Accelerating our Progress in Advancing Kentucky Campus Message

Campus Community,

Today, our Board of Trustees met to hear our progress on several initiatives, all of which are about one thing: accelerating our progress in advancing Kentucky.

If we are going to sustain a state that is healthier, wealthier and wiser, we must thoughtfully grow enrollment in ways that meet our state’s workforce needs. We need to ensure that the core courses students take fully prepare them for jobs, careers and lives of meaning and purpose.

We must strengthen partnerships and create new ones, from health care to the public and private sectors that expand opportunities for students and service across Kentucky. Listening to our people, we need to take steps now to recruit and retain an outstanding 21st century workforce.

And we must ensure we are positioned to be responsive to the state’s needs when we are called, as we so often are, to meet the moment.

That imperative — our capacity to be responsive, to move thoughtfully and quickly — was the focus of much of our meeting today.

We heard a detailed report from a work group of faculty, students and staff we empaneled at the board’s direction. You can view the presentation from work group 5 at today’s board meeting here.

Based on nearly 60 interviews across our campus, it’s clear there is a deep respect for shared governance — the idea that we are at our best when we listen to each other and create space for the expertise and experience we all bring to the table.

But it’s also clear from those interviews, as well as extensive analysis of more than two dozen similar universities across the country, that our organizational structure can be improved to further promote effective shared governance. In fact, our structure — and the rules and regulations that provide guardrails of sorts for what we do — makes us an outlier in not providing clarity.

We need clarity and we need the capacity to move quickly. The multitude of pages of processes and procedures pile on top of a structure that is convoluted and unclear.

We have outstanding, creative and world-class faculty who work alongside an incredible student body and a committed staff like no other. They need a structure and roadmap that empower their work. To that end, our board has directed me and our campus to work over the next several weeks on recommendations that help us accomplish the following:

• Define a clear and appropriate distinction between the education policy-making function of the Board of Trustees and the respective responsibilities of the president and faculty to administer and implement the board educational policy.
• Reaffirm that faculty members assume responsibility for determining good educational practice and, therefore, should have a substantive role in the development and review of academic policies.
• Ensure that the proposed changes are consistent with (A) the university’s status as an independent body politic of the Executive Branch of the government of the Commonwealth; (B) the requirements and prohibitions imposed on the university by state and federal law; and (C) the Principles of Accreditation adopted by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC).
• Recommend changes to the university’s Governing Regulations that define and clearly articulate a shared governance structure that is in greater alignment with institutional benchmarks and that clearly recognizes the board’s primacy as the institution’s policy-making body.
• Outline additional changes as may be necessary and appropriate to Governing Regulations that are consistent with, and supportive of, the substantive changes outlined above.

We need to make these recommendations for changes together. We need to “engage in the we.”

In the coming days, I will outline a process for dialogue and discussion and for how we will work together to make change — positioning our university to do and be even more for the state we all serve.

Please go to our Project Accelerate website for continual updates to our process and for background on our progress. Thank you for all you do to make us Kentucky’s university and its best hope for a brighter future.

Eli Capilouto
President