On Feb. 8, UT System President Randy Boyd delivered the school’s sixth annual State of the University Address at the historic Woolworth Theatre in Nashville, Tennessee. The event featured a panel of guest speakers from around the university. Alongside Boyd and additional moderator David Plazas, the director of opinion and engagement for the USA Today Network-Tennessee, sat a panel of five guests from around the UT system. Chancellors from UT Knoxville, UT Chattanooga, UT Southern, UT Martin and the UT Science and Health Center were all in attendance.
The State of the University Address was designed to cover topics and issues within the UT System as a whole, not just the campus in Knoxville. The presentation acts as less of a roundtable discussion and more of a way for all five chancellors to speak and showcase the work being done in their respective areas of the state, as well as give a glimpse into what the future may hold for the system as a whole.
Each panelist had a lot of ground to cover in regards to where they were at and where they are going. UT Martin Chancellor Yancy Freeman kicked things off by shouting out the equitable growth study that Martin’s College of Business is currently in the middle of. Partnered with Ford, students are trying to understand and diminish employment gaps across three counties. On top of that, they have students under the tutelage of Ford executives in leadership training positions, with training sessions being held on campus at UT Martin.
Interim UT Southern Chancellor Linda C. Martin began to speak on the nursing programs and recent successes in healthcare seen by UT’s newest campus. In just two years, Southern has already begun making strides in healthcare throughout the state.
“Eighty percent of our students who graduate in nursing and over 80% of our students who graduate in education go on to practice, go back to practice or teach in rural areas,” Martin said. “So really thinking about, ‘How do we meet needs in very strategic ways?’ We try to be nimble and meet industry needs and change degree programs but also thinking about, “How do we have non-degree kinds of certifications and credentialing so that we can really be much more nimble and meet the needs of industry today?’”
For all five chancellors and their respective campuses, innovation and a new way forward seemed to be where the priority of academia lay. One of the most visible instances of this is the inception of the quantum network in Chattanooga. Plazas admitted that quantum mechanics was one of the more difficult courses in his collegiate career, but now students can dive into the subject as early as middle school. For a state that has access to an abundance of resources, leveraging them for education to forward the economy and prosperity of Tennesseans seems obvious.
For Chancellor Donde Plowman, that sort of thinking could not arrive at a more crucial time. Plowman said that though UT Knoxville graduated 1,000 students from the College of Engineering last year, the state of Tennessee needs double that number of participants in today’s workforce. She plans to combat this shortage with innovation. Just this year, UT Knoxville opened the doors to its new College of Applied Engineering to bridge the gap between tech and theoretical engineering. Applied engineering, computer science and even artificial intelligence are all areas of interest in this new journey Plowman and the faculty have embarked on.
The hot-button issue that has been pervading academics for almost a year now was discussed during the talk. How do schools fight artificial intelligence? The simple answer, according to Plowman, is that you cannot. However, maybe embracing it is the solution to what appears to be an unsolvable problem.
“We all freak out about AI, and there’s some really bad parts to it,” Plowman said. “But one of the ways you can still teach writing is have the students critique the paper that was written by AI. And I mean that’s just one small thing in trying to adapt. We’ve got to accept the technology and then use it to our advantage.”
Another issue Plowman brought up was the retention of students after graduation. Though Tennessee has seen a massive influx of residents in recent years, the rate at which students graduate and stay in Knoxville is not nearly as flattering. It was said that roughly 40% of UT Knoxville graduates take jobs in other states. Of the large chunk of out-of-state graduates, that number only rises to 49%.
“That hurts,” Plowman said. “I mean, we really want them to stay here, but it means that we have to work harder at giving students experiential opportunities. If you get them in an internship, if you get them in a research project. A way we get them to stay here is connection with the community or the state. That’s something we’re all working at.”
As leaders in higher education, not only legitimizing the choice to attend college but displaying a vested interest in the students who choose to do so is extremely comforting for potential students, current students and graduates to hear. For the entire UT System, the future seems bright for the long road ahead.
