Criterion Four: Acquisition, Discovery, and Application of Knowledge The organization promotes a life of learning for its faculty, administration, staff, and students by fostering and supporting inquiry, creativity, practice, and social responsibility in ways consistent with its mission. Opportunities for Improvement

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	As this chapter and others make clear, UMKC has made substantial progress in the decade since its most recent accreditation in 1999. UMKC is and will remain an urban, researchintensive university with well-founded expectations of moving to the front of our identified peer aspirational institutions. Nevertheless, there is room for improvement.
One of the areas that we have developed substantially since 1999 is our interdisciplinary program. We remain committed to interdisciplinarity for several reasons. Primarily, we believe that the complexity of the modern world requires broad skills and understandings for University graduates to participate fully as well-educated citizens. Additionally, however, we believe that interdisciplinary approaches can help to overcome our University’s chronic shortage of resources. Approaching a topic using faculty with expertise in two or more disciplines, for example, can provide the “critical mass” that the best teaching and research require. UMKC needs, therefore, to develop ways to expand interdisciplinarity throughout the curriculum, to provide the flexibility that can encourage even more interdisciplinary programs, and to devise ways to overcome the administrative difficulties inherent in interdisciplinary work, and particularly in the hiring of interdisciplinary faculty. A substantial portion of the total student enrollment at UMKC is in, or expects to enroll in, one of the health and life sciences schools. (Of the 14,499 students enrolled at UMKC for AY2008-09, a total of 3,103 were enrolled in one of our four health care schools on Hospital Hill or in the School of Biological Sciences on the Volker campus.) While gathering information for Criterion 4, the self study process identified the need for explicit changes in and development of programs promoting more focused faculty growth and development for life and health sciences faculty. This need is particularly acute for two important reasons. First, the necessary and rapidly changing content of the core education in these schools is dramatic, and second, the first statement in UMKC’s mission is “to lead in life and health sciences.” Programs should be developed and supported by our central administration to allow lifelong learning opportunities for our faculty and to build into all teaching positions the time and resources needed to make this happen. These opportunities could take the form of either off-campus sabbaticals or on-campus sabbaticals. It is also particularly important to develop and implement scholarly focused research/clinical areas which cut across departmental and even academic unit boundaries. The concept of Centers and Institutes might be expanded to accomplish this. These types of cross-disciplinary lifelong learning initiatives could be one way to draw in the large but largely unconnected (to UMKC) affiliated faculty. Successful models of this can be found at UMKC (e.g., the Center of Excellence in Mineralized Tissues located administratively in the School of Dentistry but engaging faculty from other schools). This very successful concept could be expanded. This October 2009 HLC review is UMKC’s first HLC re-accreditation of the 21st century. The ongoing self study process that will follow the visit should aim at making us a 21st century leader in doing even more for our faculty with the same or fewer resources. The constraints identified here are likely to be in the future of other large academic enterprises for some time to come. Thus, UMKC has an opportunity to lead in this new area of creative use of faculty resources.