Transcript: UIA Summit Presentation by Clare Creighton & Steve Wuhs, Oregon State University

This interview originally aired on April 21, 2025 as part of the University Innovation Alliance’s Innovating Together Podcast, broadcast live on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The transcript of this podcast episode is intended to serve as a guide to the entire conversation, and we encourage you to watch the video of the session. You can also access our summary, along with helpful links and audio from this episode.

Bridget Burns:

Welcome to the Innovating Together Podcast. I'm your host, Bridget Burns from the University Innovation Alliance. So excited for today's episode, because it's really – it's one of the most powerful sessions that we have to share, and I think it's exactly the kind of insights people need right now, which is about how do you drive change in a hybrid way, how do you not force centralization or decentralization no matter the context of your campus? How do you drive change that includes people that's actually people-centered? And I'm so thrilled to share this with you.

But first, you need to know that this podcast is sponsored by Mainstay, which is a longtime friend and ally, and they have a student engagement retention platform that has worked with institutions, whether they're centralized or decentralized. It doesn't really matter the context; they find a way to help institutions be proactive and responsive to students. So, if you want to learn more, go to mainstay.com.

We're also supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, just a fabulous organization that's driving really important change, and we are so grateful to be in their orbit.

But today, this talk is from the UIA National Summit, and it is the talk that had people talking, which is about – from Oregon State, Steve Wuhs and Clare Creighton. And what you're going to learn here and what I would encourage you to see is you have two people who are incredibly humble operating from, instead of power, using actual influence because they have earned it, where they have actually built consensus and community over time and helped Oregon State go through such a transformation that –

I'm an Oregon State alum, and when I went back to campus in the last year, I was shocked by what I saw. It was unrecognizable in terms of the culture, the pace, and what they were actually accomplishing, and what they were tackling. It was so impressive, and I was just like, "What is happening here? What happened? Who, what, when, where?" And slowly unpack that there was this whole, broad, cross-institutional strategy to transform the campus, but embedding people and actually consensus and integrating feedback and actually community-driven, but not slow, not slow at all, and not unambitious in any way. It was very ambitious and moving forward.

In fact, they have adopted a new strategic plan: every student graduates. And it's not just a metric, it's a mindset is what they said. They said, "We wrote reports and ran task forces, but those reports sat on shelves. We needed to build something that actually made a difference." And they asked really hard questions like, “Who are we relying on to connect different parts of the institution? Is it students? Is it advisors? If we don't build the bridges, we're leaving success to chance. The work of a student’s success should not depend on any incumbent president. We should continue to drive the work forward.

And this is an important point, is they've gone through multiple presidential transitions while advancing this change. And it's so impressive, and it's so artful and humble, and I just, every time, I learn so much from these people, and it really caught me off guard. Like I said, I went to Oregon State. I did not see this coming, and the impact has been profound. It's been really impressive.

And they've been willing to share how you can do this in a hybrid approach that I think has been the thing missing in higher ed. You have always needed an approach to change that didn't force you into a silo of one way or another, but actually looked at what you had and what you needed and built a process that was thinking about what committees already exist, what kinds of people, what factions exist, what groups need to come to consensus, what's happening, and how do we build a plan that is sustainable and ambitious?

And so, I really hope that you enjoy this. They were surprised that we wanted to – Again, super humble people, surprised we wanted to hear from them. Yeah, there was nobody we –. Everyone in the UIA who's heard from them about this was like, “This is the talk.” So, they called it Student Success Architecture and How to Build a Student Success Architecture. And it's Steve Wuhs and Clare Creighton from Oregon State University, and I just could not be more impressed and proud and really honored to share this with you today. So please join me in that.

Steve Wuhs:

My name is Steve Wuhs. I serve as Associate Vice Provost for Academic Affairs at Oregon State University. This is my colleague, Clare Creighton, Senior Director of Student Affairs.

And so, this is our agenda for today, so we're going to skip right into the action, if we may. First, I want to tell you a little bit about Oregon State University. We are Oregon's land-grant university. We have a primary location in Corvallis, Oregon. We also have a presence in our Cascades campus in Bend, Oregon. We also have a robust and rapidly growing e-campus platform that serves online students. Oregon State has nine undergraduate serving colleges, a behemoth in our College of Engineering, large colleges of science and business and liberal arts, and several other smaller colleges that are serving distinct populations.

