Council Members
- Marni Boppart, College of Applied Health Sciences, Chair
- Louis Chan, Gies College of Business*
- Erhan Kudeki, Grainger College of Engineering
- Mariselle Melendez, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences**
- Ramona Oswald, College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences*
- Gireesh Rajashekara, College of Veterinary Medicine
- Craig Lundstrom, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences*
- Bridget Sweet, College of Fine & Applied Arts
- Mike Yao, College of Media
- Staci Provezis, Office of the Provost, ex officio
Charge Letter
Dear Colleagues,
Thank you for your willingness to serve on the 2025-26 Academic Program Review Council. I extend a warm welcome to new Council members Louis Chan, Mariselle Melendez, Ramona Oswald, and Craig Lundstrom; and thank you to Anna Dilger, Clara Chen, Kristin Hoganson, and James Slauch who are cycling off the Council. Many thanks also to Marni Boppart, who has agreed to chair.
The mission of the Academic Program Review Council is to oversee and improve the campus’s external review process by:
- Ensuring the university’s investment in the external review process produces the desired benefits for campus.
- Documenting and disseminating best practices for units undergoing external review.
- Diagnosing problems with – and recommending changes to – the external review process.
- Confirming the external review process remains aligned with the campus’s evolving strategic goals and with related activities overseen by other campus units.
- Embodying a diverse range of faculty perspectives in Council membership.
- Identifying common themes emerging in external review assessments that warrant additional attention from the Provost.
In addition to the above listed mission, during this academic year the Academic Program Review Council is charged with the following responsibilities:
- Consider innovative ways generative AI may be used in Academic Program Review. Identify potential opportunities, challenges, and unintended consequences of these uses, and recommend parameters or guiding principles for their responsible and effective integration. In addition, reflect on how AI might support the work of the committee itself and suggest appropriate guidelines for its use in this context.
- Review and revise the guiding principles section of the self-study template to make recommendations for departments undergoing review in 2026-2027.
- Examine the Qualtrics review system survey to ensure that it continues to meet the expectations for the review.
- Continue to identify effective strategies used by departments and consider creative ways to share these strategies across units.
Remember Academic Program Review Council’s focus is on policy around the reviews and not on reviewing programs. Staci Provezis, Associate Provost for Planning and Assessment, will work with both the Council and academic units to support this process and serves as an ex-officio member.
I am deeply grateful for your time and expertise in this important review process.
Sincerely,
John Coleman
Provost
Executive Summary
During the 2025-2026 academic year, the Program Review Council continued with the previous years’ initial charge to oversee the process for Academic Program Review, to provide guidance to the process, and to review the units’ progress on the reviews. To that end, the Council met once in the Fall and twice in the Spring, where they approved schedule changes, identified good practices to improve the report templates, and discussed policies. They also conducted business through email as needed.
One of the primary discussions the Council had this year involved ensuring that the self-study template updated the Guiding Principles section to revise the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion questions. Community, equity, inclusion, and belonging are core to the University’s guiding principles, and questions related to these core commitments replaced the previous set of questions. As such, departments will be expected to reflect on how these commitments are enacted through their vision, leadership practices, policies, incentive structures, and resource allocation, and the extent to which they are embedded in the department’s culture and everyday practices. Again, this year the collection of the program review follow-up reports aligned with the annual budget cycle reporting, and the Council reviewed the updates to ensure integrity in the process and follow through from the departments using a Qualtrics form to collect specific practices. The Council identified themes across the reviews and identified topics that would make for good workshop topics for Executive Officers. Like past years, faculty hiring, mentoring, and promotion comes up most frequently in the departments’ activities. Creating undergraduate and graduate programs as well as supporting students remains a priority.