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State of the University: ‘Exciting time to be a Penguin’
YOUNGSTOWN
Youngstown State University made seating room in Kilcawley Center Thursday afternoon for nearly 300 additional people to hear President Jim Tressel give his State of the University Address.
“What you’ve accomplished in the last 31 months is extraordinary and we can’t thank you enough,” Tressel said to students, staff and community members about the length of his tenure.
Some of the problems YSU faced and continues to face are state funding cuts, tuition freezes and being “asked to do more with less people,” he said during the 90-minute address.
Another problem, he said, was decreased enrollment. YSU’s 2016 fall enrollment was 12,756, which is higher than 2015 by a few hundred students but lower than the 2010 enrollment of 15,194.
“What’s been exciting to me – and a wonderful thing to observe – is like we do in the Mahoning Valley, we rolled up or sleeves and decided we understood the challenges and went to work on the challenges,” Tressel said. “We just had so much work put in by so many people.”
He also discussed general themes from the Campus Climate Survey, the university’s strategic plan and opportunities to improve at YSU.
To have success with the survey, which was created last fall to address educators’ concerns, Tressel and his top administrators actively sought instructors’ thoughts.
“It is so critical that every single person is heard,” he said.
Communication was a key component selected in the survey in need of improvement – especially within senior leadership.
In addition to improving general communication from him and his administrators, Tressel said he’s going to start hosting biweekly meetings with those administrators and each college’s dean “to ensure everyone and everything is heard going forward.”
Much of the strategic-plan discussion involved reviewing the university’s mission and vision.
“Today we are talking about where we are, where we want to go and how are we are going to get there,” Tressel said.
Areas of opportunity for improvement, he said, include better engaging media, further tightening fiscal reins and being more conscientious of the 32 counties located an hour or less from YSU.
“We’ve got to decide what is it we’d like to be and what is it we can be,” Tressel said. “It’s such an exciting time to be a Penguin.”
University Provost Martin Abraham said Tressel’s address accurately described the state of the university.
“Everything seems to be moving in the right direction,” he said.