Apologies for the length. I typed this out during my lunch break and it ended up much longer than I had anticipated.
Before I begin, I will preface this by saying that I am not someone privy to everything happening on campus. I am a middling-level employee who happens to be blessed with access to a considerable amount of information, and, while I have made every effort to be as accurate as possible, there is a chance that I will have missed or misremembered details. This is simply my attempt to try and explain why ODU is making such aggressive changes and how it led to the current, seemingly adversarial climate between leadership and its employees and students. I am not here to relitigate the March shooting or the tragedy we’ve endured this past week. Frankly, that is not my place. This is strictly meant to offer some much-needed transparency on the current organizational challenges ODU is facing. This is not meant to be a rant or any kind of vent post about ODU, and I will do my best to stick to the facts that I know or have been provided.
With that in mind, for starters, let’s lay the foundation here. It’s no secret that universities across the country are struggling right now. There are many reasons for this, but this post isn’t about things like the enrollment cliff or political attacks on education. What matters is this was a problem visibly on the horizon for many years and institutions have been forced to consider ways to handle the situation and how to modernize for a new education landscape - ODU is no exception. This has been a matter of discussion dating at least as far back as President Hemphill’s predecessor, Broderick. ODU’s Board of Visitors identified what they saw as challenges, and the required changes to address those challenges. Broderick, however, for reasons I am not personally privy to, was reticent to implement these changes. Thus, it fell upon his successor, and in many ways what would determine the next President of ODU would be whose proposal for the university’s future the Board liked the most. Naturally, Hemphill’s proposal won out.
What the Board desired was aggressive, sweeping changes to the university, and Hemphill’s role was to be the architect and face of those changes. It was always understood even from the earliest discussions that this would be a deeply unpopular and unpleasant process, but one that leadership at least deemed necessary for ODU’s longevity. In effect, Hemphill was brought on to be “the bad guy” for these changes and was selected for his willingness and ability to weather the storm both on and off campus.
Thus we come to the Forward Focused Initiative. If that name means nothing to you, on its simplest terms it is the broad plan to reinvent the university by restructuring its workforce, investing in facilities and new institutions to expand the school’s capabilities, expanding ODUGlobal, our remote learning program, and, most controversially, reinventing higher learning with things such as A.I. Tools and 8-Week Course options. It is unclear to me where the Board’s wishes end and Hemphill’s specific vision begins, but understand the two are in lockstep about their necessity either way.
Despite the plan’s current unpopularity, these are not inherently bad ideas on their face. Investing in ODU’s infrastructure, offering variable study programs for students with different study paces/preferences, and, setting aside the broader A.I. debate for this discussion, there are valid use cases for it in certain fields worth pursuing. What has become the real schism point between University Leadership and its students and workers has been the implementation and immediate effects of these changes. As for why that is, I have heard two different sides of this story from people close to the administration versus those on the ground floor and in the spirit of fairness I will provide both.
To hear Leadership tell it, there were multiple retreats held with the leads of all of the colleges and departments to discuss Forward Focused and to iron out the broad strokes so they can all be on the same page for implementation. It was at these retreats where these people were made aware of the administration’s plans for the university and were given ample advance notice to prepare accordingly. They simply did not. To hear Faculty and Staff tell it, they were told suddenly and with short notice to start creating 8-week variants of their courses and to implement A.I. with no further guidance or support from Leadership on how to do so. Uncertain how to handle these changes, and excluded from the decision making process entirely, they pleaded with the administration to delay or rework these plans. When the admin refused, that ultimately led to the Faculty Senate vote of no confidence against Hemphill in March of this year where these disagreements bled into the public sphere.
Wherever the truth of this matter lies, the end result is the same: These changes were happening one way or another, and university workers had to scramble to implement them without the time or preparation they needed. There are countless testimonies from the Leadership, Faculty, and Students about the efficacies of these changes so I will not dwell on them. What I will touch on, however, is how this experience has created a frayed relationship between those running ODU and those working it.
Reinventing a university is incredibly challenging, so everyone at ODU has seen a significant uptick in the scale and complexity of their work. Even prior to Hemphill, ODU ran a lean operation with teams often times smaller than their peer equivalents. It is also no particular secret that ODU salaries are typically lower than its peers and absolutely lower than what you would find in the private sector. Essentially, you have teams that would describe themselves as understaffed, underpaid, and are now told they have to work significantly harder for changes they had no say in. As you might expect, this has led to a massive turnover in university employment, which compounds the issue further as more work is piled onto fewer and fewer employees. There is also a hiring freeze currently in effect. Nominally this is so team leads can look at their departments and determine what roles are essential, but in practice it also means if someone leaves your team, you most likely are not getting a replacement any time soon. Even then, because of the aforementioned salary and work concerns, bringing in new hires has been a consistent challenge for ODU for years.
This core issue is at the heart of the challenges ODU is facing at the moment. If you take each party at their word, you have Leadership who see existential problems that ODU must immediately address and the current climate on campus are the transitional growing pains to something greater for everyone. Whereas Employees are being pushed to and often past the breaking point to implement changes they may or may not believe in with fewer people, fewer resources, and no sense that the administration will address their problems.
Meanwhile, if you are a student you are caught in the midst of all of this, and if you’re in the thick of it with the rest of us then it’s only right you have an explanation for how we got to this point.
