Convocation Address
President Charles Middleton

September 6, 2005

Thank you, Jim, and good morning everyone.

Thank you all for coming out this morning, and a special welcome to the new students, new faculty, and new staff who are here today. I hope that everyone had a productive summer and that you have each returned for the start of this academic year refreshed and eager to start our 61st year as a community of scholars, creative artists, and professionals in all aspects of university life.

Before I begin my comments on the issues that shape and define our future as we build upon our past, let me bring you up to date on our efforts to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina.

Nobody can fully appreciate the horror and scope of the destruction along the whole south Gulf coastline, not just in New Orleans, where the media have focused most of their attention. This is a catastrophic situation that will disrupt the lives of those who live in the region for a long period of time. It has already affected everyone else in the country in both direct and indirect ways including all of us here today.

We at Roosevelt University have a special obligation, given our deep, community-wide commitment to social justice and to the well-being of our fellow citizens; to reach out in every way possible to those most seriously affected by the ravages of hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Over the next few weeks I am sure that we will be called upon to provide assistance and succor in many ways and I know that this community will embrace those opportunities as it has in the past on other tragic occasions.

We have identified eight students from the area, all but one enrolled in the Chicago College of Performing Arts. Tanya Woltmann has contacted five of them as well as two parents who are currently in the New Orleans area. We have assured the parents that we will do whatever is necessary for their children so that they can be successful and safe here. Tanya will continue to try and reach the other three students, all of whom are continuing students who may not even be back in Chicago yet.

Walter O’Neill is checking the financial status of all of these students in light of the tragedy back at their homes and if they are high need in light of the hurricane we will offer assistance with books and basic living expenses for now.

We have also received inquiries from 17 prospective students, approximately two thirds of whom are likely to seek admission. We will wave the application fee for these students and give them an additional week to enroll.

In addition, we have made it possible for our alumni in the region to call us on an 800 number and as soon as the mail service on the Gulf Coast is restored we will be contacting them to see if there is any way that we can assist them.

We have also contacted the President of Dillard University, one of the historic black colleges and universities and a sister private institution to Roosevelt, to offer help to their students, faculty and staff who have been displaced by the hurricane.

There will be a town meeting on each campus Monday, September 12, from 4 to 6 p.m. in Chicago and from 5:00 to 6:30 p.m. in Schaumburg. These will enable us as a community to continue to find ways to help those who are hurricane victims. It’s going to take a very long time for life to return to normal on the Gulf Coast, and so we have to be prepared to reach out and offer help for as long as it might be needed.

Turning now to our work this year, I thought that it might be useful to proceed today by discussing four large, strategic areas of opportunity and challenge for us. With your indulgence I propose to review each in turn briefly, discussing the progress we have made and then to move to some of the issues that we will face during this coming year and beyond.

These four overarching strategic areas move us beyond the details of our Strategic Plan, which are embedded in each of them in various ways. The four are:

1. Roosevelt’s Reputation for Academic Quality and Student Success;
2. Facilities;
3. Non-tuition Revenue Growth; and
4. Enrollment

Today I want to focus my comments largely on enrollment, so in the interest of time, I will touch only briefly on the other three items. A fuller version of the text of this address will be available on the Web tomorrow so that you can read about these issues in greater detail.

Roosevelt’s Reputation for Academic Quality and Student Success:

Our primary strategic goals are to enhance the academic quality and reputation of the University and to assure student success. It is clear that we are on the right path in both endeavors.

Turning first to academic quality and reputation, one of the best, though flawed ways to assess how we are doing is to use the annual U.S. News and World Report college rankings. In our first year together (fall 2002), Roosevelt was placed in the fourth tier. In 2003 the good news was that we had moved up, placing in the bottom of the third tier, which was not an easy thing to do. This year’s rankings, released earlier this month, show that Roosevelt has moved farther up in the third tier rankings.

While I am not a fan of these or for that matter any higher education rankings, as you know, I am a realist, and I know that people do pay attention to them. I see this upward movement as but one indicator both that we are making positive changes here on the variables that matter most to us and that people outside the University are taking notice.

• In peer assessment of academic reputation we went from being ranked 68th to 56th;
• In Financial Resources, from 32nd to 8th (showing how really tough the financial challenges are everywhere these days); and
• In Alumni Giving, from 82nd to 65th.

