The Heart of OSU

(Larry Roper has supported a variety of community visions and he and I meet one afternoon; these were some thoughts I sent to him after our meeting.)

The “Heart of OSU”, Our Community’s Center
We need to enfold a number of essential functions and goals at OSU into a center, virtual and actual.

These include:
• Outreach
• Service Learning
• Community Involvement
• Campus Climate
• Pre-college, K-16 partnerships
• Recruiting and Retention

These functions and goals share a number of essential characteristics and a central location would foster a network with both programming and academic faculty. These functions are broader than academics, or student affairs, as they extend from the university’s mandate, reaching every aspect of program and policy. We must find a home where these foundational elements are not relegated to too few scattered and isolated efforts.

It is critical to reduce our dependence on student-learners to create these essential functions. For too long, students have had to create programs from whole cloth. If these are essential functions, then we must Pony Up the money and support. Rather than depend on students for administration, we should enfold their energy into existing well-defined and managed structures.

Similarly, we need to support both program and administrative faculty in their effects to serve students. It is essential to understand the issues related to campus climate, to recruiting and retention, and to have these complex and intertwined problems attended to in a structural rather than haphazard way.

Additionally, academic faculty are under increasing pressure to provide substantial outreach as part of their research funding. To have individual faculty responsible for creating and delivering materials that is central to the outreach and Land Grant mission of the university is unrealistic and less than productive. We must seize the opportunity, as well as fulfill our Land Grant mandate, to provide programs, products and materials that have a sustainable impact in all our communities.

Related to this, we must support academic programs whose teaching and research provides the rational and expertise for administering programs through the center. We need to make the center a source for innovation. We need to develop experience in effective program delivery and design, in funding assessment for campus as well and Oregon-wide programs. We need to support faculty and students in their endeavors to develop and deliver on their experience and expertise on how we best foster a supportive campus climate.

There are so many great questions. How do we effect changes in poverty, support underserved communities? How do we connect our research to the fruitful application of this knowledge on campus and in Oregon?

There is tremendous unfulfilled potential to develop outreach scholarship, for example, and to support expertise in community development such as through Sea Grants support of community partnerships. There is much more unlinked expertise and we could build capacity to serve both our university community as well as broader communities.


Building on Successes, Overcoming barriers

OSU has a long history of successes. For many student-run programs we can build administrative support. We can build on successful programs. We have a successful history of outreach to underserved communities in Extension, 4-H and The SMILE Programs. We have a number of campus groups whose mission is improving campus climate. The center offers an opportunity to not just highlight the needs or have conversation, but it could offer a mandate, create a mission. “All who enter here will be treated with dignity.”

However, in too many of these programs, particularly those that depend on student volunteers, we have not established continuity. If we have a program that depends on graduate students to run the programs, we lose experience and momentum each year. For less essential programs perhaps this is acceptable but for programs like Community Life, this is not functional. It takes too long; we lose too much institutional knowledge. If Service Learning is to rise to its potential as an integral aspect of each students experience at OSU, we cannot depend on the random nature of annual interns and volunteers. If we seek to enfold academic program in service we must be more substantial.

We must create long-term institutional support for offices, faculty and programming staff. We must provide a home to involve those wonderful students into an existing, well supported, growing program. We can use their help. We must not depend on their abilities to create something each year from nothing. It is wrong, ineffective and inefficient.

Steps to success
In a number of areas, we have taken baby steps. We each know pieces of the puzzle. A few are aware of some considerable detail but we have not yet created a sense across the campus that we will make a substantial change and a commitment to goal-oriented management. Unless we have the opportunity to step up, we will nibble around the edges. We must first communicate, convince, and demonstrate the need and our commitment. Then we can begin a step-wise process of creating a center for OSU’s commitment to communities.

Step 1

• We need to create a cross-campus administrative unit to bring together these functions.
• Where essential functions are missing or depend on volunteers, temporary workers; we set these areas as priorities to allocate funds.
• We retool the OSU Strategic plan to better integrate efforts with these functions
• We create a students’ group to inform the unit how to best integrate and support ongoing student-run groups

Step 2

• We create through the mission and functional units a plan to seek funding through grants and foundations to support both the overall mission and the work of individual units with the structure.
• We begin design work for a building to house those units without either an academic or an administrative home.
• Through the creation of a strategic plan, we begin delivering services that support outreach, service learning and foster a positive campus climate

Step 3

• We break ground on a sequence of ecologically friendly buildings to house these functions
• We create an endowment to support programs and faculty
• We become a national center of excellence on outreach, service learning and campus climate

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Ryan Collay, The SMILE program and many others (draft as of Wednesday, October 31, 2007, originally from 2004 or 5)