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I always like to start by welcoming colleagues back to campus, but for many of you, it is really superfluous; you did not go away. I hope you did have a restful summer and had the opportunity to do some things and to move parts of your life forward as this year we are going to be very busy.
Terry (Kinnear) has introduced some issues that I agree are very important. It is critical for this university that we continue to develop effective programs of university governance. Effective governance is a necessary antecedent for the work in which we are engaged.
I hear a lot of speeches every year. I give a lot speeches every year. I hope you all as faculty appreciate that I have very rarely met a leader in higher education, either administrator or faculty, who has the clarity of vision and the understanding of the situation of higher education that Terry has. It is a real pleasure to have him as a partner in the development of this issue in the university. There really is a three-person partnership that brings together the interests of this institution. Terry is a key partner. Ken Wilson, who has been our chair for the Board of Trustees, has also been a tremendous partner, and Ken also shares Terry's vision of where the university can go and what it can be. We will certainly miss Ken.
Today, I would like to talk with you about several issues of importance. I am not going to spend a lot of time talking about program review, workload review, or the specifics of enrollment. You should have my summer letter that deals with these issues in some depth. If there are further questions I will be happy to answer them individually.
I would like to take a couple of Terry's themes, expand upon them, and put them in a context of specific activities that I feel that we need to be engaged in this year. Back in February 1996, we all assembled in the College of Business auditorium and I addressed you with regard to setting institutional direction. This speech, which has become the basis for what has been fashioned the "Plan for Excellence," addressed questions of reputation of the university, the need to increase academic rigor, and some specific programs that we would institute to affect both the substance and image of academic excellence. I presented the vision that had emerged from a whole series of conversations. These were conversations with you as faculty members, conversations with the community, with the students, with alumni, with business leaders, and with political leaders from around the state. With the assistance from our friends in the advancement office, I toured most of the state and had the opportunity to meet with people of all ilks and varieties who had interest in what Western was doing. And out of all those conversations was synthesized a basic vision of this institution -- a vision of this institution based on the notion of academic quality. We are the faculty that can make this university one of the leading centers of teaching and learning in the United States. I am absolutely convinced of that, and nothing that I have seen in two years, either on this campus or off this campus, changes my mind in any way. The essentials of this institutional direction came primarily from you. Very little of it was new with me. I did not come to Western thinking I was going to be doing these kinds of things and working on these sorts of issues. I fully believed that my job was going to be primarily in the area of fund raising, community development and external work. And you told me that really was not the primary issue. The primary issue had to do with the future of this university internally, and the future of where this university was going.
One of the things that somewhat surprised me when I got here, and I still have concern over, was that we seem to have a culture on this campus that is self-deprecating. There is an internal campus culture that in some measure deprecates the achievements of our people and magnifies the value and importance of work done elsewhere. We unfortunately share that feeling with our students. In some ways, we have created a "self-fulfilling prophecy"-- we do not think very well of ourselves, and we convey that to the students and to the outside community. Over the last two years, we have made some strides in affecting that culture, but it still has not dissipated. We still are prone to deprecate the work of our campus and to magnify the quality of the work of other campuses.
To be sure, we have taken major steps together, but there still is the myth that Western is not academically very strong. I would like to have you think together with me about what constitutes academic quality. We should know that there can be no one definition of quality. Quality depends entirely on the mission and goals of the university. To be sure, the mission and goals need to be considered within the broader context of the norms, values, and expectations of our disciplines and higher education nationally. But one can define various types of quality very differently within that framework. We are a regional comprehensive university, and we are a very good one.
Last year, with very little rancor, we redeveloped our mission statement. That is an activity that many times takes two or three years on a campus and ends with a split vote of the faculty. We had very little rancor. We have a common consensus around some basic elements as to who we are and where we're going:
- We understand that we have a primary mission in teaching and learning at the undergraduate and graduate level.
- We are committed to the notion of the teacher-scholar. Research and scholarly pursuits play a significant role in the life of this campus.
- We understand that education has an underlying values component that involves behavior and beliefs, not just knowledge.
- We know that we have aspirations for the future that exceed our current grasp.
Let us look in a little more detail at these issues. In the area of teaching and learning, the mission development process was based on campus consensus. Consensus is not unanimity, and some of you may not fully agree with the emphasis on teaching and learning. However, the mission statement makes it clear that our first obligation must be to our students and their development. This, fortunately, also fits with the Board of Governors perspective on what the role of universities like Western must be within the system of higher education in North Carolina.
