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Dean of Distance and Continuing
Ed appointed As dean, McCaughan will oversee Oregon State's rapidly expanding initiatives involving OSU Statewide and other distance learning and continuing education programs. Among those efforts are the university's growing presence in central Oregon and the Portland area. As vice provost at Texas Tech, McCaughan supervised a distance learning program that served in excess of 70,000 enrollments annually, with students in all 50 states and 16 countries. McCaughan had been at Texas Tech since 1992, when he was hired as executive director of the HealthNet program, the rural outreach arm of the university's Health Sciences Center. He was named vice provost for outreach and information services in 1995, then vice provost for outreach and extended studies a year later. Before he joined the Texas Tech faculty and administration, McCaughan spent nearly a quarter of a century in Alaska. He began as a teacher in the Anchorage Borough School District in 1965, then later joined the faculty of the University Alaska-Anchorage. From 1988 to 1992, he was associate vice chancellor for the university.
OSU Indian Education director
to forge links with tribes "Oregon State University has long-standing relationships with the tribes, going as far back as the 1930s," said Allison Davis-White Eyes, adding that she would like to expand and enhance the university's efforts to build bridges to those cultures. New programs to preserve Native American culture, language and tradition are a major part of Davis-White Eyes' initiative. Some natural fits would be for the university and tribal governments to work toward expanding opportunities for collaborative research in fields such as land and resources, including forestry, and fisheries and wildlife, Davis-White Eyes said. Key to the success of the OSU tribal initiative is smoothing communication between tribal and university government, first regionally and eventually nationwide. Although not a native Oregonian, Davis-White Eyes said she has quickly grown to appreciate thePacific Northwest. "My tribal affiliation is Cheyenne, Kiowa and Muskogee Creek," she said. Davis-White Eyes received her bachelor's degree in history and her master's in American Indian studies from the University of California at Los Angeles. After graduation she worked at the University of Oregon moving into the spot of assistant director of admissions before accepting the Indian Education Office position at OSU. While in Eugene, Davis-White Eyes proposed a project that eventually resulted in the Aboriginal Rights Project, which addresses Native American tribes that have been split by modern political boundaries or forced out of their original homes. The project recognizes the sovereignty of Oregon's nine federally recognized tribes and grants in-state tuition rates to students who are members. Students who are members of other Native American tribes whose traditional tribal boundaries once included the state also are included. The OSU Indian Education Office works to expand awareness of and responsiveness to the skills, knowledge and history in Indian cultures and values, she said. Among the services the office offers to the community are: recruiting and retaining Indian students, faculty and staff; support and counseling on academic, career and personal issues; Indian scholarship information; and serving as a liaison between OSU and tribal communities. The office was a model for the university's Minority Education Offices, which opened in the fall of 1997. The university also maintains the Native American Longhouse, a cultural center that offers an array of social, cultural and recreational events to the community each year. The Longhouse focuses on supporting students of color, as well as educating the community.
New board of advisers formed The 14-member board, composed of regional and national leaders in business, education, natural resources, government and journalism, met for the first time on March 28 at the CH2M HILL Alumni Center. "This is an outstanding group of leaders who will become an important part of everything we do at OSU," said President Paul Risser. "They bring a wealth of experience, a broad range of perspectives, and a record of sound judgment. The university is growing rapidly in many directionsand beginning numerous new partnerships. "The strategic guidance of the OSU board of advisers will be invaluable," Risser added. Members of the board include:
Salwasser to lead College
of Forestry Salwasser will begin his tenure as dean on July 1. Interim dean Bart Thielges, who assumed leadership of the college after longtime dean George Brown retired earlier this year, will continue in his role until then. Before he assumed the directorship of the Pacific Southwest Research Station, Salwasser was the regional forester for the northern region of the U.S. Forest Service. As dean of the college, Salwasser will assume the leadership of a 106-year-old forestry program with an annual teaching and research budget of more than $20 million, which includes management of OSU's 15,000-acre research forest complex. The College of Forestry has about 100 faculty in its four departments and an enrollment of about 400 undergraduates and 150 graduate students. Salwasser also will assume directorship of the Forest Research Laboratory and oversee the college'soutreach programs. With the exception of one three-year stint, Salwasser has worked for the U.S. Forest Service for most of his professional career. He began as a regional wildlife ecologist in the Pacific Southwest Region in 1978, the year before he received his doctorate in wildland resource science from the University of California-Berkeley. From 1992 to 1995, he was the Boone and Crockett Professor of Wildlife Conservation at the University of Montana. Salwasser is active in the Society of American Foresters, the Ecological Society of America, the Society for Conservation Biology (of which he is a founding member) and the Wildlife Society, which he led as national president in 1994-95.