We also have a complicated mix of students, as do many UIA institutions. Some colleges have more than half of their students are traditional FTFT students. Other colleges have as little as 25% of those students and are really transfer student-heavy or serve a lot of part-time students. So, we're a complicated institution, we have a complicated student population, and if you layer in our online students, that complexity just grows.

We're here to talk about building a student success architecture. And so, we want to tell you a little bit about our origin story. And I'll say, I wasn't there for the origin. I've been at Oregon State for two years. I spent most of my career at a small liberal arts university. So, coming to Oregon State, I had to jump in and learn a lot about what this history around our student success efforts looked like.

We had, as many universities did, a comprehensive university-level student success initiative and committee that served for several years, and it really worked hard to advance solutions at the university level for Oregon State University. It helped us think about how we do scholarshipping support. It helped us think about how do we communicate most effectively with our complicated student population, how do we enhance experiential learning. But in the decentralized environment that Oregon State University is, those university solutions didn't always map neatly, cleanly onto colleges serving diverse student populations and different diverse student populations. So sometimes those great ideas didn't actually work. That's the sort of context that we're operating in.

The second element of our context is a very bold new strategic plan called Prosperity Widely Shared, which has a – one of three goals in that strategic plan, is every student graduates, something you heard from Bridget yesterday in the UIA context. At Oregon State, every student graduates isn't a metric, it's a mindset. We're not locking the doors, not forcing everyone to stay with us. The idea behind it is any student who comes to Oregon State University should get the supports they need in order to complete their education at Oregon State University. If they choose to go elsewhere, we'll support them in that as well. But what we want to do is be the university, be that land-grant university oriented toward access and really deliver the goods on that.

That strategic plan has two particular goals. It's got an 80% graduation rate for our FTFT student cohort, and it's got the goal of equalizing graduation rates across demographic groups. Those are big and ambitious goals for us at Oregon State University. So, what does that mean as we're thinking about building a student success architecture? It means that we have a historical legacy of, yes, some efforts around student success, but things that don't map neatly onto the decentralized university that we are. We've got ambitious goals, and we've got the need to actually reconcile. Our colleges have their own interests, their own goals. The university has its goals in Prosperity Widely Shared, and then we need to think always about access and service as the land-grant university of Oregon. So, I'm going to turn it over to Clare.

Clare Creighton:

Steve, I think you're being generous, because I've been at OSU for 15 years, and that was a lovely way to put it for someone who's been here for two years. And also, we wrote reports and ran task forces, and those reports sat on shelves, and we never did anything. Or great ideas would crop up, and they would be implemented in one area and not carried through in others, and we just couldn't get momentum and traction for things to be campuswide. And that's probably just us. I don't think that's you all. That's just us.

But we had this moment of thinking about what our origin story is and what our history and context is as we tried to build something new and different. And actually looking in the mirror and looking in depth to see what it looks like made a difference.

So, we're going to give you – we like interactive sessions. We'd love a chance to have a takeaway. So, you've got some note-taking devices that have been circulating around. If you need one, let us know. We can get one to you. But we're going to ask you to take two minutes and think about the origin story and the current context on your campus. Just take a moment, reflect, use that note-taking device and think about what's your current state.

Okay, well, two minutes of reflection. That's about how much time we spent, too. No, I'm kidding. It takes longer. This might be a question you want to sit with and be in conversation with other folks about, but we have 50 minutes, and we're going to try and stay on track.

So, a piece of what we wanted to think through was how do we build a structure that works for our university? What's going to make a difference at Oregon State? And what you've got on your takeaway handout – it mirrors a lot of what we were doing – is that these weren't statements. We were asking questions of ourselves; are we clear on our vision, can we tell what we're all working towards, are we all looking at the same endpoints? And in some ways, yes, we had clear goals around retention and graduation, but beyond that, I don't think across the university we were able to point to the specific things that we were going after to make a difference for that retention and graduation rate. So, do we have a clear vision, and does everybody know it? It was a question we asked, and our answer was, “No.”

