Rotary Club of Bowling Green guest speaker Bowling Green State University Provost Joe Whitehead spoke Thursday on the change in focus at the university as it attempts to remain competitive by redefining student success.

Whitehead addressed what has been called a demographic cliff in the pool of potential students for higher education that is affecting all universities.

As the university tries to bring in more students from a smaller pool, he said the way to do that is “bring in the right programs. You bring in programs that are attractive to young people that will result in good jobs.”

He said it’s spelled out as goals and objectives in the university strategic plan.

Whitehead looked at the problem from a scientist’s perspective. Prior to entering higher education administration, the Ph.D. physicist was a research scientist. He admitted that since starting at BGSU in 2019 things have occasionally been rocky.

“I got in trouble on campus because I launched this analysis,” Whitehead said. “It was called Program Viability Analysis and that’s a negative word, so now it’s Program Vitality Analysis. That’s a positive word. When you’re a physicist you are really focused on numbers and not words.”

There seems to be change on the horizon.

“Objective one is about the right programs,” Whitehead said. “If we’re doing new things, we have to stop doing some old things.”

There are two focus areas: Health care and science.

The combination seems to be in line with the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on both the supply chain and health.

“It has helped us realize that we can’t produce everything outside our borders,” Whitehead said. “It was part of the impetus for Intel to build in Ohio. We have to produce semiconductor chips in the US, because you know where most of them are produced now?

“Taiwan … If China goes into Taiwan, our supply of chips goes away, so we’ve got to produce things here in the U.S.”

His example was the new $20 billion Intel labs coming to central Ohio, where robots will be doing the work.

“Everywhere (Intel goes) it changes the whole economy,” Whitehead asked. “How do we support Intel?”

BGSU professor and Rotary Club member Paul Morris asked about how the university is addressing the partisan division in Ohio and what it is doing about job growth and replacement as retirements increase.

Whitehead began by addressing the perception among some that higher education is not valuable, “that we’re just a bunch of liberals that don’t care about things.”

He said that he would start the conversation with the politicians from a position of commonality and returned to the Intel example.

“The politicians understand that higher education played a role with Intel coming to Ohio and it will play a role in retaining Intel in Ohio.”

Whitehead said that it would then become a vehicle to help change the narrative.