Speech to the University
Senate
March 6, 1999
Ed Ray
Executive Vice President and Provost
The Ohio State University
Priorities, Processes and Constraints
The last year or so has been quite challenging for all of us. Many of you have contributed significantly to the continued effective management of the University and to efforts to move the University forward during that time. You have helped us realize progress in the recruitment and retention of high ability students. A number of you took on leadership positions to carry forward discussions and debates related to making strategic investments, identifying peer institutions and strategic indicators, assessing our research mission - its accomplishments, capabilities and needs; and analyzing how we might reform the budget process. You have helped us to implement our first Leadership Agenda, even as our leadership was changing. We recommitted ourselves to enhance diversity and to improve the Human Resources and other information systems on campus.
And all of this occurred during a period when the University had three presidents, two provosts, one acting provost and an interim provost and three of them were the same person. While you may never get a round of applause for all of the progress we made along numerous fronts in the last year or so, you are certainly entitled to a collective sigh of relief.
When I reflect on the last year or two, I am reminded of how many individuals have provided dedicated service to the university during this period of transition. Every Vice President, every Dean and every Vice Provost stayed on task and performed extremely well while we waited for our new President to arrive. The list of Senate members who played key roles in keeping initiatives moving forward is impressively long. But, let me mention a few faculty members who deserve particular thanks: Jerry Reagan, Alan Randall, Mark Ellis, Paul Beck, Dan Farrell, Beth Sullivan, Susan Fisher, Bob Gustafson, Larry Tomassini, Sally Rudmann, Harry Allen, Marilyn Blackwell, Sebastian Knowles, Bruce Bursten and Robert Perry. Students who have worked tirelessly for the University have included: John Carney, Jenny Nelson, Josh Mandel, Magi Swartz, Colin O'Brien, Greg Krabacher, Eric Reeves, Kathleen Carberry, Eric Ley, Soraya Rofagha, Mark Berkman and Allyson Lowe. Staff leadership came from Jack Miner and Jeri Kozobarach and many others. There is not enough time to list all of those who have made important contributions to a smooth transition, but I hope the names I have mentioned convey how much I believe that where we stand today is a reflection of what so many of us have accomplished together.
We also had some very good fortune in the last year. In Autumn 1997, Alex Shumate, then Chair of the Board of Trustees, came before the Senate and promised to find a new leader for the University who would embrace our goals and initiatives and take us to the next level. We were lucky to have Alex Shumate to accept that challenge and we were lucky that he found Brit Kirwan to accept that role.
This period has been quite interesting for me too. I have held six different University titles, including five that did not have previous holders. Fortunately, for me, the University did settle on a permanent job for me. But, the one title that I have held for more than 20 years, of which I am most proud, and which many of you share is that of Professor at The Ohio State University.
So at the outset let me stress that from the perspective of a professor at this University, I have been concerned about how the University could strike the proper balance between assuring faculty participation in the effective management of the University and providing faculty with the time and resources needed to develop and express their creative talents. Some of the financial difficulties we faced in the early 1990s were of our own making and were related to too little access to information and too little input into major decisions by faculty. In response to those deficiencies, I am concerned that we have placed too many demands on faculty in recent years. Too much faculty time has been wasted by faculty having to get up to speed on issues after decisions were made. And, too often the quality of our decisions has suffered from a lack of faculty input.
In an effort to strike the right balance, I will manage my office in an open and consultative fashion and call upon the wisdom and talent of University colleagues inside and outside the University Senate regularly when actions are being defined rather than after the fact. Indeed, I have asked Jerry Reagan, Secretary of the Senate, to serve on Coordinating Council, a major administrative, policy-setting body within the University. Including the Secretary of the Senate on Coordinating Council should help us to get faculty involved in deliberations on important matters more quickly than in the past.
An open and consultative approach works best when conversations are candid and to the point. My purpose today is not to make declarations but to be clear about what I think and to invite discussion. Therefore, let me speak plainly about what I believe the priorities should be for this university, the processes
that should be followed to achieve our goals and the constraints within which we must operate.
Priorities and Process:
In the most general sense our priorities derive from the goals that President Kirwan has expressed for the University:
- Increase the quality and national reputation of academic programs.
- Enhance the quality of the undergraduate experience and the quality of life for all students.
- Become an exemplar within higher education for the success of the University's commitment to diversity.
- Expand outreach and engagement activities to better respond to the needs of the communities the university serves.
Shared values that underlie our goals are reflected in a commitment to excellence in all of our academic efforts, including the creation and dissemination of new knowledge and inventions, an appreciation of the need to assist faculty, staff and students to attain their fullest potential in their creative work and in their lives, an understanding that diversity educates each of us and enriches our lives and a commitment to make a positive difference in the lives of the communities we serve.
