Photo by John Cross
With the right support, MSU could embark on a plan to make a push to be the No. 2 university in Minnesota in terms of student population, top-notch facilities, doctoral programs and the like.
You can say one thing about Minnesota State University President Richard Davenport: The man likes to think big.
How big?
How does 16,000 students sound? How about 18,000? 20,000?
It’s no secret there’s major growth going on at MSU, now home to about 14,000 students. A new residence hall is going up. Trafton Science Center — the busiest workhorse of all academic buildings in the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system — is getting even bigger.
Freshman classes are consistently robust. Retention is high. Marketing is gearing up.
All of this, in Davenport’s mind, adds up to this: Now would be a good time to make a push to be the state’s undisputed No. 2 university (after the University of Minnesota) in every way: student numbers, doctoral programs, top-notch facilities ... everything. (Currently, MSU and St. Cloud State University stake claim to No. 2 for differing reasons — SCSU has more students, MSU has more graduate programs and students.)
“We want to take a look at everything we can, talk to everyone we can, and find out if this vision is doable,” Davenport said. “We’re not going to sit still.”
Davenport for several months has been pondering the notion of calculated, major growth. And while his enthusiasm about MSU’s potential is evident, he tempers it with all the necessary caveats.
For example, before rushing forth with major plans, he’ll consult faculty, staff and students. And come March 23, he intends to make inroads with faculty and staff via a summit.
There he and the team he’s assembled to examine the issue will unveil to the masses their findings about the potential for growth.
Leading the charge on this issue is Davenport’s right-hand man, Scott Olson, university provost and vice president for academic affairs.
Olson said Davenport has been excited about the possibilities for months, and he’s done a good job of getting others excited about it as well.
Examining the growth issue began when the university hired consultants to advise them on dealing with a minor decrease in its freshman class last year. Freshman classes have been big, some of the biggest ever.
But, given what demographers know about high school graduating classes in the region — they’ll shrink by about 15 percent — MSU wondered if the slight dip was a sign of things to come or a simple bump on the road of continued growth.
The consultants, MSU found, had good news. They gave MSU a thumbs up on retention (highest in the system at about 78 percent,) and large freshman class sizes. And it had been doing it without any real investment in recruiting.
This spawned the idea in Davenport’s head that maybe MSU can be a whole lot more than it is now.
“What President Davenport is asking is for people just to dream of what we want to be in 20 years,” Olson said.
Among their hopes:
Members of Davenport’s vision team are examining factors such as: physical space for more students, how many more faculty positions will be required in both undergraduate and graduate programs, what’s the long-term plan to pay for it all, etc.
Olson said he concedes there may be people who will resist the idea of major growth. But he still asks those people to think about what the institution could be.
“Anybody who thinks 20 years from now we’re going to be what we are now, had better look at what we were 20 years ago, or 20 years before that,” he said, referring to name, mission, even geographic changes that have characterized MSU’s history.
In addition to the in-progress Sears residence hall and the Trafton Science Center addition, a privately funded College of Business building will go up within a few years.
Beyond that, MSU officials are already planning for a new building to house the Allied Health and Nursing programs. Further still down the road, there’s talk of a new Social and Behavioral Sciences building and more residence halls.
All of this is, of course, many years and focus group meetings and task forces away. But Davenport wants the campus to start thinking about it now.
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