Texas A&M Interim President addressed A Path Forward plan, new changes

COLLEGE STATION, Texas (KBTX) – Thousands of people watched Wednesday morning as Texas A&M Interim President Mark Welsh addressed a Path Forward plan.

Leaders laid out a plan for improvements and changes to programs, positions and future plans. His main message was addressing the past for, hopefully, the last time.

Provost

Welsh began his presentation by talking about elevating the roles of the Provost back to Executive President and Provost. He said this clearly identifies the position as the second-in-command. The focus is to create the Vice President of Faculty Affairs position, review the current admissions process to ensure fairness and create a job description for the Dean of Faculties.

Libraries

Welsh told the group there has been a lot of interest and concern about returning librarians to tenure, but he said those feelings aren’t shared by actual librarians around campus. Instead, the plan is to commit funding to libraries, specifically $3.3 million that was never returned in the past when positions were cut. The next step will be to look at space allocation for libraries to make sure the campus layout is logical.

In addition, Welsh says they plan to codify academic freedoms for librarians and classroom faculty.

Studies and Assessments

Welsh announced multiple studies, which received applause when he said they plan to use staff and A&M resources rather than hiring consulting firms. Included in future plans is an assessment of the future capacity for the University, which Welsh questioned where the cap for admissions lays. In addition, Welsh says they plan to assess the space on campus and where programs, colleges and offices are located. Over the next few months, he said they’re going to focus on deciding priorities, long range planning processes and keeping buildings that they planned to sell to make sure they can’t be of use instead. Currently, there are 51 capital projects in the works.

The university is also going to conduct a study on student experience which will be released at a later date.

“We need to know what students are frustrated by, ‘I can’t get to class. I got 20 minutes, but I can’t get from over there to over here anymore. There’s too much traffic and the buses aren’t turning fast enough and I just can’t make it, so I have to change my schedule which means I have to have a night class now, which means I can’t work.’ But we need to be looking into all that and how growth has affected us in those ways so we can figure out where to prioritize both effort and resources to figure out how to fix these things and improve them, so students don’t have those frustrations in the future,” Gen. Welsh said.

Programs

Welsh told the group that the College of Arts and Sciences budget is bigger than engineering and it requires attention. The plan for this group is to retain the merged colleges as they currently stand and do a formal reassessment at a later date. The interim president assigned the dean and faculty to make recommendations to the Provost on the best governance structure for the college.

This plan makes a change to the BioMedical degree, which was moved to the College of Arts and Sciences. This degree is now moving back to the Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.

The plan also includes the creation of the School of Performance, Visualization and Fine Arts. During his presentation, Welsh told the group this is a good plan and he hopes to stay on the course to create the school. This will appear in the Space Allocation study in hopes of finding the best options

Centralizing

There are multiple focuses for centralizing the campus and systems. This includes centralizing facilities, which Welsh says he plans to continue with the current model, centralizing finance which will come with some changes and centralizing advising.

Gen. Welsh shared concerns he heard from students and staff regarding the location of some academic advisors. Students were having to travel to other corners of campus from the college to meet with some faculty, which Welsh said is an issue.

This also includes changes to finance, outside of the Agriculture and Engineering schools, those left will have a finance position that directly reports to the Dean of the school and prioritizes customer service.

Future

In his presentation, Gen. Welsh said his hope is that future meetings like this revolve around the future on campus. This is where he says they will be addressing capital projects that are currently in the works and making changes to decide current priorities. This also includes the projects for space allocation, capacity and student experience.

The results of these studies are expected over the next few months and are to be conducted in-house.