All campus building projects over $5 million will be subject to a vote by the UM System Board of Curators after a Thursday rule change.
This is part of a move toward increased curator oversight over the four campuses, as Curator David Steelman described at a November forum.
“The board is going to have to step in, and it’ll be very controversial,” Steelman said. “There’s people who aren’t going to like these decisions being made, but I don’t see how the University of Missouri goes on to greatness until it starts becoming the University of Missouri with four campuses and not a University of Missouri System that is a back-office operation with four independent contractors.”
The decision was made at a Thursday curator meeting at the University of Missouri-St. Louis as part of a two-day session — the board’s last of 2017.
During the Friday meeting, the results of an administrative review to seek further areas for budget cuts will be revealed.
Employee benefit changes
The board voted to make three significant rule changes for employee benefits:
- Campuses will be closed between Christmas and New Year’s Day.
- Employees will have the option to donate extra vacation time to a shared pool.
- The children or spouses of full-time employees will now get reduced tuition when the employee has worked for at least one year, rather than five.
Lucile Bluford Hall
MU’s New Hall is expected to be named for Lucile Bluford, a celebrated black journalist who fought Jim Crow laws in an attempt to attend the Missouri School of Journalism.
The official vote to change the name will take place at the next Columbia curators meeting.
Promoting research
Mark McIntosh, vice president of research and economic development, presented an “Entrepreneurial Ecosystem” program to encourage business startups at the campuses. The proposed program would provide training to students and faculty and would connect them with businesses and corporations.
During McIntosh’s presentation, he emphasized the increasingly competitive landscape for research funding.
“There are very few research dollars available now relative to 2010,” McIntosh said. “Bottom line, there are less dollars available on the federal level.”
One way that MU needs to improve, McIntosh said, is seeking out larger individual grants.
“Many of our peer institutions are going for much bigger types of awards,” he said. “We don’t have a strong history of getting those types of awards.”
“This has to be one of our most urgent needs right now,” interjected Maurice Graham, chairman of the curators.
One way MU intends to accomplish this is through the Translational Precision Medicine Complex, McIntosh said, which was approved in November as the highest capital project across all four system campuses.
The funding provided by the federal government is increasingly earmarked for specific kinds of research, McIntosh said, and precision medicine is one of the biggest priorities right now.
“The TPMC is really a central, foundational piece to us being able to increase our research output,” he said.
Curators also discussed the need to increase research by recruiting and retaining more qualified faculty. One way to do so, McIntosh said, is by attracting donations for specific research opportunities or endowed chair positions.
“We, frankly, need to step up our game in that area,” Steelman said.
Memorial Stadium
The project design of the $98 million Memorial Stadium expansion was scheduled to be presented at the meeting, but instead the curators elected to read about the design in the meeting documents.
New majors
MU will offer two new majors: a Bachelor of Science, biomedical engineering, and a Masters of Science, care management.