A group of more than 50 students, faculty, staff, community members and elected officials were at Kiel Auditorium on the University of Minnesota Crookston campus on Tuesday afternoon to hear from Joan T.A. Gabel, the sole candidate to replace University of Minnesota President Eric Kaler, who is retiring in July.
Gabel currently serves as the Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs at the University of South Carolina. Prior to South Carolina, she was the dean of the University of Missouri’s Trulaske College of Business and chair for the Department of Risk Management/Insurance, Real Estate and Legal Studies at Florida State.
Chancellor Mary Holz-Claus served as a mediator for the open forum asking a mix of both prepared questions and questions from those on hand to hear from Gabel. Asked about online education at the university, Gabel said she began teaching online classes in 1998 and had to code her classes herself saying “we’ve come so far since then.” She also said one of the underappreciated aspects of online education is offering content in a low-cost way that might not fill a classroom. She added that given the demand for online learning, it makes perfect sense for enrollment management to explore online education as part of their strategy.
Gabel was asked how her office would address the concern in Crookston about dwindling on-campus enrollment and its relation to online. “National trend data shows the students are not choosing between, it’s different types of students who may not have matriculated at all.” She added, “The question then is how do you fill the capacity for the brick and mortar students, with new potential students, make sure people know the incredible Crookston story and work on the recruiting challenge which is a national challenge. But I know the opportunities that are community specific that I know the chancellor is working on that I can’t imagine won’t yield some nice new members of the community.”
Gabel also spoke to the “system-ness” or the connection and interactivity between the different campuses. That included accomplishing a core mission across the system but also develops unique contributions in its local community. Part of that includes building relationships and understanding between the rural and urban campuses with in-person contact at all levels of the university system from administrative positions to individual faculty and staff cross-campus interactions. “What I think is critical is figuring out how often to get together so conversations feel like they have real-time relevance to what is going on in each place,” said Gabel. “When you put people together who don’t see each other every day what you often find is ‘a-ha’ moments when really interesting things happen and would have a wonderful yield.”
After visiting all the campuses, Gabel will be part of a public interview with the Board of Regents on Friday. If hired, she’d become the 17th President of the University of Minnesota and the first woman to lead the system taking over for Kaler on July 1.
