Leaders say Kent State will reduce redundancy, ready students with new Transformation 2028 plan

In an effort to address a statewide trend of declining enrollment, Kent State University will soon undergo big changes to reorganize its academic affairs division and better its finances in the form of its Transformation 2028 initiative, known as T28.

T28 looks to reduce redundancies in job responsibilities and increase interdisciplinary collaboration and students’ readiness for an evolving career market, said Melody Tankersley, Kent State’s executive vice president and provost.

Under the plan, the university will shift from 10 to nine degree-granting colleges, with each retaining its own dean and being placed into one of three groups that will share other academic leadership, staff and resources.

No majors, minors or courses will be eliminated as a result of T28, the provost said. This message was blurred a bit in recent weeks, as the board did approve the elimination of some programs as part of a separate, annual review of degree offerings.

Administration within the Division of Academic Affairs, which oversees all the university’s colleges and campuses, will be reduced by 40% under the T28 plan. All affected (excluding a couple assistant deans who don’t have faculty status) have the option to return to a nine-month faculty position, Tankersley said. Restructuring of the university’s Office of Global Education and its non-degree granting colleges, such as the Honors College, will also take place.

The university estimates it will save at least $4 million from those initiatives. Tankersley said her goal is to save $8 million total within the division of academic affairs by the end of the 2028 academic year.

“We’ve got to do something to be ready for the future,” Tankersley said. “We believe in the power of Kent State, the power of education, the power of our community. So, we’re looking at how we manage not only today but our future so we’re setting up Kent State to continue to be the economic engine that it is, to continue to educate students for the workforce demands around our community.”

The university will start to make some of the moves in shared leadership around January 2026 for all colleges, and all of academic affairs will have completely gone through T28 processes by the start of the 2028-29 school year.

At its quarterly meeting March 19, Kent State’s Board of Trustees approved the final model of T28, which formed from staff and faculty input, including opinions from members of the college’s Faculty Senate Executive Committee and the Kent State United Faculty Association.

The university had started with five proposed models. After consultation, two updated models were brought forth to faculty and staff.

Faculty Senate Chair Tracy Laux said faculty were heavily involved from the very beginning of this process.

“The creation of the process involved faculty, primarily because curricular issues and culture structure is in the realm of faculty responsibility,” Laux said. “The provost and her staff started the process consulting with Faculty Senate and the Faculty Senate Executive Committee primarily, creating these ad hoc committees of faculty and staff, and we eventually brought students in. My job was to ensure the faculty voice was heard, and it wasn’t hard to do with our administration.”

Kent State’s Faculty Senate approved the final model Feb. 10, and the university is still accepting questions and feedback from the student body through an online form.

This is the first major structural transformation at the university since the 1960s and ’70s, Tanskersley said.

“It still amazes me that we did this in five months,” she said. “Things don’t happen that fast at a university, and they absolutely don’t happen that fast with as much consultation as we were able to gain.”

What are the exact plans for Transformation 2028?

Tankersley said the process of coming to a finalized T28 model started, in earnest, in October 2024. In about five months, a combination of administrators, faculty, staff and students had shared input.

Since the start, the provost said those involved in the initiative’s planning revolved their thinking around the questions like: “What are we missing? What does the world need right now? What does Portage County need right now? What does Ohio need right now?”

“T28 gives us the opportunity to combine our leadership, combine our resources, combine our services in a more efficient way, and at the same time, create new and exciting opportunities for new majors, new degrees, new ways to come together for research and service,” Tankersley said.

Reorganization layout

Currently, the university has 10 degree-granting colleges.

Under Transformation 2028, there will be a total of nine degree-granting colleges, and each will continue to have its own dean.

Within those nine colleges, there are three groups. One group is the colleges of education, public health, nursing and podiatric medicine, and the Ambassador Crawford College of Business and Entrepreneurship. Another is the College of Architecture and Built Environments and the College of Arts, Design and Media. The third is the College of Aeronautics and Engineering and the College of Science and Humanities.

The university’s current College of Communication and Information is the only college being eliminated with T28, though none of the schools within that college will be eliminated. Instead, the schools will be split between either the College of Science and Humanities or the College of Arts, Design and Media.

Each group will share academic leadership, administrative support and resources, according to T28’s Final Recommended Model.

Tankersley said these changes will further encourage collaboration and innovation.

