Criteria for Proposed Initiatives

ICCC Vision

The ICCC fosters, personifies, and celebrates culture and creativity as broadly defined through interdisciplinary programming and research anchored within and reaching beyond the humanities and fine arts disciplines.  

Among its objectives the ICCC:
- encourages graduate and undergraduate programming across departmental boundaries;
- increases the potential for research collaboration and funding success;
- improves the University's capacity to connect with external partners; and
- attracts and sustains students, visiting scholars and artists, and faculty.

Initiative Assessment Criteria

Initiatives should clearly illustrate how they contribute to the ICCC vision.  The vision will guide the ICCC Director and Executive Committee in assessing any applications. The following assessment criteria are not meant to be prescriptive or to discourage creative initiative proposals that may not be reflected in the criteria.

1. Existing faculty expertise, interest, and potential commitment.  Are there sufficient people, within and beyond the Division and/or U of S, to carry out a successful program?
2. Student demand and student recruitment potential.  How will our initiative compare with other Canadian programmes? How is a program unique, timely and able to grow?
3. Fit with the College and UofS plans.  To ensure the financial vitality and sustainability of the programs, and the ICCC itself, we need to justify each initiative.  What will the program add to the Division, the College and the UofS as a whole?
4. Fundraising potential.  Does the initiative have fundraising potential?
5. Research, scholarly, and artistic work potential.  Will the initiative create a stronger research culture at the faculty and/or student level?
6. Degree of interdisciplinarity and innovation.
7. Interdepartmental-divisional collaboration.  Does the initiative require expertise within a department, across departments within the Division, across Divisions within the College and/or beyond the College?
8. Ability to create and/or support internal connections with non-academic units within the university community. Will the initiative develop, maintain, and/or enhance, relationships with groups such as EMAP, Museum of Antiquities, Art Galleries, Library, Gwenna Moss etc?
9. Ability to create and/or support external connections. Will the initiative develop and/or maintain relationships outside of the UofS?
10. Degree of creativity in pedagogy or scholarship of initiative.
11. Ability to develop and/or share new types of knowledge and to ask new kinds of questions.
12. Resourcing: Are the necessary financial and human resources available?

Process

Faculty interested in proposing an initiative to the ICC are encouraged to carefully consider the above criteria and then to approach either the Director / Associate Director or a member of the ICCC Executive Committee to discuss informally their ideas before making a formal proposal. Formal proposals for initiatives should be submitted to the Director and Associate Director of the ICCC in writing.  They can be submitted at any time of the year and the Executive Committee and Director will attempt to proceed expeditiously with all initiatives.  However, certain initiatives will have standardized processes for approval (ie. working groups, visiting scholar) and others will have their time frame affected by college or university processes (ie. course proposals).  Others will simply be directed to the ICCC Executive Committee for review, which meets on a monthly basis. For large initiatives, the Director may request the proposer to attend an Executive Committee meeting to describe the initiative and answer questions.  It is unlikely that large initiatives will be approved at the same meeting where they are first introduced/proposed.

Questions

Please contact the Keith Carlson, Interim Director, with any questions at keith.carlson@usask.ca