Million-dollar Keck grant
to build OSU "collaboratory" With the grant, the OSU College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences will establish the "W.M. Keck Collaboratory for Plasma Spectrometry" on campus, linking state-of-the-art geochemical analysis capabilities to one of the most extensive supercomputing networks for marine research in the world. The majority of the Keck funds will be used to purchase a $900,000 multicollector plasma mass spectrometer - an instrument capable of detecting precise isotope ratios of many elements on very small samples. This instrument will be the keystone of the new collaboratory, completing a multi-instrument, interactive analytical facility that may be unique in the world. "The remaining part of the Keck grant will be used to develop the innovative interactive aspect of the collaboratory," said Gary Klinkhammer, a professor of oceanic and atmospheric sciences and director of the new facility. Klinkhammer said those funds will be used to expand Internet bandwidth, allowing for the real-time audio and video transmission via the Internet that will be necessary for top-tier research access to the new instruments by users across the United States and around the world. "The collaboratory is a laboratory without walls," Klinkhammer said. "Its boundaries extend beyond the oceans and atmosphere to encompass the other environmental sciences, engineering, electronics and archaeology. When the collaboratory is up and running, a researcher in Denmark or Australia will be able to use his or her computer to point a laser in the collaboratory at OSU and analyze a grain of sand or the tiniest part of a mosquito or gnat. "It will allow researchers at OSU and elsewhere to conduct precise, sophisticated analyses of a variety of materials, from computer chips to seawater samples, from tiny mineral grains in volcanic rocks to archaeological artifacts," Klinkhammer added. The new multicollector spectrometer will be the flagship analytical instrument of the new W.M. Keck Collaboratory. Its purchase will complete a development process that began in the OSU College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences in 1992. The multicollector spectrometer can give researchers the "isotopic fingerprints" of a wide variety of materials at a level of detail that isn't available on less sophisticated spectrometers.
Major grant to hone schools'
education-to-work focus Other partners in the consortium are The Ohio State University, University of Minnesota, University of Illinois and Pennsylvania State University. All of the partners in the consortium are considered leaders in career and technical education - that branch of education that deals with helping individuals making the transition from school to successful work, family and community life. Operated by the five universities, the consortium will establish a National Research Center for Career and Technical Education to conduct a series of research projects, and a National Dissemination Center for Career and Technical Education to deliver the results of the research to people who need it. George Copa, a professor of education at OSU, has been the primary force behind Oregon State's involvement in the consortium. OSU will be responsible for gathering and disseminating data among the western states, he said, and will establish a site in Education Hall on campus as part of the program. Copa will serve as the director of the two national centers at the OSU site. In the first year of the consortium, OSU will conduct two major research projects and one major information dissemination project. Copa will be the principal investigator for a study that will look at the changing needs of career and technical education in the 21st century. Another OSU study will look at career development intervention strategies in grades 7-12 throughout the country to determine their effectiveness. OSU education faculty Cass Dykeman, Michael Ingram and Dale Pehrssons will examine strategies such as job shadowing, internships, early work experiences, career inventories and Internet research to see how students ages 13-18 begin their exposure to the working world. OSU professor Warren Suzuki will work through the National Center for Dissemination in Career and Technical Education, along with Richard Joerger of the University of Minnesota, to create ways of sharing the results of specific research with other educators. The University of Minnesota will take the lead on the secondary school research projects; OSU will take the lead on post-secondary research.
