State of the University Address
January 24-25, 2012
President Middleton’s Remarks
Thank you all for coming here today. I would like to take a moment and acknowledge members of the Board of Trustees who are here with us today.
This occasion is my annual opportunity to share with you my reflections on what we have accomplished over the past year, where we stand on critical issues at this moment in time, and where I envision the University going in the future.
Before I do any of that, however, I want to begin by thanking you from the bottom of my heart for your exceptional work, your loyal and extensive dedication to the University’s mission, and for continuing to work so hard through these difficult times.
I am constantly proud of the fact that you care so deeply for our students and the quality of their education. I know that there have been times recently when sustaining your confidence in our future has been more difficult than we all would always like it to be, and I fully appreciate that there have been occasions when many of you have wondered if we are on the right path both overall and on each of our two campuses independently.
But despite all of this, here we are together, intact as a community as we have always been, and I cannot adequately express to you my admiration and appreciation for you as you worked to assure that we have held together as a community as we tackle our challenges together.
Institutions go through difficult patches from time to time, but those with strong, underlying purposes stay focused through thick and thin and they always emerge stronger and more successful afterwards. We at Roosevelt must forever remain a community that is informed and even driven by our twin commitments to social justice and providing educational opportunity for all who come here, coupled with our tradition of providing high academic quality in all we do, both in our formal educational programs and in our numerous public programs and community outreach activities.
When I travel around the country and abroad talking with our alumni and meeting with other higher education leaders and our many friends in other walks of life, it is clear that these enduring values --- an explicit commitment to the principle that everybody is and has long been welcome here , that diversity is a great strength of the University, that high academic standards are a sine qua non to success --- these enduring values when taken together really do set us apart in American higher education.
Not only that, it is precisely because we are so explicit and so public in expressing these values that we have even greater potential for the future. Nobody I know of is so “out there” with their mission. Who else plasters their values on all the windows, like we do on the Auditorium Building or displays them outside, as we do, in the breezeway in Schaumburg?
It is quite natural, of course, that all this hard work on your part and your principled dedication to what the University stands for has embedded in it the possibility of becoming distressed by the seemingly slow progress that we sometimes make in our efforts to move into the future as a new, re-energized 21st century University. I share those feelings myself from time to time, and I wish on those occasions that there were short cuts to enable us to do this work and attain these goals more rapidly.
But there are none.
So I always come back to a core truth, and it is this: I believe in our future, and the reason I believe is because I have confidence in you and in your ability, individually and collectively, to do the honest, encompassing assessments of our current circumstances, to creatively imagine how to improve upon them, and then to implement effectively those creative imaginings. And I thank you for engendering in me and in each other that core truth.
Let us turn now to the present and the context in which we and all of higher education find ourselves these days.
In the press of daily life in the University, it is easy to fall into a habit of thinking that we alone face such challenges, or that ours are worse than those we read about in the press and hear about from our friends elsewhere.
While it may be small comfort that other institutions are also under considerable stress, it is useful to remind ourselves that the issues they face are pretty much the same ones that we encounter and then to discern how we can use their experiences to guide our actions where appropriate.
No institution in higher education is exempt these days, even the richest, the most famous, and the oldest. The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, and other sources of information continue to publish stories of universities that recognize that “business as usual” won’t work anymore for them. For example, consider just three headlines this month alone and the story lines that accompanied them:
This is to say nothing of the furloughs, reductions in force, and salary and benefit cuts that are unfortunately more common these days than at any time since the depth of the Great Depression.
I recognize, as I am sure you do, that it is human nature to focus primarily on the things that we are most worried about. But I also believe, as I hope you do, that we must also remember to celebrate the multitude of successes that take place daily and weekly and monthly, semester in and semester out, here at the University.
Today I want to take just a moment to share some of those successes more widely than they sometimes have been noted and place them into the strategic context in which the University’s future --- our future --- will unfold.
Then, after doing the best I can to include as many of those successes as possible in the brief time that we have here together, I will turn at the end to what I see are the four major strategic challenges of the University and where I believe our collective thinking and open discussions must be focused if we are to be purposeful about the creation of the kind of future both our students and all of us deserve to be part of.
