By Larry Clark
Involvement was the primary theme as Dr. Gregory Gray, President of the Board of Regents; spoke at the first of many pseudo town meetings including all four Connecticut State Universities and the twelve Connecticut community colleges
Transform 2020 major plans include reconsolidating and reworking of the Board of Regent’s new plans to transform the current CSCU system. Transform 2020 is based off of 36 initiatives that the Board of Regents have designed to improve the state universities and community colleges.
The initiatives of the Board of Regents breaks down into a multitude of 12 over arching “Initiative Groups” that covers the topics of, attracting and recruiting students, student retention, enhancing academic offerings, transfer and articulation, instructional innovation, student services, workforce of tomorrow, transparency, revenue management, efficiency, IT and facilities.
While the turn out at Torp Theater was underwhelming for the campus community, the voices in the room certainly made up for lack of bodies in the seats. A few SGA senators, who attended and asked questions of the Board of Regents representatives and Dr. Gray. The faculty representation was present and vocal as well.
Dr. Jane Fried, English professor at CCSU, spoke about the difference between teaching and learning, or the lack there of. She spoke about how regardless of the tools we use to help teach classes, and how our teachers don’t know the science and methodology behind actually teaching. There is no difference between an e-classroom and the cavemen writing on the walls if we don’t actually know how to teach to learn.
Students were talked about briefly in a few slides about stake holders and “value proposition”, a graph that started with students in the center and radiated out into four categories, one of which was affordability. Even though, even Dr. Gray talked to the “mere” two percent increase that was approved across the CSCU system by the Board of Regents.
“I hope that as we move forward and they have made it very clear that they will add more and more student input, which I hope it’s honored,” said Alex Lee, Student Advisory Committee (SAC) representative for CCSU. “Right now we have made [it] very clear that we don’t feel the student representation isn’t enough.”
Dr. Gray mentioned that there would be even more student surveys and round table discussions in an effort to reach out to more students on the CSCU campuses. However, SAC Representative Lee seemed hesitant on such efforts actually happening and getting out to the CSCU students.
“We hope to get a student on their Executive Steering Committee, which is the very small committee that controls the steering of the entire plan,” said Lee. “We feel that if a faculty member is on the committee is on it then we also should be on it as well.”