Overall, we went from being ranked 109th to 92nd. This is clearly a positive step along the path of increasing the visibility and reputation of Roosevelt.

More significant to our quality, I think, is that each year we welcome new colleagues who have been educated at the highest level of accomplishment at the country’s most prestigious graduate schools.

These new colleagues, nearly all of whom have the terminal degree in their discipline, enhance the quality and the promise of an already distinguished faculty.

What I admire most about the Roosevelt faculty is that you seek to achieve an optimal balance among teaching, creative and scholarly work, and service. In any one year, some faculty members will excel in one area, while others attain their best year in another. Over a career, each individual should have moments where every aspect of their professional accomplishment excels; that is, no faculty member at a university ought to be mono-dimensional over long periods of time. It is the balance of all three areas that an institution like ours must sustain. Indeed, it is only through the efforts of our faculty that we can attain national recognition for high quality academic programs. Ultimately it is this work that allows us to teach and inspire our students, to guide their intellectual growth, and to prepare them better to be knowledgeable and just citizens.

Academic quality is only partially determined by individual accomplishment. It also depends on collective achievement. Last year, under the leadership of Provost Reid, the faculty and deans conducted an academic environmental scan in every college. This required a great deal of work and effort, but it was worthwhile because we were able to streamline many of our programs and better determine where our strengths and challenges lie. The College of Arts and Sciences was reorganized from six schools to ten departments in order to focus the effort on program enhancement in the future, and 12 low-enrolled degree programs were abolished.

The scan has also enabled us to launch this year a six-year program review schedule designed for a more in-depth assessment of each degree program so that we can invest wisely in program enhancement in the future. This year several departments and programs, at least one in each college, will implement this review.

Qualitative changes have also resulted from ideas generated in the Annual Faculty Forum. For instance, we created, at the faculty’s request, a new Center for Teaching and Learning. Housed in the Provost’s Office and directed by Karen Gersten, this Center will enable faculty members to develop new ideas on pedagogy and student learning in our classes.

Also as a result of faculty and administrative staff leadership a cross-divisional Service-Learning Task Force met all year. Based on their work and that of others on campus the McCormick Tribune Foundation awarded the University $500,000 to endow the project. The first three grants from these funds have been awarded this fall.

Technology enhancements also contribute to enhanced academic quality. Our Department of Information Technology, or our DoIT Team, has addressed many issues that have needed attention. These efforts were made possible largely, though not exclusively by the fact that we brought the technology operation “in house.”

The Gage Building and the Schaumburg campus now each have three classrooms with data projectors and speakers that are ready for faculty to just plug in their laptop computers, while Ethernet connections have been installed in five of the 14 classrooms that are not yet wired.

If they use the technology for teaching, faculty who are scheduled to have their computers replaced now have the option of receiving a laptop computer instead of a desktop computer.

RU Online has now been integrated with the Banner system so that all course sections now have an RU Online account. Students are now automatically entered into their courses on the RU Online system.

In the past year, 689 desktop computers have been installed in labs, classrooms and offices as part of the computer refreshment cycle.

The Educational Technology Resource Center (ETRC) has implemented a 24-hour student computer lab in the Herman Crown Center.

And, my personal favorite: there are no more computers running on Windows 95!

All of this work, and much more that I do not have time to relate here, leaves us in good shape for our upcoming accreditation site visit. I would be remiss not to take this opportunity to thank those who have worked so tirelessly to prepare for it. In April 2006, a team of site visitors from the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association will be on campus for three days meeting with students, faculty, and administrators and evaluating the University in the light of five criteria: its mission, resources, commitment to teaching and learning, support for scholarship, and engagement in community and civic life. Prior to the team’s visit, they will receive the University’s Self-Study to see how we evaluate ourselves along these dimensions.

A complete draft of the Self-Study will be on the University’s website by the end of September. The Steering Committee will then hold an open forum on each campus, and members of the Committee will visit various councils and assemblies seeking feedback on the Self-Study.

I want the Self-Study to reflect, to the greatest extent possible, the analysis of the entire University community. So, I urge all of you to read the draft carefully and direct your comments to the Steering Committee through the chairperson, Louise Love.

The story of enhanced student success also continues to be good. Student satisfaction with all aspects of their university experience is a key to student success, and it leads as well to higher retention rates which are an important ingredient in our overall enrollment planning. In short, assuring student success is everyone’s responsibility.