We also thought about the structure that we had; what's the infrastructure, who is doing student success work, how are they working together, are they clear on how their roles relate? And if we can't answer that – which we could, but not well – then our move was to say, “Well, let's answer that for ourselves. Let's figure out what that path is forward, and let's make sure we're building both the vision and the structure in a way that makes sense for OSU, that makes sense for the structure and the culture that we live with.”

And there are pieces of our organizational culture that are challenges, and I think we always saw them as challenges. And the move that we've made more recently is how can we see those challenges and turn them into assets? How can being a decentralized campus serve us in our student success work? Maybe there's some small tweaks we need to make, but rather than trying to say, "Well, we can't do it because of this," how can we lean into that and see that as an asset?

One of those ways we talked about that we're going to spend a little bit more time here on is the vision. We wanted a vision that everyone could point to that maps up to the retention and graduation goals we have, but that allows us to be more specific about the strategic work that we're doing as a campus, that all folks in colleges and across student affairs and academic affairs could look to and say, "Yeah, these five things, this is what we're working on," that when we went to make decisions about the task forces that were running and the work that we were doing, we could make sure it mapped up, that the initiatives that we were doing mapped up strategically to this, and that we could see where there are gaps in our strategy. So, the why of having a vision was really important.

We spent about 12 months working on this, and this is a thing of in higher ed, we probably could have spent six years working on this. But in the end, we were interested in having a vision that we could start working with and not keep working on. And so, this is the vision, these five areas are the dimensions of undergraduate student success that we are building the rest of our work on top of. And for us, this is about being able to map strategic initiatives and be able to assess the work as we go. This is an ongoing process, but we've workshopped this with campus partners, and we've finalized it in a place where we can now move forward.

Ultimately, like I said, we could keep working on this for a long time, but having a finished vision is better than having a perfect one. And at least now we can point to something in common.

Steve, anything you want to add about the vision?

Steve Wuhs:

No, I think that's great. And then the question for any vision is how do you turn that vision into a reality, and how do you build it into the structure of your work? I mean, we can come up with the greatest ideas, but if we don't actually get them embedded in the structures and the cultures that we're operating in, then they're not effective, then they end up on the shelf, as Clare was referring to earlier.

And so, I'm going to talk for a minute or two about our architecture for ongoing collaboration. And again, what we're trying to do here is recognize where we started, what did student success look like, what's our sort of institutional history, our institutional legacy of student success, how does it map onto the decentralized organizational structure that we and most large universities have?

And so, we want to tell you a little bit about what that structure looks like. First, we started this effort with asking colleges, our nine undergraduate serving colleges, to generate, develop internally college leadership teams for student success. Some had them, others didn't have them in that form. We've urged colleges to be inclusive as they think about who that is. So, the best examples of this that we see at Oregon State are college leadership teams that include the dean, because the dean has financial oversight, the dean has control of resources. All of our colleges have an undergraduate associate dean. Those folks need to be there.

But in addition to that, we don't just want the leadership. We want those college advising leads. We want the college's career and professional development lead. We want the college's student engagement lead. We want those to be inclusive groups. The best of them have academic department heads that are serving undergraduate students as well, trying to flesh those out. Those are spaces where we ask those teams to identify what are your bright spots; what are the challenges that you see within; how do you relate; what are the lessons that you could see in other colleges that you could be drawing on? And then we, of course, give them input as well.

We have also built a cross-university team called the ESG group that Clare and I sit on. Several of our other colleagues who are here from Oregon State and at this summit are also members of that team. That is a group of 15 or so university- and college-level leaders drawn from academic affairs, student affairs, our e-campus unit. The goal is to assemble a group of folks who can think about, strategically, we've got these goals, 80% in equalizing, we've got this decentralized environment, how do we think strategically across the whole of the university?

And then we have quarterly partnerships between quarterly meetings wherein we establish partners between those college leadership teams and members of the ESG group. Those are initially discovery; what's actually happening in your college? But as we've now gone through five cycles of those meetings, now we're getting into the nitty-gritty. We're able to see where are the persistent challenges, where are the opportunities that you have, what are you not doing here that college over there is doing? And we're facilitating some cross-college learning in that space.