It is not a matter of coincidence that President Kirwan was able to articulate and expand our statement of goals and values as soon as he assumed the presidency of The Ohio State University. It is not surprising that he spoke so eloquently and passionately about our land grant mission for the next century in his investiture speech on February 26th. He understands and cares deeply about the academy. He is decisive, and he is already doing much to help us all take this University to the next level.
Our ability to achieve those goals will be determined by the effectiveness of our planning efforts, by the resources available to us and by the extent to which we are organized for success. The effectiveness of our planning efforts will depend upon our ability to set short-term and long-term priorities in support of our goals, to establish accountability for taking action and to benchmark the degree to which we are successful. The extent of our resources will depend, in part, on our ability to reward innovations and initiative. And, how well we are organized for success depends upon the extent to which our academic programs have administrative reporting lines that are compatible with program needs.
Let me talk first about goals, priorities and process. Specific actions and responsibilities that reflect the process for achieving our goals, as expressed by President Kirwan, are reflected in the Leadership Agenda for FY99, which was developed during Autumn Quarter, presented to the Board of Trustees in December and distributed to the University community. To keep these remarks brief and to the point, let me focus on one or two of the most important or key priorities in each of our five stated areas of focus in the Leadership Agenda for FY99 and on the related processes for assuring progress. The five areas are: academic excellence, the student experience, diversity and community, outreach and engagement, and resources.
Academic Excellence:
In 1998 we began the Selective Investment Program in an effort to invest University resources in programs that could both reach the top ten in their fields and move the University toward the top ten among public universities. The work
of the Research Commission was of extraordinary value in helping document our strengths in a number of areas. We chose Electrical Engineering, Materials Science and Engineering, Physics and Psychology for funding. Furthermore, we identified eight areas for consideration in the second round of selective investment to be completed this year: Chemistry, English, History, Political Science, Neuro-science, Arts, Education and Law. One can identify other areas that are strong
in most leading public universities including Mathematics, Sociology, Economics,
or Molecular Genetics, among others. It is not difficult to identify other areas in which we need to have strong programs, but it is difficult to know when it makes sense to invest in a particular program. Without effective leadership and an environment within a department or college that stimulates productivity and
retains the most talented faculty, no area is likely to prove to be a productive investment opportunity.
Reputational rankings and comparisons with other major universities and how they choose to invest are useful information for investment decisions, but they ignore both our unique strengths and emerging areas of importance. On either or both counts one could argue that we should invest in such areas as Food Science Technology, Biomedical Engineering, Environmental Sciences, the use of technology in contemporary arts, international studies and public policy, among others. The challenge we face is identifying both where to invest and when to invest for the long-term. Bill Shkurti and I distributed a draft position paper on strategic focus last September and I circulated a paper in January on strategic investment, both of which deal in greater detail with the issues I can only touch on here. I encourage you to review those documents and would genuinely appreciate your comments.
Our new Selective Investment Program and the more well-established Academic Enrichment Program are designed to guide our efforts to determine where, when and to what extent to invest in specific academic initiatives. While
we have made an excellent start, we must improve the investment selection process itself, regularly assess outcomes of these investment decisions, and
hold people accountable for results. One point must be stressed: we will continue to make selective investment decisions as a strategy to support our goal of academic excellence even if we need to make modifications in our existing funding programs.
The wisdom of maintaining cross-disciplinary investment programs like those in molecular life sciences, environmental sciences, public policy, including the proposed John Glenn Institute for Public Service and Public Policy, and, perhaps, international studies and of maintaining competitive academic enrichment opportunities, is that they permit new claimants for institutional support to continually come from among the faculty and our academic programs.
Later this month I will appoint a committee to provide oversight for all central investment programs. The immediate charge for that committee will be to review the outcomes of previous academic enrichment investments and to begin monitoring the effectiveness of the Selective Investment Program.
While I have not discussed the Research Commission Report and the Library Task Force Report, it should be clear that we must act expeditiously to focus on and increase our research productivity and funding. During this decade we have come to appreciate better, that without our students there would be no University. But, we must never forget that without the extraordinary research and creative work of our faculty, often in collaboration with their students, we would not have a great University. We cannot approach the next century confident of attaining our goals if our scholarship is not supported and enhanced with appropriate resources, including state of the art research and educational facilities, and libraries. We have commenced searches for a new Vice President for Research and a new Director of the Libraries. Just as with our presidential search, it will be critical to find individuals who can meet us where we are and take us to the next level with respect to research and scholarly information services.
Student Experience:
As we pursue academic excellence, often focusing on research and professional and graduate education, we must recognize that the quality of the undergraduate student experience inside and outside of the classroom both contributes to and benefits from outstanding academic programs. Indeed, our ongoing success in enriching the undergraduate experience with research opportunities reflects the synergies that exist within a comprehensive teaching and research University.
