When I think about SIU, I view each college as a company with a stock and each department in the college as a major division of the company. Then I take a look at the performance of the pieces and try to figure out if the stock is a buy, hold or sell. You know act like the stock analysts, compare results with other like universities, look for reasonable expectations of growth and improvement, and known areas of excellence.
A reasonable question would be is the department better off or worse off than it was 1 year ago, 2 years ago, 5 years, 10 years, 20 years ago? How about the college? What is the succession plan when the current leaders exit? Is there a culture of excellence or not? If the results are poor, is leadership replaced, fixed or is everybody coasting? This is standard stock analyst kinds of things, but it seems that people don't try to apply it at SIU.
Sometimes you are in the wrong area, so no matter what you do your results can't be good. For example, when I was a Computer Science student at SIUC in 1980 to 1984 there were 1000 majors. I think they are down to 100 or 150 majors now. This trend is playing out all over the country, so it isn't clear from this one statistic that SIUC's CS department is poor. We would have to dig deeper to understand if CS is any good.
One interesting mental game is to figure out were the money in the academic world and see if the SIU departments that should be getting money are doing their job. The big money is available in Business, Engineering, Medicine, Computer Science, many of the Science areas.
Just something to think about, more later.
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