Faculty Senate will meet with Ohio University President Roderick McDavis and Executive Vice President and Provost Pam Benoit to discuss concerns about OU’s national rankings and resolutions Monday at 7:10 p.m. in Walter Hall 235.
“(There are) different components to rankings, and one was faculty resources, which has to do with class size and number of full time faculty,” Joe McLaughlin, the Faculty Senate chair, said. “It was the lowest and not only the lowest, but it has declined something like 85 spots in the last four years.”
On Oct. 21 the Board of Trustees met, and Stephen Golding, senior vice president for strategic initiatives, presented OU’s rankings from various publications including the US News & World Report and Forbes magazine.
“The point the provost would make is what the survey’s trying to measure and what you’re actually trying to find,” Golding said.
Three resolutions highlighting administrative goals will be examined at the meeting, two of which are second readings and will be voted on. Those resolutions are about annual dean evaluations and comprehensive reviews of deans.
The first reading of a resolution will focus on a revision to credit hour requirements for certificates, primarily at the graduate level. That has culminated partly in response to the governor and state setting a “fairly ambitious” goal in Ohio that 65 percent of adults, ages 25 to 64, would have some kind of post-secondary credentials by 2025, McLaughlin said.
“In general … the university has always looked at certificates as something that are interdisciplinary in nature, that you can’t earn a certificate all in the same department, but there are some reasons at the graduate level where we might want to give out some certificates or credentials to people for things that happen all within a particular program,” McLaughlin said.
McLaughlin’s report will include an update on the recently established task force of all senate chairs that focuses on improving diversity and inclusion at OU. He will also give an update on curriculum requirements surrounding race and diversity, which McDavis spoke about during the previous senate meeting.
The final segment of McLaughlin’s report will be about the Textbook Cost Initiative Committee. McLaughlin said the committee was started as a part of the whole effort at the state level for affordability and efficiency.
“Provost Benoit put together a task force last year of faculty, staff and students to just kind of coordinate efforts in the university to see if we can reduce costs of textbooks,” McLaughlin said. “Really, it’s more a matter of what I would call instructional materials, all these online things people have to get codes for now and clickers and all that kind of stuff, so we’ve been doing a lot of things with the library and doing a lot of studies looking at open source kinds of things.”
