The President’s Blog

They like us…

This semester has been a whirlwind of activity and it’s hard to believe that we are staring mid-term in the face already.  With over 10, 250 students enrolled, our place in the community is secure.  We know for sure that when the going gets tough, people turn to Pellissippi State for help.  I am very proud that we provide this place and this opportunity for the people of our community.

We have been able to provide some other remarkable opportunities this year already.  We have given  over 500 new scholarships to those students taking courses on the weekends.  We have put into place 20 full scholarships, including books, for students selected into our new Electro-Mechanical program.  We have added dozens of new faculty members, both full-time and part-time, to help carry the load in our classrooms, and we have been approved to offer an Associate of Science Degree in Nursing.   This may count as one of our busiest years ever, and we are not done yet.

Senator Woodson

I met with Senator Jamie Woodson this past week about the reorganization of higher education in the State of Tennessee.  Governor Bredesen is moving  toward a system of accountability for higher education which will focus on graduation rates as a key indicator of success.  This accountability measure causes me some concern.  You know the reasons why.  First, most of our students do not intend to graduate.  Plus, we advise many of our students not to graduate because some of the requirements we have for a degree will not transfer into UTK.  Finally, many of our students will simply not complete a degree program because they were not prepared for college work.  As hard as we try…and we must try…it is very difficult to remediate a student who enrolls with poor reading, math, and English skills.  The first thing we ask them to do is to succeed in the very areas in which they failed in high school.  It is very discouraging for them and frustrating for us.  We are getting better, but we have a long way to go.  Yet, these developmental courses are very important.  We provide our citizens the opportunity to grow and achieve beyond all expectations.  This is a predominately American phenomenon  and I do not want to lose it to an artificial accountability system suited better for the upper 10 percent of our population.

Chancellor Cheek and Provost Martin

I also met with UTK Chancellor Jimmy Cheek and Provost Susan Martin this week to discuss the relationship between UTK and Pellissippi State.  I am very encouraged by the visit and by the commitment they have to make UTK the best university possible.  A strong and healthy UTK is important to us, to our community, and to the State of Tennessee, and I believe that good leadership is in place there to get the job done. 

While Chancellor Cheek and Provost Martin were here, we discussed a possible “dual admissions” pilot that would let UTK admit students on the condition that they successfully complete specified coursework at Pellissippi State first.  The number of applicants to UTK has increased so dramatically in the past few years that they are trying to find ways to accommodate additional students.  We are interested but have not worked out any details yet.

Thanks to all of you who admitted, oriented, advised, counseled, taught, tested, and comforted our many students this semester.  On to mid-term, then Halloween, Thanksgiving, and we are done for another semester.  It is just hard to believe, isn’t it?

Managing growth and change…building an infrastructure for the future.

Pellissippi State, like so many other higher education institutions in the State of Tennessee, faces many difficult decisions over the next few years as enrollments increase and state resources decrease.  Even as enrollment increases, the College may have to operate with the same, or fewer, resources than we have now.  There is an obvious challenge for the College of becoming more efficient in its operation.  However, I think that the real challenge for us is “how do we do it better?” even as resources decline.  The time is right for us to prepare ourselves for the changes ahead.  I think that we have an incredible opportunity if we act now.

There is one major initiative which has dulled our initiatives and, I believe, has made us slow to respond to changes in our technical environment– the TBR-wide conversion to Banner administrative software.  Although necessary, the conversion has been expensive and complex and has deprived our employees of time and energy.  Unfortunately, it has created an environment in which  we are too often trying to “survive Banner” rather than create an environment where we evaluate and embrace new technologies routinely (something of which we have been proud  in past years.)   Consequently, I think other technologies and social media have passed us by.  For example, we are only beginning to use Twitter, Facebook, and texting to communicate with students even though we know teenagers use these social media as a primary source of communication.

Our enrollment increased dramatically this year to well over 10,000 students.  However, we know that we will not be building more classrooms even as we expand our course offerings in order to accommodate increased demand in the future.  We will often rely on adjunct faculty members, yet we do not do enough to train and orient them to the culture of the college. We know that blended instruction, which combines on-line experiences with face-to-face instruction, has proven very successful, but we haven’t really made the necessary adjustments to our infrastructure to accommodate this level of instruction.

In addition to these challenges, Pellissippi State must prepare for a reaffirmation of accreditation process which will culminate in a peer review visit to our campus in Spring 2011.  This effort alone will require that we have an infrastructure for collecting and using data in decision making that surpasses what we have in place right now.  Within that process, we will need to develop campus-wide input into selecting a “Quality Enhancement Proposal” which will effectively improve teaching and learning—and, we will have to measure every aspect of that QEP.   Also, TBR is beginning a new cycle of strategic planning which will affect our planning process and will determine new goals for our institution that reflect the influence of our governing board and legislature.  All of these efforts will require a level of data gathering and data usage that we are not quite prepared to support.   We have to act now if we will be prepared for the future.

In this time of dramatic economic, demographic, social, and technological change, the role of institutions like Pellissippi State Community College has become paramount.  Indeed, Pellissippi State Community College is working hard to meet the needs of diverse students, to respond to the economic needs of our community, to partner with K-12 school districts and universities, to adopt new and potentially transformative technology, to expand efforts to analyze effectiveness in teaching and learning, and embrace our role as an open access, civically engaged institution.

Given this context, Pellissippi State Community College is keenly interested in being a local, state, and national leader in providing high quality education and services for our students.  Building on its already strong foundation, Pellissippi State has engaged the services of Dr. Mark David Milliron, and his company, Catalyze Learning International, to help us over the next several months in analyzing our technical infrastructure and assisting us in our planning processes.  Dr. Milliron has worked with Sinclair Community College in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso Community College in Texas, and Minnesota State College and University System with similar initiatives which he calls Catalytic Change Initiatives (CCI)

Dr. Milliron’s work will focus heavily, at first, on helping us to assess the capacity of our technical infrastructure to gather and use the data we will need in developing goals for our strategic plans.

Although we have occasionally used outside consultants, I don’t like to use their services unless I believe that it is absolutely necessary.  In this case, I believe that it is imperative to move forward now, and we have contracted with the very best available in Dr. Milliron.    We are fortunate that we have been provided private funding to pay for his assistance.

I am very glad that Dr. Milliron is available as we engage with the multiple tasks that confront us.  His knowledge of both technical and academic systems is extensive, and Dr. Milliron is the one person that I know of who has the community college background, the technical background, and the experience of managing successful change initiatives that we can trust to do the job correctly.  I look forward to working with him over the next few months as we prepare for the changes and the challenges before us.