How the Proposal Will Work

I wanted to share with you all a point of clarification that came up during our last meeting when I expressed some concern that we were limiting ourselves in terms of trying to stick within the provost's offered 'budget.' It seems that what is commonly done when committees write recommendations to the university is not that they offer just one short list of unanimously agreed upon recommendations, but rather the proposal includes a variety of the ideas discussed by the committee, including those that the committee may ultimately decided not to recommend. This means that in our proposal we should able to make mention of even the prohibitively expensive ideas, even if the committee decides to ultimately 'recommend' a more moderate version. I know that might not sound like much of an improvement, I do think it will give Greg, Brian, and I a little wiggle room to strongly encourage the Provost to consider some things that would exceed his ideal budget for us.

I think we'll have a better sense of how much/little we will be able to pack into this report after our next meeting on the 22nd when we start to actually draft some sections of our report.