President Dow and Engineering at OIT
As some of you know, OIT is involved in an effort to to build a Center for Health Professionals. While I definitely support the medical programs at OIT, I have found myself growing concerned that the growth for the medial majors would be at the expense of the engineering programs. It was with these cconerns that I met with Valeree Lane, OIT Director of Public Affairs, two weeks ago. We discussed president Dow’s background and history with the university, her support for both engineering and medical programs, and her plan for the future. While I came away from that part of the discussion relieved and confident that I wouldn’t find medical hardware in the CSET labs, I also wasn’t sure where or how I was supposed to keep track of the administration’s actions short of scheduling a monthly meeting, so I presented the idea of starting a President’s Blog. This went over very well so we scheduled a meeting with President Dow for this morning.
The meeting with President Dow this morning went even better than the meeting with Valeree. While initially somewhat reserved and “polished” (fake) President Dow quickly warmed and opened up to my concern for the engineering programs and my desire to know more about what she does. She seemed quite excited about starting a President’s Blog and I talked with her about making it open and honest rather than a PR piece. President Dow also talked with me about some of the history of OIT and how when Purvine was built in 1988 the medial majors expressed concern that THEY were the ones getting the short end of the stick.
All in all I was impressed with President Dow’s recognition of importance of both the medical AND engineering programs, and am really looking forward to what she has to say in her weekly publications. She might also be working with me in promoting this for OIT, as we are a technology school and blogging is a somewhat new technology related activity that I don’t think many other university administrators engage in.
On a side note President Dow informed me that there absolutely was not a large grant offered to OIT from Boeing that was later withdrawn because it wasn’t going to be used for engineering. Apparently Boeing’s contributions to OIT focus around equipment rather than outright money, I’m really not sure where or how that rumor was started but everything I’ve found so far points to it being false.
This entry was posted on Monday, April 17th, 2006 at 9:52 pm and is filed under School. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
