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Governance

The SUNY Language Consortium consists of the thirteen comprehensive institutions in the SUNY System; representatives from each campus make up the governing body of the Consortium.

 

Purpose

The SUNY Language Consortium will serve SUNY students by seeking to offer a wide diversity of language choices to the students at all 13 comprehensive campuses. The Consortium, existing in collaboration with SUNY Online, has as its central goal providing students across the system with access to a diverse choice of languages at no additional cost and in a way that makes efficient use of institutional resources. To make this happen and to make it advantageous to institutions that offer as well as to those that receive a class, tuition will be allocated to the student’s home institution while SCH will be allocated to the campus offering the course.  While having a system-wide vision, the Consortium also recognizes the primacy of the missions of the individual language programs at the constituent comprehensives. The Consortium will establish guidelines for standards for courses made available through the program. 

 

Membership and Roles

All language departments of the thirteen comprehensive institutions in SUNY are to be considered members of the SUNY Language Consortium and each campus has at least one representative who works as part of the Consortium to further its goals and smooth functioning. More specific details about the governance procedures and structures are in the works during this pilot year of the Consortium’s existence. The fuller governance document will define participation in more detail, regular meeting cadence, and provide greater details about campus representatives and language representatives roles and responsibilities.

 

Each comprehensive will have a campus representative (typically the department chair) who is responsible for proposing courses for inclusion in a two-year rotation of Consortium offerings and who will serve as the point of contact for students on their campus who are interested in taking a course offered through the Consortium. If a department is offering an equivalent course that semester, the department chair may choose not to give permission to enroll in a Consortium offering. Each language will also have one or two coordinators at the Consortium level whose responsibility it will be to coordinate and publicize a two-year rotation of course offerings. As much as possible, the Consortium will avoid competing with in-person courses by focusing on less commonly taught lower level courses and upper level offerings among commonly taught languages. 

 

Policy recommendations concerning low-enrolled classes:

  1. Courses approved for inclusion in Consortium class offerings should be exempt from local campus policies for cancellation due to low enrollment during this pilot phase in order to build confidence in the system and decrease the likelihood that the Consortium will not be successful.
  2. After the pilot in spring 2022, campuses will propose a two-year schedule of courses that they would like to include in the Consortium. They should provide data on previous enrollment history and provide some justification that expected future enrollments (both from their campus and other partners) will be ”reasonable.”
  3. Enrollments in Consortium classes will be reviewed at the end of each semester. Future offerings after the first two years will be evaluated on their enrollment history, and low enrolled classes are unlikely to be renewed.