Martha Garland, in her newly expanded role as Dean of Undergraduate Studies, has acted quickly to improve the undergraduate experience. She recently announced the appointment of Mabel Freeman as the Director of the Kuhn Honors and Scholars House and began a search for an Associate Provost for the Honors and Scholars program to provide the needed connection between our academic programs and the Honors and Scholars House.
In collaboration with Mac Stewart, Dean of UVC and Associate Provost for Undergraduate Studies, and with the advice of an Enrollment Management Committee, chaired by Dean Kermit Hall, and the assistance of the colleges, Martha is working to implement a plan that will rapidly increase the direct enrollment of new students into academic majors. The goal is to change the current ratio of UVC to directly enrolled majors from 80/20 to 20/80 during the next 3-5 years.
Furthermore, the partnership of my office with Vice President David Williams and his colleagues in the Office of Student Affairs continues to strengthen and expand. Currently, we are working closely to increase the number of Living/Learning residence halls on the campus. And, Martha and Eric Busch are working closely with student leaders to make university-wide events such as Welcome Week and Homecoming educationally and socially memorable experiences for all of our students.
Efforts also continue to recruit and retain the most capable students for our undergraduate, professional and graduate programs. The G-QUE project under the leadership of Kathleen Carberry and the I-QUE project under the leadership of Eric Ley have the potential to provide us with sound advice for improving the graduate and professional student experience. We remain committed to developing user friendly student financial aid services. Our current initiatives to develop tools to assess student outcomes should yield results in the next year or two. And, we continue to pursue initiatives that will improve community safety within and beyond the campus boundaries.
Diversity and Community:
I believe that lasting improvement in diversity and a sense of community at this University will require a substantial and sustained effort comparable to that of the CUE committee with respect to the undergraduate student experience. Last Autumn, I asked Mac Stewart and Deborah Gill to co-chair a committee to review organizational matters relating to diversity. That committee's report has been distributed for comment. More recently, I have asked Dean Carole Anderson
and Vice President David Williams to serve as the co-chairs of a university-wide Diversity Planning Committee. I will ask the committee to draft a long-term plan for diversity for the University, including recommendations for a diversity agenda for FY2000, so that it can be reviewed as part of the current round of budget decisions. Once the diversity plan has been adopted, the Diversity Planning Committee will go out of business. Responsibility for assuring the implemen-tation of the diversity plan will rest with the offices of Academic Affairs and Student Affairs.
It is also worth noting that the search committee for a new Vice Provost for Minority Affairs, under the leadership of Professor Isaac Mowoe, continues its work with the goal of having the new Vice Provost on the job by July 1, 1999. Efforts continue to form a Student Advisory Committee for OMA. Restructuring of OMA remains a priority. But, significant changes will not be implemented until effective means for consulting with students served by OMA have been established.
Searches will soon commence for a new Affirmative Action Officer and for an Americans with Disabilities Act Compliance Officer. The former position has been vacant for several years and the latter is a new position. Filling those positions will help to complete the leadership team for diversity that we need to have in place to set agendas, assign responsibilities and measure the effectiveness of our diversity efforts, once a diversity plan has been adopted.
Affirmative Action laws are being challenged and may be changed. With or without those laws, we are here and we are committed to building a diverse community that can enrich all of our lives. Issues of race divided us even before we became a nation, and they must be addressed. More recently, we have been reminded that issues for students with disabilities and other groups must also be addressed. A diversity plan is long overdue and action agendas need to be developed quickly. I appreciate the magnitude of the challenge that Carole, David and the members of their committee have accepted.
Outreach and Engagement:
The University accreditation review in Spring, 1997 took particular note of our land-grant history and our ongoing dialogue on what it means to be a land-grant University in the twenty-first century. That dialogue shaped our plans for outreach and engagement activities.
Our efforts at outreach and engagement in the last two years have expanded and realized great success, including community involvement through the Campus Partners, Campus Collaborative and OSU Cares initiatives. But, we cannot proceed with an all-too-familiar and inappropriate approach: Find an important issue and empower so many people with authority to address it that no one is actually in charge. Well, Dean Bob Moser is in charge. He heads the President's Council on Outreach and Engagement and I have asked him to work with David Williams, Judith Koroscik, Daryl Siedentop, Keith Smith and others associated with Campus Partners, the Campus Collaborative, OSU Cares and other outreach and engagement programs to bring all of our university-wide outreach and engagement efforts together in a coherent way. Furthermore, I have asked Bob to develop specific outreach and engagement proposals for consideration for funding as part of this year's budget process.
Resources:
As suggested earlier, there are two fundamental factors that will affect our ability to achieve our goals that I want to address because I believe we have the ability to change them. The first factor is finding the resources to finance our ambitions. Absent a dramatic shift in the State's approach to funding higher education in Ohio, the University is not likely to realize subsidy increases that are much above the level of inflation. And, tuition, with or without caps, is not likely to rise much more rapidly in the immediate future than it has in the recent past. If we are to grow the wealth of resources needed to match our ambitions, we will have to do it ourselves.
