The Oregon State Board of Higher Education’s proposal for the structure of institutional boards put forward last Friday was met with mixed reviews from the campus community, but input and discussion will continue into the coming months. @@http://www.ous.edu/state_board@@
The proposal came out of the board’s Governance and Policy Committee. It included an abstract explaining the proposal as well as a matrix of how powers would be distributed between the board, the Oregon Education Investment Board and a hypothetical institutional board.@@oregon is making this much more complicated than it needs to be@@
Governance committee chair Paul Kelly said this proposal is merely a rough draft of some of the things coming up in discussion of how an institutional board would work. Both the committee and the board will proceed with more dialogue during May and June meetings. @@http://www.ous.edu/news_and_information/bios/kelly.php@@
“The Governance and Policy Committee continues to work toward a comprehensive recommendation to the full board,” Kelly said, “which in turn will presumably adopt a recommendation for the governor, legislature and the special legislative committee on the subject of institutional governance. (We) developed consensus on several aspects of institutional governance and will resume that discussion in May. The Committee’s recommendation will be presented to the full board at either the June or July meeting.”
Interim University President Robert Berdahl said the University is active in the discussion of institutional boards by sharing ideas on what will position the University to better contribute to state goals, educational attainment and economic vitality. @@http://president.uoregon.edu/biography@@
“The issue is not about power but is about outcomes for students,” Berdahl said. “We want to work collaboratively to develop the right governance structure to support greater access, affordability and academic excellence for Oregonians.”
Denying any particular criticism of the proposal, he is confident any problems will be reviewed before the official recommendation is made.
“We are early in the process,” he said, “where all ideas should be on the table so that, when the Special Legislative Committee makes a recommendation, the legislature and the governor have the information they need to decide the right balance of responsibilities and powers institutional boards should ultimately have.”
Outside the administration, other campus community members are reviewing the first proposal and are not liking what they find.
History professor Ian McNeely thinks the current proposal needs modifications to fit the new 0-20 plan of streamlined education in Oregon. He worries how effective the system would be with so much responsibility so widely distributed. @@http://www.uoregon.edu/findpeople/person/Ian*McNeely@@
“I believe the proposal undermines the governor’s and the legislature’s plan@@two or just one plan?@@ to make Oregon higher education more streamlined and more accountable,” McNeely said. “It turns an already unwieldy bureaucracy into a Rube Goldberg contraption of overlapping and competing boards and does little to improve our ability to serve students.”
The coming months will hold many more conversations and brainstorms for the State Board’s Governance and Policy Committee. The most important thing now is to make sure all viewpoints and ideas are put forward for consideration by the State Board, the legislature and the governor alike.