ASU chief regrets contract flap

Faculty was not consulted on online course management pact

— Arkansas State University’s chief said he regrets excluding faculty when the Jonesboro campus expanded online courses and he promises to include them in future academic endeavors.

In a letter dated Friday and released that evening, interim Chancellor G. Daniel Howard wrote to Mike McDaniel, the chairman of the ASU Shared Governance Oversight Committee, apologizing for failing to include faculty input during the university’s contractual process with Higher Education Holdings LLC to provide online education.

“I regret deeply that the process ... was flawed in that it did not have adequate faculty consultation,” Howard wrote.

The committee said it did not think that administrators intentionally violated the university’s shared-governance policy, which was established to include faculty consultation in academic matters.

However, the committee did discover that no representatives of the ASU College of Education, which oversees the online courses, knew of the Higher Education Holdings agreement.

“We do believe that the spirit [of shared governance] was violated,” said Dan Marburger, an ASU economics professor who served on the Faculty Senate committee that looked into the online-courses issue during a Feb. 4 Faculty Senate meeting.

The issue of online courses, specifically those offered by Higher Education Holdings LLC, has sharply divided faculty leaders.

Faculty fear that the courses could damage ASU’s educational integrity and interfere with faculty control of the curriculum.

The company’s involvement also raised faculty concerns after former ASU System President J. Leslie Wyatt retired June 30. A day later, he announced he became the president of American University System of Washington, D.C., another online education company affiliated with Higher Education Holdings.

Faculty contended a conflict of interest existed because ASU began working with Higher Education Holdings while Wyatt was ASU System president. Wyatt is a tenured faculty member on unpaid leave since Jan. 1 from the Jonesboro campus.

Earlier this month, an ASU Faculty Senate committee found that faculty were not included when administrators met with the Dallas-based Higher Education Holdings online education company on March 27, 2008, nor did they have any say when the university signed a seven-year contract on April 18, 2008.

The university signed a second seven-year contract with Higher Education Holdings LLC in February 2010.

About 2,200 students are enrolled in online programs offered by the company, Howard has said. Faculty members are paid extra to teach the online courses.

Howard, in his letter to McDaniel, said the concept of shared governance was “a relatively new and not fully developed organizational concept and practice” in 2008.

Howard promised to include faculty in any future endeavors.

“You have my assurance that ASU will not enter into any contracts in the future that relate to academic matters without due and appropriate consultation with the faculty,” he wrote.

Th e A S U Shared Governance Committee is to meet again Monday and will furtherdiscuss online courses, Mc-Daniel said Friday.

Northwest Arkansas, Pages 17 on 02/20/2011

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