1. Has there been any thought given to a professional school here on campus?

Yes. There have been focused conversations over the past several years about adding either a law school or a medical school or both. As we continue to grow to 20,000 or whatever the number may be, we will need a professional school or schools to round out a full suite of opportunities for our students. We had such an opportunity in the mid-90's with the Detroit College of Law. But, that did not work out for a number of reasons, and DCL eventually located at Michigan State. We are continuing to talk with other potential partners.

Likewise, we have also spent a great deal of time in the last couple years looking at potential medical school partnerships. In today's environment, we feel we can use the flexibility of virtual technology to bring together our strengths in the sciences with the program power of a major medical center to create a new kind of medical school. This concept is being well received in conversations and if these conversations produce something solid, we will bring them out to the university for reaction and discussion.

Bottom line, we need to secure a professional school at some point in the near future to enhance the robustness of our curriculum and to add to our growing reputation as a quality educational experience.
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2. Will there be an increase in student housing to handle the growth in enrollment?

Absolutely. In fact, we are beginning to address the need for more housing this spring by breaking ground on a new student apartment complex on Meadow Brook Road across from the upper playing fields. This first phase of housing growth will accommodate 500 more students.

We will not be abandoning our traditional housing system. Rather, students will have to live in the current residence halls for two years before they can apply for apartment space. Reconfigured, our current residence halls can hold about 1,800 students. The first phase of the apartment project will add capacity for 500 more. In three years, we plan to break ground on the second phase, adding another 500 beds. That will take us to 2,800. We would like to see 15-20 percent of our students live on campus. If we have 20,000 students by 2010, you can see we will be adding even more capacity.

How do we find these resident students? Part of our strategy for planned growth is to widen our recruiting efforts to include out of state markets. Obviously, those students would want to live on campus.
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3. Are there plans to increase the physical and human infrastructure on campus with the rapid growth in student enrollment?

Enrollment growth may appear rapid, and in some sense it is, but in any case it is planned growth. We are growing at a rate of 3 percent a year. This pattern will take us to 20,000 students in 10 years. In a growth mode, infrastructure typically lags behind. We are aware of this and are addressing it. We are adding facilities more quickly now. Not too many years ago, it would have taken Oakland 10 to 20 years to plan, finance and construct a building. We are now down to 2-3 years. On the staff side, keeping up is a challenge in a robust economy. But, we are adding top quality faculty and staff and the numbers bear that out.

Our master planning task force is addressing these very issues of the implications of growth on utilities, classrooms, capital funds and staff. The task force's next charge is to work these elements into the plan.
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4. Why don't we have a town-gown relationship?

Most campuses have an identified community that is "theirs." Look at East Lansing, Ann Arbor, Bloomington, Evanston. These communities are just immersed in the activities of the universities that call them home. Our location is such that we are literally split between two communities, Auburn Hills and Rochester Hills, neither of which have a town center. Our mailing address is Rochester, which of course has a thriving downtown, but at a distance too great for our students to embrace. The nightlife of Pontiac appeals to our students, but that city, too, is probably too far away for a realistic relationship. We have tended to identify ourselves with Oakland County over the past few years, but the county is simply a huge entity with no real focal point to attach to.

On the plus side, our outreach and involvement with all these communities is strong. And, our campus, we hope, is inviting to outsiders. We don't have walls, or walls of bushes that separate us from our neighbors. I guess it is hard to create this feeling of a "college town," but it is also hard to wait for it to develop on its own. This is clearly an area of frustration for us, and we welcome ideas!
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5. What's the status of the hotel-conference center?

We have gone through a series of steps to bring a conference center and hotel to Oakland's campus, among them a feasibility study, market research, area hotel occupancy scan, a potential use study and a serious look at curricular ties. This project has to be tied to delivering education in that complex - executive education would be one possibility. The provost commissioned this past year a study of the area's need for continuing education and professional development and found significant demand to warrant a facility on our campus. At this point, we are going down the path of putting the pieces into place to make this happen.
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6. What measures are being taken to secure resources to initiate ideas?

We have three basic sources of revenue to fund our new initiatives - tuition, state support and private giving. We are committed to holding down tuition increases so the burden of growth and educational enhancements are not borne by our students alone. We have made great strides over the past five or six years to set up a daily presence for Oakland University in Lansing. We hired a cabinet-level government relations director, we hired a multi-client lobbyist in Lansing and we are in that city every day. Over the last five years, Oakland has been among the top-funded universities in the state because of that effort. We can't, and won't, back off the commitment to tell our story to the governor and legislators because they are our true partners.

The next logical area to attract our attention is private giving. We need to increase the percentage of contributions to Oakland, and to do that we will launch a major capital fund-raising campaign in the near future. We will be looking to corporations, foundations and individuals to join us in our vision for educational excellence, and then ask them to help us get the job done with their financial support. If you get people excited about where you are going, they will support you. And, we intend to do just that. There are no great public universities that rely solely on tuition and state appropriations. We need to build significant private contributions and a significant endowment, which is what will provide us with the margin of excellence we need to create a truly outstanding university.
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