A Better Plan for Re-alignment?

In a Facebook post, Dr. Michael Adams (Interim Chair of the Political Science Department/Public Administration) and Professor Carroll Robinson (Political Science/Public Administration) published a new and more radical, yet much better plan for a re-alignment of schools and departments for the future of TSU.  We at Transparency State find their model very inspiring and have republished it below.  Hopefully the Huewitt administration and the BOR also find their plan incredibly worthy of further discussion and moving forward over the summer.  We have an international crisis at work and now is the best time to make YUUUGE changes.  As Rahm Emmanuel once said:

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”  Now is the time for TSU to do truly wonderful things with ideas from our dedicated and loyal staff, faculty, alumni and students…..for all our future.  Thank you Professor Robinson and Dr. Adams for sharing with us: 

FUTURE TSU

President Huewitt:

In your Campus Update of April 21, 2020, you express your support for "change" and willingness to "realign colleges and departments to implement new process improvement strategies”.

We are writing to express our support for change and realignment, at Texas Southern University, to address the challenges that were confronting our University before COVID-19 and to maximize the opportunities higher education in general, and TSU specifically, have, as a result of issues that have been identified and highlighted by the coronavirus and the transformations it has necessitated and continues to drive, in combination with Moore's Law in the field of technology innovation, including the growing and expanding use of artificial intelligence (A.I.). (See, e.g., Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late, 2016.)

Prior to the coronavirus pandemic, we spent several years advocating for more online courses and creating online versions of all the degree programs at the University; undergraduate, graduate and professional.

Hopefully, once the coronavirus is under control, we at TSU will continue moving forward in online education beyond returning to the status quo of just offering some courses online along with a few online graduate degree programs.

Online education is now a global reality. There is no going back to what was. The past is exactly that, the past. TSU must not miss out on the new future just ahead. We must not miss the moment. We must be leaders in creating the future of higher education and owning our fair share of what is to come through vision, leadership, intellectual capital and common, practical sense.

The online TSU infrastructure that has been set up as the initial response to COVID-19 should be maintained and improved, in part to provide students and faculty members with on-going health and safety concerns, an additional pathway to safely earning a degree and teaching respectively.

Online TSU will also help reduce the University’s possible legal exposure to litigation for COVID-19 related health issues that may occur this Fall in the anticipated second wave surge of infections.

We have a real opportunity, right now, to convert TSU into the university of the future.

The current organizational structure of our University, originally envisioned and developed by then TSU President Granville Sawyer was built for a world that is now the past as the coronavirus has revealed for those who were not already paying attention.

We believe all TSU Colleges and Schools (and academic departments and units as appropriate) should be reorganized into five (5) core academic functions: 1) Innovation, 2) Law & Policy, 3) Public Health, 4) Community Sustainability & Resiliency, and
5) OnLine TSU.

All current research centers and institutes at the university should be distributed among the five (5) Core Academic Areas, as appropriate, in terms of their research foci and academic symmetries.

This realignment would allow the Board of Regents and University to eliminate administrative overhead by reducing the number of Deans, Associate Deans, Associate Provosts, Administrative Assistants as well as central administration staffing. (A reasonable share of these savings should be reinvested into addressing faculty salary compression and equalization issues over the next three to five years.)

We also recommend eliminating the Graduate School and absorbing its admissions responsibilities as well as those of the law school's admissions office into the university's general admissions operation for greater oversight, accountability, efficiency through scale and additional cost savings.

We believe these realignments, if done correctly in terms of academic symmetries and research foci, will contribute to TSU's long term financial sustainability and resiliency while positioning us to be one of the leading global universities (of the emerging future) that will attract student enrollment from all across Texas, our nation and from around the world.

The future is being made anew before our very eyes. Tinkering around the edges of the existing pre-coronavirus TSU organization chart and administrative structure will not be enough to:

1) meet the educational needs of the next generation of college students,

2) meet the educational and critical thinking skills needs of the new innovation economy employers, to come, post-coronavirus,

3) produce the thinkers and doers needed to protect our communities, our health, our environment and modernize our democracy for the future, or

4) provide a long term stable, growing and resilient financial foundation to maintain a growing, thriving and independent TSU to the end of this century and beyond.

We would appreciate an opportunity to personally discuss our recommendations with you before we share them with the broader TSU family in the next two weeks.

Thank you in advance for your thoughtful consideration of our recommendations.

Hon. Carroll G. Robinson, Esq.
Associate Professor
Public Administration/Political Science

Dr. Michael O. Adams, PhD
Professor
Public Administration/Political Science