Esteban is the newly hired Director of Institutional Research at a large, public

Question

Esteban is the newly hired Director of Institutional Research at a large, public university with a relatively new president. The president has articulated a culture of making “data-based decisions” in a climate of decreased state funding, flat or decreasing enrollment, and increasingly scarce resources. She has commenced a formal “program review” process whereby all academic programs must demonstrate their efficiency, viability, and relevance, in addition to crafting a plan for future growth in enrollment and credit hours. Estaban’s office is appropriately, substantively, intimately involved in this process—providing extensive data and information to dozens of academic units—a process that been neither easy nor without discontent as programs, deans, and faculty members are confronted with information and realities they may not have wanted to address. Not surprisingly, some groups are either more open-minded to this data or are better able to understand it. The president has put Esteban in charge of crafting the final report and wants him to accompany her in all the final, information-sharing meetings. Effective communication of the findings falls in large part upon Esteban. Finally, to complicate matters, the data and findings do not reinforce or support some of the president’s desired outcomes, putting Esteban in a precarious position.

1) How can or should Esteban vary his presentation of data and overall message to diverse sets of faculty and staff groups?

Explanation / Answer

Esteban is not in a position to present data which is not as per desired by the president. Being in charge of this big responsibility he has to present the final report in such as a manipulated way so that the final results do not vary much which effects the stakeholders’ interest. As the matter involve review of academic programs and involve the future of students because of efficiency and relevance of these programs, data should be carefully dealt with. Data based decisions are very critical as Esteban cannot intervene on his own on the data sets, but the only thing he can do is that he should present the data differently to different faculties and staff groups. Every group have some expectations and pre mind set and according to that data should be presented to them. Different programs need different strategies and changes to be implemented and according to that in separate meetings data to be presented. In overall presentation, critical points are suggested to be avoided by Esteban in terms of explanation and rather mixed suggestions is to be made by him which is in benefit and effective for all the programs. In this way, desired outcome as per president is also maintained and data presented is not showing much varying results than the original one’s.

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