A Desire for Better Days Ahead

The views expressed in this post are solely those of the author and do not represent the views of ACUPA or Purdue University.

Tomorrow, Joe Biden will be inaugurated as the 46th President of the United States. My hope is that the ceremony is the most notable event of the day. My fear is that we will see more violence.

I do not have statistics, but it seems to me that the past six to eight months have collectively been one of the most violent periods in recent U.S. history. Protests turning into riots in nearly every city in the country. So much anger, so much antipathy, so much intolerance, so much hypocrisy. Would we see this much violence if we weren’t in a pandemic? Would we see this much violence if we had different leadership? Was all of this bound to happen no matter what?

We are cut off from the social safety nets we take for granted, the in-person conversations, laughter, and physical contact that normally temper our negative thoughts. We are mired instead in online communications—emails, texts, tweets, posts—that are truncated and lacking in nuance. We are hit with headlines, videos, and photos that highlight the worst events in our communities and across our nation. Healthy discourse struggles to see the light of day.

It is too easy to say that there is nothing I can do about it. True, I do not have any way to speed up distribution of vaccines or stop angry mobs from storming the Capitol. I may not have the ability to influence members of Congress or even members of my local community. I do have, however, the ability to touch the lives of my close family and friends. I can talk to them over the phone or on a virtual platform instead of only texting. I can plan safe, individual encounters with them. I can choose to limit how much news I watch and read. I can immerse myself in activities that boost my mood. For me, that includes doing puzzles, reading fiction, playing games with my husband, and dreaming up vacations for when this is all over. These are the things that keep me going, that give me hope for better days ahead.

And maybe, just maybe, the few minutes I spend typing a post for ACUPA’s blog that has nothing to do with policy administration will allow me to connect with one or two readers. What are you doing to keep yourself going?

How a Numbering Scheme Works Behind the Scenes

The views expressed in this post are solely those of the author and do not represent the views of ACUPA or Purdue University.

Does your institution number its policies? Do you sometimes wonder why? I had the opportunity early on in my policy administrator role to get rid of our policy numbers. Upon further examination, I chose not to. Here’s why.

Purdue University’s catalog contains approximately 120 policies and standards. This number may seem big or small, depending on your perspective. Either way, the number is large enough to me to warrant an effective numbering scheme.

Our policy numbers have three components: volume (Roman numeral), chapter (letter), and number. For example, our policy on policies is number V.C.1. Volume five, chapter C in that volume, and the first policy in that chapter. If you’re curious to know more, visit our policy website for a full description of the numbering scheme. I have heard the criticism that nobody should be expected to remember a policy’s number, and, indeed, I definitely do not know the numbers of individual policies. However, I do use the numbers in two very important ways.

First, I use the number in the name of the page that the policy is posted to on our website. So, the URL for our policy on policies ends with vc1. The URL becomes a static address that can be updated with new versions of the policy whenever it needs to be changed. This means that any other page or website that is linking to that policy will always have a functioning link. If the policy is withdrawn or superseded, we remove the text of the policy and put a note referring visitors to the policy archive and/or to the new policy, so the link is still useful—no 404 error codes.

The second way that I use policy numbers is tracking. On occasion, policy titles change. We add a word, take a word away, or completely rename it for one reason or another. The number of the policy does not change, so I can still find it on my master policy list in the same place, and I can note the previous title for reference. My master policy list tracks the dates of every version of a policy and whether that policy superseded or was superseded by another policy. For this purpose, it is much simpler to refer to policies by their numbers, rather than titles. The second part of policy tracking is finding prior versions of a policy in our archives. I just search by the policy number, and all the incarnations of that policy come back in the search results.

If you are on the fence about numbering your policies, I strongly encourage you to do so. It has made several aspects of my job easier over the years.

Articles on topics that may affect your organization’s policies

As we continue the fall semester, the Blog Committee would like to share some of the articles we’ve been reading that relate to policy administration in higher education.