The goal is to move all colleges forward, recognizing that all colleges are not in the same place. And so, what we're trying to do is tailor our work to the fact that the College of Agricultural Science has only 25% of its students are FTFT students; they are overwhelmingly transfer. Or we can look over in Forestry, where we know we have adult learners. Twenty-five percent of those students are veterans. They're not going to respond effectively to the same strategies. And our approach to student success should allow for that. But we also need to move everyone toward those common university goals. That's what the mission says we need to be able to do.

And so, what we're trying to do is build that architecture, and it's been enormously successful in terms of getting people on board. It acknowledges colleges for the work that they do and the home that they are to students, but it builds a framework for collaboration.

Clare Creighton:

And I think the one last thing I'll add on that is that it looks a bit static in that diagram, but also it's cyclical. So, we're learning from colleges about the pinch points that they see, and we're able to integrate that into some of the central decision making that that ESG group is doing. Hey, we're seeing this trend surface where there's a group of colleges that are struggling because a lot of their foundational courses are offered by other colleges. And that's not something that individual college is going to be able to advance on unless we look at that as a cross-campus, a cross-university strategy. So, I think that's a piece too, is that there's a cyclical nature of informing that is inherent in that collaborative relationship.

So, I have a coaching background. I believe a lot in the power of conversation as a place to generate insights and figure out how to move forward. So, we're going to ask you to do that. This is a case study session. It's meant to be interactive. I'm going to ask you to pair up, and ideally this is with someone that you are not at the same institution with. I don't know how that works out with how you're sitting, but ideally, you could turn to a different table if necessary and talk to another person who's not at your institution, because having that fresh set of eyes and knowing someone's listening without knowing the context can really help.

For the speaker, we're going to ask you to talk about the success vision at your institution, how clear is it, and to whom. And we're also going to ask you about the success architecture, so who are the folks that are involved, and how do their roles work out, what's the logic behind that?

I'm going to give you four minutes, and I'm going to be the timekeeper for you, and then I'm going to ask you to switch, and the other persons get to speak. When you are in that listening role, you're a thought partner. So, as much as you can, stay quiet, be curious, not judgmental, and lean into this. If you want a question to ask, you can ask, “What do you notice? What do you notice about how that's working? Oh, that's interesting, what do you notice?” So that's your prompt, but by and large, you're listening, so that other person has that four full minutes to dig in and see what they can uncover.

So, in pairs, please, for four minutes, I'm going to be your timekeeper. I'll tell you when to switch, and then we'll make sure the other person has a chance to as well.

[time lapse edit]

Clare Creighton:

So, we have time for a quick share out. Steve is right here with the mic. So, if folks could raise their hand, we want to know, not necessarily all the nitty-gritties of what's going on for your institution, but what insight did you just uncover by talking about it with someone else? So, folks, offer up an insight that came to mind. Maybe you didn't have it before, maybe you did, and you just got a chance to share it, but let's hear a couple of those insights.

Aisha El-Amin:

Hi, there. Aisha El-Amin, University of Illinois Chicago. So, I want to sing it: << You are not alone >> That is the insight, because I think sometimes we understand our culture and our university, and this is, "Oh, we do this this way," but our struggle is the same. And I think that's one thing that I uncovered for my dear colleague here.

Clare Creighton:

Thanks, Aisha. Yeah, that feels good to know we're not alone. Other insights. What else came up for you?

Jen Dobbs-Oates:

Hey, there, Jen Dobbs-Oates from Purdue University. So, one of my insights was as a longtime faculty member who's more recently moved into administration. What do different people think student success is? What do my faculty colleagues think student success is? Whose job is student success? How have I worked at this university this long? And I'm asking those questions today.

Clare Creighton:

And you're not alone there either, because they feel so obvious and basic, and yet if we ignore them, we don't give a chance to talk about common definitions.

Speaker 6: So, my visibility is a little different. I am actually a student right now, so I only see things on the student side. Working in student government, I've noticed a lot of things could be solved if the colleges just took the time to talk to each other. So, right now, each of the students or each of the colleges has one student representative, and that's been acting as the catalyst for conversation between the colleges. But if we move that around to not falling on the student senate, I think it would be a lot more effective, and we wouldn't duplicate work as much.

Clare Creighton:

That's brilliant. And another question I would potentially add to our slate of questions: who are you relying on to make connections between different parts of the institution? Is it students? Is it your academic advisors? You're creating connection, but you're relying on folks maybe, and that could go away, or that could change, or maybe that's not their job. Thank you so much.

