|
Welcome back, friends.
And to our new colleagues, welcome. I was pleased to have the opportunity to meet you the other day, and I look forward to continuing to work with you.
I do hope that all of you had a restful summer; we'll need you to be in good shape because this year is shaping up to be a pip. If you remember, the theme of my closing address last year was one of those very intellectual themes, I spent a long time thinking about, was "wow!" I said at that closing faculty meeting that I thought that last year would probably, when the next history of the university was written, be the year that really documented the transition of the institution when all the hard work, all the work of so many people, came together to make the university what it can be. It's the first year that we began to see the realization of our hopes and dreams. There's a book out that I had the deans read this summer called "The Tipping Point."
And what happened, I think, last year is that Western went through "the tipping point." It felt for so many years that we were pushing a rock uphill. We did a lot of work, but we just didn't seem to change. Everybody tried hard, and everybody worked hard, and that is so frustrating when you can't see the outcomes. But we lived through it. We went through those times. Colleagues of mine tell me that it takes about 10 years, at a minimum, to change the reputation and the image of a university. When I talk to folks after a meeting and say "Oh, gosh, we're working so hard," and they say, "Just stay with it; stay with it. It's all going to work. But it takes 10 years." And I realize that we're really now just entering the eighth year of trying to make this work and trying to make it move, but, my friends, we can actually see some of the outcomes this year. It really is a pleasure to be on the other side of "the tipping point."
Back on a cold day in 1996, I asked faculty to think seriously and to push seriously to "raise the bar," to make Western a better school. Now, there are a number of you who are still here, who were in the audience that day. That was a difficult message, but it was a message that was well received by the faculty. I teased afterwards with the Chair of the Board of Trustees. He asked "How did your speech go," and I said, "Can I call you in the morning. I got a standing ovation, and I honestly don't know what to do with it. I have to think about it for a while. Faculty never give a chancellor a standing ovation. What was that about?"
Well, what it was about is that I think I finally heard what it was that you were expecting and hoping to have happen which was a raising of the academic stature of the institution. Raising the bar doesn't have to do with making things harder on people. It has to do with energizing people, and raising standards, and teaching better, and putting the effort in to make it so that our students really can learn, that they really know what it is like to have a first class education. And that's what you've done. And that's what's happening.
I want to share with you a couple of slides. (I know that, this time of the morning, there's nothing better than a real flashy PowerPoint presentation to put you to sleep.) But let me share a couple of slides with you to show you a bit about what's happening.
What you see on the screen is a fairly complex graph, but let me explain what's there. The yellow line represents the change in SATs since 1995 at Western. The light blue-green shaded area represents the lower half of the average SATs in North Carolina for those same years. If you notice, in 1995, the average SAT at Western was five points below the state's average SAT, and the state's average SAT is much lower than the national average. Effectively, Western had positioned itself to draw students from the bottom of the high school classes. And I jokingly have said to people that we sort of had positioned ourselves as K-Mart, and you all know what happened to K-Mart in the last couple of years.
What you see on the dark line is the size of the freshman class during those same years. What you'll notice is that the freshman class really didn't change; it went up a little bit and it went down a little bit. But what happened was that every year, we pushed to raise admission standard as you pressed to raise academic quality. That paid off, and look at this year! Look at the change in the size of the freshman class. It's an amazing shift. Our average SAT this morning was 1023. It was 965 in 1995. We've gone up 58 points. We'll settle in right around 1022, 1023. The state's SAT has, indeed, gone up a little bit; but it hasn't gone up anywhere near that much. We are in the upper third, or so, of UNC system campuses in the change in academic stature of the institution, even given the hole that we started in. Think about that: we first had to dig ourselves out of a hole before we could start building a hill. And with that, we still are in the upper third. That's a great testament to the work that you've done.
Also, take a look at enrollment. Again, you see a similar pattern. After we started raising standards, we lost enrollment. Then, slowly, each year we gained enrollment back. We grew a little each year until this year. This year, it looks as though, when the dust finally settles, we're going to end up with a freshman class of around 1500. That is the largest class since the 1960's. The typical student coming in this Fall, who's already registered, has a B+/A- average, where, in 1995, they had a C+/B- average. Think about the difference in the caliber of the student; the difference in the students you are able to attract.