Over the past three semesters, you have made significant strides in improving the teaching and learning situation for our students. Most of you have raised your expectations of the work required for your classes. You are defining the nature of appropriate learning in your courses and not allowing the students to tell you that the work is too difficult. Some of you are requiring attendance of your students because you understand that their education, their real education, takes place within the context of the interaction with you and with their colleague students. You are helping students understand that to miss class is to miss their education. If they choose not to have that real education, you are penalizing them for not attending. (This, by the way, is consistent with research findings nationally. Students who are required to attend class tend to learn more, do better on tests, and, generally, feel that they got a better education). Many, many of you are being innovative. You have moved to active learning paradigms, you are engaging your students in meaningful learning-based assignments, and you are supporting the students in the development of their own research and scholarly capacities.
You may not fully appreciate it, but much of the work going on at Western is at the forefront nationally. I have spent much of the summer looking at other colleges and universities to see what they are doing. In so many ways, your work is at the leading edge of what is happening around the country. You know that I have interest in the applications of technology to teaching and learning, so I will briefly focus my comments in this area.
Our new president, Molly Broad, suggested that I look at Sonoma State University in California, since it has recently gone through the type of transition that we are working through. In 1992, their average SAT was around 900; this fall it will approach 1100. Their enrollment was down and they had a 50 percent vacancy rate in their residence halls; today, all their rooms are filled and they are in the process of building facilities for 1,000 new beds. In California, they were known as Granola Tech. Today, their major competition for students is the University of California at Berkeley and Cal Poly. They received 5,000 applications for 900 places in their freshman class. They also are nationally known for their uses of computing in teaching and learning, and Kiplinger Magazine has listed them as one of several public universities that give a private school quality education.
What I found at Sonoma surprised and pleased me. They have an Internet-intensive campus at about the same level as ours. They require all entering students to have a computer that is capable of working with their network. They have very strong network-based registration, degree audit, and library access. Our library access seems to be at about the same level of development as theirs. We are significantly behind them on registration, advising, and degree audit capabilities. However, our capacity and uses of technology in the classroom are significantly above theirs, and they are nationally known.
Sonoma has only one multimedia electronic classroom, and it is used primarily for training. We have four of these rooms, and they are very well used. Last year, 248 sections of courses with total enrollments of 5,712 students used the multimedia classrooms. Sonoma does not have the equivalent of the "faculty sandbox" in the Coulter Center that allows faculty the opportunity to try out new technologies. And, Sonoma does not have an endowed professorship in applying technology to teaching and learning like the one we just received from President Emeritus Spangler.
Although I always hesitate to single out a group or person for mention, since there are innumerable excellent examples of innovative, exciting work going on this campus, one development at Western is so out of the ordinary that I really must bring it to your attention. It has to do with the English department. You may not be aware, but every first-semester composition course this fall will be taught using our multimedia classrooms and will make use of the university's electronics technologies. This is a faculty-generated and faculty-managed initiative. The administration provided the venue, and the department ran with it. No other university in the UNC system has the capacity to move in this direction. Western's English department is literally working at the national "cutting edge" in teaching composition.
I mention this meaningful move primarily because it involved decisions made by an entire department - and you know what that's like. I also mention it because written communication is one of the most profound liberal learning skills that we can develop in students, so this effort is fundamental to the academic quality of this university. It is an excellent example of what Western's faculty can do when they think together about what it means to learn.
Many of you are doing excellent work with technology. Our multimedia classrooms are oversubscribed. You are using the teaching demonstration carts to near capacity, and many of you are making use of the Internet's capabilities in your course assignments and your interaction with students. There are many exciting, innovative approaches to learning being played out on this campus by faculty; individually and in small groups. I hope you have a sense of pride in your work, and I hope you will help our students understand how lucky they are to be at Western and to be able to work with such fine faculty.
This leads me to my second point. In developing the new mission statement, there was a confirmation of the faculty's commitment to the notion of the professor as a teacher/scholar. We know that our primary obligation has to be to student learning, but we have as faculty an abiding commitment to research and scholarly development. That is as it should be. Again, because of our self-deprecating culture on this campus, we don't really consider how much significant work is going on and how much our colleagues are really doing. Many of our senior faculty are respected scholars in their fields and significant numbers of young faculty are building reputations. What is most impressive is that the majority of these faculty have had to cope with the personal tension between the university's primary teaching and learning mission and their personal expectations for their own scholarly development. Most of these faculty taught three and four organized courses per semester. Some served as department heads dealing with the administrative processes, they've taught courses, dealt with individual student's needs, and still found time to be active, leading scholars in their fields.
