Dean Gary S. Neiman delivered the remarks below on Jan. 18, 2008, during his annual State of the College address to CHHS faculty and staff:

Welcome, everyone. This afternoon I get to share with you one of the most fulfilling parts of my job: Recognizing the successes over the past year of our College and those within it; and telling you about the exciting initiatives ahead for this year.

We accomplished much during 2007. Early last year, we finished our Vision, Mission, Goals Statement to correspond with Vision Ohio. This statement culminated in a delineation of our academic quality indicators – those measures on which we will determine our progress in meeting our commitment to increasing quality and distinctiveness. Not only am I proud of the broad base of faculty and staff at the unit level providing input into this process, I am delighted to report that we are making very tangible progress in distinguishing our College and Ohio University. Next year at this time, we intend to present a quantitative snapshot of our progress in meeting these operationalized goals. The 2008 year will be one of careful self-analysis and recalibration for CHHS.

Of critical importance is our ability to increase staffing for our students. Importantly, we have picked up nine new faculty positions over the past two years. More are to come, as the University recognizes the staffing imbalances with which we cope daily in CHHS. With these and future increases in staffing, our teaching and advising loads will become more manageable, and our research productivity and professional involvement will increase. We will need to address the support needs that go along with increases in faculty staffing.

Other academic quality indicators pertain to our research and creative activity production; incoming student profile; accomplishments of faculty, students and alumni; program accreditations; support for honors programs; program rankings; and interdisciplinary programs. These are among the
key variables on which we will hang our hats in terms of quality. Some of these will be measured by data produced by the University; other data will be derived from online maintenance of the faculty/staff database that we purchased from Digital Measures last year and hope to unveil to you soon.

Now let me turn to a description of some of our salient accomplishments over the past year, really a year of transformation for the College. We as a College greatly expanded our reach. We did this not only by providing much-needed services in our local and global communities, but through influencing policy in our respective disciplines through board and committee memberships. And we expanded our footprint abroad by cultivating educational programs and sponsoring study-abroad trips to Asia,
Europe and the Caribbean.

(To see the full text of the address, please click on the link below)