Yesterday's Town Hall Meeting with President Roderick McDavis, members of his cabinet and other university officials was billed as a natural outgrowth of the need for communication between the administration and the students, staff and faculty.
It's hard to believe that this is not a response to the wave of negative publicity popping up all over the place recently.
But questionable causes aside, this meeting was certainly a positive first step in allowing students and faculty ' many of whom expressed feelings of not being heard by McDavis and crew ' to voice their opinions in an open forum.
Students expounded upon the lack of shared governance, individual concerns and an underlying discontent with the administration's stance toward students' rights to determine and judge university policy.
Faculty, however, failed to ask more than a few questions, most of which were soft anyway. It is usually Faculty Senate who stirs up discussion and cantankerously argues about the future of OU, but when given free reign and microphones, they remained silent.
The administration, for their part, did not shy away from anyone's question as expected, and many of the answers sounded like a press release on Outlook than an honest answer to a real question.
Kathy Krendl, to whom McDavis deferred many of the questions, quelled most of the concerns with the staid we're looking into it line. Whether dozens of committees are preparing recommendations for implementation (or something like that), Krendl's responses emphasized that the university would rather discuss a problem than actually try to fix it quickly.
Near the end, a student asked McDavis when a Town Hall could happen again, which, in the long run, might have been the most important thing to ask.
17 Archives
Town Hall Meeting opened the floor for talks but responsive action is yet to be seen
