The Second Cycle of Academic Planning 
The University of Wyoming Academic Plan II 2004-2009, approved by the Board of Trustees in May 2004, guides the decisions needed for UW to advance its teaching, research, and service missions. Like UW Academic Plan I 1999-2004, Academic Plan II (AP II) also sets priorities for the institution’s support services and capital facilities plans. At the heart of AP II are (1) a set of six areas of distinction, which define the long-term academic strengths that the institution will continue to emphasize, and (2) a set of institutional issues, which are critical challenges that the university must address to advance its mission.
The text of the university plan and all associated college- and department-level plans are available on the World Wide Web at the following URL:
http://www.uwyo.edu/AcadAffairs/Acad_Plan_Implementation/Acad_Plan_Implementation.asp
During the 2004-2005 academic year, UW implemented 29 percent of the 141 action items listed in the 2004-2009 Academic Plan. This document summarizes these accomplishments.
Areas of Distinction
Approximately one-fourth of the action items in AP II involve efforts to advance UW’s prominence in six areas of academic distinction. In alphabetical order, these areas are (1) cultural endeavors, the arts, and humanities; (2) environment and natural resources; (3) history and culture of Wyoming and the Rocky Mountain region; (4) life sciences; (5) professions and issues critical to the region; and (6) science and technology. These areas are sufficient in number and scope to allow most academic programs to contribute, yet they help focus decisions about the allocation of institutional resources. In the first year of AP II, UW completed ten action items that advanced the areas of distinction.
•	Wyoming’s History and Culture – UW’s American Heritage Center is one of the nation’s finest academic archives and a leader in integrating archival collections and learning. APII called upon the AHC to expand its support for the university curriculum and enhance its role as a national forum for scholarly discourse. In response, the AHC has developed: a new Partnership for Civic Education; a close connection to the secondary education pre-service program; and, with its board of faculty advisors, a new research seminar series (action item 7). 
•	Life Sciences – During the first year of APII there were three major institution-level accomplishments in life sciences. First, three colleges—Agriculture, Arts and Sciences, and Health Sciences— implemented a revised, more rigorous, and more current curriculum in general biology, starting in fall semester 2005 (action item 9). Second, UW established a new, interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in ecology — an area of longstanding scientific strength. The program, approved by the Trustees for fall 2006, will further strengthen UW’s contributions to environmental and natural resource sciences, land-use issues, and sustainable agriculture (action items 12, 87). Third, an interdisciplinary faculty task force developed a report outlining the departmental commitments and curriculum needed to establish an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in molecular and cellular life sciences (MCLS) — a focus area that is central to modern biology. A prospectus for the program, which has been approved by the Graduate School, the college deans, and the Office of Academic Affairs, is scheduled for consideration by the Board of Trustees in fall 2005 (action item 15). 
•	Professions and Issues Critical to the Region – Educational programs in several colleges are critical to training a professional workforce to sustain Wyoming and the Mountain West. In education, UW has a natural leadership role in professional development and statewide articulation with all sectors of the educational system, both to address the growing shortage of secondary teachers in critical subjects and to build a more seamless K-16 system. As a foundation for this undertaking, the College of Education has clarified college-wide standards and performance expectations in faculty reappointment, tenure, and promotion decisions. A document codifying these expectations is posted on the college’s website at http://ed.uwyo.edu/t_p.asp (action item 19). In the year ahead, the College of Education will focus (1) on aligning content-specific curriculum with teacher-preparation standards for secondary and middle-school certification and (2) on working with the College of Agriculture to coordinate programs in childhood and youth development and family life. 
	The College of Business has a central role to play in the economic development of the state and region, through its undergraduate emphasis on entrepreneurship and its graduate programs in accounting, business administration, economics, and finance. As one example, electronic business (e.Business) plays an important role in Wyoming’s geographically dispersed business environment and is especially critical to the success of small businesses. The college recently integrated its e.Business curriculum — developed as an outgrowth of AP I — into the mainstream business curriculum (action item 23).
	The health-care professions face special issues in Wyoming’s sparsely populated rural communities. One of the most significant of these issues has been the shortage of nurses. During the first year of AP II, the Dean of Nursing worked with the Deans of Health Sciences, the Graduate School, and Outreach to develop a strategy for addressing long-term pipeline issues affecting the national supply of Ph.D.-qualified nursing faculty (action item 25). In May, 2005, the Board of Trustees approved an accelerated nursing program for non-traditional students with baccalaureate degrees in fields other than nursing. The School of Pharmacy has faced a different set of issues, which are associated with the funding of clinical practice sites and accreditation-related constraints on workforce distribution. In response, UW developed a plan for funding clinical faculty positions in Pharmacy through the use of increased tuition revenues in the Pharm.D. program (action item 26).
	The College of Law has an excellent reputation; however, its small size has limited its ability to broaden its curriculum. In the first year of AP II the Dean of the Law School developed a proposal for an increased tuition differential for students pursing the J.D. degree, to generate earmarked resources to enhance UW’s educational offerings in law. The Board of Trustees approved the plan in March 2005 (action item 29). 	