At regional universities like Western where we are funded by the legislature to educate the people of the state, there will always be a tension between our own needs for professional development and contributing to our professional fields, and the demands of a relatively high teaching load. Most of us know this, and we have worked out an accommodation. But we do have some work to do in this area.
What I am really getting to with all of this is that we as a faculty have a great deal to be proud of, and we should not be shy about expressing that pride even though it is not part of our traditional culture. Unfortunately, we have not done a very good job of helping our students or our community recognize the quality of what we do. We know, for example, that we lose significant numbers of excellent upper-level students because they transfer to "better universities" to get their degrees. Surveys show that our students are satisfied with the level and quality of education at Western, that you are academically challenging them, and that they like being here. However, they do not see this university as having a strong academic reputation. This is particularly unfortunate since we can document a better record of achievement than many universities that enjoy stronger academic reputations than Western. We need to change that. You deserve to be proud of what you are doing, and you should help your students and others know that they, too, should be proud. Our faculty's work is not only recognized in their fields, but it is being recognized publicly. Let me just give you a couple of more examples:
- Robin Kowalski's research has been picked up on national television and international radio.
- Don Chalker and Dick Haynes are receiving major attention for their work on world class schools.
- JoAnn and Jim Carland have been recognized as two of the most influential researchers in entrepreneurship in the world, and they have also established the Allied Academies, which is an academic organization that publishes ten journals.
- Dan Southern was named North Carolina hematologist of the year and received the Sherwood Professional Achievement Award from the American Society of Clinical Laboratory Sciences.
- Anne Rogers' research has been recognized by the U.S. Forest Service through its Windows on the Past Award.
- And, of course, we all know of Rick Harrison's monumental 16 volume work on invertebrate zoology and Max Williams' and Cliff Lovin's historical research.
But you may not be aware that Rick Wilson received the BERG Excellence in Research Award from the American Physical Therapy Association, or that Daryl Hale has had one of his works performed by Lynn Redgrave.
I am mentioning these individuals not to single them out, but to flesh out the fact that wonderful, excellent research and scholarly work is going on all across this campus in field after field. We have exceptional people on this campus who are nationally known, and we should be proud of working with these colleagues.
Western's programs continue to receive national accreditations. Just last week, our sport management program became one of only a dozen or so to receive national recognition. We seem to take this kind of information in stride and treat accreditations as minor victories. But, you know in most of our fields that have accreditation, a majority of programs at other universities do not. We have a wide array of accreditations.
Our probation and suspension standards for freshmen exceed those of nearly every other university in the UNC system. It is harder for a freshman student to stay at Western than nearly any other UNC campus. You expect the best of your students, you expect them to perform, and you set the standards appropriately. Your use of technology in teaching and learning is not replicated anywhere in the UNC system, and in few places in the United States.
Most of our departments have chosen to maintain small class sizes despite the pressures of research and scholarship. Seventy percent or more of our classes have fewer than 30 students in them and the median undergraduate lecture size at Western is 23. That compares very favorably with most private universities. This means that you are teaching, on average, three or four organized courses per semester while maintaining your commitment to your discipline. You truly have chosen to be teacher/scholars.
People who really care about this university and know about us are not blind to the work that you are doing. This last year, for example, we had a 37 percent increase in the number of alumni who were willing to donate to this university. People put their money in what they believe in. Our endowment has grown in the last 18 months, from $8.5 million to $15.2 million, and we have three endowed professorships, two at the million-dollar level. Very few other campuses have any at the million-dollar level. In the last couple of weeks, we have received a commitment toward a third million-dollar professorship. We are not here for the money, that is not why we chose to be in higher education, but this type of support is a firm indicator of respect for what you are doing. I have not yet met an alum who has asked me to lower the bar. They want quality, they want to be associated with quality, and the work you're doing is making them proud.
Because of the significant changes in outside support for Western, we were one of two regional comprehensives in the United States to be recognized by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) with a national Circle of Excellence Award for outstanding improvement in fund-raising. The only other regional comprehensive to get this award was Sonoma State. UNC-Chapel Hill also received it.
We have made major strides in dealing with what are national problems with fraternities and sororities. Western's relationship agreement and de-emphasis of alcohol-based open parties provides a national model. Our athletics coaches' contracts, with clauses requiring their attention to the student-athlete's education and off-court behavior, also are models that have been picked up by other schools, including a couple of our competitors. Our work in that area has been noted in The Chronicle of Higher Education.Your work in sexual harassment and abusive behavior, while far from complete, was the subject of a very positive editorial in the Asheville Citizen-Times. In fact, their comment was: WCU leads the way.