By the way, the SAT of 1023 - last year's average SAT in North Carolina for all high school students who took the SAT was 998. This is the first year that we are also above the national average of 1020.
Increasing student quality certainly came at some cost. There was a lot of work that had to be done. Some of that work, obviously, was frustrating. But we had to push to become a 21st century university. We had to implement technology. We had to focus what kind of institution we were going to be. And we had to continue to press to make sure that the programs that we had were competitive, that they could enroll students, and that they could really position the university for the future.
Now things at times got a bit bumpy, and things at times got very difficult. I don't have to tell any of you that, who lived through the last few years. But there's a reality out there now, and the reality is that the people of North Carolina have discovered Western, they're coming to Western in increasing numbers, and, more than that, better students are coming to Western on a regular basis. It's an exciting time.
I want to come back to that, but there have been a couple of folks this summer and this last year who have really been particularly important. Are Keith Corzine and Elizabeth Shelly here? Would you all stand up? I don't know how many of you know Keith and Elizabeth, but they are the people who are leading our housing operation, and the changes that they made in the quality of residential living last year were absolutely awesome. Folks, thank you. I just wanted folks to know who you are.
Gordon Mercer, are you here today? We're going to have between 1450 and 1500 graduate students this year. We had 1180 last year. And the reason (for the increase) is that Gordon Mercer took it as a personal challenge to make sure that we got graduate enrollment that we deserve. Gordon, thank you.
Now how about the members of our Admissions Office? Are folks from Admissions here? They're probably busy registering. Brenda? Y'all did a great job. Thank you. And Financial Aid? Thank you.
None of this could have happened if they'd done this on their own. It doesn't work that way. So many faculty members jumped in and pushed to make this happen. And it's such an exciting time when you see the excitement on the campus, and you see the excitement of the parents and the students.
It was really fun this summer. I was talking with a major officer of state government who told me that her daughter had chosen another university rather than Western. I won't mention the name, but you can probably can guess, given my predilictions. She said her daughter had a really good SAT but her grades weren't all that great because she is such a social kid, she's a cheerleader and she likes to party. And I said, "You know, it's probably a good thing that your daughter chose that other school. We're much more serious at Western." Ah, that felt good!
Now, we're expecting a freshman class up about 20% and maybe even a little bit more than that. We're expecting at least a 20% increase in graduate enrollment. But we're also seeing a significant increase in retention, as well. I think most of you know that retention is something that has bugged us and plagued us for a long, long time. The numbers are looking really good. I won't give you a percent yet because it's so fluid until we get through open registration, but it does look like it will be the highest in the university's history. It feels really good to be on that side of it.
Whenever you go around the state or whenever I around the campus, people are asking, "Why is that happening? Why is it that all of this is going on? What's different about this year?"
Well, I am an old empiricist, and I used to do a lot of quantitative research, and I know that when you look at causes, variables are what change things, not constants. And I also know that if you're going to try to argue for causality, the hardest thing to do empirically is to rule out all of the possible causes. So I decided that I would review the competing theories of why Western couldn't grow.
Please understand that when I do this, my tongue is firmly planted in my cheek. Please also understand that I could be exaggerating-just a little bit. I think you'll also understand why I didn't pursue a career as a stand up comedian-but here it goes.
One hypothesis I that heard for many years is that you couldn't get or keep students in Cullowhee because there were no bars. People who believe in this theory (and there are a number of them) seem to have derived it because of the Chaos Theory, because of the student behavior it predicts, but I'm really not sure of its origins. According to the bar theorists, students only attend college to drink--in bars. No bars, no students; more bars, more students. They posit a linear causal relationship between the number of ABC permits and the number of students. Well, there are still no bars in Cullowhee (but I have it on good authority that at least some our students have figured out how to drink even without bars) so this seems like a constant. I don't think that can be the answer.