One more.

Heather:

Hi, I'm Heather from University of North Dakota. And there's a little bit of a disconnect we talked about between retention effort – or recruitment efforts and retention efforts. So, a lot of times, we'll brag about the biggest freshman class or that we've brought in more low-income students or students from rural areas, but then we're not doing the things that they need to be successful at the institution. So, we're taking their money, but we're not doing the things to make it easier for them to actually stay and be successful.

Clare Creighton:

That's such a helpful insight. That's a disconnect between – For our institution, that's our enrollment management team, but where are we drawing direct strategy connections between what's happening in enrollment management and some of the goals that we have either in our colleges or in student affairs and academic affairs? Are they looking at the same playbook in terms of what they want to accomplish and the activities and strategies that they're using to get there? And oftentimes it is no.

Okay, thank you for your contributions there. Thank you for making this conversation richer with your insights. We are going to move along and talk a little bit about some of the conversations that we've been having at OSU. We've walked you through this vision of student success and the structure that supports the university vision. We're going to talk about a few of the gaps that we have seen that are maybe specific to our campus, maybe not, and how we've addressed those.

Steve Wuhs:

We're going to start with defining metrics and co-creating assessment strategies. So, I'm sure all of your data infrastructures are perfect, and all of the users on campus get exactly the data they need in order to get their work done. But we had room to grow at Oregon State University.

So, I said I've only been here for a couple of years, so I still have new-guy eyes sometimes. And one of the things I was observing in my first year in the role is across the university, we have a lot of people, a lot of time, and a lot of energy being used to generate retention, specifically graduation, specifically data, using slightly different data, slightly different definitions, slightly different timestamps, slightly different – You get the nuance.

What we needed to do at Oregon State was move toward a simplification of that so that we could have agreed-upon data available to more and more users. And so, what we did was build this ESG dashboard. It is built with student success metrics in mind. It enables anyone who's got a data clearance of level three or higher, but that means academic advisors, that means associate deans, that means deans, that means lots of student success professionals across campus have the ability to now go in and access data aggregate to be able to look at student success metrics by college, by major. So, it's an incredibly transparent data sharing interface.

And the goal for that, then, isn't just to be transparent, but it's to be transparent toward the end of enabling colleges, academic programs, the university as a whole, a school – it doesn't matter – to be able to identify where the gaps in student success are because we know we have them. And then to develop strategies that are going to enable them to narrow those gaps. And our belief is, if we have to rely administratively on a certain number of staff located across colleges that have asymmetrical funding bases, some have their own analysts; others do not. We can't work to advance student success across the university when we have a system that isn’t egalitarian in terms of providing the data.

So, mission number one for this dashboard project was to democratize data access and enable all of our users to be able to go in, look, analyze, and then of course, in the context of that ESG structure, work together on co-creating strategies that are going to narrow those gaps.

Clare Creighton:

Our next gap we're going to look at is our taskforce structures, and we're sharing gaps with you all just as examples. We're going to give you a chance to think about whether these are actually applicable to your college as well, to your universities as well. We just like being vulnerable on a national stage. It feels fun.

So, task forces. I mentioned this a little bit earlier, but we ran a lot of task forces. We love task forces. We love coming up with recommendations. And then it sat on a shelf, like I said. Sometimes if the group was motivated, that work got implemented, but it had a lot to do with the individual motivation of the team that was pulled together. Often we were losing momentum, leadership changes, the focus of the group wasn't picked up, there wasn't a way to sustainably fund the work. And so, at best, we had this daisy chain happening where we had a lot of different task forces doing work, thinking about things, but they weren't actually helping us with our student success work.

And so, one of the things the ESG group sat down and said was, "Well, how do we want to get work done? Because it can't just be the 15 of us talking in a room." And we said, "Task forces." And we said, "Really?" And then we said, "Yeah, yeah, we're going to use task forces. We're going to fix task forces."

So, if we're going to use this foundation, that's fine, but we need to get better at it, we needed to get better at scoping what task forces do. Are they exploratory? Are they about designing implementation? What is the function, and how do we know if they've been successful? So, rescoping them was a piece of it. But then also, where does responsibility and accountability lie if we're going to use task forces? Who's making the decision about which task force is running for how long? And when they finish, who's making decisions about what happens next with those recommendations?