“I was just talking to the dean of aeronautics and engineering, and she brought me a list of engineering programs that are in demand, and there was one called environmental engineering. And we have just a great engineering program, and then we have this amazing environmental sciences program. Now, those two colleges are going to be working together in this shared ‘space,’ and it’s going to make that opportunity to offer a degree, perhaps in environmental engineering, possible,” Tankersley said, noting that “shared space” was more about sharing resources and departments, not necessarily buildings.

Kent State’s three non-degree granting colleges are the Honors College, University College and Graduate College, and each has its own leadership. Its Office of Global Education, which serves international students, also has its own leadership.

The university is consulting with faculty and staff on how to restructure these colleges for “greater efficiency,” according to the Office of the Provost.

Effects on administration, staff

T28 will cut down 40% of current administration within academic affairs, including one dean, approximately 13 assistant and associate deans and approximately 16 chairs and directors, according to the university.

The university will save $1.5 million from the reduction, Tankersley said.

“When I calculate how much savings this will be, it’s not their salary I’m putting in. It’s the difference between being a full-time faculty member and being an administrator that I calculate,” Tankersley said.

Tanerskley said most of the administrators in academic affairs are also already faculty members, and all current administrators affected, excluding a few assistant deans who don’t have faculty status, have the option to return to a nine-month faculty position with their pay adjusted accordingly.

Laux said the option to return to a sole faculty role is written in faculty members’ contracts.

In October, as they already started working on T28, the university implemented a hiring freeze.

The freeze halted all reappointments, replacements and creations of new full-time and part-time positions, with exclusions applying to student employees and positions deemed critical by the provost and president. This saved the college $1.5 million from a freeze in the academic affairs division alone, according to Tankersley.

The university plans to fill these positions internally first, Tankersley said, “hopefully” decreasing the need to lay off people.

Deborah Smith, president of the Kent State United Faculty Association, said this reorganization due to financial pressures is directly related to “inadequate” support for public higher education by Ohio’s legislature. (Smith did note that KSUFA had no comment on the final T28 model or its likely impact.)

Over 90% of Kent State’s revenue comes from tuition and state appropriations, and both, Smith said, are mainly controlled by the state budget and not the university. Kent State’s expenses, like that of public universities statewide, are increasing at a faster rate than its revenue. This is beyond its control, Smith said.

“The state caps what public universities can charge in tuition – that’s good for students, but means that, even when enrollment remains constant, tuition revenue cannot keep up with inflationary costs in expenses,” Smith said. “Meanwhile, in the most recent state budgets, state appropriations have remained either flat or increased only minimally in a way that does not keep up with inflation. Unless something changes at the state level, Kent State, like most of Ohio’s public universities, will have to make larger and larger cuts in order to maintain a balanced budget going forward. Students and their families would be wise to be mindful of this when it comes time to vote.”

Not all faculty are thrilled with the changes T28 will bring, as well. A professor who spoke with The Portager said the plan is more like a gutting of key positions than a transformation.

The professor, who did not want to be named, said faculty were “basically told we needed to reduce costs or face eventual layoffs.” Since plans were initially shared, the professor said many staff members questioned the reduction of department chairs and instead suggested the university make cuts to high-paid administrative positions and reduce its number of colleges to save money.

“We don’t really know how these shared chair positions are going to work, and the amount of time we spent as a faculty debating and discussing something that is so minor in terms of its ‘transformation’ is insulting,” the professor said. “It does save the university money, so that helps in terms of a bottom line, but it harms faculty by forcing different departments to share a chair, who may have very little knowledge of how one of the departments under them operates, coming at a horrible time with SB1 and other concerns. Faculty are basically being asked to consistently do more with less – teach more but still do research, but no travel funds to present research, no graduate assistants to help with research, no money to hire new faculty. I can only see this hurting faculty and the student experience.”

Impact on students

Transformation 2028 does not eliminate any majors (the university currently has over 300), minors or courses, and Tankersely said she does not see T28 having a large impact on students because all schools, departments and degrees will be intact.

The only things that may change for students, she said, would be the name of their department chair or school director and the name of their college.

Mainly due to low enrollment numbers over time, Kent State’s Board of Trustees did approve the elimination of seven majors, with some being replaced by certificate programs, effective fall 2025 during its quarterly board meeting March 19. These decisions were not associated with T28.

