Envision ULM 2007 Speech - November 15, 2007
Thank you, Jay. Last spring we had the pleasure of welcoming Judge McCallum as our Commencement Speaker. It meant a lot to us to welcome back our distinguished alumnus to the commencement dais. It was typical Jay McCallum, to the point, often humorous and, as always, insightful and from the heart. Thank you again, Jay.
Thank you all for being here tonight. I welcome this opportunity to celebrate this great institution. In the past, we celebrated faculty accomplishments, buildings, programs, research, and service projects - highlights in the institution’s progress. Tonight we are celebrating what is most important: “the life of the mind.” We are celebrating that great endeavor through the words of those who are most important to ULM -- our students, faculty and alumni. Jack, Henry and Larry are the representatives of those three entities that make this institution great. Please join me in thanking not only our distinguished speakers but all of our faculty, alumni and students.
Tonight instead of talking about the unbelievable accomplishments of the past year, I wanted to talk a little about the past in order to establish my vision of the future.
At ULM we put students first and students now rank ULM among the top institutions in the state.
But putting “students first” does not mean that we cater to the whims of the student body. We do not just give students what they ask for. It is, also, our responsibility to give them what they need. Focusing on students means that in every decision we make, we emphasize student welfare, the development of their minds and their future, and make that our highest priority. At the same time, we should do everything we can to draw out their best efforts. Giving students the tools for success is an essential part of putting students first.
To put a fine point on it, indulging anything less than excellence would not be putting students first.
At ULM we attract and retain the best and the brightest students from the state and the region. We reversed the declining trend in enrollment and did so by increasing the quality of our student body. The ACT average for incoming freshman and the entire student body continues to rise and we increased the TOPS Scholars at ULM by over 40 percent. All of our residence halls are full, and have been full since the day we opened our new facilities. The problem we have now is finding locations for the residence halls we are planning for the future.
Perhaps the most gratifying turn of events over the past five years is our faculty’s initiative and determination to directly address the issue of student learning. The faculty began, many times on their own, to examine what they could do to directly address this issue. They developed support groups to investigate the effective use of the latest technologies in our classrooms, wrote grants that directly affect student learning, and in many cases, such as mathematics and English, completely redesigned the way we teach courses. Faculty in many other disciplines are exploring ways they can make similar improvements. Retention and graduation rates are long-term concerns, but we are well on our way to solving these issues for the students at ULM.
Over the last five years we made the ULM campus the most beautiful in the state—not only the physical, but the psychological as well. We did not create this new and exciting physical environment just for the sake of appearances. By working hard to make our campus environment look exceptional, students are realizing that they must be exceptional, that they must invest their time and effort in to their work because we are investing our time and effort in our work.
We are a better institution financially and from an audit perspective. Decision-making at ULM has been decentralized, and we continue to push administrative and financial decisions down to the colleges and the respective deans.
Where do we go from here? Where will we find ourselves when we return for Envision 2012?
I believe very, very deeply in my life’s work, the world of higher education, the life of the mind, and serving the Academy. I must admit, however, that I am a traditionalist. I believe like Cardinal Newman when he explored the “Idea of a University.”
Newman implied, “Learning . . . comes from the ancient method of present communication, of the personal influence of a master. . .”
“The general principles of any study you may learn from books at home; but the detail, the colour, the air . . . the life which makes it live in us, you must catch all these from those in whom it lives already.”
As much as I believe in this personal touch for students, my vision for the future of ULM is quite different. The student of the future, both those direct from high school and the new emerging adult learner population, will demand that we provide them with a postsecondary experience that fits their schedules, not ours. We at ULM must continue to change, or we will be left behind by the marketplace. The adult learners, those who for some reason chose to delay their education or return to finish their education, are older, they work, and they have families and the concomitant job and time constraints. We must be prepared to meet the needs of the students with anytime, anywhere, anyplace instruction. The one hour - three times a week courses will be a thing of the past. We must be prepared to offer online, blended, distance, weekend or evening classes. These courses will require a change in the way we work and schedule and perceive our students. We will be required to find a way to accommodate the much needed faculty-student engagement for these new and often impersonal alternative delivery methods.
