Develop an interim policy process for extenuating circumstances

**The views expressed in this blog are my personal views and do not represent the official position of Metropolitan State University of Denver or ACUPA.**

When I drafted the expedited policy clause in Metropolitan State University of Denver’s “policy on policy,” which allows the MSU Denver president to enact interim policies “to address legal requirements or a significant institutional risk,” I did not have a worldwide, coronavirus pandemic in mind. However, as the daughter of two Vietnam vets and the wife of a military historian, I knew that an organizational threat might come from somewhere (or something) unexpected.

Balancing Inclusivity and Operational Effectiveness

MSU Denver’s policy process is designed to be inclusive and transparent. New and revised policies are reviewed by MSU Denver’s President’s Cabinet, by students and employees who serve on the Policy Advisory Council, by the shared governance groups, and by the university community at-large during an open review period. The inclusive process balances efficiency with effectiveness, in that publishing a policy quickly might not mean that a policy is communicated and implemented effectively.

Some circumstances, however, require quick, decisive action when it comes to policies. To address the current situation, MSU Denver’s leadership has instituted several interim policies related to moving courses online, working remotely, and allowing flexible grading options for students for the spring 2020 semester. Policies that were already in the works, such as a new social media policy, are still moving through the inclusive process, with meetings and document review occurring online.

Full Process

• Decision maker: Board of Trustees, president, or provost
• Review/Input:
  • Board of Trustees (for governance policies)
  • President’s Cabinet
  • General counsel
  • Policy Advisory Council
  • Student Government Assembly
  • Faculty and staff senates
  • University community open comment period
  • Ad hoc work groups based on expertise and operational area
• Documentation: Formal policy statement published online in University Policy Library

Interim Process

• Decision maker: President or provost
• Review/Input: Key constituents at president’s or provost’s discretion (in this case, a cross-functional taskforce, including the provost, general counsel, senior leadership team, and others was formed to address all things COVID-19)
• Documentation: Informal policy statements published online in the employee newsletter and MSU Denver’s COVID-19 Updates and Resources webpage

Staying Flexible

Including some flexibility in the policy process has saved me a great deal of stress during this time, as it allows me to focus on ongoing operations as senior leaders within the organization address current developments.

Where do Your Procedures Live?

Throughout my years working in policy, I have found that there is one area of little agreement and great discussion—whether or not policies should contain procedures. While there may be something to be said for making a clear distinction between these two instruments of administration, they are inextricably linked to each other: most agree that a policy is not worth much if readers are not told how to “follow it,” i.e., not given procedures or constraints for compliance.

At Cornell, we decided right from the beginning that four criteria would be common to every university policy: (1) possessing broad application across the university; (2) requiring senior-level approval; (3) increasing efficiency, ensuring compliance with law or regulation, or protecting from audit; and (4) containing constraints or procedures for compliance. With that in mind, we began our policy journey, before the existence of the Internet, believing that a university policy must contain even the most granular procedures, to protect the university from any potential claims of ignorance, upon an individual’s non-compliance with policy. This, of course, yielded outlandishly long policy documents, such as our 300-plus-page “Accounting System” policy (which was, thankfully, retired many years ago).

With the advent of the Internet and in the years since, hypertext links have become ubiquitous and expected, and no employee can function without the ability to bounce around from website to website, virtually from office to office, gathering whatever information is needed to complete the task at hand. But where does that leave the policy developers, when considering what procedures to include with a policy, on behalf of the institution? And who takes the responsibility to issue, maintain, and update these various items as needed? I imagine the answers would be wildly varied, and I doubt there is a single institution that would any longer champion the “tomes of yore.”

Cornell’s solution has been a gradual reduction in the number and complexity of procedures contained in official university policies, opting for a more distributed approach, to the point now where most “how to” instructions are housed on sites within their respective administrative areas. But our policies still are required to contain at least a short overview of procedures, with information on how to obtain the minutest of procedural details, on an office website or through other means. We accomplish this balance of completeness with brevity during the policy’s development, or during an existing policy’s periodic review. The balance here, and likely at your institution, depends upon the relative resources available, the complexity and length of the procedures, and an assessment, through judgment, discovery, and analytics, as to the most logical place for the user to look.

Perhaps your institution has a different solution, maybe even to the point that your policy function is not responsible for the maintenance of any procedures at all. However, it is a worthy exercise for institutions to consider these aspects of policy management. I’ll close my post with a battery of questions, designed to elicit opinions and spur discussion. There are no wrong answers.

• Do your policies contain procedures for compliance? If not, do they point clearly to the location of the procedures?
• Who owns procedures, and who is responsible for updating them?
• Does your policy process include the development of procedures?
• What resources are available to your policy initiative, and is it realistic to expect procedures to be developed through the same system? …and for the central policy library to be the place to house procedures?
• If procedures are housed outside of your institution’s policy initiative, how does your institution ensure that procedures are kept up-to-date and linked to policies?
• Do you have separate templates for your policies and your procedures? If not, would this be an effective way to develop policies at your institution? If so, would it be effective to combine them into one template?
• If your institution’s policies contain any procedures, are minor changes to procedural elements of your policies required to pass through your entire policy process?