The Board of Regents met on Oct. 2 along with Deloitte, the consulting company that was hired to propose a business plan for the three regent universities in Iowa. Yesterday, they met at Iowa State University to discuss eight business proposals. The business plans have been put in order to make the universities run more efficiently. Although these meetings can seem boring, they will have a large effect on the way the university will run in future years.

The changes that Board of Regents plans to make at Iowa State are changes that we cannot see right away. It is difficult to be concerned with something that you have no concrete evidence of. An example of this would be construction. When building a shop, it is easy to see the changes that are being made to it, however, with BOR, the changes being made can’t be seen. But that does not mean that they are not important.

One of the primary focuses in the meeting was the proposal to centralize the human resources and finances departments. As of right now, each college and even some departments have their own finance and human resources department. With the new program, all of the finances of the departments would be handled in one centralized department, while the same will happen for human resources.

While this idea will work well by relieving departments of having the extra burdens of handling human resources and finances, there will also be many jobs to be cut over time. The proposal does not suggest that anybody will be fired when the departments become centralized, rather, if someone quits or retires, they will not be replaced.

 The changes being made at this university are something that we as students should be paying attention to. Earlier in the year, there was a BOR meeting and not a single student showed up for it. That is not the way we want our university to be seen by the Board of Regents. More people showed up and showed interest in the latest meeting, but still it was a small fraction of students considering how many people attend this school.

While we might not be able to see the impact of the BOR and Deloitte right now, there will be changes made in the future that we should be concerned with. These changes are greater than just Iowa State, but for all three of the regent universities. They are things that may take a few years to implement and many of us will be graduated before then, however our children and grandchildren -assuming you stay in Iowa- will be seeing the changes that we had the power to influence while we are here, now.

Get involved with the changes that are being made to our university. We have the ability to do something great, not just for Iowa State, but for Iowa as a whole. A voice that is not heard, is only being wasted.