the ADP process. 

Here are the annotated power point slides from the public presentations to date: Town Hall (October 29, 2024) and Open Forum (March 20, 2025). They are available to anyone with an lclark email account.

The annual process can be viewed in the image below. This includes a data summit in January, events throughout the semester, including an open forum in March and a departmental happy hour in April, then a day-long workshop in mid-May (after graduation). This work is designed to inform the building of departmental schedules that normally happens in late September.

In practice, especially during this first year as we get used to ADP, the general goals include (a) reducing reliance on visitors and adjuncts; (b) better absorbing leaves, overseas assignments, and retirements; (c) reducing the number of under-enrolled (<10) classes; and (d) increasing opportunities for cross-disciplinary collaboration, with departments and programs either ‘lending’ or ‘borrowing’ teaching capacity.

Different departments will use the data differently. Our goal was to provide data that was meaningful, useable, and relevant to the planning work we need to do in ADP. Needless to say, none of the data metrics capture the totality of our work. None of these metrics will algorithmically determine what a department should do. But taken together, they allow a department to see itself and its work in relation to (and as part of) the larger academic collective. This view across the College is important and one of the goals we had in putting the process together. The best way for a department to familiarize itself with the data (and learn to use it in planning) is to have Bruce or Scott visit a department meeting to speak to the particulars of your department’s or program’s data. 

You have to turn in a completed “qualitative response sheet.” The steps are:

1. complete the response sheet (either the excel file or word doc).
2. rename the file as “Dept.ADP.Apr4” (eg. ENG.ADP.Apr4 or SOAN.ADP.Apr4 or POLS.ADP.Apr4)
3. Drop in this google folder (link also available on the ADP data sheet and in all reminder emails). 

Simply send an email to Bruce or Scott and they will get you the materials.

As depicted in the image below, ADP’s role among these different planning processes can be characterized as operational planning, using widely-accessible data and creating a common framework for individual and collaborating departments and programs to make changes. Big Ideas (SAIC) is the 3-school institutional strategy platform, one that is building a set of imperatives to guide fundraising and enrollment efforts for the next several years. It’s upon the Big Ideas scaffolding that ADP will build out the curriculum for our students. Similarly, with our work on the budget, in the next couple of years, as we have to absorb attrition, retirements, etc. more than we have in the past, the ADP process will be the mechanism for departments to build collaborations, consolidate courses, and/or devise other strategies to accommodate reduced FTE. It’s not new that departments have often had to find creative ways to deal with such situations. What’s new with ADP is an opportunity to have standardized data to make visible such situations; and an opportunity to collaborate and collectively strategize for good curricular solutions.