Program Reviews

Program review documents have many elements in common with learning assessments, although the former tend to be dictated by institutionally mandated formats. The National Women’s Studies Association does not function as an accrediting or evaluating agency, though it lists program evaluators in the members-only section of its web site. Evaluators apply and list their credentials; their listing on the site indicates that the organization has approved their applications, but they have not received any special training from NWSA.

There has been some discussion of whether the association should set standards for program reviews; however, many members are reluctant for NWSA to adopt this role because they have seen evaluation used in the past to exclude women and Women’s Studies from higher education on the grounds of “quality control.” The 2004 strategic plan of the organization, based on a wide membership survey, notes, “The association should promote best practices in Women’s Studies. Establishing benchmarks for Women’s Studies programs was mentioned by respondents as well, though less enthusiastically.” What follows, therefore, is not intended to be an official guide, but rather a set of recommendations, which I hope will be useful for program administration and development. Examples of best practices are based on plans that were submitted to me or placed on line.

The need for program reviews has been sparked by the increasing institutionalization of Women’s Studies in free-standing departments. While these reviews are time-consuming, their generally positive results have helped the units that have undertaken them. For instance, after the review at Minnesota State University-Moorhead, the program’s director was allotted additional release time for her administrative work. In other cases, a review can identify curricular gaps that may not be apparent to those who are closely involved in developing requirements—in a review accompanying a proposal for a major at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, the evaluator noticed that the phrasing of the cross-cultural requirement was such that a student could graduate without any courses focusing on non-white women or women not of European descent. Last but not least, an outside evaluator can lend credence to and advocate for recommendations already made by program staff.

Program reviews are most easily accomplished when Women’s Studies administrators have access to and keep meticulous records over a period of several years. Record-keeping can begin with the learning assessment data drawn from activities of the kind described above. In addition to documenting the actual numbers of students and gathering information from course evaluations, it is important to obtain figures on credit hour production (especially per faculty member) and costs per credit hour, because these numbers often reveal that, rather than being drains on institutional resources as they are sometimes accused of being, Women’s Studies programs tend to serve large numbers of undergraduates relatively inexpensively. Indeed, one Women’s Studies administrator conducting a program review was surprised to discover that her unit had lower credit hour costs than any other on campus! In recent years then, Women’s Studies programs have become major providers of service courses, modeling ways of teaching general education classes to large numbers of students without sacrificing quality or individual engagement.

Other useful indicators include student achievements (publications, grants, and conference papers) as well as the status of alumnae (employed, in graduate school, etc.). When discussing instructional staff, it is useful to provide information on their publications, artistic productions, grants, and service to the university. Women’s Studies programs are often outstanding in terms of the productivity of their faculty. Marjorie Pryse drafted a guide to assessing faculty scholarship, Defining Women’s Studies Scholarship, which is available through the members-only Program Administration and Development (PA&D) part of the NWSA web page. Similarly, budgets, facilities, and other resources can be compared to those suggested in the NWSA document drafted by Susan Hartman and revised by Dorothy Miller and Magdalena Garcia-Pinto, What Programs Need: Essential Resources for WS Programs (available on the NWSA PA&D web site, too). Resources should also be compared to those for similar units in the university, as Women’s Studies programs continue to fall short in this regard.

Most universities establish a particular format for program reviews; however, if none is available, the guidelines for academic program reviews on the University of Missouri-St. Louis web site are clear and comprehensive and thus provide an excellent model.

Thorough guidelines may also be found in the 2001-2002 University of Wisconsin College of Letters and Science faculty handbook.

More recent University of Wisconsin guidelines are linked to university specific mission indicators and may be less useful to those outside the system). The narrative should ideally be written by a committee so that multiple points of view may be incorporated, although in small programs, this task may fall to the administrator. Student comments are often extremely persuasive.

An effective strategy is to provide comparative data both from other units within the university and from Women’s Studies programs in similar institutions, regardless of whether the university requires such information.