This number of major eliminations is what the university usually sees in March, Tanskersley said. Program changes, which start with faculty and college-level reviews before moving to the Faculty Senate and Board of Trustees, usually are up for board approval in March because of Kent State’s university’s academic calendar and curriculum deadlines. For all students enrolled in the affected programs, the university will still offer the courses they need to graduate, meaning all students currently enrolled in these majors will still graduate with their desired degree.

After review of annual reports given to the provost, the Board also approved the elimination of 15 academic centers and institutes, including the Center for Educational Leadership Services and the Institute for Applied Linguistics. This was also not related to Transformation 2028.

Tyler Carraway, chair of Kent State’s chapter of United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), a political, student-run organization, said in an email that some media reports confused the majors being cut with the T28 initiatives. The group has met with Tankersley, he said, who assured them all students will be able to graduate with the degree they are currently seeking.

Earlier in the semester, USAS had shared a post on Instagram about the plan, calling for greater transparency for students. The Office of the Provost had sent out an email to students about the beginnings of the plan in October, but there had been no other further updates emailed to students from the Provost’s office (though the university had continued to update its T28 website and post articles about the plan on its public relations-based online publication “Kent State Today”). Faculty had been updated throughout the process, according to the provost.

Now, USAS said it has a greater understanding of the potential effects of T28, but they still want the university to focus more on updating students.

Carraway, on behalf of USAS, said T28 will benefit the university in some ways, like the university’s Visual Communication Design major (which is currently in the College of Communication and Information) moving into the new College of Arts, Design and Media. The business and health colleges sharing resources will also help them administer online courses more efficiently, USAS said.

However, concerns remain about the non-finalized plan for the non-degree granting colleges. He also said Transformation 2028 “fails to clearly address other issues.”

“While we still have some concerns about the future of specific programs, we feel much better than we did in the past about the restructuring as a whole,” the group said.

Budget impacts

Tankersley said the university has already recorded that it will save at least $4 million from its proposed plans, not including cost-saving estimates for the restructuring of non-degree-granting colleges. That amount also takes into account the money saved within the Division of Academic Affairs from the hiring freeze.

According to the Office of the Provost, the reorganization of degree-granting colleges accounts for about $1.5 million in savings. The college saved another $1 million from the reorganization of the regional campuses. The hiring freeze within academic affairs saved $1.5 million.

The university doesn’t yet know what the total savings from restructuring the non-degree granting colleges will be, though it does expect the amount to be around $1 million.

Tankersley said her goal is to save $8 million within the Division of Academic Affairs by the end of the 2028-29 academic year, at the latest.

Regional campus effects

Two years ago, Kent State’s eight regional campuses underwent their own transformation, with four campus deans expanding their responsibilities to two campuses instead of only one.

According to the Office of the Provost, the university had positions open due to retirements or previous role changes, so the four open roles were available through attrition and filled by remaining deans. The dean-sharing system choice was recommended by the regional system’s Faculty Advisory Committee.

Tankersley said Transformation 2028 will not affect the university’s regional campuses, which offer courses and degrees that are overseen by the Kent campus, more than a possible change in department chairs.

What is the future of the university?

Laux and Tankersley agreed the process of getting to a finalized plan gave them a good look at how the university can behave successfully in the future, which includes making continuous check-ins and changes so large overhauls aren’t always necessary all at once.

“The fact that we’ve gone through this process means we can continually think along these lines and have things evolve without waiting 50 years to do it – that we’re going to be more in tune with the academic structure and the programs and how they align with each other in a college, and this is going to be more at the forefront so that, as opposed to having things evolve organically and sometimes for not any really good reason, we’ll be in more control of it,” Laux said. “That sets us up well for having a better impact on what Kent State does over the next 10, 15 years.”

Tankersley said she is proud of her colleagues and grateful for the partnership of the Faculty Senate and faculty unions for digging in during Transformation 2028’s process and for caring about the university’s success.

“I’m amazed at our academic leaders, our deans, our chairs and directors putting everything above them, looking at Kent State holistically,” she said. “I don’t know if I can say it’s been a beautiful example of what we can do together because it’s not easy, and it’s hard, and we know that people are going to be having to experience a lot of change. So, beautiful doesn’t seem like the right word, but it’s been incredibly powerful.”