October 28, 2002

A new committee designed to assist in developing an academic plan for the University's Storrs-based programs began meeting last week.

Members of the Academic Planning Task Force, which is co-chaired by Karla Fox, associate vice chancellor, and Richard Brown, director of the Humanities Institute and professor of history, were named by Chancellor John D. Petersen:

• Stephanie Brown, undergraduate student
• Claudia Carello, professor, psychology
• Gary English, professor and head, dramatic arts
• Moses Farrow, graduate student
• Robert Fisher, professor, social work
• Debra Kendall, professor, molecular & cell biology
• Darcy Kirk, professor, law, and director, law library
• William Kraemer, professor, education
• Veronica Makowsky, associate dean, liberal arts & sciences
• Suman Singha, associate dean, agriculture & natural resources
• Erling Murtha-Smith, professor, civil and environmental engineering
• Robert Stephens, director, African American Studies Institute
• William Stwalley, professor and head, physics

The purpose of the Academic Planning Task Force is to provide a set of planning principles and objectives to assist UConn trustees, administration, and faculty in making decisions regarding the allocation of resources for both programming and capital expenditures in the coming decade.

"As we continue our efforts to become one of the top public research universities in the nation, the task force's work will assist in establishing academic priorities to help us meet that goal," said Petersen, adding that he hopes the task force will work "both thoroughly and expeditiously."

The group will conduct a review of current academic programming and relevant data from both internal and external sources, and will make recommendations to the administration regarding the next stage in the evolution of the academic enterprise at UConn.

The task force will work closely with the academic deans, and the deans will review the recommendations in the plan as they are developed. The task force will solicit input from a wide variety of campus constituencies, employing a comprehensive approach to forming their recommendations.

This planning initiative will be an interactive process, in which various portions of the task force recommendations will be disseminated, possibly as soon as late winter. The planning process will culminate in a final written report no later than fall 2003.