Forms & Procedures

Also in Faculty & Staff

Related Links

Memo from Dean Sapiro
Dean of Arts & Sciences

To: CAS/GRS Chairs and Academic Program Directors, and Staff Administrators
From: Virginia Sapiro, Dean of Arts & Sciences

Process for Curriculum, Budget, and Academic Planning: Fall 2009

It is time to launch the annual curriculum planning process for the academic year (AY) 2010/11 and the budget planning process for FY 2011, as we outlined at the September CCD meeting. Related to that, President Brown has called for a longer-term planning exercise, to be completed by April 1, 2010, where all schools and colleges will have the opportunity to refresh their Strategic Plans by aligning goals for the next decade with the 2007 University plan, Choosing to be Great. By beginning our major annual planning processes simultaneously, and this year incorporating a head start on the 2010 Strategic Plan, we hope they will support a more efficient process of information collection, analysis, and discussion with your colleagues. These different planning processes should also inform each other. Full detail on the one-time all-university strategic planning exercise will be provided next week. The annual exercise described here comprises three interrelated components, all due by the previously announced deadline of Friday, October 9:

  1. Academic Planning Self-Study: Update the baseline Academic Planning Self-Study that your department/program faculty first conducted in Fall 2007, this year using the Executive Summary section to extend the usual three-year framework to ten-year projections and priorities.
  2. 2009/10 Curriculum Planning: Develop your department's proposed class schedule and teaching assignments for 2010/2011
  3. FY2011 Supplemental Budget Request: Analyze your budget to make sure you are making the best possible use of your resources, identify high priority areas of instructional and other budgetary needs for FY 2011 (July 1, 2010-June 30, 2011) that cannot be covered by the current resources, and submit a well-documented request for additional one-time or continuing funding to cover those needs.

1. Updating the Academic Planning Self-Study

In September, 2007 we launched the first wide-gauge Academic Planning Self-Study. The purpose of the Self-Study is to help us fulfill the goals of (a) providing the best quality educational experience to our students at all levels; (b) making sure we offer the courses necessary to fulfill the implied promises of our academic programs in a timely way; (c) planning for making sure our courses are staffed as far as possible to allow our students to work with our superb faculty of nationally- and internationally-recognized professors that drew our students to this university; and (d) sharing the obligations our curriculum poses as equitably as possible among our faculty. We will ask you to update this planning document on an annual basis to insure that we continue to be active in pursuing these goals in our annual curriculum, budget, and faculty recruitment processes.

This year we have slightly expanded the final section of the Self-Study, in order that its familiar rubrics and the groundwork already laid by two years of experience can also be directly applied to development of the goals we will advance in our CAS/GRS Strategic Plan for the next ten years.

Your first step in planning for next year and beyond should be to engage your faculty to review and refresh last year's Self-Study in light of the evolving commitments and priorities that define your department's educational mission, as well any year-to-year changes in degree requirements or instructional capacity that affect how you currently see, and plan to implement, your curricular obligations. The form for updating the Self-Study is available at http://www.bu.edu/cas/faculty-staff/forms/. All of last year's Academic Planning Self-Studies will also be available at http://www.bu.edu/cas/faculty-staff/forms/. This allows you to download your own in case you don't have an electronic version, but you can also see the plans of related departments as well as your own.

The format of the first three sections of the study (Curricular Context, Specific Course Needs, and Course Staffing) is exactly the same as last year, so your basic task remains to determine what, if anything, has changed since last year, and to update the section on three-year planning of how you will fulfill the curricular needs generated by your responses in the first two sections of the Self-Study. Please be sure to integrate any new faculty into your planning for course coverage and to make adjustments for retirements and other relevant changes of status.

The fourth and final section of the study, normally reserved for an executive summary of year-to-year updates, has this year been renamed "Executive Summary of Updates and Ten-Year Planning" to anticipate the extended time-frame for our Strategic Plan. You are asked in this section to look ahead ten years; to list any significant changes you foresee in your department's set of commitments in undergraduate and graduate education, curricular offerings, and faculty composition and profile; and, briefly, to assess the potential impact of these changes on the scope and quality of our academic programs.

2. 2010/11 Curriculum Planning: Class Schedule, Teaching Assignments

As of September 15, the tool kit of forms and guidelines that you will need to prepare your AY 10/11 curricular and FY 11 budgetary submissions is posted at http://www.bu.edu/cas/faculty-staff/forms/. This tool kit consists of:

Please be sure to use the current version of Guidelines for Class Scheduling, which has been slightly but importantly amended since last fall to help ensure that your submission captures all information relevant to developing our overall class schedule.

** A new database has been created for submission of the information requested in the Course Scheduling Form and the Faculty Load Form. Academic Administrators have been contacted regarding training on the new database. While we encourage departments and programs to use the database, we will, as an alternative during this transitional year, accept the form versions of these documents for your planning of 2010/11.

Once the appropriate person(s) have been trained and granted access to the new database, work for AY 2010/11 may begin by logging onto the secure site located at http://casfm4.bu.edu/fmi/iwp/res/iwp_auth.html?sid=0220250AB207D86B1203788E.

View the user manual for the new database.

3. FY 2011 Supplemental Budget Requests

Following an assessment of your instructional and other budget needs, please submit your request for supplemental one-time or continuing funding using the Budget Request form.

Please list requests in order of priority and provide specific detailed information about each request, either in the description section or attached as backup.

Deadline, Format, and Consultation

The deadline for submission of all scheduling, budget, and academic planning documents is Friday, October 9. Please provide these documents both in hard copy (CAS 106) and electronically (cmcmull@bu.edu) to Chris McMullen. Please do not submit them directly to me or any of the associate deans.

My staff and I will try to reserve extra time for consultations to deal with questions and concerns that arise in the course of your work. If you need to talk with me, please contact Chris McMullen for an appointment as soon as possible for scheduling purposes. For efficiency, we suggest the following first points of contact for different aspects of the process:

  • Class Scheduling: Lorraine Boyd
  • Teaching Assignments, New Course/Program Proposals: Susan Jackson
  • Teaching Fellows: Scott Whitaker
  • Faculty Searches and Leaves: Peter Doeringer
  • Instructional and Other Budgetary Needs: Juliana Walsh Kaiser

We will read materials as they arrive on a rolling basis, and will respond with comments and, as needed, requests for additional information or meetings.