Former Interim Provost, Scott Coltrane, was appointed Thursday by President Michael Gottfredson as the Senior Vice President and Provost of the University of Oregon.
A national search for the university’s vice president and provost began in the spring of 2013, in which over 200 applicants were reviewed and eventually narrowed to 25 candidates for consideration. The 11 semi-finalists participated in a series of campus interviews and a public presentation.
From 2008 to 2013, Scott Coltrane served as dean of the College for Arts and Sciences at the University of Oregon before being selected as the interim provost last spring.
He earned his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1988, and was a professor of sociology for 20 years.
Coltrane’s familiarity with the campus is a strong asset for him as he transitions into his five-year-long term.
“A lot of [the job] is problem solving and bringing together the right people to solve those problems,” Coltrane said. “I won’t have to take a year getting to know the university because I already know it.”
According to Gottfredson, the underlying issue with the university has to do with finances and this will be at the core of Coltrane’s responsibilities.
“We’ve been in a process, in the last several years, of refinancing the university — finding new ways to support excellence, in light of the state withdrawing so much financial support form the university,” Gottfredson said.
Generating revenue to supplement where the state has “faltered its obligation to support higher education” is on the forefront of the issues Gottfredson and Coltrane will face in the near future.
“One of our strong missions is to provide access —very broad access— to the highest educational experience. We’re redoubling our efforts to assure that [the university] is affordable.”
Among many of the other foreseeable issues Coltrane plans to address with his new leadership position, retention rates, financial stability and tenured faculty are highly stressed on his agenda.
An essential part of Coltrane’s goals of balancing the rising cost of tuition will include seeking financial grants, convincing the state to continue its investments, hiring strong faculty and seeking outside private funding.
“We need to look at the cost of education and we have to consider not burdening our students with tuition,” Coltrane said.
Above all, Coltrane stressed the importance of hiring quality faculty as the university continues to grow in size and status — one of the primary responsibilities of his new position.
“We’re a research university that thrives because our faculty are the creators of knowledge,” he said. “We are decentralized in that we trust faculty to come up with right research questions and to prepare students for jobs that don’t exist yet.”