•	Science and Technology – This area of distinction encompasses three focus areas: (1) earth and energy sciences, (2) materials science, and (3) computational sciences. An interdisciplinary effort to integrate aspects of the earth and atmospheric sciences, ecology, and the social sciences to form an earth-systems science curriculum has yielded a proposal for a new bachelor of science in earth-systems science, to be presented to the Board of Trustees in fall 2006  (action item 87). In response to a request from the Wyoming Legislature, the university has also developed a proposal to establish a School of Energy Resources (action item 32). The plan is viewable on the World Wide Web at http://www.uwyo.edu/AcadAffairs/PolicyStatements/energy_school_plan.pdf).
The Learning Environment
Much of the groundwork for UW’s educational mission occurs before students arrive at the university. This fact underscores the need for strong articulation between UW and other educational institutions — high schools in particular. In the first year of AP II, several departments, including the biology departments, Mathematics, and Art, extended their annual articulation conferences with community colleges to include high school teachers (action item 36). The university has established a Learning Resource Network (LeaRN) through several measures, including stabilized funding for a Math Lab and an Oral Communications Lab, appointment of a LeaRN advisory council and a new director, and identification of permanent space for LeaRN in the renovation plans for the UW Libraries (action items 45, 46, 47, and 48). Finally, the university has made significant strides in the assessment of student learning — the process of understanding and documenting the learning that takes place at UW. In the first year of AP II, the university held numerous well-attended workshops and seminars to guide and advance curriculum assessment activities across the institution (action item 53). The Office of Academic Affairs funded, through the Ellbogen Center for Teaching and Learning, an assessment assistance grants program. The University Studies Committee  received one of these grants to develop an assessment plan for an element of the University Studies Program, which is the core curriculum required of all students (action item 54).
Scholarship and Graduate Education
UW’s reputation hinges in part on the robustness of its research enterprise and graduate education. At a university of UW’s size, few departments are large enough to cover the breadth of their disciplines and, at the same time, attain critical mass in the areas of distinction. Cross-departmental and cross-college ties — summed up by the concept of interdisciplinarity — are the best ways to achieve and sustain scholarly depth and national and international recognition. In the first year of AP II, the Dean of the Graduate School implemented a plan to reserve a pool of state-funded graduate assistantships for innovative and interdisciplinary graduate programs. Five percent of UW’s state-funded GAs were captured in 2005 for annual reallocation on a competitive basis. A further five percent will be reserved in academic year 2005-2006 (action item 60).  In a related arena, research and graduate education at UW have faced challenges associated with large increases in the costs of faculty start-up, information technologies, and research facilities. UW dedicates an increasing amount of its institutional resources to supporting departments’ hiring packages, particularly in the laboratory sciences and engineering. Much of this funding comes from indirect cost accounts generated by competitive external research grants. In the first year of AP II, the Research Office developed a system to track the external funding secured by faculty receiving start-up funding. The system will help gauge various departments’ effectiveness at producing the return on start-up investments needed to sustain this funding mechanism (action item 62).   
Enhancing Diversity and Internationalization
To reduce some of the significant barriers to diverse hiring, UW’s Employment Practices Office developed a new, more flexible Affirmative Action Plan during 2005 (action item 68). The plan is viewable at www.uwyo.edu/EmploymentPractices/affirmative_Action_Plan.asp
To facilitate the internationalization of its student body, UW has contracted with ELS Language Centers for the delivery of services for students who speak English as a second language (http://www.uwyo.edu/ELS/, action item 71). Additionally, a program of special grants, funded through centrally reserved summer-school revenues, has been established to promote summer courses in international education. The program has already increased student participation in opportunities to study abroad (action item 72).  
Structure of the Curriculum
AP I spurred the review, revision and streamlining of UW’s core undergraduate curriculum, known as the University Studies Program or USP 2003. One of the revisions was the addition of an Information Literacy (L) requirement. Implementation of this requirement has led to the approval of several L courses (http://www.uwyo.edu/unst), and additional courses are under development (action item 78). Faculty-initiated curricular review also resulted in the elimination of several degree programs that were no longer current, including the B.S. degrees in health education, recreation and park administration, and history (the B.A. in history was retained), as well as the M.S. degree in e.Business as described above (action item 84). 
Faculty Development and Program Planning
A significant set of action items focused on the allocation of faculty resources and the management of academic personnel.   The Office of Academic Affairs modified its annual call for faculty position requests to mandate explicit links between department- and college-level requests and institution-level areas of distinction or other goals identified in the academic plan (action item 90). Academic Affairs also commissioned and received a quantitative analysis of the academic workforce distribution, to help guide future decisions in the allocation of faculty and academic professional positions (action item 91). In March 2005, the Board of Trustees approved a new, more internally consistent version of University Regulation 408, the regulation that governs UW’s employment policies for extension educators, lecturers, research scientists, and postdoctoral fellows (action item 92). Finally, through discussions with the college deans and the Vice President for Institutional Advancement, the Office of Academic Affairs developed a set of guidelines to help manage the special fiscal issues associated with endowed faculty positions (http://www.uwyo.edu/AcadAffairs/PolicyStatements/endowed_position_mgt_05.doc, action item 93).
