Forging onward: Interim Provost Dan Ennis on persistence, preparation, and pragmatism
by Sara Sobota
Interim Provost Dan Ennis has been around the block of academic persistence a few times. Over the past two decades, in his progressive roles as professor, department chair, associate dean, dean, and vice president of academic outreach, Ennis has become quite familiar with best practices that have defined Coastal Carolina University's campuswide effort to keep students enrolled, engaged, and enthusiastic about their academic programs. While balancing his rule as interim provost, Ennis endeavors to introduce programs that have intrinsic value regardless of staffing decisions at the senior-most level.
“My guiding principle,” Ennis said, “is, ‘Would any reasonable provost or president be happy that this exists when they arrive?’”
In the first few months of his position, Ennis has unveiled a trio of initiatives. Each initiative relies on input and innovation from faculty and staff, is designed to retain current students, and is projected to attract new students. The three initiatives, Completion Agenda, Level Up, and Frankenstein Repackaged, each take a different approach to providing support and guidance to CCU students. As a whole, these programs represent a comprehensive effort to update the way CCU approaches recruitment and retention in order to fit the needs of students in 2019 and beyond.
The first piece of Ennis’ persistence puzzle is the Completion Agenda, a voluntary, one-time workshop offered to faculty and staff that focused on student success and degree completion. Topics and activities in the Completion Agenda revolve around a message that the landscape of higher education will continue to change over the next decade, and CCU needs to develop a strategy to handle the change. Ennis explained that CCU enjoyed record-breaking enrollment growth nearly every year from 1993 through 2016, yet the tide on a nationwide level is turning based on sheer demographics.
“There will be a decline of freshmen no matter what we do,” said Ennis. “There’s a smooth slope down in which there are simply going to be less freshmen every year for the next decade, and this is the first time in our institutional history that this has occurred.”
The phenomenon is particularly concerning for CCU because of its history of rapid, consistent growth for more than two decades. Ennis created the Completion Agenda because he wants to get the word out about the future of enrollment instead of having faculty and staff discover the situation after the fact.
“I want to be upfront with this reality because almost universally – from the community to the trustees to the faculty to the staff – the idea that Coastal grows is embedded in our ethos, it’s part of our identity,” Ennis said. “‘Of course Coastal grows – what else would Coastal do?’ I have the unfortunate duty of being the messenger of a new era in that it is not a fait accompli that any university in the United States will grow. In fact, most will decline.”
Ennis is seeking attention and input from faculty and staff to assist CCU administration in identifying ways the institution can prepare for and respond to the projected decline.
“It’s a reset of the conversation to very clearly articulate the landscape going forward,” said Ennis, “and solicit from faculty and staff their ideas for how to manage that new reality of higher education on a local level.”
Ennis’ second signature initiative is Level Up, a program that takes aim at student attrition and involves reaching out to proactively provide academic assistance to vulnerable students much earlier than in traditional scenarios. A common situation prompted this initiative. Students who would like to drop a course because it’s too difficult, or who discover the field is not what they imagined, find that the action would leave their semester course load below the minimum number of hours to retain a scholarship or move forward in their degree progress. This student remains in the course, commonly earns a low or failing grade, and winds up on academic probation. This outcome can be avoided, Ennis believes, by more customized, responsive action.
“One thing I wanted to change was our ability to respond very quickly, very early to academic crises,” said Ennis. “I’ve learned that you have a lot higher chance of a successful intervention with a student in trouble the earlier you identify the trouble and the earlier you apply resources.”
The key feature of Level Up is a new course, UNIV 154, that can be taken in increments of one, two, or three credits, depending on the student’s need. This online, asynchronous course is comprised of modules taught by faculty within specific disciplines and is combined with on-campus experiences and integrated academic coaching and instructional support. The course can be started at any point during the semester. This means that the moment a student finds a need to drop a course, they can pick up a customized version of UNIV 154, and not only solve the problem of credit-hour minimum, but also have the opportunity to sample a discipline or field without the commitment of a semester-long course. Students create their own course by selecting faculty-developed modules according to their interests and work at their own pace, so different students will begin and end the course at different times throughout the semester.
“It’s not a remedial course,” said Ennis. “It’s really academic exploration. I wanted it to have academic and intellectual content supplied by faculty in the disciplines so students can dip their toe into some academic fields and consider, ‘What is the thing that interests me, that inspires me? Is there something here that makes me want to stay here at Coastal?’ I want to show students there’s a rich intellectual landscape out there, which is sometimes difficult to discover when you’re a first-semester freshman taking gen-ed courses.”
Ennis’ third initiative, dubbed “Frankenstein Repackaging,” involves expanding academic offerings in a way that attracts potential students, yet does not require new buildings, expensive equipment, or new faculty hires. Instead, it reimagines traditional programs with an interdisciplinary approach.
Ennis has gathered information about the academic desires of potential and transferring students through reports from field admissions officers, exit interviews with students, and study of new programming at other institutions. His goal is to offer majors that appeal to students by gathering together courses from a variety of existing majors and packaging, each with a title that fits current academic demands.
The Frankenstein Repackaged title derives from the stitched-together nature of the new majors, constructing new programs by comingling existing, “old line” disciplines in new combinations.
“Maybe the arm is from political science, the leg is from marine science, and the head is from business,” Ennis said. “In circumstances where we can create a new major that we’re proud of, that has integrity, and it’s something students are looking for, then we help admissions.”
Offering fresh programs that reflect modern industries with an interdisciplinary framework is a recent and quickly growing strategy across higher education.
“A field such as ‘sustainability,’ for example, which didn’t exist a generation ago, combines elements of science, public policy, and management,” said Ennis. “It suits our location, and in times of tightening budgets, much of the coursework can be offered from our existing schedule of classes. If we have empty seats in an upper-level section, and those seats can be filled with students attracted to a new program, we’ll be better positioned to deal with any enrollment challenges headed our way.”
Ennis also suggests there are other potential majors Coastal could offer that would involve both disciplinary collaboration and groundwork by faculty and administrators across colleges.
“Engineering management would require the Wall and Gupta colleges to share resources,” Ennis said. “A speech science degree would draw on linguistics, anatomy, and education – that’s three colleges that I’d be asking to give a little so we can offer a new program. A provost can’t simply speak a program into being – much less an interim provost – so all I have is the bully pulpit. But I see our peers and competitors beating us to degrees I know we could offer, recruiting students I know we’d want here. That shouldn’t happen.”
As interim provost, Ennis wants to make sure CCU remains competitive and aware of evolving, broad-scale changes in higher education.
“Things are going to be different, and we have to be ready.”