Ohio State President Carter wants to build university's future with faculty, staff input

Ohio State University President Ted Carter wants to take the university to the next level. But what that will look like, he said, is yet to be determined from input from those invested in its success.

In his first State of the University address on Thursday, Carter said he plans to lean on the Ohio State community to craft that future together.

"Where this university goes next isn’t up to me," Carter said at the Ohio Union's U.S. Bank Conference Theater. "We will do this together."

Since his first days on campus in January, Carter said he's been in a "listen-and-learn period" with hundreds of Buckeyes, including students, staff, faculty, administrators and others invested in the university.

Carter plans to ask university faculty and staff to weigh in through a questionnaire in the coming months, similar to annual surveys taken by medical center employees. The 14-question survey will essentially be a "temperature check," he said.

That feedback, he said, will create a baseline from which he can craft a strategic plan.

"I'm not afraid to hear what the answers will be," Carter said. "How do they really feel about Ohio State?"

All of this will help the university get in alignment, Carter said, using a word he repeated multiple times during his hour-long remarks.

Some of that alignment will come from planned major hires of university leaders.

Carter said he is "weeks away, not months away" from naming Ohio State's next provost and four regional campus deans. The university has also started the search process for the next deans of the Fisher College of Business and the Mortiz College of Law.

But other aspects of that alignment will come from Carter looking at and studying the university's 154-year history. He spent a good portion of his speech highlighting major moments in Ohio State history.

From the 1862 signing of the Morrill Act, which paved the way for the founding of land-grant universities like Ohio State, to the first class of 24 students in 1873 (which included two women, a "very progressive" move at the time, he said), to the founding of regional campuses in the decades following a post-World War II enrollment boom, Carter said the university has much to be proud of.

"But I don't believe the people who founded this institution would want us to rest on our laurels," Carter said.

"What it took 10 years ago to be bigger, better and stronger is not what it will take to be bigger, better and stronger in the next 10 years," he added.

In closing, Carter quoted the oft-forgotten third verse of Ohio State's alma mater, "Carmen Ohio," which, as a retired Navy vice admiral, he said he found special meaning in as he studied the song:

"If on seas of care we roll, Neath blackened sky or barren shoal, Thoughts of thee bid darkness go, Dear alma mater O-HI-O."

It was touching to learn, he said, that Ohio State has "always been eager to welcome a lifelong sailor" like himself.

"Together, we will navigate the seas of care."

Sheridan Hendrix is a higher education reporter for The Columbus Dispatch. Sign up for Extra Credit, her education newsletter, here.

shendrix@dispatch.com

@sheridan120

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This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Ohio State president wants faculty, staff input for a strategic plan