Education Infrastructure
UW’s physical facilities and the library collections are critical components of our institutional infrastructure, and both were addressed during the 2004-2005 academic year. The former Survey Research Center combined with the Wyoming Statistical Analysis Center to form the Wyoming Survey and Analysis Center (WySAC), now located in the University’s Office Annex facility (action items 107 and 108). The Libraries’ collection budget has been restructured to support interdisciplinary purchases, including electronic journal packages and streamlined monograph purchases. This restructuring has allowed the addition of several major interdisciplinary citation indices, journals, and collection packages that support the humanities, social sciences and sciences through cooperative agreements with other academic libraries (action item 98). UW applied for membership in the Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA, action item 99), and the alliance conducted a site review of the university for potential membership.  Although the site review was positive, the GWLA membership voted down UW’s membership application, based upon the relatively small size of the Libraries’ collection (UW would have been the second smallest library in the organization), among other factors. Subsequently, UW has become an affiliate of GWLA, and the administration has included collections development as a high priority in its legislative budget request.
Outreach
The Outreach School continues to develop innovative approaches for reducing barriers to educational access, especially for site-bound and nontraditional students. In addition, there is increasing demand by students in Laramie for UW classes delivered through the Outreach School. Permanent fiscal support from the Outreach School for faculty positions in academic departments, brokered through UW’s central position management process, has furthered the integration of UW’s outreach mission into the core responsibilities of the faculty. It has also enhanced the institution’s ability to deliver more outreach courses. And it has contributed to a more seamless connection between outreach and on-campus instruction (action item 73). To address particular market needs, two colleges have partnered with the Outreach School to initiate entrepreneurial programs:  the Executive MBA and the accelerated nursing program (action item 122). The Dean of Outreach has organized an Outreach Advisory Council to provide broad perspectives on Outreach School programs. The council includes representatives from all academic colleges and from support units like the Libraries, the Ellbogen Center for Teaching and Learning, and the Division of Information (action item 119). In 2005 the Outreach School launched a statewide survey to assess Wyoming citizens’ perceptions of the university’s engagement in communities and the needs for outreach programs (action item 130). Finally, the College of Agriculture and the Cooperative Extension Service completed the implementation of the 2002 Cooperative Extension Service Strategic Plan (action item 124). Now in place are a new staffing model and leadership and program teams that operate at state and extension-area levels.
The Next Year of Academic Planning
Issues to be emphasized in academic year 2005-2006 include the following:
•	Learning Environment:  schedule a yearly meeting for K-16 administrators; involve faculty in annual principal-counselor conferences held at UW; examine resource commitments to the Honors Program; emphasize training to enhance teaching in large classes; and reorganize the federal work-study program to involve student interns in the academic success center (LeaRN).
•	Scholarship and Graduate Education:  develop graduate program goals for all graduate degrees; augment support for both department-level graduate recruitment and centrally supported activities.
•	Diversity, Internationalization, and Access:  highlight diversity-related courses; consider co-locating the activities and services currently associated with International Programs, International Student Services, and the ESL Language Centers.
•	Structure of the Curriculum: analyze the time taken to complete degrees and the factors associated with longer time periods; coordinate cross-college undergraduate interdisciplinary studies.
•	Faculty Positions and New Programs:  standardize the metrics for faculty job descriptions; evaluate UniReg 808, which governs post-tenure review, for possible modifications that might strengthen the mechanisms for performance improvement.
•	Education Infrastructure:  investigate the digital archiving of scholarly work; centralize audiovisual equipment and instructional technology; consider the spatial clustering of ethnic studies programs and international programs; decide the future of the Science Library space; update the College of Education’s facilities plan; document the institutional office and laboratory space needed to accommodate new faculty positions.
•	Outreach, Extension and Community Service: review outreach compensation policies; examine the institutional costs and benefits of economic development programs, in order to understand the demand for their services and the financial implications; discuss future facility plans for the UW – Casper College Center with Casper College administrators.
•	Enrollment Management:  establish target enrollments for off-campus degree programs; connect jobs to student aid.
UW’s ongoing academic planning process will continue to help guide deans, department heads, and faculty groups in their decisions about resource needs and allocations. In addition, academic planning — supplemented by support services planning and capital facilities planning — will help ensure that the University of Wyoming will remain forward-looking, positioning the institution to serve our students’ learning, our state’s economic development, the nation’s intellectual capital, and the worldwide quest for new knowledge.