And we decided when we were going to use task forces that we were going to own that responsibility within ESG. So, when a task force wraps up, that's our call to figure out what's going to be advanced. And we know that not everything all the time will be able to be advanced. Some things we'll have to wait on. But then it's this group to say, "We need to find the funding for these initiatives. We're going to go after these." We're responsible for sustaining that work because previously that was up in the air as to whether or not it continued. So, that was a piece that we made a choice about. If we're going to rely on this structure, how do we make sure it works? How do we make sure it's successful?

And the last gap that we're going to talk about from our perspective is the human one. Actually, this is what brought Steve and I together in this work, is a shared value around the people in this. And so, there's been a lot of times in student success work where I haven't been in the room, and I think there are a lot of folks at our institutions who haven't been in the room. And it's hard when change feels like it's being done to you, when you're just getting handed a bunch of work without a broader understanding of the role that you're contributing in that.

And so, a piece of our work to build trust and transparency was to make some of the bigger-picture strategy visible to folks. Can they see the vision, but also how their work contributes? And can we do a little bit ourselves at recognizing how much labor folks are putting into that work that's getting the student success work done? So, there's a piece there that is spending time and energy thinking about how folks are experiencing this change, and what we need to do to take care of them and help them see their role in this.

We also own some responsibility for fostering collaboration. If we want to break down silos, and we do, we have to find ways to do that. And ESG, the central group, has to be responsible for that. And that looks a couple ways for us, but two examples. One of them is, within the college leadership teams, we're listening for connection points: "Oh, that's an interesting challenge. Have you talked to this college about that?" "Oh, actually there's a support resource that could really help you with that. Have you connected with this other program or initiative?" So, we're listening for those connection points and trying to seed some of that in our conversation.

The other place is we're designing a spring student success summit. And the goal is to bring people together from across different position types and put them in the room together to solve problems. We want it to look a bit like a hackathon. We want to be having folks thinking together to solve problems collectively in ways that they're not normally doing. They're normally working in their colleges to figure things out. And we want folks to be solving problems together and from a range of different perspectives. So, we're owning some responsibility for bringing people together and help making that collaboration happen because it's not necessarily been happening without that.

And finally, we've been really thoughtful about trying to design a porous infrastructure, and this is Steve's language. And the idea is how are ideas moving around? When we were in convening two years ago or so, Bridget said, "Where do ideas go at your institution?" That stuck with me because I think it's really important. I think how ideas move around is important, and every student graduates, the central team can own responsibility for where ideas go. We can create pathways so that that coordinator who's in a program in a college who sees something in the student success landscape that needs to be fixed has something to do with that idea. They have a place that they can take that idea and a direction that they can go with it.

And this is important in my mind for two reasons. It's important because it makes our work better. I mean, we're going to be able to hear ideas that we wouldn't have had access to, but it's also important for that coordinator who feels like they're working in a system where their ideas matter and they have a chance to contribute and make things better. And if we care about student success, we should care about that. We should all care about that. And then we end up with a cycle. We can marry those two things together and end up with a cycle where we're all excited about doing student success work and we feel like we have an opportunity to contribute, and so then we feel excited about the student success work again, and we're going to end up with a better outcome and a better product because of that. So those were our gaps that we shared.

Steve Wuhs:

And so, now it's your turn. So, we're going to turn you back to your tables. We'd like to do, again, the four-and-four minute. You can swap around at your table if you would like a new conversational partner. A full-group four minutes.

Okay. It's a big sharing moment for you. We've been sharing. Okay. So, as Clare said, nothing like sharing dirty laundry on a national stage. So, you get to do it at the privacy of your table. So, we'd like you to think about a little bit: What are those gaps that you can identify right now at your university that could be about the design? What is the architecture that you have in place? And I would encourage you to think about that architecture, who does it include, who does it exclude, how does it map onto different kinds of priorities? Are there sorts of priorities that are going to be advanced by the design model that you have in place? If so, are those the right priorities?