In the campus forums last summer and in other venues this past fall, as I listened carefully to your discussions, it became apparent that I must do better in placing our current and proposed actions into a broader, strategic context. I heard people wonder why we are pursuing some of these initiatives while others wanted to know how they all fit together to form a coherent whole.
Historians know that there has long been in the history of the United States, a premium on innovation and reform. Sometimes --- in fact, often --- these come from new enterprises created in part because there’s no place for creative energy to find traction in the traditional economic, educational, and cultural organizations.
This was certainly true of Higher Education after WWII, when only 5% of Americans had a college degree in 1947. Higher education was transformed in the ensuing quarter of a century thanks initially to the GI bill. Then, in response to the threat posed by the rise of Soviet military power, many more institutions came into existence, and they educated vastly both larger numbers and different kinds of people, many of them the first in their families to earn a college degree.
It is useful to note, however, that at the outset the critics said this expansion would destroy quality, that it would undermine our country by taking people out of the work force during some of their most productive years, and that government aid to pay for college was blatant socialism.
We know today, of course, that they were so wrong. Because of these bold moves, we created the strongest system of higher education ever seen, which have led to 28% of adults with college degrees these days, and as the last century ended, American pre-eminence in this area was seemingly unchallengeable.
But, we also know that to remain competitive the 28% who have bachelor’s degrees must become 40% or higher by the end of the decade.
Roosevelt University was born and began to mature as an institution in this environment but it has never stood still, especially when facing serious challenges of survival. We borrowed money to buy a derelict old building in 1946 to enable future generations to have a permanent home.
We changed when the University of Illinois - Chicago opened in the 1960s and depleted Roosevelt’s undergraduate student body, putting a premium on adult education and the creation of new programs that met the interests of the commuting student downtown.
We again changed when we decided, amid controversy about its financing, to buy and renovate an office building in Schaumburg, which we now see still has great potential, even if that potential is vastly different than what it was perceived to be in 1995-96.
We took a huge and bold step when we decided to participate in the University Center of Chicago, putting a premium on educating traditional age undergraduates downtown.
Does anyone now think that any of these transformational decisions was easy? Or misguided?
In the 21st century, for the foreseeable future, ongoing changes at Roosevelt must be as dramatic and purposeful as those earlier ones were. And that is why we are striving today to put the University in a position to take advantage of emerging new opportunities while we also expand on those traditional practices that still make sense.
As the years go by in a dynamic new century, it is clear that generally the world is in great flux and that standing still is simply not an option, not just because it really isn’t possible anyway, but because even casual observation of our world today clearly shows that the status quo is the most risky place of all to be.
All forward-thinking universities are trying to engage an uncertain and unknowable future, though for many different reasons. Some are driven in part by financial distress in the states; others change in part because they know that the rapid emergence of high-quality universities in all regions of the world must be met head on as a matter of national interest. They know this trend will translate into economic challenges to American pre-eminence and ultimately into opportunities for millions of previously uneducated people in other countries to successfully challenge American hegemony over the course of the next century with corresponding declines in our standard of living. Unless and until more Americans than ever have degrees and certificates from our colleges and universities, the future of our country will be diminished.
As I consider this environment, it seems clear to me that there is no better institution than Roosevelt University, given our values, to provide some of those opportunities to students who will soon enough be the citizen leaders of Chicago and the nation.
The issue is not whether we should do this. It is, how will we do it in a 21st century way, taking advantage of having two distinct campuses, serving two separate locations and the people who live there.
How we do that work is worthy of great discussion and requires collective decision making. But what is certain is that American Higher Education generally, and Roosevelt in particular, must change if we hope to maintain our relevance to the larger purposes of our society. Whatever our future evolves to be, Roosevelt has no choice but to be different in many respects from what we have experienced and found helpful and useful in the past, or else we shall become irrelevant to the evolving world of the current century.