Summary of Academic Plan II Action Items Addressed in 2004-2005
Action Item 
	Brief Description
	
7
	Expand the AHC’s curricular support and enhance its national presence.
	
9
	Implement revised biology core curriculum.
	
12
	Advance an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in ecology.
	
15
	Assess the viability of a Ph.D. in molecular and cellular life sciences.
	
19
	Codify the tenure and promotion expectations in education.
	
23
	Integrate e.Business and differential tuition into the M.B.A. program.
	
25
	Increase the number of nursing Ph.D.s.
	
26
	Develop a differential tuition plan in Pharmacy.
	
29
	Increase the tuition differential in Law.
	
32
	Complete a feasibility study for a center for earth and energy science.
	
36
	Include high school teachers in articulation conferences.
	
45
	Appoint an advisory council to guide the Learning Resource Network (LeaRN).
	
46
	Fund and staff the LeaRN proposal.
	
47
	Renovate Coe Library to accommodate LeaRN.
	
48
	Provide institution-level funding for a director of the Math Lab.
	
53
	Organize workshops to guide departmental assessment activities.
	
54
	Develop an assessment plan for the University Studies Program (USP).
	
60
	Set aside graduate assistantships for innovative and interdisciplinary graduate programs.
	
62
	Track the external funding secured by faculty receiving start-up funding.
	
68
	Review and enhance UW’s Affirmative Action Plan.
	
71
	Enhance instruction in English as a second language.
	
72
	Support summer opportunities for students to study, work and travel abroad.
	
73
	Offer permanent support for faculty outreach positions.
	
78
	Integrate information literacy requirements into the USP.
	
84
	Eliminate specific bachelor’s and master’s degrees.
	
87
	Add an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in ecology, and M.F.A. in creative writing, and a B.S. in earth-systems science.
	
90
	Link position requests to institutional areas of distinction and academic planning goals.
	
91
	Study the instructional workforce distribution.
	
92
	Draft a revision of UniReg 408, which governs academic professionals.
	
93
	Develop revised policies to manage endowed or partially endowed faculty positions.
	
98
	Review and revise the Libraries’ collections budget and allocation process.
	
99
	Develop library partnerships through the Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA).
	
108
	Study the feasibility of combining the Survey Research Center and Wyoming Statistical Analysis Center.
	
119
	Activate an Outreach Advisory Council.
	
122
	Implement entrepreneurial outreach programs.
	
124
	Implement the 2002 Cooperative Extension Service Strategic Plan.
	
130
	Assess outreach needs.
	
136
	Explore differential-pricing mechanisms.
	
137
	Establish institutional policies to guide enrollment filtering and screening mechanisms.
	
138
	Develop a philosophical rationale to guide tuition rates.
	
139
	Discuss the use of tuition and fee revenues with respect to associated instructional costs.