Convocation Address
President Charles Middleton

September 2, 2003

Thank you, Jim (Mitchell). I would like everyone to know how fortunate we are at Roosevelt University to have a board chairman who understands and supports our mission. Jim spends countless hours working on Roosevelt University activities. I deeply appreciate his wise counsel and never-ending enthusiasm.

I would also like to thank and recognize the other Roosevelt University trustees who took time away from their busy schedules to be with us today. Would the following trustees please rise when I call your name.

Mel Katten
Phil Siegel
Pam Kimmel
Bruce Crown
Rueben Hedlund
Barry Carroll
Larry Howe
Vicky McKinley
George Lofton
John Newman
Jim Stone
David Hamilton
Dwight Neely, Student Trustee
Brian Cook, Student Trustee

I thank all of you for your dedication to the University and I want to say publicly how much I appreciate my own interactions with each of you as we work to strengthen Roosevelt University for the future.

I also want to thank everyone else for being here this morning – our students, our faculty and our staff. I don’t know about you, but I am always energized at the beginning of a new academic year. I hope you are as excited and as optimistic as I am about our prospects for the future.

I see these remarks as my opportunity to share with you just a few of my thoughts about that future. We had a wonderful turnout and lively discussions at our Faculty Conference on August 22. This followed an earlier retreat for members of the Division of Enrollment and Student Services in June where we explored ways to develop the seven key goals of our new strategic plan.

I want to personally express my gratitude to the 153 faculty members who attended the August Conference. It’s almost unheard of to have two-thirds of the full-time faculty attend an event of this type. Without this participation, we cannot achieve all of our dreams. With it, since we are limited only by our lack of imagination, I’m not worried about our future!

In the months and years ahead, we will be working together on the topics that were discussed in the Conference break-out groups – topics such as enhanced levels of faculty support, class size, student preparedness, work-load, academic reputation, the number of full-time faculty, recruitment selectivity, and sustaining social justice. Although they are not novel issues, as all major universities across the country are addressing them, nevertheless how we deal with them is crucial to our long-term success.

In the spirit of inclusiveness, we will be holding another retreat in early October for all full-time staff members in Business and Finance, Institutional Advancement and Academic Affairs, including clerical staff, who have not yet had an opportunity to participate in these discussions.

For those of you who didn’t attend the Faculty Conference, allow me to share an observation from Pedro de Jesus, a 1996 Roosevelt graduate who went on to receive a law degree from Northwestern University, and who is now an attorney with an international law firm in Chicago. Pedro said, “Roosevelt is not just a good university, it’s a great university -- under construction.” I couldn’t have said it better.

We already have evidence that these efforts are paying off. Here are a few examples:

In June, the Walter E. Heller College of Business Administration became an officially accredited member of the Association of Collegiate Business Schools and Programs. This is a major accomplishment for our business college, and I salute the hard work and dedicated service of the entire faculty and staff, with special thanks for a job well done to Tom Head and Vinton Thompson.

Dean Patzer, you are joining the Heller College at a most opportune time, and I know that you will build upon this success.

This July, our extremely talented theatre students presented Cymbeline at the prestigious Colorado Shakespeare Festival. We were the first university outside Colorado ever invited to perform at the Festival. Joel Fink and his 10-member cast presented one of Shakespeare’s more difficult plays clearly and creatively, and they made the entire University look great. Not surprisingly, the play received stellar reviews. Congratulations once again, Joel.

In August, we used our new Request Registration procedure and the information students gave us in it to offer more Spanish classes in Schaumburg; to add more intensive and accelerated courses; and to offer more Saturday courses, more on-line courses and more day classes than were in the original schedule.

Perhaps these changes contributed to our strong fall enrollments. As of this morning, our enrollments for the fall 2003 semester are higher than they were last year. We currently have 6,675 enrolled students taking a total of 54,600 credit hours. Last year our totals at this time were 6,605 students taking 53,090 credit hours. An increase of 2.9% in credit hours.

Finally over the summer we completed the new Student Success Center located in the lobby of the Auditorium Building. For the first time ever, as far as we know, academic advising, registration, financial aid and student advocacy are available in one convenient location.

No more run arounds!

While our future is bright, I would be remiss if I told you that it is secure. We have work to do to earn that security.

Fortunately, the new Strategic Plan for the University focuses on two key factors -- student success and high academic quality. The plan contains seven major goals and more than 60 objectives that will guide our operations for the next five to 10 years. I owe a debt of gratitude to all of you -- the hundreds of faculty, students, staff, trustees, alumni, and community leaders -- who sent in suggestions or participated in town meetings, focus groups and planning sessions. I believe we have an outstanding document, one that clearly outlines what Roosevelt University intends to do in the future.

The Strategic Plan is an organic document. As I promised the Board and you, we will revisit it yearly and modify it as necessary. In addition, the Strategic Plan will be strengthened by separate plans currently being developed for the areas of academics, finance, marketing, institutional advancement, technology and public relations.

As we discussed at the Faculty Conference on August 22, we are now ready to begin the second phase of the strategic planning process. You could call this the implementation phase, but in reality it must be selected implementation. The Plan is way too comprehensive to accomplish in a single year. We will need to set priorities and determine which objectives we will work on during the 2003-2004 academic year.

