How will students be involved in the governing councils of the university?

 

President Clark: Our intent is that the University Council will be the council that we would ask the student body officers to participate and sit on. In addition, within student government we will have student representatives on most of the councils in the university. 

 

What's the vision for the new Outreach and Online Education area of Academics?

 

President Clark: I believe technology has a tremendous role to play in this university. I believe it will change in very fundamental ways our capacity to teach, our ability to educate in a more powerful way, and I think over time we need to exploit what I think are technologies coming from heaven to help us educate in a more powerful way. I thought it important to create a group of people charged with that responsibility - to think hard about how we bring technology to bear on education in a far more pervasive and powerful way than we've ever done before. 

 

One of the reasons Continuing Education is part of that area is that it has a very important role to play in this endeavor.  We have some great opportunities to use the technology to reach people and educate them in ways we otherwise could not do.  And that will take place through our Continuing Education effort. Then over time we will use it extensively on the campus in ways we can't even imagine today.  I think it's going to be very exciting.  At least it better be exciting.

 

Where will International Students fit in the new Student Services and Activities area?

 

President Clark: It will be wherever the Vice President and the Dean of Students feel it ought to be in order to effectively meet the needs of those great young people who come here from outside this country.  Exactly how it will work and where it will fit are issues that have yet to be worked out.  We've changed the structure a bit so that the Dean of Students is now responsible for all the students' well-being.  And now we have an Honor Code Office that has that very specific responsibility, so we'll determine where International Students will be housed. But rest assured it will absolutely happen and it will be better than ever.

 

Could you explain more about the Honor Code Office? How would it impact faculty and ecclesiastical leaders on campus?

 

President Clark: We expect that what the Dean of Students Office has been will now be largely under the direction of Mike Lehman in the Honor Code Office. The office will maintain the integrity of our standards, work with students, and deal with issues that come up when they fail to live up to the Honor Code.  It doesn't mean the Dean of Students won't be involved in what Jim Sessions has responsibility for, but that now will really take place in the Honor Code Office.

 

There is an interesting and an important connection with the ecclesiastical leaders on campus and Brother Sessions will have responsibility for dealing with that. We are at work on strengthening those relationships. We're going to bring all the bishops and stake presidents on campus together to talk precisely about these issues, and I think that will be a regular occurrence. The university has grown enough and the Church has grown enough in this area we now have bishops serving on campus who come from as far away as Shelley who are really not very familiar with the university. They don't work here and they have not lived in this community.  Therefore, we need to do a lot of work in helping them get up to speed on how the university works, how the Honor Code Office is going to work and so forth.

 

The relationship with the faculty will continue to be as it has in the past. We'll continue to encourage the faculty to not only live the Honor Code but to hold our students accountable for it, to be great examples to them, and help them gain the great benefits that come from living it.

 

Can you tell us a little bit about how these changes can take us into the future and how we can be instrumental in working as a group?

 

President Clark: I think it's important for us to recognize that it is our responsibility in this university to move the university forward on the steady upward course. Waves of change will come to this university over the next several years. We felt it important to position ourselves for this next period of time in this organization. If you think about it, it has a couple of elements.  One, we're trying to balance the need for additional structure.  I think specifically of the new Student Services and Activities organization, where we've tried to bring together all of the pieces of the university that deal directly day to day with students. The same thing is true within University Resources and Academics. 

 

We're trying to create some structure that will give us the ability to have individuals, under inspired direction of the Lord, take action and move the university forward.  At the same time, we also want a broadening of governance, a broadening of participation in the university. We still have a leadership team of the vice presidents and the president, but many other people are engaged in those important decisions about managing the university. We have in the President's Council now a broader group of people who have significant operating responsibility for the university.  We felt that was an important part of getting not only the alignment we needed, but insight and perspective and ideas flowing into the decisions that need to be made. It's my sense that when you see a period of time that has a lot of change, we need a structure that can both accommodate the change and drive it at the same time. But we also need good input and ideas flowing so that we can make good decisions and take appropriate action as the opportunities come to us.

 

What each of us can do is what we've always done: do our work well, do the best we know how, pray, seek the inspiration of the Spirit, and live our lives so that the Holy Ghost is our constant companion.  This is the Lord's university.  We make changes like this and we have meetings and do our work, but He's in charge, and He will direct us in our work.  There's no doubt of that. We will be guided and led and inspired to do the things that need to be done to make this university everything the Lord would have it be. There's a great work ahead for us.  It's going to be an exciting time. It has been exciting. It will always be exciting at BYU-Idaho. There will never be a time when it will be said, "Gee, they're kind of complacent up there. They kind of stopped.  They're sort of quiet." It's not our lot. We'll always be a place where innovation is occurring and new things are developing, because this is the Lord's work. And there's much work to be done.

 

Is there a possibility with extra technology that Continuing Education might broaden to include post-graduate courses? 

 

President Clark: I don't think we will, as part of our main program, be anything other than an undergraduate university.  However, through Continuing Education we can work with other institutions to create opportunities for people in post-graduate education, especially with online education coming into play. I think we could well see something like that particularly where we feel there's a real need. It would, therefore, not be us creating a master's degree program as part of our regular program. It would be Continuing Education creating opportunities through people working with other institutions, particularly BYU in Provo. It's definitely something I think could happen.