The Affirm Thy Friendship Campaign is perhaps the most visible way in which we have expanded our resource base. Since the beginning of the campaign, we have provided funding for 33 chairs, 26 professorships, 356 new endowed funds that will benefit 600+ students and millions of dollars in non-endowment funds for scholarships through fundraising. And, much of our success in this campaign is attributable to faculty participation. The Research Commission Report cited a number of strategies that could help us increase external funding for research. Other opportunities for funding include creating and expanding revenue streams, such as Affinity Card sales and pouring rights contracts. These initiatives are not just about raising money for its own sake. Affinity Card money is providing support for the Campus Collaborative and for student legal services. Pouring rights revenues will be used to support programs such as Honors, student internships, study abroad and other social and educational services for students.
Further opportunities for funding exist in terms of patents, licenses, and partnerships, such as those being pursued for the Science and Technology Campus, and revenues from distance learning activities. But, almost all of our efforts to expand our resource base beyond traditional sources have been frustrated by the current budget system, which provides little incentive for individuals or programs to take advantage of market opportunities, based on their creative work and initiative.
In the next week or so we will circulate a proposal for a new budget model that has the potential to create incentives to increase our revenue base by rewarding initiative and creativity and to provide financial discipline by imposing consequences where costs should be contained. Ohio State's discussion of budget restructuring has been open and, quite honestly, has taken a lot longer than at other universities. And, there is a strong desire here to have existing budgets rebased, or reset.
The current proposal will be revised based on discussions throughout the University. Recommendations will be made to President Kirwan and the Board of Trustees later this Spring. Assuming that changes are adopted, I expect them to be implemented on a shadow or pilot basis in one or two colleges next year, with broader implementation possible the following year. I expect the new budget process to include rebasing and, if that is the case, I am committed to a rebasing process that is well defined and phased in according to a predictable schedule over several years. But, the long-term benefit of changes in the budget process will be directly related to the extent to which there are positive and direct financial rewards to those who expand desirable activities and direct costs to those who use resources.
The second factor influencing our ability to achieve our goals is structural. I remain impressed and in agreement with the observation made more than two years ago by the Senate Oversight Committee on Restructuring that the restructuring effort of the mid-90s did not go far enough. I believe that the way our colleges and departments are organized does shape the conversations that we have among ourselves and does influence the possibilities we imagine. The current configuration of colleges is the product of an effort to organize the University for success that is more than 30 years old.
We need to revisit the question of whether or not the array of colleges and the composition of individual colleges on this campus will serve us as well in the next 30 years as they have in the last 30 years. College boundaries are difficult to cross to pursue interdisciplinary studies, and interdisciplinary studies give rise to new disciplines. To the extent that interdisciplinary work is easier to effect within a college than across college boundaries, it is important to configure colleges to maximize potential collaboration.
I have discussed with Senate leaders the need for legislative changes that would permit the University to reconfigure colleges. Until the Senate creates the rules of engagement that realistically would permit us to rearrange our colleges and departments, substantive changes will not take place. I urge the Senate to create the means to make changes possible. That done, I will consult with Senate leaders and colleagues throughout the University to appoint a commission to develop specific proposals for reorganizing our academic units. This is an effort that surely would take a number of years to complete. But, it is not too soon to raise the question and to begin to get the process right.
Summing Up:
I began my remarks by pointing out that despite an extended period of transition in the leadership of the University a great deal of planning and progress has been realized at Ohio State. And, many of you deserve the credit for those accomplishments. If anything, we have come through the transition, more focused on our goals, closer to key decisions on important matters and more confident about our future than when the transition began.
For my part, as a faculty member of this University for almost 30 years, I am absolutely committed to the principle of shared governance and to openness, consultation and meaningful involvement of my colleagues in all important matters at this University. Let me say too that having come to know our new president, I am more enthusiastic than ever about my job and more certain than ever that the best years for this university lie ahead.
I spoke about the excellent start we have made in implementing our Selective Investment and Academic Enrichment Programs and the need to continue to perfect the selection process and to assess the outcomes. Our effort to improve the student experience must be a continuous one. We need an effort in the area of diversity and community that is no less bold than the CUE committee effort of the mid-1990s. Our efforts at outreach and engagement have improved substantially. But, we need to coordinate our actions in this area, and we have identified a mechanism to do so.
Finally, I have described the challenges we face with respect to creating the resources we need to match our ambitions for this institution and the structural changes that we should address to make certain that we are organized for success.
I do not know if any of the preceding has surprised, pleased, annoyed or puzzled you. But, I did say at the outset that I would say what I think and here you have it. As always, I value your support and counsel and very much look forward to working with you in the months and years ahead for our common cause.
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