So, think about the design. Think about the process of your work around student success, what does the flow look like, and where are the hitches, the pinch points, where are there gaps in terms of where ideas flow? And then also think about the people who are actually engaged in this work, and the extent to which you can bring together, or your university brings together, the folks who are doing student-facing work on the ground, working with students on a day-to-day basis versus those who have more strategic roles across the university.

One of the things I like best about the college leadership teams is that we as ESG members get to go out to the colleges, and we see how a college's dean and associate dean, we see them learning from their head advisor, from some of their student success or their engagement staff who are working with students every day. That structure has enabled our colleges to learn more about themselves internally, that ultimately should also lead to different kinds of priorities coming forward. So, we want you to take some time to think about the gaps at your university.

[time lapse edit]

Steve Wuhs:

So, we're not going to do a formal share out from that conversation you just had, though. We want you to reflect on it. We do want to give you an opportunity, though, to reflect on this conversation through questions, comments, sort of connections. Clare is now on the floor with a mic, happy to run around. We'd love to hear from you for the remaining time that we have with you this morning. So, Clare is open to your hands in the air.

Jen Dobbs-Oates:

So, I think I heard you nod at this earlier, but I'd love to hear more. Lots of different colleges, lots of different realities, I suspect like at my home base there are haves and there are have-nots, and they're not resourced the same. So, how do you try to do this work within the reality of budgetary differences?

Steve Wuhs:

Yeah, thank you. That is our case, yes, that is also your case. You are not alone. So, interestingly, that's what the Oregon State group that is here right now has been doing in our downtime, our team time together, is pooling our insights from a full year of college leadership team meetings to be able to identify what's the status of the College of Forestry, College of Business, College of Engineering. There are haves and have-nots in that space, but also to identify what are the university-level challenges that are emerging in the conversation, what are the college-level challenges? Where do we see commonality of challenge across college? Which means that it's a university problem. So, it's an opportunity for us to elevate, identify where is the appropriate level of action. There are things that are currently being pursued, and the colleges that are the haves that are ultimately could be university-level pursued. And so we're asking ourselves, and we will be asking the colleges questions about how do we make decisions about where responsibilities lie, how budgets are allocated so that we're making sure that we're both being efficient in the delivery of service and inclusive in the delivery of service, but also not creating situations as a function of decentralization that ultimately lead to systematic underserving particular kinds of student populations. Yeah, I mean, it's a great observation. We are working hard on that.

Clare Creighton:

And there's a bit of coaching to that too. There's a sense of, hey, this college is leveraging their foundation in a different way; they're connecting with industry in this way that's offsetting some of their costs. Would any of that be valuable or applicable for you? And so, there's a piece of that sharing the different strategies across colleges that may help as well. Steve Wuhs: Other questions out there or comments?

Speaker 8:

Melissa Korn from The Journal just wrote an article about the rise of the interim president, and she was talking about how the amount of vacant president and provost roles across higher ed is at an all-time high. I would love to hear how y'all were able to make progress in some of these initiatives in the face of what sounded like some substantial leadership change at Oregon State.

Steve Wuhs:

Thank you. No, actually, it's interesting, as Clare and I were talking about doing this presentation with Bridget. Oregon State University has had presidential turnover. Not in my two-plus years. We've had a wonderful new president who is behind this new strategic plan, Jayathi Murthy.

What I would note is that the challenge of executive turnover is real, and also the work of student success should not depend on the incumbent executive. The work that we do, that I do every day as the associate vice provost in academic affairs or that Clare does in her role, that is operational mission-based work, that a new president could raise a priority or lower a priority, but the work that we're doing advancing student success, that should not depend on any particular incumbent president.

So, my attitude is that work should go on no matter what. And part of the structure we're trying to build is attentiveness on a quarterly basis at least across nine undergraduate-serving colleges that this is our goal, this is our work, this is routinized, this is standardized, this is what we do.

Clare Creighton:

Some of the same strategies that work around stability at other levels work here as well. Is it in people's position descriptions? Is there a whole network of folks who are responsible for things? Some of those same rules apply, some of those same strategies apply.

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Innovating Together is an event series that happens live on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. It also becomes a podcast episode. Every week, we join forces with Inside Higher Ed and talk with a higher education luminary about student success innovations or a sitting college president or chancellor about how they're specifically navigating the challenges of leadership. We hope these episodes will leave you with a sense of optimism and a bit of inspiration.

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