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Meet your new president

Metro's new President Stephen Jordan sat down one-on-one with The Metropolitan last week to talk about his vision for Metro's future. He discussed community partnerships, Metro's growth, the importance of having more full-time faculty, the implications of referendums C & D, his commitment to student involvement in decision-making and his goal of making Metro the preeminent public, urban, baccalaureate college in the country.

Editor's note: Some of Jordan's answers have been omitted or edited for space.

Stephen Jordan: I just think there are tremendous opportunities for us, especially if we choose to partner with other important governmental entities-with community colleges, with the Denver Public School system and others. I think we can make a real change in this community.

On the community college side, I've already started conversations with the leadership of the community college system. So, I've met with Nancy McCallum, the CEO of the community college system, and with Linda Bowman, who is their vice president for academic affairs ... about the concept of our partnering with them to offer Metro degrees on community college sites throughout the metropolitan area. I think they're very excited and interested in that.

I think that we set up this community college system for place-bound folks who are, basically, working adults. We say, "You know, you shouldn't have to go just downtown, you should be able to get it in your local community." And ... when they get an associate's degree, we somehow say to them, "Ah, well that concept's out the window; now you have to drive downtown." Well, no, we can deliver the program there with partnerships.

The Metropolitan: Some have expressed concern about Metro's rapid growth; is this a strategy for dealing with this?

SJ: I think it absolutely is. I think what it does is help to bridge this issue of the space problems. You-probably a lot more than I do-know how tight space is on this campus. What this allows us to do is take advantage of existing space out in the community college sites without necessarily having to build more space down here.

MET: What do you see as being some of the bigger problems facing Metro and do you have any specific plans to tackle those?

SJ: First of all, I'm trying to formulate where I think we should go as a college in a ... 10-year time frame. And I'm conceptualizing that into three phases.

The first is the stabilization phase, where we really try to address some of the significant, fundamental, structural issues on campus...prepare ourselves for where we want to take the institution, because we have some work to do to get ready to do that.

The second phase would be the growth and investment phase, where we then take those plans we've laid out and actually begin investing in specific programs and target programs...implementing the vision of the multi-campus kind of system where we're cooperating with community colleges and delivering our programs broadly. And it also relates to the nature of what I think it will mean to be a 21st century, urban college. I think that's a big piece of what we're going to have to examine in these first two years.

And the last phase will be what I call the assessment phase. We're going to take a step back and ... really assess what was our success and then to make adjustments to that and do it again.

Clearly I'm very concerned ... about the decline in the size of the tenure and tenure-track faculty at the college. We're down to the point where only 40-some percent of the credit hours are generated by tenure and tenure-track faculty. I intend to set a goal that we should be at some 60 to 65 percent of the total credit hours. I've already authorized the provost, working with the deans and the chairs, to move forward with hiring 60 new tenure and tenure-track faculty for fall of next year

MET: Why is it important to you to have more full-time faculty?

SJ: One of the things that I've already had relayed to me from folks who have been associated with the college for a long period of time is that we, in their view, used to have a reputation as being a place where students could get a lot more personal counseling and advice and supervision from faculty, and that, in their view, as the size of our tenure-track faculty has declined, that has gone away.

Second, it is the tenure and tenure-track faculty who carry on the committee work of the college, who really work on the curriculum, who do all of the day-to-day governance kinds of things that are necessary to move the college forward. The size of that faculty has declined so much that we're asking too few people to do too much now.

Third, I think, in my view, that if we maintained 35 to 40 percent of those total credit hours being ... those professionals, I think that gives us sufficient flexibility.

The last reason_-and it gets to this notion of what does it mean to be a 21st century, urban college-we need to be actively engaged in solving problems of the various communities in this metropolitan area. That means our faculty and our students need to be out there doing applied kinds of work, which, for the faculty, could mean their research interests in an applied way.

For students, we will be bringing real-life experience to the theoretical knowledge that you're gaining in the classroom, and then the faculty can bring it right back into the classroom in terms of their requirements to make sure that what they're teaching is on the cutting edge of what's really going on.

MET: Specifically, how do you do that?

SJ: There are a number of ways. One, we already have a great opportunity with this $9.5 million grant that we have with the Denver Public Schools and I hope that will become the centerpiece of a number of ways that we can get engaged with the Denver community. Because so many of our students are products of the Denver Public School system, we have every reason to be vested in helping them to solve their problems because it will contribute to solving our own problems if we do that.

But, let me give you another example, the CVA (Center for Visual Arts). We've spent some time, again, working on that. CVA can become a place in which we help DPS around the whole issue of art and bringing those students into the CVA and having our students be involved in it

MET: You have said before that Referendums C & D must pass for many of your plans to succeed as well as to keep Colorado higher education in general alive. Why?

SJ: ... Higher ed. is the single largest component of the budget that is 100 percent discretionary on the part of the legislature. And it is one of the few components of the budget in which the legislature can allow the institutions to offset either budget cuts or future growth by simply passing it on to students as tuition, instead of either giving any money-or they could cut the budget and say, "We're going to let you raise tuition in order to keep the institution whole." ... If C & D don't pass, it creates this very large budget gap, assuming the numbers from the Office of State Planning & Budgeting are correct. We have been told by CCHE and by the Joint Budgeting Committee that if it doesn't pass, the reductions to higher ed. could be as high as 50 to 60 percent of the current state support. And we've been asked specifically by CCHE ... to go through and see what would be the impact of a 10, 25, and 50 percent budget reduction. We will actually have that policy discussion at the board meeting; we're going to walk through to show you what that impact will be ...

CW: What do you see as your role of president being with regard to the student body?

SJ: I see ... my responsibility to help assure they get a quality education and that's really where I'm trying to focus my efforts.

PS: What role do you see students taking in decision-making processes on campus, especially regarding the provost search?

SJ: Well, as you notice, I've already appointed a student on the provost search committee and ... I've honored my commitment to have the student body president, even though it's the current interim president, be on the cabinet and participate in all those conversations. I think we're involving students in the other searches that are going on. We're creating processes through which student input can go into each and every one of those. I've said, with respect to the cabinet, one of your responsibilities in sitting at the table is to make sure as we're discussing these things that there's a flow, that you're getting information back to your constituents and then bringing decisions back up to us ... I think that you've got a student trustee on the one side ... a student at the cabinet level and that we're trying to pull students ... into a lot of the decisions that we're making. I think the opportunities for students to participate in decision-making are pretty broad, truthfully.

CW: You talk about Metro becoming the preeminent public, urban, baccalaureate college in the country ... Do you think this concept is compatible with our open admissions policy, and if not, is it something you would consider changing? What does a "college of opportunity" mean to you?

SJ: I don't think that concept is inconsistent with the open admissions. I think there are some reasons to reexamine current implementation of open admissions ... We need to have an honest discussion about what it means to be a college of opportunity ... There's a difference between the opportunity to succeed and the opportunity to fail. If we simply open the doors to the college to individuals, and don't put around them the services that are necessary to allow them to succeed, then we haven't done them one favor at all ... I am absolutely committed to our being an institution of opportunity, if what we mean is, we're going to open the doors to students and we're going to do everything in our power to see that that student graduates from this institution and has a real chance at a meaningful career.