Loh, administration to tackle implementations

At the start of his first full year in office, university President Wallace Loh had an unusually long to-do list — even by typical presidential standards.

He was leading an almost entirely new administrative team consisting of 11 new faces, including several vice presidents and deans, a new athletic director and high-profile coaches. Loh and his cabinet planned to transform the university as students now know it — embarking on new initiatives and kick-starting ones that had been simply talked about for decades. Three months later, a remarkable amount of work has been completed — but Loh said it's only just beginning.

The real test will come next semester, Loh said, when some of these projects — including increasing collaboration with the University of Maryland, Baltimore and moving forward on an East Campus development, which has been talked about for nearly a dozen years — leave the brainstorming phase and administrators tackle making them into reality.

"In many respects, making the decision is the easy part. The implementation of the decision is the difficult part," Loh said. "All [of these decisions] are of importance to the future of the university. There may be certain constituencies who care more about different things, but from a university-wide perspective, they are all important."

Many university officials said Loh's administration has thus far proven it can work as a cohesive unit. But next semester, it faces the challenge of making headway on major initiatives with limited time.

"If you look at the amount of time spent over one semester for initial reports, you'll see it's going to take a lot more time in the next semester to make these things a reality," said Assistant President and Chief of Staff Michele Eastman. "But the commitment is there, and if you have the commitment you'll find the time."

A plan officials have little time to craft is how to implement a strategic alliance between this university and UMB. Officials from both institutions spent the last six months studying the potential benefits and drawbacks of a merger. But now, Loh, UMB President Jay Perman and University System of Maryland Chancellor Brit Kirwan have less than four months to draft an implementation plan before presenting it to the state legislature by March 1.

Devising such a plan won't be easy, Loh said. Throughout discussions on a potential merger that would create one institution with two presidents — which Loh adamantly supported — UMB students, faculty and staff voiced strong opposition. Ultimately, the Board of Regents — a 17-member governing body that oversees the system — decided to recommend a strategic alliance, which would not unite the universities under one name, to the General Assembly.

Moving forward, Loh is tasked with seeing through an initiative far different from the one for which he had advocated. Nonetheless, Loh is now focused on the task at hand. Provost Ann Wylie, who has led groups studying the merger for the last six months, has been at the forefront of this university's role in moving forward.

Wylie said while there are not yet specifics as to how implementation will work, officials hope to devise ways for faculty members from both institutions to work together on various research endeavors.

"What we're looking for is development of some sort of administrative functioning — a governing structure — and the implementation of some projects that we might be able to do with limited resources initially," Wylie said. "It's a process, so it'll take some time and thought, and we don't have a lot of time, so we're going to do the best we can."

And while many university officials will aid in this initiative, other administrators said they must focus on moving forward with East Campus — a proposed 38-acre project to revitalize College Park that has stalled for several years — and building partnerships to ensure this project comes to fruition.

Vice President for Administrative Affairs Rob Specter, who was appointed over the summer, prioritized this project from the start of his tenure and said he hopes to present a concept to the Board of Regents this spring.

"It's been a dozen years that people have been conceptualizing and thinking about what an East Campus project would look like, which is different than working on it," Specter said. "We have a vision — though still in draft form — that's something we can sink our teeth into and that we're proud of."

So far, officials have allotted spaces in the city for a hotel, a graduate student housing complex, a restaurant and a parking garage. The next step, Specter said, is establishing partnerships with private businesses to fund these undertakings. Officials hope to begin construction on the project by spring of 2013.