The University of Central Florida Provost search committee held the second open forum earlier this week for candidate,Stefanie Lindquist.
Lindquist is the second candidate to hold an open forum following fellow candidate Larry Singell who spoke last week. Lindquist drew an audience of a little over 50 members made up of largely faculty members, academic deans, and committee chair spokesmen.
Here are Lindquist’s stances on issues such as students, faculty and education:
Stance on Students: “One of the things with debt is that you want to make sure that you get that student through in the quickest possible time and that there’s no extraneous effort made along the way and that the degree becomes the most important objective that student can have. There’s ways that we can adapt this system to ensure that [getting a degree] happens such as adaptive learning or hybrid learning [online and in class]. I worked as a waitress at a fancy restaurant, I was a worker-learner and I believe that is the future people we will be teaching and they are going to need our help getting through the program while they’re working and that’s true of young people too, the people who just graduated high school. We really need to think about this group and how we communicate with their employers to be sure their employers understand what their assignments are like so we can have a triangulated effort to help these students achieve a bachelor’s or graduate degree.”
Stance on Faculty: “Having the faculty develop the mindset of research and knowledge entrepreneurship and that what we are here for are to be innovative entrepreneurs to solve the world’s problems and then market that message because that’s what university faculty staff and students do, they really do solve problems. First thing I would do would be to go to all the departments and visit with faculty, especially in faculty meetings, and set up some kind of hotline for information from the faculty to me ,as long as the deans wouldn’t mind my hearing from faculty directly, but I think it’s really important to have some sort of direct communication to the office of the provost and learn from the faculty what it is that motivates them and what challenges they see.”
Stance on Education: “Corporate engagement is particularly important because corporations can help us understand what young people need to succeed in the marketplace and that’s another reason why I think in some places their doubtful of the value of higher education because they’re not entirely sure if higher education prepares people for the job market. But if we partner with corporations to build our curriculum, if we ask them what will be helpful to their new hires, what kind of skills are necessary, they’ll tell us and this is where experiential learning comes in.”
Stance on Her Role as Provost: “I’m a lawyer so believe me, risk management is always at the front of my mind, but on the other side you got to make sure that you’ve got that needle somewhere in the moderate range when it comes to the value between risk acceptance and risk avoidant behavior. The provost is the chief intellectual officer of the school, the academic officer of the school, and as I have told folks in other meetings today; I’m a scholar, I’m a lawyer, and I’m an administrator. Has anyone ever fallen out of an airplane? Ok so you guys know, It is beautiful. And as you’re falling you think you’re going to be suspended in air forever, so it doesn’t really matter. So when this guy gave me the thumbs up sign [to pull the parachute] I was like yeah it’s great, thanks! And of course they realized I was about to kill myself so they came up and pulled my parachute for me and let me tell you, that is a lesson in teamwork. That’s why I love teamwork and think it’s really important.”
Candidate number three will have their open forum on Sept. 13 from 3:45p.m. to 5p.m. at the Fairwinds Alumni Center. All meetings of the search committee are open to the public and press.
