The good news for Ohio University deans is that they all received generally favorable reviews in their latest round of evaluations. The bad news is that, because none of the evaluations garnered enough responses, they only can be seen as the opinions of some of the professors in their respective departments.
The survey is a standardized one-page Likert scale evaluation with room for comments distributed to faculty. Deans are evaluated in five broad categories: planning and management, personnel matters, external relations, unit goals and overall performance.
The Office of Institutional Research creates the evaluation forms and sets a base response rate that ensures the opinions expressed are representative of a college's Group One faculty. Group One faculty are those who are either tenured or on the tenure track. Just like professor evaluations, the surveys are anonymous.
For instance, it was determined that the College of Arts and Sciences, the largest college on campus, required 42 percent of its faculty to respond, but only 30 percent returned the survey. The College of Business, a smaller college, required an 83 percent response rate with only 65 percent of the surveys returned.
Provost Stephen Kopp, whose office oversees the evaluation process, said the low response rates preclude the evaluations from being seen as a definitive review of the deans.
The results cannot be generalized to the faculty overall
he said.
That does not mean, however, the evaluations are not useful, Russ College of Engineering and Technology Dean Dennis Irwin said.
Irwin, who received aggregate approval ratings of more than 88 percent in all five survey categories, said he appreciated both the results and make-up of the process and was more interested in the feedback he received from both the survey and the formal evaluation process -which is performed by a four-to-six-member committee -than the low response rate.
His college's response rate was 53 percent, with 76 percent needed to be truly representative.
A few parts of the process, however, may need tweaking, he said. Written comments often evaluated areas Irwin said he was not necessarily responsible for, and a lack of comments from anyone other than Group One faculty often precludes many people with consistent contact with him from commenting on his performance.
Only about half of the people that report to me actually had an opportunity to evaluate me Irwin said.
One small aspect of the process Kopp said he wishes to improve is the written comments, where the evaluators currently have no idea how many individual comments were made by different faculty members.
It would be helpful to be able to frame the written responses so we know how many different respondents actually wrote comments he said.
Kopp alluded to the necessity of getting feedback from all groups the various deans serve, not just from Group One faculty. Comprehensive reviews, given every five years, take these other groups into account.
Tibor Koertvellyessy, a professor in the College of Art and Sciences, said he was one of the 30 percent of faculty in that college who filled out an evaluation. He attributed low response rates on a few factors, namely a professor's busy schedule and a lack of a need to respond from those with neutral feelings.
You tend to have those responding with very strong opinions either way
he said.
Koertvellyessy said the evaluations should be expanded to include more than just Group One faculty.
Regardless of what your status is
if you are in the faculty
your work is going to be influenced by directions of the dean
he said.
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