Then there was the 'Fruitopia Theory." This one was my personal favorite. (By the way, I'm exaggerating these, but all of these have been told to me.) It seems to be a derivative of the field of nutrition, but since we know that students care about what they eat, it doesn't really have many people who are followers. According to this theory, we were serving the wrong brand of fruit drink in Dodson, and, as a result of that, students were leaving. (I should mention in the interest of full disclosure that there also was a corollary, a subgroup that was pushing what was called the "fowl hypothesis" regarding the brand of chicken sandwich served in the UC, but that one just wouldn't fly.) Well, we still have the same food contract, and the fruit drink hasn't changed, and the chicken sandwich is the same, so that can't be it.
Then there was the "Urban Theory." As a person who studied urban and community sociology, I really like this theory; it had some heft to it. According to the urban theory, we were simply recruiting too many people from cities. I'm not sure about the origins of this theory, but it does to be a derivative of Oswald Spangler's Decline of the West. (Perhaps this theory should be fashioned the "Decline of Western.") I think that this theory was based on Spangler's notions that urbanites had separated themselves from nature, and Western was simply too natural (you know, too much fresh air, too much open space, clean water, hiking trails)-so, heck, these urbanists just left. Some of the adherents to this school of thought also were empiricists, and they were deriving statistical significance measures and measures of correlation and I don't even want to go into the titles of them - they had things like Birkenstock in them. While they were working on the sampling distributions for these statistics, they discovered that people from Raleigh have among the highest retention rates in the university, so that can't be it.
Now, the last one (and this is actually my personal favorite - the one I like the best) was a "gravitational theory." This one may be a derivative of either Einstein's Theory of Relativity or Newtonian Gravitational Theory. I'm not quite sure because I'm not a physicist, but bear with me and I'll try to quote it. The hypothesis is that: "if a boyfriend or girlfriend of a student in Cullowhee attends another university, the relative gravitational pull of that body is greater than the relative gravitational pull of the body in Cullowhee; therefore the student in Cullowhee will be pulled into the orbit of the other university." Theorists of this school do not subscribe to the notion that the direction of attraction is affected by the student's mass since both large students and small students seem to have been attracted away. I tried to ask the US Geological Survey and also Oak Ridge National Labs to validate the notion of differential gravity, but they tell me that gravity is a constant, so that can't be it.
Well, if our rural location and the effects of gravity are constant, and our fruit drink of choice and our chicken sandwich are constants, and there still are no bars in Cullowhee, what the heck are the students doing here? What's changed? Why are better students choosing Western and why are more of them choosing to stay?
The answer is really quite simple. We've ruled out all of the other possible causes. Quite honestly, the cause is you. It is every faculty member, every staff member and administrator who raised expectations, focused on students' needs and interests, and went the extra mile to improve the University. It is our Residential Life staff who improved our housing operations. Our admissions staff who recruited hard. It is the marketing staff and faculty who contributed to getting the word out. But, in the end, what was most important, it was faculty members who are willing to raise academic standards.
I spent some time this summer looking at college guides. You might want to spend some time looking at them as well. They give you a pretty interesting picture. College guides tend to rate universities based on such things as graduation rates, admissions standards, percentages of students from the upper ranks of their high school classes, freshmen to sophomore retention rates, among other things. The emphasis is clearly on academic quality. Academic quality is the core of the university, and everything else is secondary. Now, to be sure, if we're running students out of housing, they'll leave. If there's nothing for them to do when they're out of class, it makes it difficult to keep them here. But, fundamentally, the core of the university is academic. Everything else is ephemeral to the core. It wasn't fruit drink; it wasn't bars; and it wasn't urbanity. It was really none of those things.
The fact is, what changed, what made a difference is that you were willing to raise academic standards. Each of you, individually, one at a time, raised the bar (and I'm not talking about drinking).
When I first came to Western I was told by a lot of people, Well, now that we're on this side of the tipping point, I think we can be honest with each other in public about what most of us knew in private. You don't improve the quality of a university by raising admissions standards. Admissions standards go up because the quality of the university increases, therefore you can attract better students. Higher admissions standards are the consequence of quality, not the cause of quality. What's happened here is that you've changed real standards, base standards, the poor educational standards of the institution. You were willing to create a nationally competitive, high quality education.
