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One-stop shopping for university policies

Posted on | January 22, 2009 | 841 views |

by Adam King

Rob Coleman, vice chair of graduate studies in the Department of Chemistry and chair of the University Research Committee, was one of the architects of the university’s updated Research Misconduct Policy. But once the Faculty Council approved it last year, even he didn’t know where he could find a public version of it.

“I had a copy of it, but that doesn’t mean one of my colleagues could easily get a copy of it,” Coleman said.

That will likely never be a problem again with the Jan. 22 launch of Ohio State’s University Policy Web site at osu.edu/policies.

The site has links to every policy governing the university, and they are organized in user-friendly fashion — sortable by overarching content (such as business practices, governance, academics, athletics, etc.), alphabetically or by audience (faculty, staff, student, visitor/vendor).

“We tried to set this up so people who find things differently can find their own way,” said Eunice Hornsby, a program director in the Office of Human Resources’ Organization and Human Resource Consulting who was tasked with implementing the Web site. “Before policies were buried and hard to find. Now everything is in one place and policies will be kept updated through a single database.”

The Web site simply provides links directly to the policies, and a keyword search is available to keep from having to scroll through extensive lists.

“This project is about using 21st century thinking and technology to ensure that university-wide policies are consistently developed, make sense and are easy to find,” said Lynn Readey, deputy general counsel in the Office of Legal Affairs, who worked with Hornsby in developing the site.

Along with easy access, the site accomplishes some other important functions, not the least of which is quickly dispelling misinterpretation of policy, Coleman said.

“Policies that are developed centrally, when they’re distributed to the units or departments, they’re subject to reinterpretation,” he said. “You’ll see travel policies being implemented in different ways from department to department, usually more stringently, and that can be a hassle. If someone in my college says, ‘No the policy says this,’ well I can now go find out for myself if it does say that. It can be proved or disproved very quickly. So it will help a lot of people do their jobs better.”

Hornsby agreed, saying many units and departments have documented their own standard operating procedures for years and cast that as official university policy.

“That might be a policy of that office, but it’s not a policy of The Ohio State University,” she said. “That doesn’t make it invalid. There are some things the university chooses to affirmatively adopt as policies, and standard operating procedures of subunits don’t fall into those categories. As a general proposition, university-wide policy prevails if there is any conflict with unit policies. This site will help people understand what is or isn’t a university policy.”

The Web site also can be considered a launching pad for new policies. Information on the site under the “About Policies” tab explains how the policy process works from start to finish, bringing transparency to something that wasn’t always clear. Up to 20 different focus groups were consulted on the policy process over the past two quarters to determine what information should be included.

The Office of Human Resources and Legal Affairs manage the process and will give policy creators advice and help along the way. There also are tools under the site tab, such as templates to create a policy, that make jumpstarting the task easier.

“That’s just as important if not more so than the policy site itself,” Hornsby said. “We’re a community, and policies are like our form of legislation. They represent how we run ourselves or the university and we shouldn’t be forming policies in a vacuum. Transparency is a value of this institution.”

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