Our attention to the needs of our students is having the intended consequences. For starters, findings from the Noel-Levitz Student Satisfaction Inventory, a national study in which 400 institutions annually participate, found overall satisfaction consistently rising at Roosevelt. Using the year 2000 as a baseline, satisfaction improved in each of the 12 categories of questions and, remarkably, in 87 of the survey's 89 items. While satisfaction improved across the board, in several key areas we still lag behind our peer institutions and so we will be discussing ways to improve our performance in the future.

Student satisfaction can also be seen in retention and graduation rates. The preliminary data for this fall shows that the first year retention rate of full-time freshmen is up from 71.0% for the ’03 cohort who returned last fall to 73.0% for the ’04 cohort who are currently registered for this fall. Three years ago, the retention rate for the full-time freshmen was just 51.9%. Parenthetically, the national first year retention average for full-time freshmen is 75%.

Total enrollment for all continuing students – a wider measure of retention -- also shows improvement. The number of continuing students is up from 4,860 to 5,097, an increase of 4.9% this year compared to last.

Our residence halls are also at their largest capacity to date with 481 students living in our facilities. We have 313 residents in the University Center, which is at 100% of capacity, and in the Herman Crown Center we have 151 Roosevelt students or 77% of our goal. We also have a number of non-RU students coming into the Herman Crown Center who are not included in the above numbers. In the end, we should have over 220 residents in the Herman Crown Center, compared with about 115 total last year.

The final measure of student success is in graduation rates. From 2002/03 to 2003/04 the six-year graduation rate for full-time freshmen increased from 25% to 37%; and the total number of degrees and certificates awarded, an outcomes measure from a broader range of students, has increased annually in each of the last four academic years, going from 1,761 (2000-01) to 2,073 (2003/04).

What contributes to these successes? Overall I’d say that our being clear about our objective conveys to our students that their success is paramount here. That message is delivered in hundreds of individual ways daily and it is hard to capture all of those details. But there are examples of how we have done things together in order to enhance our student satisfaction, beginning with changes in the physical environment.

We’ve made physical improvements on both campuses in response to our collective desire to make our campus environments ever more student-friendly. Our Student Success Center in the Michigan Avenue Lobby centralized our admission, registration, and advising processes for our students, and simplified their lives -- and ours. On average, about 80 students a day visit the Center. Over the course of a year, this translates into over 20,000 interactions with students. Let’s think about that -- that’s potentially 20,000 students who can now come directly to the Student Success Center, secure the assistance and advice of the able staff who work there, and then get on with pursuing their education instead of spending time wandering around trying to find the admissions, registration or advising offices.

Right above the Michigan Lobby in the renovated Fainman Lounge you will find students hanging out, studying, and working at the new kiosks. I look forward to receiving the recommendations of the committee that is designing ways to replicate this welcoming environment in the Michigan Lobby.

And what about improvements in Schaumburg? The two vending machine lounges on the Schaumburg campus were renovated to create a warmer, more comfortable atmosphere for students, faculty and staff. Once described by an undergraduate student as ‘reminiscent of a hospital’, one wall in each lounge has been repainted and they were furnished with brightly upholstered couches and chairs, low tables and lamps, all selected by students serving on the Schaumburg Student Alliance Space Improvements committee.

The dining center on the Schaumburg Campus has reopened this fall as a café in a space that has been redesigned to provide the ambience of a coffeehouse, with a menu to match.

All these changes are designed to make the Schaumburg campus a more welcoming place for students and others.

Facilities:

High-quality instruction and first-rate scholarly/creative work can be done best in modernized facilities. Some of our facilities are truly excellent, and our renovations continue to chip away at the inadequacy of others. For instance, in addition to the computer changes I have already noted, this fall the Department of Counseling and Human Services and Psychology will have a new state-of-the-art interview lab, classroom and resource center for simulated interviews in Auditorium 411.

Overall, however, our present space remains in too many places inadequate as a function both of our current quality and our aspirations to meet the academic needs of the future. This is especially, but not exclusively, true in the Auditorium Building.

Last week, therefore, we began a thorough and comprehensive review of all facilities, including the residence halls, so that we can think boldly and imaginatively about how our academic initiatives can be undertaken in space that is more suitable.

The underlying assumption bears stating here: given our limited financial resources, in order to succeed we must focus these discussions exclusively on our current campuses in Schaumburg and Chicago.

