Where I Stand — Guest columnist Christine Chairsell: Where students can excel

Tuesday, Aug. 6, 2002 | 8:36 a.m.

Editor's note: In August the Where I Stand column is written by guest writers. Today's columnist is Christine Chairsell, the acting president of Nevada State College. She has served within the University and Community College System of Nevada for the past 17 years. She will return to the chancellor's office in Las Vegas in September as the associate vice chancellor for academic and student affairs.

I MADE an interesting discovery in February while I was in Baton Rouge, La., as part of a team evaluating successful partnerships between K-12 and higher education. Although the work I did with my fellow education professionals was enlightening, my epiphany came while reading USA Today and sipping my morning cup of coffee.

When I opened the paper, on the left page was an article written by a syndicated columnist who proposed that our nation's universities and community colleges would be more successful if they were run like businesses instead of schools. He suggested that if academia focused our attentions more on the bottom line, we could better meet the needs of industry.

On the opposing page, another columnist was lamenting the fall of Enron and its impact on corporate America. He reasoned that if Enron had embraced a culture where there was a climate of trust and candor, an opportunity for open dissent, a fluid portfolio of roles, a belief in individual accountability and a system to evaluate performance, the company would still be with us today.

How ironic that the very attributes he described are the essence of our higher education culture.

Since reading those two articles, I have had little time to reflect on their significance. Within a month, I was asked to serve as acting president of Nevada State College. In the ensuing months, my energies were focused on opening our doors so we could meet our deadline of starting classes on Sept. 3. With nearly 400 applications in hand, we are doing everything in our power to make this the best college experience the state has to offer.

With our faculty and staff coming on board, we now have the ability to reflect a bit more on our philosophy of providing our students with outstanding teaching, mentoring and advising. As we go through this philosophical evolution, I find myself going back to those two articles. Certainly, those admirable attributes must provide us with a blueprint for our students' academic achievement.

Our first priority as educators is to provide a climate of trust and candor inside and outside of our campus. Students, faculty and staff alike must feel they have the freedom and responsibility to innovate, challenge the status quo and explore the boundaries of humanity.

Hand in hand with trust and candor is our ability to provide a culture of open dissent. At the institutional level, faculty and student governance is critical to the proper stewardship of the college. Their input and participation in strategic planning, program development, and public forums create a marketplace of ideas where concepts and ideas converge and conflict.

Third, we must be able to evaluate individual skills and make the best use of them. Certainly, for a new institution with a limited budget, this is crucial. It takes a very talented team that can draw upon the total individual life experiences to achieve the objective for the day, or at least, come up with a "plan B" and still make it happen.

Fourth, there must be individual accountability. The president is accountable to the chancellor of the University and Community College System of Nevada and the Board of Regents, as well as the faculty, staff, students, and the community. The president decides how to invest public funds entrusted to his or her institution so that our students and our community will get the most return from their educational dollar: a well-rounded, intelligent individual who will leave our campus armed with the ability to make a significant impact on our society.

Finally, there must be a system in place that evaluates the performance of administration, faculty, students, programs, et al. This is the strongest attribute of Nevada State College. From the outset, we have emphasized assessment and evaluation of students, faculty and the curriculum. We will build our own success upon a solid foundation of student achievement.

A college is both reflective of the values of the community that surrounds it and the means to achieve the higher aspirations of the community. Our explicit commitment to the values of trust, candor, dissent, individual accountability, and continual evaluation of our performance will produce the students that Nevada needs and deserves.