Retention success: OSU considers it a campus-wide effort
The university reports that its freshman-to-sophomore retention rate has increased from 77.3 percent in 1997 to 83.4 percent in 1999. According to the American College Testing Program, the national freshmen retention rate at four-year doctorate- granting universities averages about 76 percent. Overall, 88.8 percent of all students enrolled at OSU in the fall of 1998 either graduated or returned in the fall of 1999. Freshmen retention rates are considered a key measurement in a university's success. Leslie Davis Burns, director of undergraduate academic programs at OSU, said it takes a campus-wide effort to realize this level of success. "This is not the success of one office or one program," Burns said. "It's a campus-wide effort. Students feel good about being at OSU, and they feel their degree is worth the time and effort." Burns said Oregon State's successful retention efforts began after university leaders developed a report in 1996 that took a critical look at how OSU approached the task of keeping students in school. Following the study, OSU developed a three-step program to better prepare students for the rigors of college. A summer academic advising and registration program was created along with OSU CONNECT, a new student orientation program that begins the week before classes start. Odyssey, a one-credit orientation course was introduced to help new students learn about university services. Staff, faculty and returning students volunteered to implement the university's retention plan. While OSU exceeds the national average in freshman retention, Burns estimates that the university spends only 75 percent of what peer institutions spend on similar programs. "Our retention efforts are a good deal for Oregonians," she said. "Our campus volunteers help us hold the costs down. We couldn't do it without them." Staff and faculty members volunteered to teach more than 1,400 first-year students in 74 Odyssey class sections last fall. The number of Odyssey classes has more than doubled in the last three years. - Robert Hood
Training teachers in the
21st century Last year nearly 200 teachers received licensure through OSU. That number is up from the previous year, but down significantly from the 700 or so licenses granted each year at OSU in the early 1980s. "When the College of Education was closed in the wake of budget cutting during the early 1990s, the implication was that teacher training was eliminated as well," said Wayne Haverson, director of the School of Education. "But teacher education is clearly alive and well at OSU." Although the administrative unit of the College of Education was abolished, the School of Education became a department within the newly reorganized College of Home Economics and Education. Teaching programs now are housed in that college and in four other colleges: Agricultural Sciences, Liberal Arts, Science, and Health and Human Performance. Ten years ago, an aspiring teacher could earn a bachelor's degree in education and a teaching certificate at OSU in four years. Today OSU's teacher training programs are graduate programs, requiring a fifth year of course work and internship experiences. Armed with bachelor's degrees in the area in which they plan to teach, students enter OSU's graduate program a month before fall term starts, intern and take classes in the fall and winter, student teach in the spring and are ready for licensure in June. They can complete additional course work during the summer to attain a master of arts in teaching degree. Karen Higgins, coordinator of the elementary education program, said research supports the graduate teacher education program and the value of mastering content areas before learning how to teach. Scarlet Valentine, who received a bachelor's degree from OSU in 1988, worked in business for 10 years before deciding to enter OSU's teacher education program. "Teaching was what I always wanted to do," she said, "but my father, who was a teacher, talked me out of it." Valentine said there are things she knows now that she can bring to the job as a teacher that she couldn't offer 10 years ago. New state requirements requiring eventual completion of a master's degree to maintain a teaching license also support a post-baccalaureate training program. Although OSU increased its academic requirements for future teachers, at the same time it is trying to make its programs more accessible to people throughout the state. A newly approved distance- delivered elementary education program operated out of Bend University Center makes it possible for future teachers in Central Oregon to earn licensure from OSU without relocating to Corvallis. Also a technology education program delivers individualized instruction entirely on the Web to a statewide audience. In an effort to increase the number of underrepresented members of the population in the teaching work force, OSU is collaborating with Chemeketa Community College and the Salem/Keizer School District in a program offering licensure to bilingual/bicultural classroom aides in the Salem area. Haverson emphasizes that in addition to offering a master of arts in teaching degree, OSU also offers a bachelor of science degree in technology education and advanced degrees in education, counseling and adult education. "Actually elementary and secondary teacher training is only one leg of the three-legged stool that is School of Education," said Haverson. The second major area, adult education, prepares professionals to work in business and industry in training and development or to teach in community colleges. In addition, OSU offers a doctorate with an emphasis in community college leadership. The program, one of the largest in the United States and the only one on the West Coast, grooms educators for leadership positions as community college presidents, vice presidents, deans or administrators. The third area of emphasis for the School of Education is counselor education. OSU offers both master's and doctorate degrees in counseling. Its counseling program is one of only two in the state to be accredited by the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs. - Patricia Filip |
