WEBER STATE UNIVERSITY Comment on Rankings Institutional Goals Inventory he Institutional Goals Inventory (IGI) contains ninety goal statements arranged into twenty areas. It asks the respondent to respond to each statement twice. First, how important is the goal at the institution at the present time? Then, how important should the goal be at the institution? The five possible responses on each are (1) "of no importance or not applicable," (2) "of low importance," (3) "of medium importance," (4) "of high importance," and (5) "of extremely high importance." All areas of the University community were proportionally represented. The representation included both professional and classified staff, and faculty by rank and academic area, contract status, and age. Student representation was proportional with respect to class in college, enrollment status, academic area, and age. In the following explanation, the twenty IGI - goal areas appear rank-ordered according to the WSU community's assessment of what is important at the institution. The numbers in parentheses following the titles relate the goal areas to the Task Force's list of values. Discrepancy ("Disc.") Academic Development (1) Acquisition of general and specialized knowledge, preparation for advanced study, and maintenance of high intellectual standards WSU IS MEANS SB 3.48 4.09 RANK 1; .4 US MEANS IS SB WSU DISC. 3.42 +.61 4.09 University Community (4) Maintaining a climate in which there is a faculty commitment to the general welfare of the institution; open Some instances of discordance are equally interesting. While the Task Force and IGI "is" findings placed Freedom in the top five, the “should be" designation was only ninth place. Social Egalitarianism, ranked third by the Task Force, finished ninth and sixteenth respectively for "is" and "should be" importance. The Task Force rated issues related to Humanism/ Altruism third, yet that placed fifteenth and eleventh respectively on the IGI. and candid communication; open and amicable airing of differences; and mutual trust and respect among students, faculty, and administrators WSU MEANS Ir - SB 3.19 4.18 RANK ne US MEANS i. Sb 3.00 4.20 — WSU DISC. +.99 indicates the difference between what is ("IS") important and what should be ("SB") important, a positive number indicating the degree to which the goal should be more important than it is. (Remember, 1.00 means "no importance.") mong the most interesting results of the IGI is its concordance with the values assessment that came from the Strategic Planning Task Force. The top five "is" goals expressed in the IGI coincide rather dramatically with Task Force findings. With only one exception, IGI "should be" goals also coincide closely with both "is" goals and Task Force values. Freedom (5) Protecting academic freedom, not preventing students from hearing controversial points of view, placing no restrictions on off-campus political Discrepancies Between IS and SHOULD BE: WSU vs. The Nation ompared to the national data, Weber State's discrepancies between what is important and what should be important correlate closely. In fact, the difference (between WSU and the nation) in sixteen of the twenty goal statements has a discrepancy less than or equal to .20 and the average is .15. This is important, because seemingly high discrepancies (for example, Personal Development at +1.11) might seem alarming, but when the normalized discrepancy of twenty-eight other institutions is +1.04 it becomes apparent that WSU is perhaps not far away from a generally perceived notion across the country. Similarity to National Data: Some Tentative Observations Ithough the differences between WSU and other institutions are small, their direction is suggestive and may be significant. University Community and Freedom are values somewhat at odds with one another, and yet both are somewhat more important at WSU than nationally, perhaps a reflection of the influence of and a reaction against WSU's fairly homogenous cultural and historical setting. A similar tension exists between Intellectual Orientation and Vocational Preparation, the former seem- ing "high-brow" and the latter often construed as "bluecollar." WSU finds both values more important than national averages, perhaps revealing some schizophrenia about whether the institution is really a "university" now, with all the ideals and pretensions attached. The ranking of Research and Advanced Training with national averages similarly reveals some confusion about the role of Weber State University. Perhaps the similarity of WSU's results to national averages masks more pronounced polaritics at Weber State on such issues. Respondents may be of a more divided mind individually, rather than collectively, yet WSU's standard deviations are actually smaller than national averages. As one member of the Values Subcommittee put it, "A group of schizophrenics might disagree less among themselves on some issues than a normal population. I wonder if that doesn't fit WSU."