The finding of this self-study is that North Carolina State University is essentially and substantially in compliance with the SACS criteria for effectiveness in administrative processes. Nevertheless, NCSU is increasingly challenged to find ways to enhance the effectiveness of its administrative operations. Although North Carolina State University is today a major research university, it has inherited an organizational structure from its days as a much smaller and less complex institution. Even though many administrators have been able to work effectively within this structure, the result has often been a lack of coordination among units, unevenness in distribution of resources, multiplication of committees, and a sense of administrative remoteness from faculty concerns.
North Carolina State University has learned from the past several years of budgetary constraint that there are serious disadvantages to the University's historic pattern of decentralized organization and duplication of effort. If NCSU is to achieve preeminence as a research-intensive university in the land-grant tradition, it needs to become more effective in planning and decision making, and more efficient in allocating and using the resources available to it.
To achieve this end, faculty need to become more involved in University planning and decision making. Both faculty and administrators need to be accountable for the quality of institutional activities and for the effectiveness of institutional planning and development. The University needs to achieve new levels of institutional understanding and coordination of activities, so that there is one institutional future toward which all are working. Instead of competing visions of the University's mission, there needs to be one vision to which each school or college contributes.
A more widely shared understanding of the University should be reflected in more centralized processes for space allocation, resource allocation, and supporting facilities and activities. Even as the Division of Institutional Advancement is coordinating school and college fund-raising into a single University program, so should other dispersed University activities, from public-information programs to inventory control to risk management, be focused and organized for effectiveness in delivery of services.
This vision of the University embodied in a complete and up-to-date master plan that integrates facilities planning with program development and assessment of effectiveness. This plan needs to be reviewed and revised periodically in relationship to the institutional mission, and kept current as a reflection of institutional planning and analysis.
In general, NCSU's administrative processes should promote effective planning, tying future development to success in fulfilling the University's mission of teaching, research, and public service. As all members of the University community contribute to planning the University's future, many of the University's organizational difficulties will be transcended by a new spirit of collegiality. Demonstration of effective use of its financial and other resources will support NCSU's efforts to fund the institutional development needed to achieve its goal of preeminence.
