President John G. Peters is the chief executive officer of the university. His 5-year vision of NIU’s future encompasses five goals, outlined in his 2005 State of the University Address:
1) As a
2) As an
3) As a
4) As a
5) As an Accountable University, NIU will track its progress on university priorities, especially student retention and graduation rates, which are key measures of higher education accountability in this new century.
NIU operates on the basis of a formal and institutionalized system of shared governance, in which faculty and administration jointly shoulder responsibility for making decisions, and negotiate to achieve consensus. At the top, NIU is organized around four administrative units that report directly to President Peters: The Division of Academic Affairs, the Division of Finance and Facilities, the Division of Administration and University Outreach, and the Office of University Advancement and Development.
The Dean of CLAS sits on the Council of Deans, which represents all seven colleges and reports directly to the Executive Vice President and Provost, Raymond W. Alden, III. The colleges are unified by their instructional and scholarly orientation. They are responsible for promoting the spirit of the teacher/scholar, nurturing a climate conducive to inquiry, fostering intellectual freedom, and stimulating the pursuit of excellence in the transmission of knowledge. The colleges provide the essential community—the framework for intellectual interaction and that part of the organizational structure that makes the academic enterprise operational. The colleges, then, are a basic mechanism through which the faculty discharges its prerogatives and responsibilities.
The Dean is the senior administrative representative of the College in dealing with officers of the university and of other colleges. The successful management of the College is made possible by a multi-layered staff that works directly or indirectly with the Dean. Three Associate Deans provide supervisory support in the areas of budget and personnel, undergraduate advising, and curriculum and space.
The professoriate of the College is composed of 385 regular faculty members, approximately 75 percent of whom are tenured; approximately another 100 positions are held by adjunct faculty. Almost eighty-five percent of NIU’s Presidential Research Professorships have been awarded to College faculty. In addition, the vibrancy of NIU’s research community has brought national and international recognition to College scholars in anthropology, biology, chemistry and biochemistry, history, mathematics, geology and environmental geosciences, history, political science, psychology, and physics. For instance, NIU is a member of the Universities Research Association, a prestigious consortium of universities across the country that supports the work of important national laboratories such as Fermilab and Argonne National Laboratory in partnership with the Department of Physics. NIU’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies is part of the College and is a world-class resource on
The College faculty is also recognized for its outstanding teaching achievements. Excellence in research supports excellence in teaching, in which research-active scholars across all disciplines come together with students in the classroom, from freshman through senior and graduate courses. Forty percent of the university’s Presidential Teaching Professorships at NIU have been awarded to College faculty.
A substantial portion of the faculty’s teaching responsibility is at the undergraduate level. CLAS generates just under 60 percent of all undergraduate credit hours at NIU, and undergraduates majoring in CLAS subjects represent approximately 35 percent of all undergraduate majors in the University. Because CLAS has a good completion rate and attracts some students from other colleges, forty-three percent of all NIU baccalaureate degrees are awarded to students majoring in the liberal arts and sciences. At the graduate level, students working on CLAS subjects account for 19 percent of degree recipients.
A substantial portion of the enrollment growth at NIU has occurred in the
The College not only offers 29 baccalaureate majors leading to the Bachelor of Arts and the Bachelor of Science, but also provides the majority of general education courses for undergraduate students from across the university. Pre-professional students can focus on programmatic study that supports admission to schools of dentistry, law, medicine, optometry, podiatry, and veterinary medicine. Undergraduates can also choose from six Certificates of Undergraduate Study in areas that range from Actuarial Science through Homeland Security to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies. The College is also home to 10 Ph.D. programs and 17 master’s programs, including the Master’s in Public Administration, recognized in 2005 by U.S. News and World Reports as one of the top graduate programs in the country.