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Welcome back colleagues to the new academic year. This has been an interesting summer with the state budget situation. I know that several decisions that the legislature felt it needed to make this year were very difficult for each of us individually and the University collectively. Health insurance premium and deductible changes were especially difficult. Please understand that we will continue to focus on improvements in the fringe benefit package both in terms of the optional retirement system and our health insurance package.
Despite the very tight budget this year, there have been some significant improvements in our situation. Most notably, the state Department of Insurance has allowed the University to advertise for bids for the fine and performing arts center. This has been a long time in coming and it will have major impact on our art and performance programs.
I also need to mention another milestone that was passed this year. For the first time in the history of the University our student athletes achieved an overall GPA above 3.0. Seven of these students obtained a perfect 4.0 while competing and practicing many hours a week. The approach that Jeff Compher is bringing to athletics is beginning to pay off. We all enjoy it when our student athletes win a championship, but we like it even more when they begin to win at the game of life. Academic achievement is the key to their future and our coaches are focusing efforts there. Indeed, as our men’s and women’s basketball teams have learned, skipping class brings a great deal of running—at five o’clock in the morning.
I want to focus a bit more on athletics for just a minute because I think that they have been able to put into words a concise statement that captures the essence of all that you have worked for over the last five years. As you will recall, we have been focusing a great deal of attention on raising standards. We are expecting more of ourselves and of our students. We are "raising the bar" and increasing expectations across all areas of the institution. Well, last spring the athletics department began a process of strategic planning that involved coaches, students, faculty, members of the Catamount club, and outside facilitators. Out of that planning process came a departmental statement that defines the essence of Western: "one goal…to be the best." Doesn’t that say it all? Isn’t that what we all come to work every day for--to be the best? You as a faculty have within you the capacity to be the best and you are showing it in the work you do every day of every year. Although you don’t seem to know it, you are the best and you are taking Western to places that we never dreamed were possible even four or five years ago. And it is showing in the ways we are viewed by outside constituencies and the quality of students we can attract.
How did we do with enrollment this fall? Reasonably well. The current freshman class is composed of around 1190 students and it is the very best class in our history. The average SAT of entering students this fall is 1015 and the average high school GPA is a strong B+. You will recall that the state average SAT is 998, so we are now attracting significantly better students than the typical North Carolina student who is considering going to college. On the screen behind me are two graphics; one showing the change in SAT since 1995 and the other showing the change in high school GPA. I think that you will see that our efforts to "raise the bar" have been working very well. Data on this class also show that we are seeing a shift in the nature of the students who are applying to Western. Our greatest increases in applications were from students in the upper ranks of their graduating classes. At the same time, we saw a decline in applications from students in the lower ranks. This is an important shift.
A few weeks ago the new Board of Governors members toured our campus. During that tour the Vice Chair of the Board, Jack Cecil, told the new members that over the last five years Western has become a university of choice for students from this region. He recognized that our position in the region was changing and shared with them his excitement and pride in your accomplishments. We have aspirations to become the "university of choice" for the State, but starting with the region is important. I hope that you, too, will take a minute to reflect on how far you have come. I’ve known for years that you are, collectively, the best faculty that any university could ask for—now others are beginning to recognize it and respond.
I know that it takes a great deal of effort on everyone’s part to make this kind of change happen, and I want to thank you for all you have done to improve the quality of this University. Now, we need to "stay the course." Keep raising the bar and keep building enrollment. If we can continue down this road, Western will truly become what Casey refers to as an "elite comprehensive university." The rest of the road will be difficult, but you have shown time and again that you are capable of propelling this University forward.
Over the summer, the folks in the Office of University Planning and the admissions and retention folks reviewed our admissions situation and criteria. This review showed some very interesting results. First, the number of applications has grown from 3,270 to over 4,050 since 1995 (this represents a growth of approximately 24 percent). Second, our acceptance rate is at or below the acceptance rate at significant key competitors including UNC-Charlotte, UNC-Greensboro and ECU. (So that you are aware, the "acceptance rate" represents the percentage of applicants to whom admission is offered. Lowering the acceptance rate increases the "selectivity" of the University which is nationally viewed as improving quality.) This change will have implications for our rankings and listings in major national guides (over time). At the same time, the last change in standards that we instituted reduced the size of the entering freshman class. What has been recommended is that we maintain our current admission standard for at least one more year and focus on growing the number of high quality applicants. This will allow us to increase both the quality and number of freshmen, so that we "grow into" our new admissions standards. I plan on accepting that recommendation. We do not yet have the admissions standards we need, but we will have to iterate toward those standards.
By the way, in addition to having the best freshman class in our history, we also have five National Merit Scholars, 22 North Carolina Teaching Fellows, and 4 high school valedictorians. The Honors College has 127 new freshmen with an average high school GPA of 4.08 and an average SAT of 1227. Last year, the Honors College SAT was 1222. This is a great class and I will talk a bit more about the Honors College and its implications a little later. But first, I want to set the stage by focusing outside the University for a bit.
Western historically has been called the "best kept secret" in higher education in North Carolina. While smaller schools always have difficulty with name recognition, our admissions marketing campaign and some of the press we have received regarding your work is beginning to have effect. This summer, Senator Robinson teased me about folks in the legislature getting tired of seeing bills that mention Western. The continuing press regarding our computing and technology programs is beginning to make a difference. Newt Smith, from English, for example, presented a national paper along with folks from MIT, Stanford, and Princeton on the future of technology in the classroom.
I also should mention that your work is beginning to achieve significant national recognition. Over the summer two faculty members in education received major competitive federal funding. Billy Ogletree received a grant of $1.4 million and Lisa Bloom received $800 thousand. These were both competitive grants and they represent important recognitions of the quality of work that can be accomplished by this faculty.
Your work, plus the designation of Western as a "focused growth institution" will continue to have impact on our enrollment and our visibility. This visibility has more than one side. When we were the "best kept secret" we were below the radar screen. People simply didn’t pay attention to us so whatever we did was "good enough." I think that all of you have hard phrases like "hey, we’re just Western," or "that is good enough for around here." Those phrases, and the mindset they exemplify, are no longer true or appropriate. Western has the attention of many people and they are beginning to look at what we are actually accomplishing. This is good because it means that your work is beginning to be recognized, but it also means that with recognition comes very significant outside interests and expectations. The remainder of my address will focus on major sources of special outside interest and on some very important responses that we will need to make.
There are currently four major sources of outside interest to which we will need to respond most immediately. The implications of not responding successfully to these constituencies are significant and difficult. On the other hand, successful response will likely propel the University to another level of recognition and excellence.
I think that most of you have been following the legislature and its actions. This legislature is becoming more activist in creating agendas for the UNC system. During the budget process, we had to work to keep legislative committees from determining which programs would be eliminated from the University to reduce the budget deficit. As late as June, the house considered mandating elimination of the Mountain Resource Center at Western through specific budget legislation. We were able to convince legislators that we needed to make these decisions locally, but it is clear that legislators increasingly are expecting visible outcomes from their investment in the University. Therefore, we must understand that the legislature is increasingly going to represent a point of pressure on the University.
The second constituency that is focusing attention on Western is the Office of the President and the Board of Governors. Western is a defined "focus growth institution." We are expected to take an additional 2,700 students to achieve a total enrollment of 9,540. You will recall that Vice President Bataille and former Vice President Pulley both have made specific requests for action by Western to improve our academic climate, retention, evaluation of teaching, and the effectiveness of our academic programs. These are critical questions to which we must respond this academic year.
I must note that while the questions that are being asked by the Office of the President are difficult and we will have to work together to answer them, the questions are being asked because these people care about this University. They want us to succeed and they want to keep the legislature from directing specific University actions. We need to see them as allies and we need to understand that the questions they are asking represent professional critiques focusing on improvement.
The third major source of special interest is our own Board of Trustees. This board has changed significantly over the last several years. Longer-term faculty may remember when the board met four times a year, it passed a few recommended actions, and it went away. This is no longer the case. We have a number of members of the Board of Trustees who chose to be on the board because they wanted to be activists and improve this University. Two recent appointees are former Secretary of Commerce Rick Carlisle and former Senator Clark Plexico. They are important political players in North Carolina. This board has an agenda for Western that comports very closely with the internal agenda as expressed in our mission and aspiration statements, but they expect action. Their greatest concern at this point is student retention and enrollment. They expect that we will solve the retention issue and at every meeting they want detailed updates on our applications and what we are doing to improve retention.
You also should be aware that there is a move by the Board of Governors and the legislature to consider devolving a great deal of additional authority to the Board of Trustees. If this occurs, trustees will be an even more important constituency who will have final say over many personnel issues that affect faculty (such as tenure and promotion).
The final external constituency that is having a direct effect on us is SACS. Standards for reaccredidation have changed. And, while we recently received recognition from SACS to award the doctorate, the team that reviewed Western last spring had nine specific recommendations to which we must respond over the next couple of years. Responding to these requirements and preparing for the next review in 2006 will take a great deal of effort on our part.
Some folks do not consider institutional accreditation to be a major issue. I have had people say to me that they did not believe that SACS would disaccredit Western so we should not make such a big deal over the review. Generally, I agree that we are not in much danger of being disaccredited. The work you are doing is much too good and we have made significant strides. However, I do believe that if we do not respond to the standards appropriately we could be placed on "probation" or otherwise be publicly embarrassed. This would undo everything you have worked so hard to accomplish over the last five years. Clearly, we need to respond and to respond well.
We have completed a very significant round of internal undergraduate program review, we are implementing the Liberal Studies program, and we are in the middle of reviewing academic issues associated with retention. The demands of the various external constituencies will provide us more than enough to do over the next year or more. At the same time, if we address the issues that interest these constituencies, we will make very significant progress. We must be aware, however, that providing a reasonable response to the various areas of concern will be something we need to do.
I want to spend the remainder of my time with you highlighting some of the most significant issues that we will need to address and suggesting a possible direction for addressing them. I think, as with much of what we do, we need to focus on the University’s mission and values statements and build our work on those statements. In doing so, we will focus on the degree to which we, as an academic community, actually share a sense of core values.
The critical questions that we pose for ourselves are the same as those posed by the UNC system, the trustees, SACS and (to some extent) the legislature. It is very important to note that we are not being asked by our critical constituencies to do anything that will not improve the University. All of their requests are consistent with critical actions that you have taken over the last five years. The interests of these constituencies can be summarized under several headings: evaluation and assessment, retention, enhanced academic quality, growth, and regional service. Each of these will manifest themselves in complex and different ways, but all are related.
First, SACS is moving to a full "outcomes based" model of accreditation. The old standards with hundreds of "must statements" have been replaced by a set of criteria that focus on the effectiveness of the University. Very simply, SACS will require us to document that whatever we are doing, we are doing it well. How we assess the quality of our programs is up to us, but we must assess all academic, student affairs, and administrative programs of the University. Currently, we do not have sufficient evidence to document the effectiveness of many of our academic programs and we have very few outcomes measures for our administrative programs. This year, we will have to develop true outcomes measures and begin to apply them so that we can document to SACS that we are addressing the core approach to reaccredidation.
Second, during its recent visit, the SACS review team recommended that we must develop mechanisms for evaluating teaching, research, and public service. Specifically (and to quote):
"The Committee recommends that planning and evaluation of teaching, research, and public service activities be systematic, broad-based, interrelated, and appropriate to the institution." The SACS visiting team did not believe that we have an adequate system for evaluating at an institutional level the fundamental elements of our academic mission: teaching, research and service. What is interesting is that the UNC system also has raised questions regarding the methods we use to evaluate teaching. We must, therefore, develop an effective institutional system for teaching evaluation. To be sure, individual departments need to have flexibility, but there are common issues that underlie all teaching that can be analyzed at a common level.
Likewise, SACS rightfully highlights the need to both have a system for evaluation of scholarship and to develop an institutional standard for scholarship. Over the years, it has become very clear that there is no common understanding regarding the role of scholarship in the University. For example, in discussions with faculty there seem to be at least some people at both ends of the spectrum regarding the importance and role of research in the University. At the one extreme are those who believe that our only real job is teaching. Scholarship, if it should be valued at all, should be seen as ancillary to teaching. Colleagues who argue this position want Western to be more like an undergraduate liberal arts college. At the other extreme, there are faculty who see their "real job" as research. For these faculty members, a one or two course per semester load would be more appropriate so that they can conduct their research. While Western’s mission does not allow us to act as though we were a private liberal arts university, it also does not allow us to pretend to be a research University. We neither have the facilities nor the doctoral students who can support research at this level. Therefore, we cannot have pretense that we are a research university.
Both of the extremes of this continuum are unrealistic and do not comport with the role of a comprehensive university. We need to move to the point where people have time for scholarship that matches both the institutional mission and the nature of the academic program that we offer. Specifically, people who are teaching in graduate programs must have more time for research than those who are not. The normal teaching load at most comprehensive universities (and at Western) is four organized courses per semester. We must expect faculty members who teach graduate courses to spend more effort on research, so we need to work to reallocate faculty positions to allow more research time during the semester that they are teaching in a graduate program. Over time, we should expect that a full-time faculty member should have three organized courses in a semester if one of those courses is at the graduate level. At the same time, it will be very important for departments to adjust tenure, promotion, and merit criteria both to reflect institutional expectations and actual differences in assignments of individual faculty members—even within a particular discipline.
The third area that SACS requires us to address is public service. It is not unusual—and we seem to fall into this trap—to equate public service with membership on committees. This is not what was intended by the concept and we will need to reevaluate how we conceptualize service if we are to meet SACS standards.
One of the beauties of working in a university is that we have a strong system of shared governance. Faculty, staff, and students have input at various levels of the decision-making process. For shared governance to be effective, it is necessary that people participate in the various committees and meetings that provide opportunities for input. Serving on curriculum committees, the Faculty Senate, advising a club, or holding an office is not what is meant by the concept of "service." More correctly, these are the activities of good university citizens. Public service entails systematic assistance to constituencies external to the University. We need to clearly differentiate good citizenship from public service and, at the same time, we need to assure that we are both effectively evaluating public service and citizenship and rewarding both through the tenure, promotion, and merit processes.
What is being required of us is that we develop a University standard for each of these areas that is consistent with our University mission. This is departure from some of our expressed processes that tend to be almost exclusively departmentally based. For this University it is going to be very important that we honor the traditions of departmental standards while coordinating those standards within a University-level, mission-derived, framework. From a faculty member’s perspective, these are the most difficult issues for us and we will need to develop these standards if we expect to meet the new SACS criteria.
At the same time we also have to create mechanisms for evaluating the effectiveness of our academic programs. Some departments have adopted various forms of portfolio assessment, but others are doing no assessment at all. By the end of the academic year, we will have to have models for assessing each of our majors for effectiveness.
This brings me to another point that affects both our SACS requirements and the concerns of the Board of Trustees and the UNC system: our retention rate for students, though improving, continues to lag the system’s average. The faculty committee on academic causes of retention problems has submitted a preliminary report that includes several recommendations regarding teaching and assessment. These recommendations need to be further developed and an action plan must be established. This will help both with retention and SACS.
At the same time, the Strategic Planning Committee noted in their final report on program review that we as an institution suffer from very significant "curriculum creep." That is, the major and minor in many departments has gotten so large that it no longer is possible for a student to graduate in four years.
As we begin to respond to SACS and the UNC system we need to reflect carefully on the meaning of our undergraduate curricula. Consider for a minute an interesting conundrum. Let us say that we have a student who takes a full load of courses each semester—that would normally be 15 hours. Let’s also say that the student gets all "As". Can the student graduate in four years? With only a few exceptions, the answer may be "no." Many programs at Western require 128 hours. This means that a student must take more than 15 hours or must stay in school longer than four years to graduate. Can we really argue that those 8 hours improve the quality of an undergraduate degree? I’m not sure.
I am old enough that I remember traditional conversations regarding the structure of an undergraduate degree. I’ve mentioned this concept to other faculty members who are about my age and they too are familiar with the concept. It is called "a third, a third, a third." That is, the traditional bachelor’s degree had one-third of the hours in general education, one-third in the major and courses related to the major, and one-third of the degree as free electives. Many of our majors require students to take more than forty hours and most require more than fifty. I am not only talking here about accredited programs, but basic liberal arts and sciences curricula. It is not unusual at Western for curricula to have 39 to 45 hours in the major, a major-related language requirement, and a required minor of 18 to 24 hours. In some cases, requirements within the major alone exceed 50 hours and some exceed 60 hours. This situation is made even more interesting by the fact that the UNC system defines a major as consisting of a minimum of 27 hours.
Consider for a minute the impact of this on a student’s ability to graduate. Can a student declare a major at the end of the freshman year and expect to graduate from your department in six more semesters? If not, are we really offering a bachelor’s degree or have we changed the basic meaning of a liberal arts and sciences education?
The term liberal arts, according to several authors, is derived from Latin and roughly means "that which must be known for life." Traditional American liberal education caused students to explore a variety of disciplines and to have sufficient program flexibility to be able to make decisions about where he/she would explore topics in depth. In too many cases we have unnecessarily substituted our own judgment for that of the student. We have created undergraduate tracks, added hours to the major, required minors, and otherwise minimized student choice in education. And, I am not referring here to separately accredited or professional programs—both traditional liberal arts programs and professional programs have succumbed to the allure of "curriculum creep." I hope that every department will spend some time this fall looking at the curriculum and asking two questions:
- Can a student reasonably graduate from my program in three years without taking more than 15 or 16 hours per semester? This assumes that a student declares a major at the end of his/her freshmen year.
- Can a community college transfer student, with an associate of arts degree, reasonably expect to complete my program in four additional semesters by taking 15 hours per semester?
If the answer to either of these two questions is "no," then I would strongly encourage you to examine the structure of your major and degree.
Also, when we look at accredited programs in the professions the situation is similar to that which we find in the liberal arts. Very few accrediting bodies require a certain number of courses or a certain course sequence to meet their standards. Instead, most that I have dealt with focus on learning objectives and content coverage. Nothing prevents us from restructuring our own curricula to allow students more discretion while meeting the requirements of our accrediting bodies.
While Rick Collings had the final say in the program review process, I followed the recommendations closely. Once the Strategic Planning Committee acted, I looked carefully at the programs that were being considered for elimination and compared them to equivalent programs at UNC Chapel Hill, Vanderbilt, and Duke. I found some interesting things. Generally, most of their degrees were 120 hours, not 128. Also, in several programs students were not allowed to take as many courses as we require them to take.
I think we have to ask ourselves some very serious questions regarding the structure of our curricula. Are we really giving a "better education" than these three schools? Do our programs reflect more our personal interests than the best interests of the students? To what extent have we overspecialized our undergraduate programs at the expense of a strong liberal education? And, to what extent have our arts and sciences programs become more professional and less focused on the true meaning of the liberal arts? Do we really benefit students by focusing them on a single discipline rather than encouraging them—indeed requiring them—to experience many disciplines? Are we substituting lock-step programs with many requirements for a curriculum that encourages a student to experience the broad range of human thought? The typical Western student who does not fail a course and who does not drop to part-time status takes 10.7 semesters to complete a bachelor’s degree. Is this really what a bachelor’s degree was intended to be?
This is becoming a very serious issue. As we increase the quality of student at Western we are having more students who are planning for their future. Jill Ghnassia tells me that we had three pre-medical students transfer out of the Honors College last year to UNC Chapel Hill because they could finish their degrees a full year earlier if they transferred. Each one of them told her that they did not want to transfer but they couldn’t justify taking an extra year before applying to medical school.
Can we really document that we are giving a better undergraduate program because of the number of requirements related to the major? Each of us can name someone who went to graduate or professional school from our programs, but we also must face the fact that the UNC system alumni survey shows that fewer of our alumni take graduate placement exams than at any other UNC campus. SACS requires us not only to assert that what we are doing is better, but also to prove it. I think that this will be very difficult.
We also should be cognizant that Western had more academic programs on the UNC system’s latest potential program elimination list than any other university in the system. I would submit that one major cause of this issue is the size of our undergraduate curricula. Students do not need to attend Western for five years when they can attend other schools for four. At the same time, why would our undergraduate students take our graduate programs—they have already had many of the courses at a lower level as undergraduates. I suspect that undergraduate curriculum creep is reducing the number of students who attend graduate school. If this is so, we will continue to lose graduate programs that otherwise might have robust enrollments.
This talk has gotten too long, but I do need to address one final issue regarding retention. This involves the use of part-time faculty members to teach a very significant portion of our liberal studies program. The legislature funds a certain number of faculty positions based on credit hours. It is up to us to allocate those positions so that we offer as effective an education as we can with the resources we have. Curriculum creep in the major is one of the most significant causes of the use of part-time faculty to teach liberal studies. This year, because of the budget crisis, we had to more regularly enforce the standards for canceling low enrollment courses. As a result, the number of sections taught by part-time faculty members was reduced very significantly. To be sure, we want small average class sizes, but we cannot waste resources. In this era of accountability we will need to be very sure that we only offer courses that can meet minimum enrollment standards.
While we are reducing our reliance on non-tenure stream faculty, we need to do a better job of rewarding part-time faculty members who stay with the University. State funding will not spread far enough to allow us to provide reasonable compensation to part-time faculty members, yet we must assure that we can keep the most effective teachers working with our most vulnerable students—our freshmen.
Therefore, I am proposing to the Board of Trustees that Western take several actions to improve the quality of first-year teaching. First, I am requesting that we develop a procedure that allows us to create full-time "lecturer" positions that will be dedicated to teaching in liberal studies. These lecturers would be required to have a master’s degree. I also am requesting that the Liberal Studies committee consider requiring lecturers to teach an "enriched curriculum." Courses in the enriched curriculum would meet an additional hour a week. This hour would be used to tie the course material to the student’s personal experience to give the curriculum "meaning." Lecturers would also be required to hold regular office hours and to make themselves available for informal discussions regarding the subject of the course.
Lecturers would be compensated at a higher rate than current part-time faculty and they would receive both health and retirement benefits. I believe that the legislature has given us a mechanism for obtaining the funding necessary to implement this program through assessment of a local tuition. I therefore, am requesting that the Board of Trustees consider assessing a local tuition primarily for support of improvement in teaching liberal studies.
The second request that I am making of the Board of Trustees is that they authorize the payment of salary supplements to full-time faculty members who teach freshmen seminars, enriched liberal studies courses, or honors courses at the upper-division level. I am asking them to approve a supplement of $1000 per course as an initial investment in our students and their future. We must demonstrate that we value liberal learning and the quality of the freshman and sophomore experience of our academic programs. At the same time, we must increasingly meet the needs of our very best students to assure that we can continue to attract the best and brightest North Carolinians. Both we and the region need them to stay in the mountains.
Third, I am requesting that the Board of Trustees make their approval of these compensation policies contingent on developing a strong consistent mechanism for evaluating the quality of teaching and learning in Liberal Studies. Many faculty members have worked very hard to implement this new Liberal Studies Curriculum and we must assure ourselves, SACS, the Board of Trustees, and the UNC system that only our very best faculty members are teaching this most critical portion of our educational program. Every student who attends Western must have an opportunity to have a first-class liberal education and that can only happen if our very best faculty members are committed to their students’ education.
My friends, every year I end my speech with the same thought. You have come so far. You have raised the bar, brought prestige to this University and made Western a player in higher education both in the state and nationally. Yet, in true mountain fashion, you still don’t know how good you are. You are the best. I know that you will keep building this University and this region. Thank you for all that you have done for this campus—and I wish you the very best of years. Thank you.
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