3.24.21

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HAMLINE UNIVERSITY | ST. PAUL, MN | 3.24.21 | VOL. 132 | NO. 16 | HAMLINEORACLE.COM

rofessors, rogram review & roblems

A program review is underway with professors experiencing a time constraint and a lack of clarity. CUTOUT | MOLLY LANDAETA, ORACLE Hamline faculty members have experienced a stressful few weeks after the College of Liberal Arts (CLA) was put under an expedited program review (EPR) that gave just three weeks to evaluate each of their departments. The last program review took place during the 2016-17 school year. Program review materials were sent out on Feb. 23 and included a questionnaire given to each department regarding their classes, number of students and plans for innovation, all with a due date of March 12. This short turnaround and the lack of clarity originally given to faculty about why and how the review was being conducted resulted in confusion and worry regarding its potential consequences. “It is sometimes confusing what our objective for this

Anika Besst Senior Reporter abesst01@hamline.edu

Nicole Ronchetti News Reporter nronchetti01@hamline.edu

review is,” said Mike Reynolds, department chair and professor of English, and program director of first-year writing. “What makes a program review less successful is, I think for me, a lack of clarity.” While program reviews are not unusual, the abrupt announcement caught faculty members off guard. It was also a deviation from the recommendations of a subcommittee put together last semester tasked with planning ongoing cyclical reviews which would have tentatively started next fall. “[An ideal review] would provide programs with ample time to prepare materials to understand when their program was going to be under review,” said Kristin Mapel Bloomberg, program director for Women and Gender Studies and a member of the subcommittee last

semester. “That would have been a preferred process than yet another round of emergency program review specifically designed with budget cuts in mind.” This expedited process was initiated to examine the changes that have occurred over the past five years, the most recent relating to the changes in number and type of student enrollment and the drastic and unpredicted changes to departments that COVID-19 has produced.

Make way for Workday Hamline will replace Piperline with the cloudbased HR software Workday. Jack Fischer News Reporter jfischer12@hamline.edu Hamilne has utilized Piperline, a student portal from a software called Banner, for decades in everything from registering for classes to performing degree audits. As technologies and workflows progress and advance, the software originally purchased by the university is now out of date and will

no longer be supported. Hamline had a choice to make — reinvest and purchase new Banner software and upgrade Piperline, or transition to a new, more interconnected software. Either option would have required Hamline to make a significant investment. It has been a long process to transition. Associate Dean of the College of Liberal Arts Andy Runquist has been overseeing the student side of this system. “Our Banner system is made up of a lot of patches that we’ve had to do in house,” Runquist said. “We’ve been using it since at least, I believe it was 1990 or something like that.” As the technology has gotten older,

Hamline has had to hire people to make those patches to a system that has not aged too kindly. Hamline has implemented a slow rollout of the new Workday software. The Human Resources department started using it, on-campus employees use Workday to log their hours and now, next month, undergraduate students will use it to register for classes.

see WORKDAY page 3

see PROGRAM REVIEW page 4

To read about mandatory COVID-19 testing on campus, see page 2

To hear an Indigenous perspective on Line 3 and Hamline’s response, see page 8

To learn how to support AAPI businesses in the Midway, see page 12


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