“Dr. Frank embodies all the best traditions of the college.”
That is how Executive Vice President and Provost Pam Benoit described Robert Frank when Ohio University stole him from the University of Cincinnati to become the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.
Since he started Fall Semester, Frank said he believes OU’s biggest college needs to rethink its traditional teaching and research roles.
“I think we need to move toward having some people who are just teaching faculty who are paid just like tenure track faculty,” Frank said. “Their job is to be expert teachers and they’re going to help inform the researchers who are focusing on their research about best teaching practice.”
Frank added, there is a need to hire more teaching faculty while moving some current faculty into new teaching roles.
“There are some people who can truly be at the cutting edge in their teaching practice and in their research but in my experience, there aren’t a lot of people who can be truly excellent at everything,” Frank said.
About 88 percent of the college’s $122.47 million revenue in the 2011-12 academic year stemmed from undergraduate and graduate instruction, said John Gilliom, associate dean of Arts and Sciences.
Research efforts brought in less than 8 percent of the college’s revenue in that same period, though still roughly $10 million — about a third of all research money brought into OU that year, according to the Office of the Vice President for Research and Creative Activity.
“If you do it straight by the money, you’d stop (research). But we’re not a business, we’re a university,” Gilliom said. “(We’re) re-embracing our educational mission and finding a way to sustain our research part of our portfolio.”
Despite the numbers, Frank and Gilliom both want to reassure interested parties that research remains a critical part of their mission.
“(Research is) 40 percent of the effort of the faculty and … it does not cover its costs at all,” Frank said. “We do research because it’s a public good … and because we think it’s valuable to our students.”
Elizabeth Sayrs, chair of Faculty Senate, said she believes Frank has been an effective communicator.
“He’s been very helpful in bringing issues that are of concern for faculty to faculty senate,” Sayrs said. “The reputation he has is of being candid and transparent.”
By focusing on his college’s history, Frank said he hopes to provide a more holistic liberal arts education for the roughly 5,000 students that are enrolled in his college.
“We have people coming in who have a variety of interests and whose talent differs and our obligation as an institution is to help each of those people be successful … that’s quite a challenge,” Frank said. “In the end it’s hopefully making available to students different kinds of pathways so they can engage in that process of figuring out how to fit in.”
dd195710@ohiou.edu
