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Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady University has a new president and CEO slated to begin this summer.
David Bellar, the Dean of Usha Kundu, MD College of Health at the University of West Florida, is stepping into his new role at FranU on July 14. Current President Tina Holland announced her retirement in May 2024 after 11 years at the helm. Bellar was selected from a national search of about 40 candidates.
Daily Report sat down with the future FranU president to discuss his plans for the university and his new position.
What are your goals as president and CEO of FranU?
First and foremost, my goal is to get acclimated to the institution and community. There are many more people that I need to meet and form relationships with.
The university has aspirations you can see clearly in their strategic plan. It’s looking at those, evaluating where things are and helping the institution move forward in a mission-aligned, thoughtful and strategic fashion. Enrollment growth is a priority. I’m over a college of health now that has many similar programs as FranU and has experienced a lot of growth and partnerships. In this role, working with Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center and the Franciscan Missionary of Our Lady’s health care system is something that I’ll be doing and looking forward to.
Health care is a growing sector of the U.S. workforce, especially with the aging population. It’s an area where Baton Rouge will need to continue to have health care practitioners graduate and out in the workforce. We’ll need to do our part to make sure that we’re producing the workers that are needed to support the health care needs of that area and the region beyond.
We’re still months away from your start date, what will the transition timeline entail?
Remotely, I’ll be immersing myself in data reports and documents, and starting to make connections via Zoom or other fashions. I am trying to carve out some time where I can potentially be present on the campus, not in an official capacity but just to meet and greet people and start to build relationships before I arrive. I want to get a granular understanding of where the university stands and a sense of where the board of trustees would like to see the university in the future. My goal is to be as ready on day one as humanly possible to start taking an active role and moving things forward.
How do you plan to increase enrollment, academic achievement and the development of the university’s master plan?
We will work as a team and review data. We’ll review information about our region, our community, what the needs of the community are, and then we have to formulate plans and move things forward. Making sure that we have full enrollment in all of our programs is something that, I believe, the university has already accomplished. Now it’s looking at where the needs are most present in the community, and how we can reposition resources or maneuver to grow those programs that are in most demand.
Louisiana does a great job of making workforce data publicly available for the state and helping categorize and prioritize that. We’ll work on a process where we bring all that data together, trying to synthesize it in a digestible way, and then have dialogue around it.
What is the first thing you want to tackle when you begin your new role as FranU president?
I will probably work from a point of what’s the criticality of the issue to prioritize. I need to get down into the data and learn a little bit more from some of the different components of FranU to prioritize. Working with the board of trustees that gets the enrollment funnel is going to be something that I will want to take a look at and talk to all groups that are involved in that. The enrollment has been good, but that may be something that I focus on at the beginning, particularly because the board of trustees has a focus on that.
As health care rapidly evolves, what programs or initiatives would you implement to equip students with the skills and knowledge needed for a technology-driven workforce?
In my current role, we’ve done a lot of work on implementing training around artificial intelligence into our programs. We’re talking to the students about the ethics and the use case of artificial intelligence, not just what artificial intelligence can do. There are a lot of health care systems now that are leveraging artificial intelligence for a variety of different fashions. We want our students to go out into the workforce and be aware of what this means, what the use cases are, and any ethical implications of it, so they’re prepared to just walk in the door.
Artificial intelligence is one of the hottest topics in higher education at the moment. Helping students be as ready to go in the workforce as we can and as resilient as we can, instilling in them some understanding of team dynamics, and working in team structures in the health care space is a conversation I’ll look forward to on the FranU campus.