Some of you may have read the work of Joseph Campbell on the "power of myth." I am a particular fan of Campbell. There were a few disciplines on this campus that used to equate high academic standards with failing large numbers of students. The higher the percentage of failing students, the higher the academic standards, according to this theory. Well, you have dealt with that myth. You have made it increasingly clear that you understand that high percentages of students failing simply means no one's learning, that there is no connection between the faculty member and the student. Quality education brings students success, not failure. High standards excite people, engage them, and people move to try to achieve. High standards lead to pride and accomplishment, not failure.
Let me give you just a couple of examples. All of us were proud of our women's golf team for winning the Southern Conference Tournament and our women's basketball team for winning 21 games for the first time in their history. Every year, the National Golf Coaches Association names its all academic team. Eleven players from the Southern Conference were named to that team: five were from Western. Five. My friends, Western not only beat Furman on the golf course, we beat Furman in the classroom. That's a national standard. Our women's basketball a great season. But you know what was more important? They had two starters on the Arthur Ashe all academic team. That's a national standard and they had the highest grades among all of those national class student athletes. Academic quality leads to student success, not failure.
The other example I should mention this morning is the Department of Music since we're in their building. Robert Kehrberg and I exchanged a series of e-mails over the course of the summer regarding the recruitment and retention rates. Last year, 47 students declared majors in music with an average SAT of 1100. Robert attributed student quality to their high retention rate, which is running about 90 percent. After a closer look, however, we both agreed that the retention rate and the quality of those students was an outcome, not a cause. What has happened in music since 1995 is that very real academic standards have been raised and raised significantly. The quality of the program is very high. Teaching is very good, and the faculty care deeply about their students' learning. And the department has been willing to innovate and reach out. Sound recording, commercial music, reorganized basic programs, all play a part; we know that. But the key is that the faculty members in this department increasingly expect excellent teaching from each other based on student learning. Quality leads to student success, not failure.
You can see the impact of increased quality across the campus. Think for a minute about entire College of Education and Allied Professions. It's one of the best in the state. And, those of you in Arts and Sciences who care deeply about what happens to our students in teacher education - you're contributing significantly to that process. Because of your commitment, folks in education, to trying to improve both the quality and quantity of teachers, I have asked the legislature to put a new building on Western's campus to house the College of Education. (And, by the way, we came within one day of getting that building before the legislature adjourned.) We need your students to understand that we value them. And, we need to double the number of teachers that we put out. Quite honestly, we simply can't do that in the facility that you have.
As I get around the state, it is so much fun to tell people about what's going on at Western. The departments of Chemistry, our theater program, media, English, entrepreneurship, sales marketing, technology, health, nursing, engineering, criminal justice, environmental sciences, philosophy-the list just goes on and on of departments and programs that are raising standards, and reaching out, and doing the right thing by their students. We are seeing increases in the number of students choosing to register in your classes or to become majors. Remember what's happening here -- quality, true quality, brings student success, not failure.
You also should be aware that your reputation in the region and in the state continues to improve. And, equally important, the region continues to look to you for leadership in helping bring this state out of its recession. We are in the middle of the greatest higher education revolution to hit Western society since the Industrial Revolution. It is affecting us in very fundamental ways, and I suspect that it will continue change our situation, and those changes will be profound. To a large extent, you've shown that you can control those changes. We need to play for the future, and this is the year bring that to conclusion.
I want to take a little aside here and ask you to think for a minute about what's happened to your role in higher education since the 1930s. Prior to World War II, only about 20 or 25 percent of the people in the United States graduated from high school, and, of those, only about 20 percent went on to college. So what you're talking about when you look back there is that about four or five percent of the American population had experience with college. You simply didn't need college to be successful. If universities were "Ivory Towers" and if the faculty members were a bit tweedy and a maybe a little bit out of it, well, that was sort of endearing, because we were sort of on the side. But today, 67 percent of all high school graduates go on to tertiary education immediately after leaving high school. 67 percent. We are right in the center of society. We've moved from a manufacturing to a knowledge-based economy, but I don't think most of us have realized the implications of that move. People are looking to you to lead them to prosperity. It's no longer a case of people engaging in lifelong learning because they just want to. Learning is no longer just for learning's sake. It's now lifelong learning for instrumental reasons, and, I think, as an educator, that bothers me a lot. But, as a sociologist, I believe that's real. What happens to students at the university will affect everything that happens to them for the rest of their lives. Without tertiary education, their chances of having a decent income are limited. Without the nature of learning that happens in a university, that chances of them fully understanding the world in which they live is limited. We care about student learning both because of its role in creating prosperity and because of its role in creating a whole, complete human being.
Western is positioned not to forget the human for the sake of the economy, but, also not to forget our role in prosperity.
What you have been able to do, and, please understand, this is no mean feat, is to move this university toward being a true 21st century institution. You're educating the whole person; you're concerned both with spirit and career. The new world in which we and our students live requires both ethics and the ability to do; technical skill and the ability to think abstractly; science and art; making the deal and finding meaning; sustaining our environment while preserving our past and building a significant future. Well, folks, you are engaged in all of these things, and you are doing it very well. Quality brings success, not failure.
Now, we let's turn to the work of the year. First, this is the year for departmental level strategic planning. We need to hear from you in formal ways. How would you define your department or program's mission? What does your department need to grow enrollment? What are your plans for your programs? What resources do you have, and what do you need? Now, departmental plans have to fit within the institution's mission, and within the institution's strategic plan, but there is a great deal of flexibility as to how you can position your department. We will provide you key data regarding enrollment trends, and we'll probably also ask specific questions that are relevant to your department or to your program. Departmental plans are critical to our future. So use this process wisely.
You also should be aware that I see the college deans as the key to these plans. I am expecting that the deals will provide the leadership necessary to bring these plans to fruition. They will have to set priorities, and they will have to look realistically at what is possible. Not every plan can be the first priority, and not every request can be the top priority. They will need to bring a perspective on how to make the process work and how to address our need to grow, or need to increase quality, and our need to help this state return to prosperity.
Because of the importance of this time in the University's history, I plan to begin another round of meetings with academic departments. Over the next two years I will get to each department. I will ask the dean and the vice chancellor for academic affairs to join me in these meetings. I want to make sure that I understand your needs and concerns, and I want to be sure to answer your questions. Terry Welch will be calling to set up appointments with each department.
Please understand that my schedule in representing you off campus is what's causing this to have to happen over two years. Because Western is becoming increasing importance in the state, I am spending a lot more time in Raleigh and around the region. Also, because of the role of Congress and federal agencies in helping us move to our future, I need to spend significant time in Washington.
But, because we are in program level strategic planning, all of these meetings are going to be very important. Likewise, enrollment growth brings with it significant new resources in the form of faculty positions, and we need the strategic plan to help us understand where we should put faculty positions to help growth; where faculty positions being placed will help us increase quality as perceived by our key constituencies; and where putting faculty positions will help us return the state to prosperity. Because of enrollment growth we've already experienced and because the history in this state of funding enrollment growth even in a down economy, I have authorized Rick to release 12 tenure-track faculty positions to be searched this year. Now, these aren't positions that were held in reserve; these are positions we are releasing "on the come" in expectation that the legislature will fund them. This should allow us to meet the most critical needs in those departments that are most rapidly growing.
Second, I think that all of you are aware that Oak Winters has decided to retire. We will all miss Oak. He is a really good person. With Oak's retiring, it gives us an opportunity to think a little differently about distance education. I've asked the search firm that's assisting us in finding the right person to bring us a person who understands distance education marketing and distance education delivery. We're turning the development of programs in distance education to the departments and to the college deans in the graduate school. A couple of years ago, the state determined that it would fund distance education credit hours the same that it does resident credit hours for the purpose of generating faculty positions. That means that we now generate tenure track faculty based on distance education. It's no longer an "add on;" it's at the core of the institution, and the intent of the legislature was for us to teach distance education students as if they were the same as our students on campus. Therefore, we're going to allocate the resources to the academic departments, including tenure track faculty, based, in part, on the role you play in distance education. The Dean of Continuing Education will have a hearing for budget, exactly the same as other departments do, and then that dean will be allocated resources. All resources now are blended in the university for the purpose of serving our constituencies. We still have to report those numbers separately, but that's all we have to do, is report them separately. The money is all the same; all generate faculty positions, and all generate tenure track faculty positions.
Last year, the economy was bad (sounds familiar) and I took $25,000 out of our other programs and put it into a additional faculty travel fund. Now, there are many funds for faculty travel; this isn't the only money, but a number of you present papers at programs that are fairly expensive or far away. So we're going to keep the $25,000 travel fund and the same process we had last year for the faculty committee overseeing the disbursement of those funds to allow you, in this down economy, to have the opportunity to go to your professional meetings where you are presenting major papers. I am sorry that it is not more, but it is what we could afford this year.
Fourth, I am acutely aware that you did not receive merit raises this year. I can't change that. But, for the first time, we're growing beyond historical levels in enrollment. For the first time, we have a hope of resources that can make a difference in the quality of the lives of the faculty on this campus. Therefore, it's time we take an action to affect some of our longstanding faculty who have suffered salary compression, salary inequity, and where the market has changed, or where they came in in a time of bad market and the market has shifted. Therefore, what we're doing is that Chuck Wooten has agreed that we have the funds to set up a $300,000 base for us to be able to provide additional monies for people who are in departments where they are disadvantaged as a result of market changes or as a result of inequities. Now, there are a couple of things that you need to be aware of. One is, that we have a long history here of allowing courses to run that don't have sufficient enrollment to be justified. Most folks don't want to understand this because they like to teach those courses, but the reality is that that takes money out of your pocket. If we can't justify the course, then we shouldn't offer it, and the justification has been the Faculty Handbook long before I got here. It was put in when Chancellor Robinson was here. So, the way we're going to fund this is that we're not going to allow courses to run that don't meet the minimum standards in the Faculty Handbook for course size. That's the only way we can generate the money. What that means is, that we will allow courses to run only in small programs where there is a specific plan for growth that they're implementing. But, if they're not linked to other departments, if they're not trying to do what's right by you, then we're not going to allow those courses to run. We will try, as we grow, to take some of the faculty money from the growth lines and put it into this pool, because there's no way that $300,000 is going to solve all of our problems, but it is a good faith effort to start.
I have to ask your support on something else. The only way that I think that we can manage to have impact on the inequity issue, the market issue, and the issue of salary compaction is if we increase local tuition. I think you know that the first round of local tuition that we approved - that we distributed all of that money. There is no pool of tuition money out there. It's in your salaries. So the only way that we can get more money at a level that can actually make a difference is to charge an increased local tuition. It's going to take two to three years to get this straightened out. Therefore, I'm going to ask the Board of Governors to support a local tuition at Western. And I can tell you that I hate local tuition. I dislike it, I think it's wrong-headed, I think the people of the state, if they want a first class educational institution, should pay the freight. But in this economy, it can't happen. Now, I'm enough of a realist to know that, if we're going to keep our best faculty, we have to pay them. And the only way we're going to get the money to do that, is to put a local tuition on the table. As a result of that, I'm asking that the Faculty Senate endorse the proposition that we have a local tuition to allow us to solve these problems of inequity, compaction, and lack of market pay. President Broad raised the issue with the Board of Governors at the last Board of Governors meeting, and they are going to decide by November whether or not they will allow universities to have local tuition for these purposes, so it's important that we act quickly if we're going to have an impact. But remember when we take that kind of an action, we are making a contract with our students. We're asking those students to pay more for the privilege of working with you, and, therefore, it is incumbent upon all of us to assure that their experiences are national class. It's happening; you're doing it; but it is a contract and we need to understand that. We have to help this region grow, we have to help it prosper, we have to grow the university, and we have to add academic quality to our programs.
Now, in talking with Newt, I know he had planned to have a committee this year to study the issue of inequity, market pay and compaction. I'm glad he's doing that. He had already contacted Chuck Wooten to get some technical help, and, because this area is so involved with the law and with some university policy, I'm asking Newt to include Rich Kucharski and A.J. Grube as staff members to this committee. I think all of you know that there are huge federal court cases around this issue; it involves Title IX of the Civil Rights Act; it involves a whole array of issues under the Equal Pay Act, an array of federal law, as well as a number of state laws and Board of Governors policy. We don't want to run afoul of the law, and we certainly don't want to run afoul of UNC policy. I've also asked Newt if he would chair this committee himself because I think this is such an important issue; it has to be transparent, it has to be clear as to why we're doing it, and it has to address the most egregious situations.
For the recommendations of this committee to be implemented, they must follow UNC policy, and there are some things that I know some of us won't like. There is no such thing as seniority pay in the UNC system. There is a market differential by discipline and by speciality - that's just real. And we need to understand that our colleges are organizations of convenience, and, therefore, there is not really a college concept in terms of pay. The pay relates to specific specialities and specific disciplines and that's very real, and that is the North Carolina way of doing things. At the same time we know there are differentials by discipline in how far people are away from any reasonable standard of pay. And we will try, over the course of the next two to three years, bring that as close as we can to something that works for all of us.
I've spoken at length on this issue with UNC-Charlotte's Chancellor Jim Woodward. They've just completed a similar study. It met UNC system requirements, it met federal legal requirements, and we've asked them to provide us with a copy of their study so we can at least have a starting place. We will need to compare our salaries at Western with salaries of peer institutions (and Rick Collings did a very good job of selecting the peers) so that they are truly comparable and they are truly solid places, so that we know what we're looking at.
It's also important that you understand that, for EPA administrators, exactly the same thing is happening. They have not received raises, and it's affecting them the same way that it's affecting faculty. Therefore, I'm going to empanel a committee to look at EPA administrative salaries the same way. I will exclude myself from this review. I'm not part of it. But everybody else who's an EPA administrator is dealing with these same issues, and so we need to effect them as well, and I'm asking the Board of Governors to allow us to do that with the local tuition. We have many fine faculty, and all of you can name someone who left because of fringe benefit problems or salary problems. We all know those people. We want to try to put a stop to that to the extent that we can, locally. We need to get copies of the studies that have been done, and we need to do this in such a way that it passes muster.
I'm going to put Newt a little on the spot. There's nothing worse than this. I'm going to say this to you all at the same time. I'd like this study to be done quickly, and I'd like this study to be done well. I want to distribute this money around Christmas, if possible. I can't do that if the study takes all year. Therefore, it's important that we build on the work that's been done, that we have this in your pay packets. I can't change the past, I can't change the legislature, but I can try to make a difference because you're making a difference.
Friends, I had a lot of other things I was going to say, but I don't think I will. Just one more thing. After this meeting, we're having a celebration of what it means to be Western. All of you have done such great work, we're having a barbecue lunch, we're having a great local band. I hope you'll come. It's over at the Ramsey Center. Newt had asked me also to arrange tours, so we've got tours of the facilities that are open that are almost open. So please come and enjoy and have some comraderie. We've invited everybody from the maintenance people to the distinguished professors because it takes all of you to make the university work.
And, when you go, drive by the front of the Administration Building. That's where I always hang weird signs. And today you'll see one that's fairly weird. It says "Student interest compounded daily. 10 by 09; 50 by 06." Obviously self explanatory, right? If you keep doing what you're doing; if you will continue building this university the way you've been building it, continue to raise standards, continue to attend to students' learning, continue to care about those students, push them to achieve more than they ever thought they could, I believe we can be 10,000 students by 2009 and, by 2006, we can have an average SAT of 1050. And, yes, folks, that will put us above Greensboro and ECU - no competition there. 10 by 09; 50 by 06.
I want to end with a little poem that is my favorite. It was used also at graduation. Apparently it's more than one of our favorites. But I think it tell us all a bit about who you are and this is a paraphrase, you understand.
I shall be telling this with a sigh,
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and [you]-
[You] took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Aren't you proud to be a Catamount?
|