When I was thinking about these issues, I recalled a statement by the prominent public intellectual King Whitney, who is widely quoted as saying:
“Change has a considerable psychological impact on the human mind. To the fearful it is threatening because it means that things may get worse. To the hopeful it is encouraging because things may get better. To the confident it is inspiring because the challenge exists to make things better.” King Whitney Jr., date unknown.
So which is it going to be for us? Fear? Hope? Confidence? The Roosevelt way is to have confidence in our ability to shape change for the common good. And, we must change, or as General Eric Shinseki, retired Chief of Staff in the United States Army said in a different context, “If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.”
In recognition of the imperative of change, we have pursued over the last decade three major strategic initiatives. Consider them to be 21st century strategic investments, if you will, first, in people by recruiting a new, talented and expanded faculty; second, by the creation of new and exciting academic and support programs; and third, by developing new and renovated facilities worthy of the quality of those who teach and learn here.
We can already see that these three initiatives are beginning to pay off in enhanced quality and a growing reputation not only here in Chicago and Illinois but also in the country as a whole and, indeed, abroad.
Initially, my intent in the next portion of my remarks was to point out some of the successes that people in our community have had over the last year to provide evidence for the conclusions that I have just drawn. In order to gather this information, I reread the annual reports of the colleges for 2010/11. I also looked through the recent RU Broadcasts to pick up on accomplishments that we have experienced more recently.
In so doing, I found that I faced a dilemma. The reality is that there are so many wonderful things that students, faculty, and staff have accomplished in the past year, both individually and in combination, that it’s impossible to give due credit individually to each of you in this venue.
So at the risk of appearing to privilege some over others that could just as easily have been noted here today, I hope you will permit me to identify just a few that to me reflect our community values of inclusiveness and high academic and artistic quality at work.
I’m going to focus on student examples because I believe student successes at these very high levels of attainment are essentially impossible without the strong under-pinnings of a very high quality academic and creative environment at the University --- a high quality that is created, sustained, and enhanced by faculty, staff, and administrators who continue to do exceptional things in a stressful environment.
I have selected a handful of examples of student successes that build upon the foundation that we have provided here.
You can see from just these few examples that Roosevelt is a place of exciting, dynamic, and purposeful mission-driven accomplishments that rival the successes commonly attained at the most distinguished universities in the country, and are only aspired to by so many other institutions. We should all take great pride in these students because their accomplishments were made possible by learning and collaborating with distinguished faculty, while being supported by administrative folks in offices all over the campuses.
If students are succeeding, you know very well that we are delivering on our promise to prepare our graduates to go forth from Roosevelt and change the world in large and in small ways.
But, to sustain and expand on these achievements, we cannot stand still; we must continue to evolve, and to do that successfully we must tackle four strategic challenges for the 21st century. They are:
Today, I will briefly outline what each is about at its core; then, as the semester unfolds in a series of public communications. I will delve deeper into these challenges and provide more detail with regard to their broader, strategic context.
Enrollment Growth: Students have choices and these days they are dearly seeking value for their investment in their education. Successful universities will provide that value in unambiguous and purposeful ways so that enrollment of new students grows annually and so that upon matriculation students find that their expectations have been met and they elect to persist to graduation.
No program, no course, no service is exempt in the current century from an obligation to deliver on the promise and values of the University as a whole. And so, how we do that work in mutually supportive and mutually accountable ways must be an ongoing discussion and we must engage in continuous evaluation of all we do as our future unfolds.
I know that everyone is taking seriously and working smartly on our enrollment challenges. I am deeply appreciative of all those endeavors, many of them taking place in new territory for us.
I want especially to single out the enrollment possibilities in adult, experiential, and continuing education. This is historically an important sector for Roosevelt University, and it must return to its prior prominence so that it can be a key component of our future success.
To achieve that goal we must once again be an institution of choice for this market, but we can only do that if we act with purpose and self-confidence. Recent enrollment trends indicate that we are poised to re-capture market share if we act purposefully, intelligently and quickly.
The effort to be a university of choice for the adult market historically has been at the unit level at Roosevelt and we have a significant and strong history and good grounding in teaching and serving adult students in four of our six colleges.
