With Responsibility Centered Management being the talk around campus, the College of Arts and Sciences held data summits last week to go over challenges within the college.
RCM, a budget strategy created by the university to help fight Ohio budget cuts to public universities, would result in the college making more decisions for themselves, said Robert Frank, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.
“We needed to tackle some problems at the college level and in order to do that I needed to start talking to the faculty in the college,” Frank said, who organized and led last week’s meet.
Frank said he supports the model that may be implemented by 2016.
“We know better than the university how to solve our problems,” he said.
During the summits, Frank presented statistics and reasons why students chose to leave OU and the College of Arts and Sciences. He said he thinks a way to improve retention could be getting feedback from students about advising, career planning and their satisfaction with the curriculum.
Most of the faculty in attendance agreed that advising and student relations need to be improved.
“I think (the improvements) are going to have to happen,” said Greg Springer, a geological sciences professor. “It’ll be really difficult and there will be a lot of push back on some things, but the Dean is committed to it and if he is committed to it, people aren’t going to have a choice but to do something.”
John Gilliom, associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, echoed Springer’s comments on Frank’s commitment.
“The meeting itself demonstrates his leadership style,” said Gilliom adding that Frank being a first generation college graduate wants to make sure students get out of college what he did.
Frank said he was happy with the results and conversation that took place among the faculty.
“What I was hoping was that exactly what happened would happen,” said Frank.
“We need to collectively come up with a plan and what I heard at both of the sessions was faculty suggesting ideas and identifying issues and starting a conversation.”
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