The University’s image has been studied and compiled in reports before, but administrators and faculty say a newly approved faculty image report and efforts by Institutional Advancement will guide the University’s image-building activities,

The report, approved in Tuesday’s Faculty Senate meeting, states that the Senate and the University should work together to establish and fund a University image research program.

W. Russell Wright, an associate professor of medicine, said the report is not a public relations document but a blueprint for faculty participation in image-building activities.

Advertisement

Creating a University image research program will allow faculty to work with the University in collecting data, and later developing a hypothesis based on that data, he said. Students would even benefit from supervised research by our faculty for a relatively small cost to the University.

The University’s image has undergone eight prior studies in the last 10 years, ranging from student entrance questionnaires to focus group studies.

The task force examined these reports and made recommendations in September based on their contents.

The task force, created by the Faculty Senate in February, was charged with investigating the University’s image and making concrete recommendations for improvement to the Senate and the administration.

The previous reports also state that many students say SIUC has a beautiful campus. A number of students also cited SIUC’s party school image as a reason for not attending SIUC. However, many students said the party school image is undeserved.

Wright said the task force was not created because SIUC has an image problem, but rather because faculty wanted to work with the University to share student and faculty accomplishments.

I’m not concerned that we have either a good or bad image, he said. I think like other schools, we range across the good and bad continuum depending on the topic.

Advertisement*

Some students view SIUC as a party school, but compared to other schools, we are not really in the party school ballgame.

Wright said the task force addressed the party school image and other image questions by recommending that the University seek the input of an untapped group parents. None of the previous image reports contacted parents.

There is no question about it, parents are a constituency that should be focused on, he said. Parents of students enrolled here and parents of prospective students are a premier audience, and we don’t have any data on parents.

The report further recommends that the administration create a comprehensive communications plan for the University. The plan would detail how the University communicates with internal and external audiences.

Such a plan is being designed and will be implemented, Tom Britton, vice chancellor of Institutional Advancement, said.

Britton is working with Wright and the Faculty Senate to implement the plan. The plan will offer strategies for reaching different audiences by employing advertising, the news media and electronic media such as the Internet.

The plan is part of Institutional Advancement’s strategic business plan, which calls for a doubling of the amount of private contributions and for a capital campaign to raise as much as $100 million.

A communications unit within Institutional Advancement will first research existing methods of communicating and then will recommend a specific way to reach audiences and state the cost of the attempt.

That unit will be responsible for a variety of communications made by the University through University News Service, advertisements and electronic publications, Britton said. And we want to do this in part by working with faculty with experience in marketing and public relations and make the best use of our resources.

Britton said the unit will partly focus on the internal image of the University.

We want to look at communicating with students and faculty internally that are so often overlooked, he said.

He said he is uncertain of the cost of the communications.

We may find that we already have the resources in place, but we also may find that we need additional resources, he said.

Britton said the unit likely will be implemented by 1998.

Faculty Senate President Steve Jensen said image building generally has been fractionalized and that the streamlining will help the University broadcast positive information.

Trying to bring all public relations through one office will take a tremendous amount of work, he said. But we’ve all been speaking out of different sides of our mouth, and the Faculty Senate fully supports Dr. Britton’s efforts.

Britton said the entire University will have to participate in the implementation to make it work.

This is an effort that the entire University including faculty, staff, and administrators has to be involved in if this is to be successful, he said.