The consequence of this fragmentation of effort, however, is that our endeavors have become too diffuse for us to compete effectively in this market the way it is currently being shaped by other institutions and by public policy. In the new world order of adult and experiential learning in the 21st century, the strategic imperative is that we either direct that effort at the University level or step aside and let others continue to pick apart our market share.
Therefore, I am announcing today the appointment of a Blue Ribbon Task Force composed of faculty members and administrators from across the University and chaired by Provost Knerr. I will charge them to develop a unified, university-wide strategy and operational plan that we will begin to implement no later than the end of the spring semester of 2012 in order to take advantage of the considerable opportunities that are already emerging in this market and position us to act rapidly to take advantage of those that will emerge in the future.
Campus Differentiation: The University as a whole can prosper best only when each campus, both independently as well as in symbiotic ways, prospers. Put another way, as one of our Trustees publicly stated in Schaumburg last week, Roosevelt will be successful only if the Chicago Campus and the Schaumburg Campus are both successful.
We can no longer prosper overall through a series of alternative successes like those we experienced in the past where one campus largely supported the whole University while the other struggled.
To do that work in each place is going to require all the energy, good thinking, creative and imaginative problem solving that we can muster. This work must be deeply --- indeed, it can only be --- focused at the Campus level. The challenges at each Campus are different, though at times they may not appear to be so; they deserve the full and undivided attention of people in each location if they are to be successfully addressed.
I am aware of the fact that this will mean that we must undertake a major cultural change and that for some that change will be scary to contemplate. But we all know that while we have been trying to address these issues collectively as a whole, we are having less than optimal results, in part, as a consequence of following that wholistic strategy. So there will be a premium on campus differentiation without which our overall success will be suboptimal.
How this will work out should be the subject of wide deliberation. But one creative example of this that is already out there is the College of Arts & Sciences plan for establishing a division of Professional Arts and Sciences on the Schaumburg Campus. I’m certain that you will create others.
Revenue Sources Enhancement: We need to increase all revenue streams, not just tuition revenue, as important as that is as a first priority. In higher education, there are only four sources of money. These are, in descending order of total dollars:
We can ill-afford to ignore any of these revenue sources, and the people who generate each of them need to think deeply about how to enhance them and then act purposefully to do so. No part of the University is exempt from contributing to the growth of at least one revenue stream.
Workforce Modernization: Finally, and maybe most challenging, we need to modernize our workforce. By this, I mean that we must recognize first that the work of the 21st century is clearly more dependent on the use of technology and less dependent on the traditional skills that we have always valued.
As a learning community, we need to evolve so that the work of the University in all of its divisions takes advantage both of the new technologies and the new types of organizational thinking about the evolving workplace in higher education so that we are able both to hire forward-thinking employees for new types of work and to promote into higher levels of responsibility those of you who are looking to play more responsible roles here at the University.
In addition, there is coming, sooner rather than later, a major demographic shift in higher education as the baby boomers retire. It will become increasingly difficult to hire talented individuals to succeed them. We must think about our human resources in strategic and developmental ways, and we must become less reliant on the national and regional job markets for recruiting talent, especially in leadership positions at all levels if we are to attain our overarching goals.
As a first priority, in order to be successful in these endeavors and as an integral part of these changes, we must provide higher levels of compensation based upon the meritorious performance of those individuals who contribute successfully to the attainment of our broader purposes, and we must do so as soon as we begin to generate the revenues necessary for budget growth.
Permit me to conclude by once again thanking you for being here today and to thank you especially for your dedication and commitment to the University. I know that you all share my belief in the critical importance of our mission, in its twin aspects of inclusiveness and high quality, and I am thoroughly confident that we have the collective ability, even in these unprecedented times of extreme difficulty for our county and our state, to emerge in the future where we have been heading over the recent past, and establish our University both as a core institution for the City of Chicago and as a core institution for the suburban communities in Schaumburg, Arlington Heights, Buffalo Grove, and surrounding areas.
I am confident that we will succeed, and I promise you both to do everything in my power to support you in your work to bring about these future successes and to advocate strenuously in every forum in behalf of those endeavors.
Thank you.
Chuck Middleton
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