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Part of resource management is quality decision-making as it relates to planning. Once a decision has been made, does the university assess the quality of its decisions and planning, and if it does, does it learn from its assessment? How do we know if we’re doing the right type of assessment — one that gives us the feedback we need to make necessary modifications (or none)? What is the best process for acquiring and managing the all-important resources supporting the educational endeavor? In a sense, much of the past decade at Cal Poly Pomona has been spent seeking the answers to these questions. The 1990 WASC report spoke to leadership and the quality of decisions with respect to the university culture. This theme will explore these issues. Section A defines resources. Following sections discuss planning and the assessment of planning, enrollment growth and the problems and progress associated with Cal Poly Pomona’s current strategy, the leadership culture at Cal Poly Pomona (with reference to faculty as well as administration), and how it affects resource management and enhancement. Section E closes this theme with several observations and some possible remedies and recommendations.

The constellation of issues around resources addresses the very capacity of the university to deliver its educational program and maintain an environment suitable for work and study; hence, these issues have been implicated in many of the discussions in the preceding two themes. Resource issues also to a great degree adumbrate the topics of interest in the final thematic study, "New Directions", following. Theme One’s emphasis on community building and Theme Two’s articulation of the importance of coordination and collaboration are essential threads in the development of the most critical issue in Theme Three: planning.

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At the beginning of the last decade, both the budgeting and allocation processes were under the control of the Vice President of Finance, and neither was shared with the campus community. The campus community did not know the state of the university’s finances, the amount of reserves, the budget priorities, and intended future directions. The management and enhancement of resources requires the university to strategically handle, manipulate, and allocate budget and discretionary funds to the best long-term advantage of the university. This requires a shared understanding of where it is now, and a shared vision of where it is going. This present and future vision frames the plan. There has been considerable planning progress at Cal Poly Pomona since the last WASC report but there is more to do, in the view of many. Long term planning has become a central focus of the management and enhancement of resources at Cal Poly Pomona, despite the difficulties we’ve experienced, because it is one of the most important issues in educational effectiveness facing us in the new decade.

Has planning been integrated into the campus culture? The need for planning is acknowledged; however, administrators, faculty, staff, students and the local community bring to the table both competing priorities and different notions about processes of plan-making. As the discussion that follows shows, Cal Poly Pomona entered the decade with a strictly controlled top-down non-rational planning and allocation process with little or no built-in accountability. As the decade progressed, Cal Poly Pomona moved painfully towards a more iterative bottom-up planning-allocation process with some built-in accountability.

The 1990 WASC site visit specifically cited enrollment growth and planning for the ultimate size of the university as subjects of intense interest. The Chancellor’s Office has directed increased effort in the area of system-wide growth management, and Cal Poly Pomona is responding to these stimuli in a number of ways.

Shortly after Dr. Suzuki assumed the Presidency of Cal Poly Pomona, he initiated the first of three strategic planning efforts viewed in retrospect as problematic in two respects. First, this planning effort used the vocabulary of the corporate world; for example, to "re-engineer" the university by "rightsizing" its operations, which alienated some of the faculty, staff and students, especially as it coincided with the start of the economic recession in California. Second, because previous plans hadn’t laid the groundwork for a shared vision or trust and had no discernible consequences, planning was considered tangential to the crucial business of the campus.

The second planning effort began the next year with one significant difference. A faculty member, Dr. Charles Hotchkiss of the Department of Urban and Regional Planning put considerable effort into developing a credible bottom-up strategic planning process. This Strategic Plan was adopted in 1994, and contained a mission statement and six broad goals. The plan lacked any way to measure the progress made in institutionalizing the goals. The goals were revisited in the Guidelines of 1997 and were also used by the Self-Study Committee to represent university goalposts during our research. (Please see Chapter III or Appendix A3.)

There was no explicit precedence or priority among the six general goals. Once the broad based campus plan was adopted, each division was asked to develop a Division Strategic Plan that was consistent with the University Plan but more concrete in its goals and objectives. Once the Division Plans were in place, the Colleges, Schools, and other divisional subordinate Units would develop their plans which were more concrete yet but consistent with the Division Plan. This process continued down to the Academic Departments. (Departmental, College, and Division Strategic Plans and other assessment and planning documents are readily available, but too voluminous to attach in the portfolio of this report.)

In 1996 President Suzuki led the university into another strategic planning phase, using the previous Strategic Plan as the starting point. Again a faculty member from the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Dr. Ana-Maria Whitaker, was put in charge of the process. In the most recent revision of the Strategic Plan, each goal contained a list of tasks to be successfully implemented before the goal could be viewed as accomplished. In fact these tasks assess whether and how the university acquires, manages, and enhances its resources. After presenting the new Strategic Plan to the university in 1997, the Divisions, Schools, Colleges, and Units were all required to update their plans. During this exercise, departments and other "devolved" entities articulated specific objectives and measures to gauge achievement towards each objective. These were gathered up to higher levels (Colleges and other units), becoming part of a much larger plan. The participation of faculty and staff at department and College levels made this a more bottom-up participatory planning process.

Some faculty have wearied of the strategic planning process for at least three reasons. First, the planning process started at the same time as the collapse in California’s economy. This collapse resulted in work being shifted to faculty while support and respect for teachers at all levels was in a steep decline. Strategic planning and recession are not a good mix, as our ACE partners have commented. Strategic planning was viewed as more work with little hope of bringing about positive change. Second, the lack of integration with other decision cycles jeopardized the credibility of the strategic plan among faculty and others who have little voice in those other decision cycles. Sometimes administrative budget decisions conflicted with department-level objectives that were articulated from the same goals. The new budget advisory committees (see next section) established in 1997-98 were intended to resolve this contradiction.

