The ‘restructuring’ of Central Connecticut’s Media Center will lead to “no disruption of [student or faculty] services,” but will instead improve them, according to Vice President for Institutional Advancement Dr. Christopher Galligan.

“To better serve our students and our faculty, I felt much more comfortable that if the support of [our multimedia] rooms was back in Information Technology,” Galligan said in an interview.

The change “is based on feedback from the campus community and information gathered during the past year,” Galligan wrote in an email to the campus last week. He also said in the interview that “conversations took place” with the Media Center staff on the plan.

Before, the Media Center and multimedia classrooms reported directly to Galligan in Institutional Advancement. However, he believed that he could not “provide that level of leadership to make sure those classrooms are running the way they should be,” whereas IT could.

“The people [in the Media Center] right now really do a great job. They just really need the leadership or they need to be better-involved in the IT department,” he said.

In addition to now being under IT’s wing with Chief Administration Officer Dr. George Claffey, the Media Center will also report to Director of Public Relations Janice Palmer. Galligan said that the Media Center’s involvement with Marketing and Communications through Palmer will allow for better promotion of the university by getting the campus community more engaged in the advertising process.

“We need our students and faculty involved in how we market our university,” Galligan said. “We have to make use of the talent on campus.”

Galligan explained that this could be done in a “student work capacity,” having students work with relevant departments like Marketing and Communications or through “co-op opportunities.” This would also address the issue of the Media Center being “understaffed.”

“There’s a lot of [opportunities] to bring students into the projects that we work on. They have a lot of talent in terms of social media and video production,” Palmer said.

The essence of the plan is to better promote the university and to give adequate technical support to existing multimedia rooms. But Galligan also hopes that the Media Center, through its initiatives under new leadership, will aid Institutional Advancement longterm in enrollment management, retaining and recruiting.

“The folks in the Media Center and the individuals that are going to IT are talented people. This was more of a strategic decision for the university,” Galligan stated. “At the end of the day, we have aggressive recruiting, fundraising and community engagement goals and I also think this will enhance academic excellence and that was the driver behind it.”