NDSU Transform is a five year university-wide program implemented by President Cook in his first year of working for NDSU. Its goal is to rebuild NDSU in a way that provides more profit for the university and to ensure NDSU’s continued position as an R1 University. In order to accomplish this goal, Cook hired an outside consultation firm called Huron Research. They decided that the schools inside the university needed to be consolidated and the financial system needed an overhaul and to be dispersed across campus instead of having a central building where all financial employees work. Huron identified many areas where costs could be cut. Many of these were struggling departments and underfunded groups on campus.
President Cook wants a new pre-law program and has stated that NDSU needs one in order to compete with UND. In order to fund this, there needed to be department cuts. Nothing small like individual departments–instead entire departments needed to be cut. Most notably, this includes the NDSU Geology department. The Geology department and NDSU Tranform are forever linked together thanks to the decision of cutting it entirely after giving them a state-of-the-art facility to teach and work in. This decision was strange as a land-grant institution was built on the idea that ground sciences were integral to the identity of NDSU.
Other notable changes that NDSU Transform brought about was the consolidation of schools from 7 major schools to 5. There were hiccups here during the initial process as it was revealed that Huron had very little knowledge on what departments actually did. This led to mistakes like putting the Emily Reynold’s Costume Collection into the Nursing school. Luckily the administration listened to faculty and staff to an extent and fixed a few of the more glaring problems Huron introduced to a university that was functioning.
As of now, the last official communication about NDSU Transform was April 2023. That communication was to alert the campus community about the creation of several councils on diversity, inclusion, well-being, and retention. These councils have been relatively quiet and have each released one or two reports for the 2023-2024 school year. Most of the information they provide is simply a collection of meetings that happened to happen on campus.
A strange aspect of NDSU Transform is the sudden silence. There have been zero communications, zero reports, and zero additional information provided on the NDSU Transform website. Since it is a five-year program, many expect data and plans to be continually released to the stakeholders in NDSU. Instead there has been nothing. A mysterious lack of anything new for this groundbreaking program is worrying for students who want to know what will come next.