Greetings! I'm Brian Noland and I along with Dr. Bethany Flora will be team
teaching ELPA's 6454 Policy, Power, and Politics in education during the
fall 2016 semester here at East Tennessee State University. The purpose
of this video is to provide an overview of the syllabus but also to provide a
context and background on my career. I feel it's important for us to get to
know each other as individuals, we'll have the opportunity to be together on two
occasions in early October and then in middle November in Nashville for
focus seminar conversations around current issues facing American higher
education and its system of community colleges but as referenced earlier I
want to take a few moments to walk through the syllabus and talk some about
myself. I had the wonderful opportunity to spend formative years at the
Tennessee Higher Education Commission as I was working on my doctoral degree at
the University of Tennessee. My three degrees are in political science but it was
during that period at the Tennessee Higher Education Commission that I
developed the love and the passion for higher education. I had the honor to work
with Dr. Richard Rota, who is involved in the program here at ETSU, who you will
have a faculty member this semester and with Dr. Rota learned about the policy
context, landscape, national overview of issues facing American higher education
in the mid-1990s through the mid-2000s. While at THEC I began as a research
assistant, an analyst, worked progressively to various roles in
academic affairs, institutional research and then had the culmination of my time
at THEC working with the Lottery Scholarship Program, its development,
background research, advent and implementation. One of the things that I
gained a deep appreciation of at THEC was the significance of a system of
institutions, particularly community colleges, to provide access opportunities
for Tennesseans. Those access opportunities have defined the mission
of higher education in our nation since the land grant
development in the late 1800s all the way up through the GI
Bill, to the advent of the community colleges in the 1960s, to the rich
development of systems of Education across the 50 states. From THEC I had the
honor to service as Chancellor of the Higher Education Commission in the state
of West Virginia, a lay board that governed the universities within that
state. Within my portfolio of responsibilities included
hiring firing presidents, setting a broad public policy agenda for the state,
serving on then-governor now the United States Senator Joe Manchin's cabinet but
representing the institutions in a public sphere as they look to serve
their individual missions and responsibilities to those missions, their
faculty and our staff. Within the state of West Virginia my board covered
everything from West Virginia University to Marshall, to the small regional liberal arts
institutions, such as Shepherd University, West Liberty Concorde, Bluefield State,
Glenville and others. From their, transition to East Tennessee State
University where I presently serve in the capacity of President of the
institution.
This is my first opportunity to be back in the classroom and I'm excited not
only to spend time again in the literature, becoming acclimated with
current issues and trends, but also really looking forward to being with you
during the two weekends in Nashville. The course structure is fairly
straightforward. The reading materials are defined for you and can be found in
D2L. As we move through the reading materials you will see that the course
is structured initially with an overview of the shape of American higher
education. We'll spend some time focusing on the current policy challenges facing
the academy, as well as putting those policy challenges in concert with issues
that have faced the academy historically. We're going to talk a little bit about
the role of state systems. Within the state of Tennessee we are going through
governance changes result of the focus act, so we'll place that change in a
broader landscape and a literature that describes that landscape at a national
level
and then we'll talk a little bit about in the Griswold article some of the
policy influences of tuition fees, financial aid, and state appropriations and
how that iron triangle of support for the operations of our institutions has
come to both define and confined the manner in which those institutions
operate. In the third week, we are going to look a little bit at the history and heritage
of higher education,
we're going to spend some time with a piece by Dr. Grady Bogue, former
Chancellor of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, long time
faculty member the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and his piece
with Jeff Aper entitled "Exploring the Heritage of American Higher Education".
We'll then transition into a piece from the Association of Governing Boards that
really outlines the current issues that define the landscape for the academy as
we transition into the new millennium. In week 4 and week 5, we are going to spend a lot
of time on finance. We're going to discuss the matter in which states fund
their universities, how those funding trends have changed, the
interrelation of state tax dollars on institutional appropriations and overall
support for the institutions, as well as alternative revenue sources in the
Hirsch article that institutions are beginning to turn to tell offset
declines and state appropriations. Week 5 we will focus on tuition and fees, and
financial aid. We'll learn in the Heller article about the tuition price
elasticity, the relationship between access and price. We'll examine the
landscape of national financial aid policy and then there are two
supplemental readings that are there to provide context "The 2015 Reports From
the College Board on Both Affordability", as well as "Trends Within Pricing and
Student Aid". The next section of the course in this will be the final section
of the course for which I will bear lead responsibility for instruction focuses
on performance funding. For those of you who work in the state of Tennessee you
are familiar with the new funding formula,
what is described as Performance Funding 2.0 but in a series of readings
both by Nate Johnson, by Roarson, as well as by King Alexander. We're going to talk
some about the differences between Performance Funding 1.0 and 2.0. Tennessee
in the late 1970s received a grant from the Ford Foundation that provided the
genesis for the Performance Funding movement across the nation. That initial
focus on student outcomes the ability to reward institutions financially for
outcomes really was a paradigm shift in the academy. We'll examine how that
paradigm has evolved and then how that paradigm was transformed with the shift
to a new proprietary focus on outcomes as the sole means through which
institutions received state support in Tennessee, in Indiana and as you'll see
in some of the readings in really about a third of the states nationally. From
there, I'll transition the course to Dr. Flora, and Dr. Flora will delve into the
seminal work of Pascarella and Terenzini, examining how college impacts
students. So that is a quick overview of the syllabus, a quick overview of the
portions of the course for which I will provide the lead instruction, as well as
a little bit of background on myself. I look forward to being with you
throughout the semester and I really look forward to meeting each of you
personally when we're together in Nashville in October and November.