Q&A with Dr. Cathy Robb, Oakland City University provost
Subscriber Benefit
As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe Now
With a current enrollment of around 800 students, Oakland City University is the only General Baptist-affiliated higher education institution in the country. The university has been named one of WalletHub’s Best Colleges & Universities and one of U.S. News & World Report’s Best Colleges.
In January, Dr. Cathy Robb began serving as provost and vice president of academic affairs at OCU. Ron Dempsey, the university’s president announced Robb’s appointment in December. Robb spoke with Inside INdiana Business about her time at the university and her goals as provost.
Tell me about your career at Oakland City University.
I started at OCU in January 2013. I was hired as a full-time faculty member in the School of Business to teach business classes, and then also to serve as the coordinator of our adult and professional studies program. That’s a program that had off-campus sites that I managed, and so that served primarily the adult student population. We had a facility, at the time, at Evansville, Rockport, Bedford, Plainfield … kind of from Plainfield south through the state of Indiana.
In May 2016, the dean of the School of Business retired, and I had an opportunity to move up. In 2023, I served as interim provost as well as dean of the School of Business. Then I went through the interview process and was selected to be the full-time provost. That started in January.
Describe your role as provost at OCU.
As provost, I am over all the academics on campus. The faculty in each school, they report to their dean, and then the deans report to me. In addition to that, I’m vice president of academic affairs. The academic affairs team, they report to me, as well as the library, our assessment office. That’s under the provost watch. We’ve got an instructional technology curriculum department that reports to me as well.
What are your short-term goals in this role?
My short-term goals, being new to this full-time, are trying to meet with everybody, all those people, all those different departments that report to me. I’m trying to meet with them on a regular basis to better learn their needs. What do they need to be more efficient? What do they need as far as training, professional development and resources to better allocate things so everybody can continue to do their job and be competitive?
What are your long-term goals as provost?
If I look down the road, like any institution, higher education, we’re looking at what curriculum programs we need to add. What do we need to do to enhance the technology in our classes?
You’ve got all the challenges now with [artificial intelligence] and virtual reality and all these things that are coming into the classroom. We’re trying to figure out how we embrace that and stay on the cutting edge with all the changes that we’re seeing happen.
What are your thoughts on the enrollment cliff?
All the research shows that in the next couple of years, there are going to be fewer traditional-age, college-ready students than in the past. That’s something everybody’s trying to prepare for. So one thing we’re looking at is the adult market niche. How do we better serve those adult students? How do we look at growing our graduate programs? How do we do things better online?
One of the things that we’ve been doing the last couple of years, and something I’m very proud of, is that while I was dean of the School of Business, myself and the graduate director were able to secure a partnership with Toyota in Princeton to deliver our graduate business programs on site. We send our instructors in and deliver the classes between shifts, which saves them the drive time to come to campus.
Many of those people don’t want 100% online. It still gives them those touch points with the instructors and that face-to-face interaction many adult students enjoy. We have been doing that for four years. It’s been a great model. The classes run every eight weeks, and it’s an eight-week graduate program. We have students who have gone through our MBA program, and then we have a master’s in strategic management program, and those students select their degrees.
We have goals, myself and now, the new dean of the School of Business [Dr. Jervaise McDaniel], to try to build and grow that model with other businesses and industries.
What is the state of higher education right now?
Everybody struggles with retention. That’s one thing that we’re trying to look at strategically: how to do a better job with our student retention, especially with the first-year college students. We have a lot of first-generation college students. We’re looking at ways we can better engage them in this college culture. It’s a big transition for students to come to college right out of high school and live on their own and navigate a whole new environment.
We’ve got a class that we’ve called their first-year experience class. It’s a class that we’ve developed and put into play as a way to build what we call success communities. For example, we have a coffee shop on campus called Holy Grounds. Since we’re faith-based, the students help to name it. Sometimes those classes meet at Holy Grounds where they get a cup of coffee, and they have a roundtable discussion.
The instructor leads it, and the students talk about the challenges and problems they’ve had in the past week so they can talk about that and help them overcome those things that maybe they’re struggling with early on to help them feel better and engaged. Things like that, those creative initiatives that we can do to try to engage the students early on help with the retention and with the state of education.
If we can grab one of those students early and get them engaged and make them feel comfortable, statistically, we have a better chance of seeing them at the graduation line. And that’s what we want. We want the students to graduate and be successful with retention.
How can we deliver our curriculum so it’s on the cutting edge, and programs that the students might want that maybe we don’t have, and how do we better meet the needs of business and industry with the training that they need?
Every school has an advisory council. Business professionals come in and meet with the deans and we get first-hand feedback about what they’re seeing when they bring in new people. These are the gaps, these are the things that we need to do better at. We get that feedback to try to ensure we’re meeting the needs of business and industry when they’re hiring new students.
What’s new at OCU this year?
We’ve just launched a new esports program this semester. We’ve got a new esports arena, an esports team. They’re starting to compete this spring.
We added sprint football last fall. That was a lot of fun, almost changed the whole culture of campus to have the football events and the tailgating and all those things that come with it that we haven’t had here. That’s been a first for OCU.
We opened a new dorm on campus; we got that for fall and were able to open that up on time. Campus enrollment has been growing, so we’re at a position where we needed housing for those students.
We’re also adopting a 4-day class schedule for next year. This will reflect classes on Monday through Thursday and then have Fridays open for class projects, community service activities, internships, required labs for classes and for students to connect with faculty during office hours.
What does the future look like for OCU?
We are really focused on being a professional Christian university. We are dedicated to being a professional liberal arts type of institution. We want to prepare students for that professional world. We want to continue to expand our enrollment. We want to continue to grow.
How do we add more activities on campus? As you build the enrollment on the main campus, we’re looking at also building the activities and the facilities that go along with that to help support those students. Because once we get them here, we want retention. We want them to be happy. We want them to have a good experience. So we need those support services in place to go along with that.
Your education career spans more than 30 years. What are you most proud of?
I finished a doctorate degree at the University of Illinois when I was working full time and I just had my son. I was caring for him and doing the program and juggling all that and being a new mom and trying to figure out that balance. I was really proud just to be able to go through the program and finish that up.
I recently finished a doctorate in business administration through Liberty University, and that just added to my professional credentials to help better serve what OCU needed. So I’m just really professionally proud of some of those accomplishments.
The Toyota partnership was a great achievement. That took almost a year to put that all in place. They were looking at other universities as well. They had a lot of things that they wanted verification on, and it took a while to make sure we had all that mapped out for them. And we had several follow-up meetings before they said, “Yep, you guys are the one. We’re going to go with OCU.”
When I was the dean of the School of Business, we had our accreditation visit, and myself and the graduate director in the School of Business, we led the charge on that site visit and were able to secure a seven-year renewal for our accreditation with no findings, which was a huge undertaking as well.
I’ve been in education my whole career. I’ve taught high school, community college and God’s led me here to serve and lead, which has been an awesome experience.