Interview with Dr. Steve Scott

What we've done is, and I think I'm really proud of the record that we have in place over the last last number of years of working to communicate in a very direct way, very transparent way, what's going on both the budget and what's going on in Topeka with the legislative session. And we also talk to people about how they can help us, how our employees and our faculty and staff can help us be successful. So I think we've got a good record. Well, Dr. Smith came in as our new provost and one of the things he thought about right off was his observation was we're not getting many questions in those forums. So could we create forums that are smaller and then people might feel more comfortable stepping up and asking a question. So it accomplishes that. It also provides just more access to them. It puts us in probably in front of more people. I would guess as we do the five will be in front of more people altogether and that's what we want. We've had some criticism in the past of our messaging that it's negative. And I think, you know, my view of the world is if we have negative information to share about the budget or the challenges, we need to share it. We need to be very open about it. But we need to also talk about

what is the whole poor the opportunities. We've tried to do that. I think people have thought maybe the balance hasn't been there. But nonetheless, I still feel like informed employees, faculty and staff are much better off than being kept in the dark. And so I'm excited about that. We'll have Dr. Smith sharing some information on enrollment. He'll kick all of them off, which I think is an important role for the provost to do. We'll have Doug Ball, our CFO. He'll share the financial information that we have, kind of where we are and where the bright spots, where the continuing concerns. And then Sean Nakarato will do a legislative, not really an update, kind of a handicap in terms of going into the session, what he's seeing and what he's concerned about or he sees the opportunities are. And then I'm kind of the anchor leg and I'll just kind of pull things together and make a few comments and talk about some of the, again, some of the bright spots. And then we'll see what kind of questions there are. So we're going to try to limit our work to about 45 minutes and a lot of 15 minutes for a Q&A from our staff.