Editor's note: This is the first in a three-part series examining the progress of Focused Excellence.

About 14 months ago, President Peter Likins stood before the Faculty Senate and announced publicly, for the first time, his plan to reshape the UA into a more narrowly focused university.

On that day, and in the months following, he has talked of emphasizing the university's strengths and eliminating areas in which it struggles, while increasing tuition and improving access for minority groups.

He dubbed that set of priorities "Focused Excellence," and in the past year, we've seen those priorities play out throughout the UA, with varying degrees of success.

Though Likins achieved his goal of raising tuition while protecting poorer students from paying more, he appears to have made other plans too hastily. As a result, the cuts and changes to programs that were supposed to be a centerpiece of Focused Excellence's first year were dramatically scaled back, and it's hard to envision them having a major impact on the UA's future.

In January, Likins and Provost George Davis released lists of proposed program cuts, mergers and reorganizations. Though the lists were long, many of the proposed changes didn't seem as sweeping as people were expecting.

The handful of controversial proposals included eliminating the School of Information Resources and Library Sciences as well as the School of Landscape Architecture.

But most of the major cuts and mergers were taken off the table. Some, like the library sciences program, were removed from consideration because they are moving toward financial self-sufficiency, but others, like landscape architecture, were saved simply because Likins and Davis were persuaded that they should be spared.

While it's refreshing to see that administrators are willing to be moved by suggestions from the campus community, it's also disappointing that we haven't seen the drastic improvements we thought we were getting.

Even the initial proposals were far less sweeping than we were led to believe. And now the question that lingers is, "Just how focused is Focused Excellence actually going to be?"

Tomorrow: The future of Focused Excellence
Thursday: Tuition and minority access