Letter to Time White--OSU restructuring

This letter was during a budget crisis, a time when OSU was more interested in measuring students as widgets, and our leadership was faced with revitalizing the vision for "OSU."

Letter to Tim White- Thank you for all your efforts. I wish to offer my time and expertise with the campus-wide redesign process. My seven years with The SMILE Program, involvement with outreach statewide, and my experiences working with each academic college through their students and faculty, has given me a unique perspective on the role of connecting academic experience with community and outreach.

I'm concerned that we have translated “supporting resident undergraduate education” into “classroom instruction” as the overarching mission of the university. In developing the mission and metrics we may be missing the role of developing that undergraduate population, building a cohort with the necessary attributes to succeed at OSU, who will persist and attain, requires efforts beyond the classroom experience. Our academic efforts require internships, service learning, involvement in community and outreach, involvement in research and projects, all working to create a graduate that has both the content competencies, skills and experience to move out and be a successful graduate.

I'm very concerned that as we measure these efforts those that are "easiest" to define and measure will inherently take precedence over the more difficult and perhaps more powerful. For example, if we are striving to build a more diverse population and we must look systemically at the variety of barriers each student will experience and our efforts may play out over many years. I have a letter from a white pre-med., 3.96 GPA, who says one of the most important experiences of her undergraduate career was teaching Hispanic and Native American fourth and fifth grade students at our camp. She told me that she was surprised how smart and motivated they were studying field ecology. When she is a doctor she will treat patients differently based on this transformative experience. She now sees these students as “college material” and will work accordingly. Her experience is exemplary of SMILE and the mission of OSU.

How do we measure this? What's the metric? Is this strategic?

Unless we look at a holistic model for academic skills and experience we miss these transformative experiences, the involvement that keep students in school, helps them to make informed personal choices about steps in their careers, the kinds of experiences that stay with them when they reflect on their time at OSU. There is a current disconnect between these elements of student’s academic preparation. For example volunteering with SMILE is required as part of the Public Health MAT experience through our HS Challenge. Why should engineering students get involved with our engineering challenge middle schoolers if it’s not part of their program. What about the role faculty play in creating these experiences for students? Many faculty wish they could be more involved in these community-based projects but feel, rightly so, that this is not valued as part of retention and tenure. They will do the work but only at the expense of their careers-this is a foolish calculation.

So, if the goal is to best support a high quality students experience, to create the best graduates well prepared to pursue the career of choice, why don't we better define the overarching academic experiences for students and involve faculty in this effort? It is clear that if the goal is to grow impact then we must think outside the constraints of defining the undergraduate experience as classroom contact.

The comment has been made that while SMILE is highly effective at welcoming students into a family of learners, at creating a vivid vision for a future that includes academics, we may be creating false expectations for college life and what will be important once they arrive here.

We focus on a community of learners in a challenging and yet inviting world, an idealized view of academics. The view of people as life-long learners working and striving for excellence, working towards a common set of goals. Is this the academic experience the redesign envisioned? Have they gone only the first step or they even on a path to consider a model based on experience and success or are we only rearranging the deck chairs?

It seems to me that a coherent set of overarching goals should drive all efforts and that we should avoid the competitive metrics model. We should back off pitting one academic area against another. How can you define a common vision and strive towards these goals if we define a model that ultimately looks just like what we have now, with those deans and division heads that are best at protecting their turf in control of all academics and budgets. Putting a college into a division with a couple of other groups doesn’t mean anything unless there’s leadership to define a set of goals integrated into the mission of that group.

A truly different way to define the roles would be to look at overarching goals of undergraduate experience, define the elements and competencies more campus-wide, engage faculty in providing these experiences to include classroom instruction, service learning, research, outreach, creating an inviting campus climate, learning teams, while defining "student success" as the metric for campus-wide success.

We could involve a variety of groups, students, recent graduates, faulty, business and community leaders, in defining student success. We can then more tightly couple this metric to pre-college, post graduation, graduate and professional school enrollment and give us the chance to get more impact for effort on many facets.

Colleges would have a role in providing content competencies but also in providing faculty that are involved in the overarching university-wide goals as well. Where a coherent set of standards and goals exist for the undergraduate experience in which all efforts strive towards create a successful college graduate.

When I worked for a general contractor we had a designer who said, "If I can draw it, you should be able to build it." When they drew something with no supports we would laugh about hiring the "sky hook", a helicopter that would fly over the house in perpetuity. I also liked your comment about it "smelling right" although I guess we are all downwind of somebody and we can always point fingers.

So, on the macro scale I see a current plan hasn’t evolved enough to justify that effort that looks good on paper but doesn't set us on to a 5-6 years time course to redefine the undergraduate experience university-wide. On the micro scale I see a variety of ill-defined metrics that could mean most anything and leave me wondering if I'm essential and strategic enough to continue to be an integral part of OSU's mission.

So there’s my bias and resume. I would very much like to be involved in the process, as I strongly believe in the need to make real changes and I see a great need to think about solving the problems at hand over a much longer term that just next year. Otherwise we should just take our collective lumps, hunker down and ride this out as we all know that, “This too shall pass.”

Thanks again and take care.