La Voz

Issue date: 4/21/08 Section: News

Media Credit: Photo Courtesy www.deanza.edu De Anza College President Brian Murphy

President Brian Murphy suggested a plan to reorganize the central administrative body of De Anza College at the March 17 Academic Senate meeting, entailing the creation of a new instructional division and two associate vice president positions.

Questions about the reorganization began to percolate at recent Academic Senate meetings. Members at the April 14 meeting noted three clarified points of the proposed De Anza reorganization.

Under the proposition, the library would lose its dedicated dean position, the distance learning program would be moved away from its current academic position and the two open associate vice president positions would be reclassified.

Currently, the library dean position is being considered for administrative oversight of a new instructional division, which would work in conjunction with the present day Student Success Center.

The Student Success Center currently comprises a cluster of nine programs, including ESL Readiness Lab, Academic Skills Center, Instructional Computing Lab, Listening and Speaking Lab, English Writing Readiness Center, Tutorial Center, Math and Science Tutorial Center and the Reading Readiness Center. All of these instructional support services are currently housed within the Language Arts Division.

Many other support services, such as the Math and Science Tutorial Center and the Instructional Computing Lab, are out of place under the Language Arts Division. Thus, there is an effort to move these programs to a new separate instructional division.

Gregory Anderson, director of the Student Success Center, said, "I think it is very positive. Right now, there are a lot of effective programs that are being isolated, and this will allow the programs to work more efficiently."There are no plans to reformat the present curriculum within these programs. In terms of the proposed movement of the Distance Learning Center away from its present instructional position to facilitate more collaboration between the Technology Resources Group and the Distance Learning Program, there was some obvious opposition during the Academic Senate meeting. The Technology Resources group is currently housed under the Finance and College Services Division.

Representatives from the Distance Learning Center expressed concern that it is being pushed in the direction of technology instead of the direction of academia, and the members, concerned about the lines of communication, felt that this could potentially undermine the academic importance of their department. Director of the Distance Learning Center Linda Elvin referred to a survey by the Instructional Technology Counsel that stated that the trend in the last ten years has been to move the distance learning programs away from an IT classification and into the academic domain. "Consequently this type of reorganization could be a backtrack," it read.

The issue of the reclassification of two open associate vice president positions also met with some opposition. Several members of the Academic Senate felt that it would be a hasty decision to essentially "grandfather in" members of the administration into associate vice president positions without clarifying what the job description of those position would be.

The newly reclassified positions would be the associate vice president of instruction and the associate vice president of finance and college services. The purpose of this proposed classification would be to alleviate some of the workload currently handled by the vice presidents of these respective divisions.

The reorganization of De Anza is definitely in the preliminary stages at, but President Brian Murphy noted that "this initiative will take place in the short term, hopefully by the start of the next academic year."

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