Dear Colleagues:
I am writing to share that the university is taking actions to strengthen OSU’s central administration of graduate education.
The actions are motivated partly by lessons learned on a project over the past fifteen months to streamline central and academic college roles in graduate admissions, enhance engagement with prospective students, and make more efficient use of enrollment IT systems. Teams in the Graduate School, colleges, and the central divisions of Enrollment Management, Information and Technology, and Educational Ventures have all been engaged in this work in various ways.
The project has surfaced opportunities to improve how we administer graduate education at OSU while also reducing costs. Duplication in central administration and confusion over roles are making it harder to efficiently recruit and admit top students, support student success throughout their journey at OSU, and facilitate college aspirations to create and launch new programs. These are not issues caused by any single administrative unit, but rather a feature of a complex mix of widely distributed practices and systems that have evolved over time. A lot of dedicated people work hard to support graduate admissions at OSU, not least in the Graduate School, and that work is appreciated.
Chief among the actions are to: move the Graduate School’s admissions function into the Division of Enrollment Management (DEM); move the Graduate School’s information technology function into the Division of University Information and Technology (UIT); and move the Graduate School’s remaining programs and activities under the Division of Academic Affairs and into a new unit called the Office of Graduate Education. These shifts will make it easier to serve the unique needs of graduate programs while taking full advantage of the coordinated EM and IT systems and best practices implemented in recent years to support undergraduate enrollment. This approach will also capitalize on the Division of Academic Affairs’ administrative infrastructure.
Effective Monday, March 17, the Graduate School’s recruitment and admissions team directed by Patrick McBrien will report directly to Vice Provost Jon Boeckenstedt. The School’s information technology team will report directly to Digital Experience Director Matt Hansen, a member of Vice Provost Andrea Ballinger’s team. Concurrently, Associate Dean for Graduate Academic Programs and Student Affairs Steph Bernell will report to Senior Vice Provost for Academic Affairs Alix Gitelman. Directors of the interdisciplinary programs currently situated within the Graduate School will report directly to Senior Vice Provost Gitelman.
Given these organizational shifts, the role of Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School will be discontinued. Dr. Philip Mote will serve as a senior advisor to me (and beginning April 1, Interim Provost Belinda Batten), assisting with these transitions and other special projects, before returning to his faculty post in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences on June 30.
Over the last six years, Dr. Mote has provided leadership of both the Graduate School and important university initiatives. Highlights include his work to design and implement a new approach to assessing academic units (Academic Unit Assessment); conceive and develop OSU Grad Advantage, which supports students’ development of transferable skills; encourage OSU’s most competitive graduate programs to adopt holistic admissions; strengthen transdisciplinarity generally and via interdisciplinary graduate programs; and develop a data-informed approach to charting the excellence of OSU’s graduate programs. I am grateful for his contributions and will appreciate his help implementing the transitions noted above.
FAQs with additional information are available here.
I recognize that organizational changes of this sort may bring disruptions and will require many in the university community to work through process and system changes. We thank you for helping the university to better serve graduate education at OSU going forward.
Sincerely,
Edward Feser
Provost and Executive Vice President