A. INFORMATION FOR FIPSE
As co-principal investigators of the Hunter College Language Diversity Initiative (LDI) Drs. Janet Poppendieck and Suzanne Michael were fortunate to come to this project having had a previous Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) project grant under the Community Service Competition (1994-1996). We therefore knew several members of the FIPSE staff and were familiar with the FIPSE culture – that staff were encouraged to assist in conceptualizing and developing project activities and ready to solve problems as needed. In addition, we had benefiting from participating in the annual program directors’ meetings.

From the outset, with the new proposal, we were supported in our efforts to translate lessons learned from our prior project. After the project was funded, talking to and/or meeting with our program officer, Dr. Joan Straumanis, was consistently helpful. Dr. Straumanis was perceptive, had helpful suggestions and was ready to advocate for us when our college was preoccupied with internal administrative changes. Dr. Dora Marcus, in person and by telephone, was also responsive and helpful in answering our questions about the timing and design of our evaluation.

We found the program directors' meetings particularly useful for addressing evaluation issues. We also enjoyed meeting colleagues from around the nation. However, we found that the focus of our project was significantly different from those of our colleagues. We thus never found a network of peers with whom we could engage in on-going dialogue. In addition, given the challenges we faced at Hunter College, which no doubt are also faced at other urban colleges, we feel it would have been extremely helpful if there had been more focus on and dialogue about the process of campus-wide changes and how best to meet the structural and cultural challenges that face large urban commuter campuses.

Dr. Straumanis' site visit in April 2001 (final project year) was extremely important to us. Her observations, insights and suggestions were helpful. We believe, however, that these insights and suggestions would have been more useful to the project if they had been expressed earlier in the funding cycle. To make site visits more effective, we think that FIPSE needs to define better the purpose of the visits. We assumed that a site visit was evaluative and thus should occur well into the project, when the project had “something to show.” What we learned, too late, was that a site visit is an opportunity for the program officer to:

• provide support and FIPSE status,
• problem solve and engage in strategic planning, and
• help leverage resources.

With increased clarity of the potential and functions of site visits, we suggest site visits be scheduled within the first half of project funding.

Our initial project objective was ambitious – to change campus climate. Under even the best circumstances, it is difficult to change individual behavior and/or attitudes. On an institutional level, the difficulty increases. Culture change is a slow evolutionary process that is made even more complex by our large (20,000 students) diverse urban commuter campus where over 46% of class instruction is provided by adjuncts (Hunter College Office of Institutional Research, 2002) and full-time faculty have responsibility to teach seven courses per year with average class enrollments of 40 students.

Institutional change requires: