Ohio University President Roderick McDavis and Executive Vice President and Provost Pam Benoit opened Faculty Senate’s Monday meeting by preparing them for a new way OU might receive funding.
McDavis also addressed President Barack Obama’s proposed plan to revamp the way higher education is funded to base it off degree completion and student retention.
“His plan sounds familiar and that’s because many of these affordability issues are already in place in Ohio,” McDavis said.
McDavis confirmed the guaranteed tuition model and the $75 million endowed scholarship program.
“We’re not going to start the (guaranteed tuition) plan until (Fall Semester) 2015 because we want everything to be in place before we move forward,” McDavis said.
OU will also be reevaluated for reaccreditation — a process that will begin Nov. 1, 2013. The university was last reaccredited in the 2008-09 school year.
“It’s incredibly important that if (the review board) talks to you that you know that we’re going through an accreditation assessment,” Benoit said.
Now that OU passed the semester transition phase, Senate is proposing a new scheduling model — trimesters. Trimesters would replace OU’s two summer sessions.
“It makes sense from being efficient because you’re going to be using this huge capital investment, but it’s not the standard academic model so it’s pretty complicated to figure out how to best implement that,” Sayrs said.
Robert Frank, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, also updated Senate on the general education task force, which is working to evaluate the effectiveness of general education processes.
The task force has consulted college deans and those deans will begin department chair and faculty discussions this semester, Frank said.
“If the task force in the process fails to engage the faculty in this conversation, this will fail,” Frank said.
Faculty Senate will next meet on Oct. 14.
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