President's Report 2/7/25

February 07, 2025 / Lyndsay Rhodes

Board of Governors

BOG meet January 30th at the University of North Florida. A few items of note. All SUS general education courses were approved in a single vote without much discussion. BOG has provided a 2-week window following this meeting for individual universities to submit any changes, to be approved by the Chancellor, that they may want considered for Fall 2025. Mainly this was to allow for universities to potentially pull approved courses from other SUS institutions to implement. I have not heard if we are planning to make any changes, but will stay in touch with Dr. Ross for updates.

The BOG has approved the 2030 SUS strategic plan. We will go into more detail on that later in this meeting as an information item. I encourage you all to review the document and let me know if you have any questions or concerns and I will do my best to find the answers.

PBF Metrics

There was a PBF Metric townhall on Wednesday February 5th with some interactive discussions to better understand our performance-based metrics system and how they impact our budget. In recent conversations it has come to my attention that some may not fully be aware of the impact scoring below 70 has on the institution. Universities that score below 70 points lose 50% of the state PBF allocation. For FGCU in 2024 that was $7,684,630. These funds were distributed between the top 3 scores in the SUS (FIU, UF, and FSU/USF). The remailing 50% of FGCU’s allocation was held in reserve. The BOG released $3,842,315 to us in September following the approval of our student success plan. The remaining 25% may be released to us in March pending our student success report. However, this is still a net loss of more than $7.68M. The State Investment allocation per institution changes year to year, but we could expect similar investments this year. Since we will likely score 67 points this year, we will again lose 50% of that allocation, with the possibility to receive the remaining 50% if the BOG supports our Student Success Plan.

Scorecard

The university PBF metrics Scorecard is now available for all FGCU employees. This can be accessed at scorecard.fgcu.edu  and entering your university credentials. More information will be communicated with the university community on use of this tool very soon.

I know we are all tired of hearing about PBF metrics and scores. However, this is the system we must operate in and our scores directly impact our funding and ability to support our mission. Thank you for your tireless work and dedication to the university. The work is paying off and we all look forward to the day in the near future when our scores stabilize, and we can focus on other amazing things.

Executive Vice President & Provost Search Update

5 candidates have been selected for campus interviews:

The schedules for open forums & committee interviews and CVs have been emailed and posted to the Provost Search website. Cover letters will also be posted. Faculty Senate Leadership will have an hour session with each of the candidates. Senators and any faculty are invited to join these sessions (AB9 222). I have posted this information to the Senate Teams Announcement page along with the other scheduling information, and it has also been emailed to all Senators. Please share with your colleagues. I continue to ask you all to be as engaged in the process as possible and attend all sessions you are able to. We are also asking that you submit any questions you might have for the candidates to be asked in the Senate session via Teams (I will post a submission link) by Monday 2/10. We would like to ask the same questions of all candidates in these sessions, but open discussion will also occur. The committee is scheduled to meet at 2pm on Tuesday 2/18, the final day of campus interviews. It is imperative that you submit feedback to the faculty representative on the committee as much in advance of this meeting as possible for your feedback to be considered. Please do not assume someone else has submitted similar feedback.

Other quick updates

Academic Calendar

AY 26-27 Academic Calendar has been approved by Cabinet supporting the Senate-approved version, without revisions. This information has been forwarded to the Registrar’s Office for implementation. IAT is working on the AY 27-28 calendar now and we expect that to come before Senate for approval prior to the end of the term.

General Education Assessment in HelioCampus

The updated Gen Ed assessment plan was presented at Gen Ed Palooza February 5, 2025. HelioCampus will be used where faculty-identified assignments aligned with specific Gen Ed learning outcomes are linked via Canvas into Helio. Direct assessment of student performance on each learning outcome will be pulled into Helio without additional efforts from faculty, continually and in real time. Juried assessment will continue to supplement these efforts to ensure alignment with standards and confidence in the system. Dr. Joe Ross will be working with faculty to get things set up, but this is a bit step forward for us to truly assess gen ed.