New Initiatives
Accepting high enrollments and restricted funding as a given, the “new normal,” Terry Calaway asked his colleagues what new initiatives they had launched to prepare for the opportunities available even in difficult times.
Health care dominated the discussion. As Calaway noted, one initiative that JCCC has taken part in is the county-wide effort to expand health career opportunities, an effort that has involved a variety of partnerships.
As Edwin Robinson, president of Mid-America Nazarene University, pointed out, the Olathe Medical Center is a full partner in this effort, especially in helping ascertain what kind of educational programs will be necessary to provide the appropriate work force down the road.
Gail Hackett, provost and executive vice chancellor for academic affairs, noted that UMKC has received a one-time grant to increase its health profession capabilities. Administrators at UMKC are particularly excited about the possibility of getting permanent funding for a satellite Doctor of Pharmacy program in Springfield with Missouri State University.
The Metropolitan Community Colleges, as Penn Valley President Bernard Franklin observed, is bringing 17 of its health programs together in a state-of-the-art facility that is partly based on the Mayo Clinic model.
Kevin Eichner, president of Ottawa University, sees an opportunity in bringing programs on site, particularly nursing programs. Rockhurst University, Associate Dean Al Hawkins observed, has partnered with KCUMB to create an MBA program for doctors who hope to start their own practices.
Kansas City Kansas Community College, said President Tom Burke, is in the second year of a phased-in merger with a nearby technical school that had been under the control of the KCK school district. The merger has nearly doubled KCKCC’s technical offers in terms of career programs. “It has been a nice merger and opened up some new avenues for us,” said Burke.
Market Adaptations
The question was raised as to whether colleges and universities are able to divest themselves of career-oriented programs when the careers lose their viability. Newspaper journalism comes to mind.
“Yes (programs) go away,” said Burke, “but it isn’t easy, especially if you are a state institution, and there are some state laws you have to deal with in terms of personnel and so forth.”
Gordon Mapley, dean of the Western Institute, the continuing education and outreach arm of Missouri Western State University, noted that the university’s biology faculty members had been slow to embrace the concept of working on graduate programming because they still view their primary role as an undergrad instruction. Businesses, however, are concerned with graduate course work and are very eager for the university to provide it. “So that is a real challenge we have,” said Mapley.
Belinda McCarthy, the provost of Missouri State University, spoke to the expectation of publishing, “If you are working on proprietary research in an incubator at a business environment, (researchers) aren’t interested in having things published until they are ready to have things go to market. There is a whole different construct we need to develop so faculty work can be reviewed successfully for tenure and promotion but not compromise the interest of industry as well.”
“If you have a large enough university,” said Gail Hackett of UMKC, “if these people aren’t interested you can recruit people who are; that is part of the beauty of a university.”
(...continued)