Significantly, the recognition of our new mission statement by proclamation of the Faculty Senate that student behavior, commitment, integrity, and responsibility are fundamental to a quality university education are truly at the forefront nationally. In fact, this work was the subject of much of my interaction with colleagues at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities this summer. You should be proud that you are standing up and saying "no" to abusive behavior, and that you expect all members of the Western community to treat one another with respect and dignity.
Speaking of our student-athletes, did you know that, over the past years, 13 Western students have been awarded Academic All-American status, and that last year 102 of our student-athletes had grade point averages above 3.0 in at least one semester? That is out of 285 total athletes, including seven who had a perfect 4.0 in at least one semester.
This year we have become part of the consideration set of many of the state's better prepared students. The average SAT for fall admitted students was approximately 1000 for the first time in the history of the university. We will need to work to move these better students from considering us to joining us. But there is significant progress. Three more National Merit finalists, six high school valedictorians, and 24 North Carolina Teaching Fellows will enter Western this fall. The number of freshmen is up significantly and the average SAT will be about the same as last year. The highest SAT of an entering freshman this year was 1560-- he had a perfect verbal score and missed a couple of math problems.
This year, several high school students who did not meet our fall admission standards and were admitted only into our summer programs were accepted into the fall programs at other sister schools. We deferred admission on more than 25 students, told them they needed to go through diagnostics and attend a community college, and then reapply when they were ready to do the rigorous work at Western.
Over 10 percent of our entering freshmen this year have been admitted to our Honors College, and a significant number of applicants were rejected. The Honors College will open with 230 students, including 128 freshmen. These freshmen had an average SAT of 1160 and a high school weighted GPA of 3.94. Western's freshmen scholarship students, all 121 of them, had an average SAT of more than 1170 and a weighted high school GPA of over 3.8. These are students who could have gone anywhere and they chose to join you.
Your work is increasingly being recognized by granting agencies, and the number of grant applications and grant awards is at an all-time high. In fact they are 4 percent higher this year than they were last year.
I really do not want to belabor the point any longer, but you've got much to be proud of. You are doing terrific work at a national caliber level. But it is not enough to do well, we have to be perceived as doing well. The first step in this process is to begin to believe in ourselves and to take pride in our work. You are accomplishing a great deal. Help your students understand they do not have a need to transfer. They can't get a better education than they can get at Western. There is no better faculty. There is no better place to go to school. Believe it. Help others believe it.
Obviously, we've made a great deal of progress. When President Broad was on campus this summer and I had a chance to brief her on the work that you are doing, she was particularly excited about the preliminary work we have done in assessment of senior-level performance. She believes that it is the most important work in which we are engaged. She's right. Some of our departments have moved to traditional, student-based portfolio assessment, and others are considering other appropriate models. We took a few halting steps last year. They were good first steps. We need to continue to develop in this area, and we will receive recognition both in- state and out-of-state for the work we are doing.
Most of you have increased your expectations for student performance, and even though very large numbers of students did not return this year since they were suspended, you need to stay the course. Continue to expect the best of your students; they will learn to rise to your expectations. So, continue to set your high standards, continue to move forward and we will continue to make great progress.
We have been known as a university with a personal touch; in fact the SACS team coined a phrase that we're using in a lot of our recruitment now - "excellence with a personal touch." But we have a lot of work to do on the personal touch side. We need to deal with those issues more systematically. Literature indicates that most students who leave universities, leave for social reasons (though we are also beginning to lose a few students to other schools because "Western has just gotten too hard"). It may cost us a few FTE in the short run, but it will help us in the long run since we want to be known for quality.
We need to improve our overall approach to helping students adjust to campus, and you are really the key here. Current research continues to show that students stay in universities when they develop a personal relationship with an individual faculty member. If they feel that they are accepted, valued, and believed in, regardless of how much you ask them to work, they will stay with you and continue to do what you ask them to do. If they feel isolated and alone, they will find somewhere else to go to school or not go at all.
You know we have suffered some budget cuts this year. That is no secret. If we had a retention rate at this university that was equal to the average retention rate for the UNC system we would not have faced a budget cut; in fact, we would be looking at budget increases. Our retention rate is the lowest in the system. I am not referring here to students who are not doing the work. I am referring here to students who are in academic good standing, who could stay at Western, who should stay at Western and get their degree here. Those who are unwilling to do the work, those who are unwilling to attend class, who are unwilling to come prepared, do right by them -- help them go home permanently. Those who are in good academic standing, those who are willing to do the work, we need to retain. We are not doing a good job in this area. We need your help as individual faculty to continue systematically building this area of the institution. Frank Prochaska has taken it as a primary goal this year. It is absolutely critical for our future. In a move that should assist with improving campus life for students, we have just completed the renovation of Hinds University Center, and this is a major addition. It is a wonderful facility, but we still do not have sufficient facilities for student activities on this campus. It is time to begin planning for phase two of the University Center. That planning process will consider such issues as expanding the wellness center, adding an outdoor swimming pool for recreational use, a sauna and whirlpool, and additional group and activity spaces.
