During the Global Site Directors' Meeting, I saw first hand the potential for collaboration to greatly improve the success of a project within an organization. NYU is currently working to assess the academic quality of the programs at its global sites. To do this, NYU has established a working group led by a Provostial fellow and faculty representatives from NYU's departments and schools in New York. This New York formed group will be responsible for conducting global site evaluations. When this process was discussed at the Site Directors' meeting (the directors from each global site gather for one week every semester to plan and collaborate) many of the directors were clearly uncomfortable with the whole process. They felt that their sites were looked down upon by New York. Despite New York claims that the evaluations were meant as a tool for self improvement and were similar to departmental evaluations often conducted here in New York, the site directors were not enthusiastic. The meeting became a bit heated, and the issue was not resolved when they broke for lunch.
Over lunch, the Provostial fellow leading the evaluation effort had a casual conversation with the site director from NYU Florence. They discussed how the global sites and New York could collaborate on the evaluations. They came up with the idea of introducing some global site faculty on the evaluation committee, so that it would not be seen as simply a New York investigation of the global sites and also so that the committee could be strengthened by learning some of the challenges unique to educating study abroad students. This idea was then presented to the rest of the site directors after lunch and suddenly the entire tone of the conversation changed. The site directors became very accepting of the idea of site evaluations and agreed to work in support of these efforts.
What the Provost's office must now do is ensure that this committee is truly collaborative, and not merely a cover to accomplish the original objective. The global sites must not only be represented on the committee, they must truly have a voice in the decisions and recommendations that it makes. The Provost's office should also clearly present the non-negotiables of what education should look like at the global sites, so that the committee does not spend time debating issues and making recommendations that the university will not help implement. If the site evaluation process truly is collaborative, it will be far more successful than it would have been, had it just been a New York only venture.
