Opinion
 

Staff Editorial

                            Bridget Brown    Matthew Dulin 
Ray Hafner                  Geronimo Rodriguez                Lisa Street

One down, four to go

Luanna Meyer, the first of five candidates for UH provost to visit UH, participated in an open forum Monday.

Meyer has experience building faculty diversity, working on a tight budget and attracting research dollars, particularly from government entities.

For a school that boasts the most diverse student body of any research university in the United States, UH has an astonishing lack of diversity in its faculty.

And Meyer said she would promote diversity among the faculty by recruiting professors from the ranks of UH alumni. In recent years, the University has gotten away from hiring its own graduates to become faculty members. 

If UH graduates aren't good enough to teach UH students then something is horribly wrong.

Meyer is assistant vice-chancellor-academic at Massey University. Massey has about 40,000 students and an annual budget of $230 million. UH has about 32,000 students and an annual budget of $655 million, nearly three times that of Massey.

How does Massey operate on such a small budget? Though the school has raised tuition in Meyer's tenure there, it also reduced the number of administrators to cut expenses, a measure that UH might do well to think about.

And Meyer has experience getting research funds. As a professor, she was very successful at securing grants — something she continued on a larger scale as an administrator. A university like UH with significant research facilities would do well to get administrators who can raise funds.

Even faculty members at the forum seemed to like Meyer, though the test will be in actually working with a new provost. 

There are four candidates to go, but if Meyer is indicative of the type of candidate UH is looking at, the University should get a good provost.

Let's hope, anyway.

 Send comments to dccampus@mail.uh.edu