As I look to the future, I see improved retention and graduation rates. My colleagues in The University of Louisiana System all agreed that we will achieve the national average graduation rates by 2012—a daunting task, since those prospective graduates started school this semester. In this new era of accountability and assessment, we will see funding based not on how many we admit, but on how many we graduate. And, we must be ever mindful that while funding is important, we must help our students stay in school and graduate because it is simply the right thing to do.
To accomplish this vision, we must evaluate many things: who gets admitted, how they are advised and how they are taught, are we making the educational experience meaningful, what barriers does this institution create and what barriers do the students create that keep them from succeeding? We must find alternatives to massive amounts of student loan debt and full-time work while in college. Difficult, yes, impossible, no.
As I look to the future, I see an institution regionally acclaimed and nationally recognized for the education we provide our students. The education at this institution is among the most rigorous in the country. In the near future, we will announce that many of our programs recently faced some of the most challenging accreditation standards in the Academy, and passed with little or no comment—a testimony to the extraordinary collaboration of faculty, department heads, deans, and the administration. We must assure in the coming years that all of our programs, which have separate accrediting agencies, receive accreditation. This certainly includes the upcoming Southern Association reaffirmation.
At ULM, we have some of the best and brightest faculty in the Academy, yet we settle for the “average” SREB salary as a target. I see a time when we no longer just settle for the “average” but raise our faculty’s salaries to the top of their SREB peers, because my faculty deserve it, and because we must do everything we can to retain our current faculty for ULM students of today and tomorrow.
No one ever imagined we could have come this far in such a short time. But we did; and we did because of the unwavering support of the larger ULM community. Our faculty and staff worked diligently to accommodate the ever changing landscape and the community never wavered when asked to join in the renaissance. Many of you stepped up to fund the Clarke M. Williams Student Success Center, the University Residence, and numerous new endowed scholarships. Others engaged their companies to help with the planning, financing and building of all of these great new facilities. We do not say thank you often enough, but we want to take time to do that tonight.
The future is bright and challenging -- and all it takes is money. More state, federal, and certainly more private money. Before I left Missouri six years ago, I asked the athletic director what it takes to win. Without skipping a beat, he said money. I noted that he was coming off three losing seasons and asked if it was more difficult to raise money if your teams were not winning. Again, without pause, he noted that unless you increase fundraising in the losing seasons, you will never have a winning one.
I ask you tonight to help us achieve this vision for the future -- write that check, fill out that donation form, talk to us about including ULM in your estate plan. If you cannot give of your treasures, give us your support. Come to the campus; join us at an athletic event or a cultural event or at one of our many alumni celebrations. Or just come and sit at Starbucks and enjoy the campus ambiance. Continue to make ULM part of your plans just like you did tonight.
I have many, many other goals for this institution that I hope we will celebrate when we gather for Envision 2012. But there is a final part of my Vision for ULM that I think is as important as any I mentioned earlier, and it is that we become “One University.”
ULM is an enormous, complex, ever-changing entity. ULM is a place where ideas are born and shaped and then either whither or bloom. ULM is a place where ideas are exposed so that they may be blunted or focused by sharper minds, and we end up in a position other than where we started. ULM must become a place where controversy is expected and welcome, not sensationalized. The best and highest values of American higher education are represented right here. At ULM we offer advanced learning to men and women regardless of their background, we are responsive to the problems of the people of our state, and we offer a haven for free and open inquiry into both the unpopular and the liberating ideas.
My task is to protect and preserve these strengths, to ensure that all who come to ULM, student and faculty alike, have what they need to grow to the extent of their abilities. I believe in the philosophy of Abraham Lincoln when in the summer of 1862 he said:
“I shall do less whenever I believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall adopt new views as fast as they shall appear to be true views.”
There is much to be done during the next few years, and I am asking everyone --- administrators, faculty, staff, students, alumni, and the community at large --- to help us as we plot the course. For each of you, this will be your university, and if you do your part, it will fulfill your hopes.
I welcome the possibilities of the future because I have faith in the ULM community. My vision then is a University bound together -- student, faculty, staff, administrator, alumni, and community members where there is no “them” and no “us,” only the “we” with a common goal – One University.