Vol. 38, No. 18

3-4-2008
By: Adam King

Gee: OSU should be a top-100 workplace

The final questioner at the Feb. 20 University Staff Advisory Committee’s Town Meeting tried to put Ohio State President E. Gordon Gee on the spot: For whom will you vote for president?

True to his nature and showing why he is so appealing to staff, Gee, a professed independent, said only that his politics run scarlet and gray.

Of course, he had already made that apparent during the meeting at the Ross Heart Hospital auditorium as he took questions from some of the 150 staff in attendance and others who e-mailed during the Webcast.

In his opening remarks, Gee maintained Ohio State will strive to be a national leader in higher education and at the same time has an overarching goal to be one of the top 100 places to work in America.

“No university has ever achieved that,” Gee said.

Many of the questions directed at Gee, Senior Vice President of Business and Finance

Souba said the proposed $1 billion Medical Center expansion can be one way. Because it would be the largest expansion project the university has undertaken, pursuing the project shows the commitment the university has to creating one of the premier collegiate medical facilities. The project’s sheer size, he said, makes it “imperative that we all work on this together.”

Shkurti said preliminary recommendations for Medical Center expansion through 2014 and beyond — including medical towers for cancer and critical care — were being finalized and would be brought to the Board of Trustees in April after Gee’s approval.

Other areas of capital improvement, Shkurti said, will be student housing, road and utility upgrades and the Academic Core North.

The Academic Core North project is an effort to develop the area north of the Oval from High Street to Tuttle Park Place as a single, interdisciplinary district rather than with a college-centric, building-by-building approach.

The effort promises to save nearly $100 million in deferred maintenance and renewal costs and includes the replacement of Lord and Brown halls.

Gee also said the neighborhoods surrounding OSU, what he likes to call the “doughnut,” should receive priority as well.

“For many years this university did a poor job of addressing the needs of our community, and we did not really engage in any community building,” he said.

“So we are not just concerned with the campus itself but with our neighborhoods, and we want to focus our time and energy into that as well,” he said. “Even on West Campus, we want to see how we can partner with the city, state and private partners to develop a much stronger set of opportunities.”

Retaining the best faculty and staff is another Gee priority, and he reiterated his intent to change OSU’s culture in order to attain his goal. When asked by a staff member why managers weren’t required to do performance reviews, Lewellen said the university has never had a universal policy, but he hoped Gee would be interested.

“We need for people to know how to solidify their relationship within the institution,” Gee said. “So we will be doing that.”

Staff continued to be concerned about safety, especially after the recent Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois shootings. One staff member questioned what the university was doing to keep campus safe.

“Because we are an open community, each of us has a responsibility in this,” Gee said. “I think of the young man at Virginia Tech, his were cries for help on a number of levels and he got through those safety nets. I would hope when these cries for help come, wherever they may be, that we are not so isolated in our own areas that we don’t listen to that. We are a family and we have to act like one in terms of protecting each other.”

According to Shkurti, the university has multidisciplinary teams that bring together experts in law enforcement, human resources and student affairs to identify and help troubled individuals so that striking out physically becomes less likely.

The Buckeye Alert System is available to inform the community when an emergency on campus does occur through e-mail alerts, phone calls and text messaging. The first test in January went reasonably well considering all the complexities, Shkurti said, and a second test is planned soon to fine-tune the system.

This was Gee’s first Town Meeting since returning to OSU in October, and he and Provost Joe Alutto also are holding monthly breakfasts with different staff groups so employees can have direct communication with administration. The next Town Meeting will be held spring quarter.

Bill Shkurti, Associate Vice President for Human Resources Larry Lewellen and interim Medical Center CEO Chip Souba touched on just how the university plans to get to that point.

onCampus Home