• Class Notes: The gender poverty gap, COVID-19’s impact on college students, and more
  By Ember Smith and Richard V. Reeves, The Brookings Institution, Sept. 9, 2020
• A Perception Problem About Free Speech
  By Greta Anderson, Inside Higher Ed, Sept. 29, 2020
• University of California must stop all use of SAT and ACT in admissions, judge orders
  By Michael Burke, Ed Source, Sept. 1, 2020
• Accommodations in the Time of COVID
  By Nancy Gunzenhauser Popper, Talent Management and HR, Aug. 31, 2020
• UW System: Registration is now open for national public summit on preventing sexual harassment in higher education
  WisBusiness.com, Sept. 29, 2020
• 4 COVID-era Cybersecurity Threats CISOs are Confronting
  By Matt Zalaznick, University Business, Aug. 20, 2020
• California Bill Likely Conflicts with New Title IX Regulation
  By Jeremy Bauer-Wolf, Education Dive, Aug. 28, 2020

Innovations in Policy Draft Development that Saved Me Time and Tears

It was 10 p.m. on the night before the new draft of our Title IX policy was due for review by our Chief Policy Officer, the final step before it could move to President’s Council and on to Trustees for (fingers crossed) approval and adoption. It was crunch time, just a couple of weeks out from the new Title IX rule’s August 14th deadline, and I was elbows deep and hours into a heavy edit of what I was promised was the final draft from its writing committee. That’s when the emails started.

First, it was, “Just one more quick thing . . .” and “Can you change these lines, too?” then a flurry of discussions, and with it, more and more requested revisions, which I dutifully and meticulously incorporated. And then it happened. The dreaded “I made some additional changes to the draft throughout; see the attached draft.” No, no. I protested internally. That is not the Draft. I have the Draft. That is the Ghost of Drafts Past with (groan) new revisions!

If you have ever edited anything for anyone ever, you likely just visibly shuddered at the above scenario. Every editor will inevitably, at one point or—more likely—many points, experience the same sinking feeling when the sanctity of version control is casually disregarded. But with documents as important as policies (especially ones as critical and time sensitive as the one mentioned above), the balance between editorial courtesy and non-discretionary necessity becomes heavily (and rightfully) skewed toward the latter. So, what’s a policy editor to do, besides swallow her tears and play a very long, very high-stakes game of Spot the Differences? Which is, inevitably, exactly what I did for the next few hours of my evening.

The following morning, I woke from a (dismally short) sleep and decided something had to change about our editorial process. Over the past few months of remote work, our institution has embraced using Microsoft Teams to keep in touch with co-workers and collaborate on projects, but, at the time, we were still using shared Box folders to store working drafts and their numerous past versions. And while Box integrates well enough with Teams, files hosted through Box do not have the same advanced capabilities as files hosted on Microsoft’s cloud services SharePoint and OneDrive. As long as we continued to insist on keeping files scattered on Box, in emails, and on our internal drives, we truly weren’t utilizing Teams to its full potential, and we were creating a lot more unnecessary work for ourselves. Little did we realize we were needlessly complicating a system already automated and optimized through Office 365.

How it Works and How it Works for Us

Like ours, many institutions have adopted Teams for remote communication and project collaboration as we all continue to navigate the new normal of current events. But many Teams users are not aware of what happens behind the scenes of Teams. Every file (including all documents, notebooks, wikis, Planner tasks, calendar entries, and everything in between) shared or created within a Teams channel is uploaded to SharePoint (or OneDrive in the case of files shared in chats). (If you use Teams and haven’t already, I highly encourage you to take a few minutes and explore what your SharePoint site looks like. Think of it as Teams’ central repository—because it is.)

The benefits of this, besides embedded organization and easy access to needed files without leaving Teams, are the integrated collaboration and cross-app features you only get with SharePoint and OneDrive files (Microsoft hosted files play nice with Microsoft apps, go figure!). These features include automatic saving (no more losing progress), automatic version record keeping (eliminating the need for multiple version files), and, most importantly for our office, collaborative editing between multiple authors in real time (goodbye, Ghosts of Drafts Past).

By embracing and encouraging the use of Teams instead of email for sending drafts and Box for housing versions, we were able to ensure that a single working draft was always live and available for authors, editors, and reviewers. Consequently, the next round of review and revision for our Title IX policy went far more smoothly. We were able to work together, simultaneously, on a living document in real time and chat seamlessly with each other as needed, eliminating the need for tracking down relevant email chains, sending out and downloading multiple drafts, re-uploading them, and other general draft babysitting and housekeeping. The sanctity of the working draft was respected without effort. It was a game changer.

Since then, we have integrated this process into how we handle every document that comes through our office, and we continue to explore additional ways to utilize the automation, collaboration, and project management features embedded within SharePoint. It might be dramatic to say that it has revolutionized our editorial process, but it certainly has spared me a lot of extra work and frustration (not to mention, late-night tears).