The prolonged contract disputes (CSU faculty worked without a contract from July 1998 until spring of 1999), dissatisfaction with increasingly burdensome (administratively) and divisive merit pay schemes (please consult the Draft FMI analysis on file in the Team Room), and a sometimes turbulent campus climate weaken the willingness of faculty to seek common ground and shared vision on which a dynamic, comprehensive strategic plan must rest.

The campus organization climate facing Bob Suzuki when he first assumed the Presidency at Cal Poly Pomona was not pro-planning. Before the last WASC accreditation visit, the university developed a plan titled "Cal Poly through 2001" as part of the self-study. The WASC team report noted that "The University was not as self-critical in its planning assessment as it might have been, nor as clear in its statement of major problems or issues that should be solved." It was further noted that "While applauding the detail and specificity of the goals and plan, the team notes that the planning was almost entirely incremental and did not seem to consider seriously the possibility of consequential change in so volatile a time and environment" (WASC 1990:8). The university’s current Strategic Planning Guidelines document is not specific or incremental, nor thoroughgoing in its internal accountability. Departmental strategic plans, however, are quite specific, and some are self-critical.

It is difficult to understand how resources were managed and enhanced during the last decade without understanding the environment that existed in the State of California in general and at Cal Poly Pomona in particular. Immediately after the last WASC visit to Cal Poly Pomona, California went into a major recession or mild depression. As State support declined early in the decade, enrollment levels also declined. This was a double budget hit for the state university system. State support is based on enrollment levels and average student load. To compensate for the loss of State support, the CSU started a systematic program of tuition increases. In order to continue access by under-represented groups, one-third of the increased student fees were earmarked for financial aid.

The three goals of Enrollment Management are to grow by matching program capacity with demand, to grow by retaining currently enrolled students and to grow by increasing the student applicant pool. Students are recruited based on existing program capacity. With effective enrollment planning, resources are acquired in anticipation of changes in program capacity. Over the past decade, Cal Poly Pomona has aggressively recruited students. The university’s enrollment management strategy sought to manage FTES.

In addition, Cal Poly Pomona’s ‘Polytechnic Mission’ seems to add an extra resource burden to the university. This equates into larger building needs, more equipment and higher costs. The ‘polytechnic style of learning’ values practical as well as theoretical knowledge. The web page http://www.csupomona.edu/~engineering/student/success.html of the College of Engineering provides a view of the polytechnic engineering education program at Cal Poly Pomona, to offer one example of resource demand.

This climate of competing needs, originating in the beginning of this decade, has persevered and is characteristic of many of the dilemmas we face today regarding the acquisition and fair distribution of scarce resources.

In 1998 the President took a number of steps to regain popular confidence in his leadership. He invited the Chair of the Academic Senate to become a member of the President’s Cabinet, and also created both a University Budget Advisory Committee (UBAC) and a Division of Academic Affairs Budget Advisory and Planning Committee (AABAPC). The existence of these two new committees raises the possibility of the planning process becoming more meaningful. Currently, according to interviewees, the Division Committee receives requests from various Schools and Colleges, which it prioritizes for the next year’s allocations. This situation forces the committee to base its allocation of resources in part on past practice and presently perceived need, as well as on whatever priorities and plans for the future have been formulated. (There are various examples that long-term and future needs have been articulated by the units/colleges and accepted by AABAPC and UBAC.) To the outside viewer, both the University Budget Advisory Committee and the Division of Academic Affairs Budget Advisory and Planning Committee ‘reactively allocate’ resources. In their short history, both committees appear to allocate with the goal of alleviating short-term problems and short-falls. Historical patterns still determine baseline allocations. Problems around deferred maintenance, coping with high enrollment majors, handling entering students’ preparatory needs, the organizational crisis within the Division of Instructional and Information Technology, and even planning and support for the university’s re-accreditation effort are all recent examples of emergency resource management.

Currently, the general campus community has not internalized knowledge of the goals and priorities of the President or his cabinet. It is difficult to arrive at a consensus without doing this, and yet in the atmosphere of decentralization and teamwork the administration has sought to instill, it is essential to do at least some decision-making consensually rather than bureaucratically. In the university model of shared governance through collegiality, the policies, goals and priorities must be shared values, shared goals and shared priorities. Whatever the name given to the process for arriving at these shared values, goals, and priorities, the process must foster trust, it must be continuous, it must assess itself, and it must change with the times. In order to achieve the administration’s goals, evolution of planning entails a consultative, meaningful budget-building and allocation process with built-in, agreed-upon assessment. Cal Poly Pomona must strive to become a community with community values, vision and direction. All members of the community have a role to play in this work.

The previous paragraph is not intended to imply that the President and his Administration have no public agenda; this is not the case. While the President, the Vice Presidents, the Deans and Directors have often talked about their goals on an individual ad hoc basis, part of the project of leadership is to unite around common values. The elucidation and acceptance of the "administrative agenda" is a task still to be done. The President’s goals and values for this university are the appropriate ones. The problem is that the campus community has not adopted his vision in order to make it a shared vision. Part of the resources issue thus relates to shared vision, planning, and trust.