Naturally, I have a few recommendations! The time has come to implement a systematic academic program review process. I know that many academic programs have been assessed during the past few years. However, I have asked the Provost to work with the faculty to devise a process to assure that all our programs are measured against nationally benchmarked criteria. The key characteristics of any successful plan are that it is on going, periodic, nationally benchmarked, developmental, and faculty driven. Once we have agreed on how to proceed, we will commence with the first round of reviews. We will also use this process to prepare us for the renewal of our University-wide accreditation visit in 2005-2006.

I also believe we must develop clear and well-articulated expectations for promotion and tenure in all ranks. What should the career track of a Roosevelt faculty member look like? What do we expect from new faculty members in regard to teaching, scholarship or creative work and service? And, what model should we use for a person who is on a non-tenure track appointment? At the same time, let’s determine performance expectations for faculty and staff so that all Roosevelt University employees can be held accountable and each can be rewarded proportionally for their contributions to the University.

Another objective in the Strategic Plan that we must address this year is how to make social justice integral to the Roosevelt experience both in and out of the classroom.

We are already off to a good start. This fall the School of Policy Studies will offer Introduction to Social Justice, the first course toward an interdisciplinary major in Social Justice.

We also have begun a long-term relationship with the residents of Wentworth Gardens, a Chicago Housing Authority complex near U.S. Cellular Field. During the next several years, Roosevelt employees and students will be working with children, young mothers and senior citizens at Wentworth Gardens to build community there.

Another new initiative at Roosevelt is JumpStart, which will enable our Work-Study students to tutor Chicago preschool children struggling in Head Start and other early childhood programs.

But there is much more that can and should be done. At a minimum, all Roosevelt graduates ought be exposed to interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching focused on social justice issues.

I expect all of us to follow through on our commitment to make Roosevelt a student-centered University, a University where the success of our students is paramount. We must strengthen academic support services including internships, clubs and community service, and we must promote meaningful student-faculty interaction in and out of the classroom. These are areas that need attention at Roosevelt, according to findings from our students as reported in the 2002 National Survey of Student Engagement, and we must address them.

I also believe all of us must be more responsive to the personal needs of our students. One way we will be doing that is by having two Commencement ceremonies each fall and spring. This will allow students to invite as many people as they like to their graduation.

The importance of these examples was brought home to me with the publication of the widely used U.S. News and World Report survey last week. Our rankings this year improved from the fourth to the third tier. That is extremely welcome news and an indicator that we have begun to make progress in a number of key areas in our Strategic Plan, including graduation rates, ACT scores, acceptance rates and alumni giving.

While I personally am not overly impressed with this way of measuring “excellence,” I am a realist, and I know that people do pay attention to these rankings.

Our goal should be for Roosevelt to be in the second tier by the end of the decade. That’s a tall order, but one that I think is quite feasible provided every member of this community accepts his or her personal responsibility for working to attain these results.

Those of us in the academy are well aware that higher education is being put under an increasingly bright spotlight. From the federal government to individual donors to potential students, people are asking tough questions about quality, return on investment and never ending tuition increases. In many ways, I sympathize with their concerns.

When you compare the Higher Education Price Index to the Consumer Price Index, the Education Index is at least a half a percentage point higher every year. Universities across the country are being asked to do more with less, and some small private colleges are struggling to survive. Thanks to careful financial stewardship by our Board, we at Roosevelt are in a much better boat than many colleges and universities, but the financial waters are still very choppy.

We may be a private university, but we operate as a public trust, and this means we must work to protect that trust for the next generation even as we meet the needs of the current students.

Therefore, at the same time we are enhancing academic quality, we must pursue new revenue sources and carefully monitor expenses, just as we did last year when, thanks to your cooperation, expenses came in below the reduction we had in revenues.

To increase revenues, we must seriously consider differential tuition pricing, seek more sponsored research opportunities for the faculty, and aggressively pursue new donors, largely but not exclusively from our alumni and other individuals.

One way we will reduce expenses this year is by having a different type of holiday party. Instead of a large costly affair at a hotel, I will be hosting open houses during the workday at both campuses so that everyone will be able to visit with their friends and colleagues. A broad-based committee will be organized soon to begin planning these events.

Before we end, allow me to share a final story with you. In July, I attended a memorial service for Robert Ahrens. I don’t imagine many of you knew Mr. Ahrens, but he was one of our pioneers. He attended Roosevelt in the late 1940s and was a personal friend of Harold Washington, behind whom he was standing in line to register when they both arrived here for the first time. After graduation, Mr. Ahrens stayed at Roosevelt, and was the founding director of both our Alumni Association and the Division of Continuing Education and Extension, the predecessor of the Evelyn T. Stone University College. When he left Roosevelt in 1965, Bob joined the City of Chicago, where for more than two decades, he created and then headed up the city’s impressive pioneering programs in services to adult citizens.

Mr. Ahrens lived a productive and a useful life, and, as his family was eager to tell me, he loved this University. Just today, John Allerson informed me that Mr. Ahrens left $400,000 in his will for Roosevelt. At his memorial, I kept thinking about the impact that Roosevelt had then and continues to have on people like him. Many of our graduates and our programs have a reputation for excellence that extends throughout the city, across the country and around the world. I think that sometimes it is easy to forget the importance of our University in the lives of so many people, and to underestimate the power and traditions of the Roosevelt name. Bob Ahrens never forgot; neither shall we.

Thank you very much for listening. I look forward to working with each and every one of you as we continue to enhance academic quality and ensure the success of all who come here. May you have a rewarding and productive year.