For those who are interested in utilizing collaborative editing but need additional guidance, Microsoft provides tips and tutorials on their support pages, a few of which I will link below:

• Collaborate on files in Microsoft Teams
• Document collaborations and co-authoring
• Collaborate in Word tutorial

Bringing the ACUPA Conference Home

At last year’s ACUPA conference, I attended a session called “What Have We Been Missing? Adding Equity Review to Our Policy Process,” presented by Michele Gross from the University of Minnesota. Michele presented information about UM’s “equity lens” facet of their policy review process in which policies are evaluated for unforeseen, undue burdens for groups who have experienced exclusion and/or discrimination. The presentation was informative and thought provoking. I returned to my campus motivated to implement something similar. This post describes the process of realizing this change on my campus. 

By way of context, I work at a college of almost 13,000 students with the only student demographic majority being women. Georgia Gwinnett College (GGC) is also relatively new, founded in 2005, and serves large populations of first-generation, immigrant, and students of color. We have approximately 600 faculty and 400 staff. Our policy process involves the following stages: 

1.      Informal review by me 

2.      Informal review (which we call coordination) by senior leadership 

3.      Final reviews by our Legal Affairs team and me 

4.      Final approval by the president’s cabinet.  

Despite a growing level of diversity among our faculty and administration, many faculty and administrators are from different demographic groups than our students. Our policy process is relatively streamlined, which has many advantages, but the equity review presentation I attended highlighted one of the disadvantages: A potentially narrow view of the impact of our policies, made even more possible when creators and reviewers of policies aren’t members of the groups potentially impacted by the policies.  

Consequently, when I returned from the conference, I began plans to pilot test an equity review stage in our policy review process. After assembling a proposal describing logistics and potential benefits, I met with my supervisor and her supervisor (then, the president’s chief of staff). They were both on board quickly and the idea was presented to the president’s cabinet for their feedback. Because the cabinet is the final approver of all policies and provides oversight for the policy process itself, their support was necessary. They agreed to a pilot test of the idea, so I updated our policy review flowchart and created a memo outlining the process and the reasons behind it. After some discussion, the equity review stage was inserted early in the process, between my informal review and senior leadership coordination. I also assembled a team of campus officials with responsibilities with relevant groups who would compose our equity review team. Because our campus is relatively new and leanly staffed, we don’t have many of the cultural centers that other campuses do. Here is our current equity review team and, where not obvious, the groups for which they review: 

• Associate Dean for Advising Programs: Students receiving mentoring for academic renewal or enhancement 
• Executive Director for Diversity and Equity Compliance: Groups covered under federal EEO and Title IX policy 
• Veterans Success Manager 
• Executive Director of Financial Aid Services: Pell Grant recipients and other low income students 
• Director of Disability Services 
• Senior Associate Vice President, Student Affairs: A wide variety of other student groups that don’t currently have dedicated staff, such as LGBTQIA+, returning students, etc. 

After identifying the group, I met with them to gauge their interest and invite their suggestions about maximizing the success of the group. All agreed that equity review would provide a beneficial level of review and potentially provide them with a professional development opportunity to become more involved with policy creation and review.   

If you’ve managed any type of organizational change, you know how strongly institutional context and timing influence its success, and our equity review implementation was no different. In particular, a series of staffing changes created an environment conducive to success, although this could have easily had the opposite effect. In the past year, a new president and four new VPs (two in newly created divisions) have been hired and three new deans (out of seven total) have either been hired or are in the final hiring stages. This has led to a slow-down in normal policy review activity, but also created fertile ground for new ideas to take root, since the entire campus was in change mode. 

The equity review team has reviewed a few policies and we are still in the early stages of implementing equity review, but every sign so far has been positive. I have every reason to believe that it will become a permanent feature of our policy review process. We are currently exploring the addition of staff who work with international students and athletes to the equity review team.  

For anyone interested in making such a change, I highly recommend UM’s equity lens website and Michele’s presentation from the 2019 conference and the webinar she and her colleagues presented last week, both available under Resources on ACUPA’s website. Additionally, tying the effort to campus culture and traditions strengthens its chance of success, and most campuses have a mission or vision statement or some other foundational document that describes the institution’s commitment to diversity that can add support to the effort. A variety of administrative units, such as those whose staff work with underrepresented groups, also may be engaged to build a coalition of support for anyone wanting to implement such a change on their campus.