President Mark S. Schlissel went before the University Senate on Monday in a question-and-answer session that covered topics ranging from diversity to rankings, and from guns on campus to the needs of the Flint and Dearborn campuses.

In a meeting at Forum Hall in Palmer Commons, Schlissel spoke to more than 80 members of the Senate, which includes all professorial faculty, librarians, full-time research faculty, executive officers and deans.

“The university will only be as strong as its faculty, and I really view my responsibility as making this a place where you can fulfill your ambitions as scholars and teachers, and that we work together to achieve that,” said Schlissel, who recently became U-M’s 14th president.

Among the topics Schlissel addressed were:

Diversity

Asked how to increase diversity among the faculty ranks, Schlissel said it will take a “persistent, relentless effort” that may not be achieved in three to five years.

“At the end of the day, it’s on us as faculty members,” he said. Administrators can help, “but faculty own the process of defining what areas we want to search in. You own the process of doing searches and then doing recruitments. You own the process of making your departments a comfortable welcoming place for scholars from all different backgrounds.”

Rankings

“I’m not a huge believer in U.S. News. That’s a magazine that sells information for money,” he said. “I’m not going to lead a university in response to a commercial ranking.”

He acknowledged that some departments are strong and some could be stronger, but the university should tackle those issues by hiring good people, setting a high bar for tenure, and providing infrastructure and support for the faculty ranks.

Guns on campus

Schlissel said a lot was learned from a recent episode in which a campus alert was issued after an ROTC student was seen carrying a model, non-lethal weapon. He said most of the procedural responses that were supposed to work did, but that broad-scale, real-time communication can be improved.

He said the executive team will be conducting a table-top exercise in which different scenarios are played out in an attempt to clarify best practices and proper reactions in the case of a campus emergency.

“We’re a big, open, public university that’s enormously visible. … I think we have an enormously professional public safety staff,” he said. “I’d be naive if I said to you I thought it was impossible that we’d ever have a shooter on campus. I don’t think it’s impossible.”

He said he would look into the suggestion that all classroom doors should be lockable from the inside, but said he needs to be assured the measure, which could cost millions of dollars to implement campuswide, “buys us the security that we think it does.”

Flint and Dearborn

U-M’s two regional campuses serve different populations than the main campus in Ann Arbor, but those missions are essential, Schlissel said. What’s needed is a more coherent strategy for how they fit into the broader university.

“The challenge that I’m going to take up in my first year is to try to figure out how to think of the three campuses as strategic components of a whole,” he said.

And, he said he’s not convinced increasing the numbers of students at Flint and Dearborn should be a primary goal, but rather that those campuses bring graduation rates “up to a level to be proud of.”

“We need to figure out what our constituencies need, and at Flint and Dearborn there are important things that your regions need, and then figure out how to provide them at a level of excellence,” Schlissel said.

MOOCs

The growth of massive open online courses — so-called MOOCs — has provoked a discussion about innovations in how to educate university students, which can lead to better, more engaging teaching methods.

“I think that online modes of delivering content will end up making what we do here on campus better, but not replacing what we do here on campus. I think there’s a ton more to learning than absorbing content that you deliver in an online format.”

Graduate studies

Asked about the problem of funding graduate education, particularly in the humanities that do not draw external grant funding, Schlissel said U-M will have to “tease out our values” to find the balance between training future professors and educating people in disciplines because they may offer a social good.

“Where do you want our resources spent?” he asked. “These are discussions we have to have as a faculty to decide how to spend our resources and strike the right balance between all the legitimate things we want.”

Likewise for graduate students in areas such as the hard sciences, and the question of whether a graduate degree or postdoctoral work can be expected to result in a job.

“We have to figure out what the right sustainable size is for the careers we’re training our graduate students and our postdocs for.”

Community relations

Schlissel said he is fascinated by Detroit, and while that city is starting to come back it still faces significant problems on which U-M can help work toward solutions.

“It turns out we’re doing quite a bit in Detroit but like many things here at the university … there isn’t optimal coherence. It’s like a thousand flowers blooming,” he said. “If we added together all these educational and research-focused investments in Detroit it would be quite substantial.”

Regarding town-gown relations with Ann Arbor, Schlissel said, “We benefit from Ann Arbor tremendously and vice versa.”

“My challenge is to develop a collaborative, respectful way to work with the town government, and to sort of become a citizen of the town as well as the leader of the university.”

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