As you know, we have made great strides in technology, so it is time that we begin to think about this issue in a systematic fashion. It is very doubtful that a student can get a first-rate education any longer if he or she is not capable of using technology, and if he or she does not have access on a 24-hour basis to a personal computer. They need to be able to do class assignments, to interact with professors by e-mail, and as we add capacity, to register, audit their progress towards degrees, drop or add classes, or seek a job. Therefore, I'm proposing to our Board of Trustees that they study making it a university requirement that all students who enter in the fall of 1998 own his or her own personal computer. I am very concerned about the fiscal impact of this approach. I am very concerned about the impact on the university, our enrollment, and on the individual student. We do not want to exclude low income students from this university. There is reason to believe that there are ways that this can be managed. If it can be managed, if we can maintain our enrollment and provide adequate support, then I'm going to encourage the Board of Trustees to mandate that all entering full-time students have their own personal computers. In this way, you as faculty will know that every student has access to at least a minimum level of technology. We will not mandate a particular computer; we will mandate connectivity.
This is a year when we need to look at our degree programs. Are our programs meeting the students' needs--not our personal needs as faculty--but are they meeting the students' needs? I'm particularly concerned about our graduate programs. You know that we have 11 graduate programs that are up for possible elimination under the state-level review process. We need to complete work on our nursing master's degree and get it implemented. We also need to have a systematic plan for building other new degrees and to redirect existing degrees to meet student needs and student demand. We must have full-time, traditional graduate students in Cullowhee. That is part of being a regional university, and I have no interest in reducing our emphasis on traditional, full-time graduate students on our main campus. We need also to create new degrees that positively affect these students and our ability to enroll students. This is not a mandate, but some possibilities that might be useful for us are environmental science, environmental health, environmental management, occupational therapy, writing (including creative writing), early childhood education, music, art, and possibly even a graduate program in criminal justice. I suspect that you could think of many others. The ones I just mentioned may or may not work out. But it is time we thought about this in a systematic form and move our degree offerings on campus to meet the needs of students who are going to be working in the 21st century.
At the same time that we are building graduate programs on campus, we must recommit ourselves to Asheville. Asheville is the main population center in this region and they are not being well served by us. They are beginning to be served by other institutions. Dealing with non-traditional students in Asheville is very different from dealing with traditional students on campus. They have different needs and interests, and going to school is only a small piece of their entire lives. On the other hand, they are often more motivated to get their degrees and to study than traditional students. We have many excellent opportunities for adult learners in place but we need to think through this issue systematically. We could make better use of cohort programs, weekend programs, half-semester scheduling, so we can meet the need of the adult learner. Many times it is easier for an adult to figure out what they are going to do with the next two months of their lives than it is for the next six months of their lives. Many excellent universities have gone down this road and do a very credible job in educating the adult learner. Adult learners do not take random classes; they need full programs. So we need to do a better job in every program of laying out exactly which courses are going to be offered in which semesters so the student, an adult learner, knows when he or she can graduate and how long it is going to take to get that degree. We need to have guaranteed schedules in Asheville.
What I am getting to with all of this is that when we deal with students, we have four fundamental objectives: quality, retention, graduation, satisfaction. You are going to get as tired of me saying this as you did of my saying, "raising the bar." Quality: everything we do with a student must be quality. We must continue to raise academic expectations, and we must continue to raise behavioral and value-based expectations for our students. We must retain those students; we must keep them here to work with these excellent faculty so that they can graduate. And we must continue to increase their satisfaction so that they help us recruit better and better students to continue Western's growth. Quality, retention, graduation, satisfaction: four fundamentals for our students.
One final note. Over the last few months I have had the opportunity to interact with alumni who graduated from Western in the ë40s and ë50s. What I hear from them is that when they went to school here, Western was the university of choice. You would not consider going to other lesser schools, because you knew if you went to Western you would get a great education. You would work hard and you would have something when you finished. The good work that you are doing today is in many ways an effort to reclaim our legacy, to move back to the position where we are a university of choice for North Carolina. You are the faculty that can do it. I have no doubts of that. Welcome back and let's have a great academic year.
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