Among other things, we need:

• Larger classrooms;
• More office space for faculty;
• More technology in all of our classrooms;
• Teaching and research labs for our scientists and their students;
• A moderately sized theatre so that our talented students can perform on campus; and
• A proper student union along with better recreation facilities, certainly in Chicago and perhaps in Schaumburg as well.

These needs present big challenges, but the imperative to address them is clear.
To deliver on quality and reputation, to generate enrollments and enhanced external funding, we need to do more than incremental work on our current space if students and faculty are to have the best facilities to support the highest quality work of which you are capable.

Non-Tuition Revenue Growth:

Roosevelt University, like all institutions public and private, has four main sources of revenue. In ascending order of importance they are, or ought to be:

a. Sales of Services (Residence Halls, Bookstores, Concerts etc.).
b. Private Giving;
c. Sponsored Research, Contracts and Grants; and
d. Tuition and Fees.

What are we trying to accomplish in the first three? First, to assure that our residence halls are full so that they do not provide a drag on the overall budget. The Chicago College of Performing Arts is at or near capacity, so this means that in Chicago we need to be aggressive in recruiting full time, traditional age undergraduates, especially in Arts and Sciences and Business.

Next in importance is private giving from individuals, corporations and foundations. In order to achieve the goals we have set for ourselves we must continue to develop this area. Attaining the margin of excellence over our competitors and in our strongest programs will depend largely on success here. High ambitions in focused areas of excellence will require higher levels of funding for those areas than tuition revenues can provide.

I am aware that there is impatience with our progress in this area. So let me be clear about the challenges. Bear in mind that we benefit from the work of our predecessors just as our successors will benefit from ours. This is as it always is in universities. So we have a dual challenge. First to raise greater sums of money annually, and second to build capacity for the future, both short-term and long-range. This requires both hard work and a degree of patience. I’m sure that our progress will not be linear, but I am equally certain that we will see improvements over our average performance over the past ten years in every area of endeavor.

Last fiscal year, which ended just a week ago, was a very successful one in private philanthropy. A lot of this money came in as a result of work done years or even decades ago, such as the bequests that we received which are the result of connections and student satisfaction generated by our predecessors.

That said much of our success this year has to do with organizational changes made in the Office of Institutional Advancement that are beginning to pay off. I am pleased to offer my congratulations and thanks for hard and imaginative work to the Institutional Advancement Team for surpassing so many of their annual goals.

The goal for cash raised this year was $5,000,000. This was an ambitious target given the fact that in 2003/04 the actual figure was $3,811,195 -- yet we did it! The total cash raised for 2004/05 was $5,256,689. That is an increase of roughly 37% over the previous year.

With our restructured phone-a-thon office fully staffed with our own students and operational this year, we set the largest goal ever for the Annual Fund: $805,000. I’m pleased to report that the Institutional Advancement Team surpassed this goal, raising $877,228, exceeding the goal by 9%.

Other news from the Office of Institutional Advancement:

• The goal for new donors was set at 900 and we attained 1,027.
• Returning donors – those who also gave in 2003/04 -- are up slightly at 2,615
  or a retention rate of 65%. The national average for nonprofits tends to run 50 – 60%; the higher education average for Big Ten Universities is 60.2% and for Ivy Leagues, 74.4%. We are better than the Big Ten and but not as good as the Ivy’s. We will strive to match the very best in this area.
• And finally, thanks to your support and commitment to the University, faculty
  and staff participation in the Annual Campaign increased by 58% this year, growing from 90 to 143 donors.

Also in the area of private funding and sustaining financial security is the endowment. Since I have been President, the endowment has grown from $30,763,000 to $57,180,000. Much of this is a result of tuition investment policies of the Board Investment Committee with Bruce Crown as Chair. But $4.2 million, or 16% of that growth, is the direct consequence of new contributions that we have added to the corpus from private giving sources in the three years since July 1, 2002.

To do even better in the future we must continue to build a culture of support and philanthropic commitment to the University. We have to do this in a highly competitive and changing philanthropic environment. This is why I have been, and will continue to be spending an increasing amount of my personal time with corporate leaders, foundations, political leaders and alumni.

The leadership which is necessary to further develop our internal successes will fall more and more upon Provost and Executive Vice President Reid, who will be working closely with the Deans, the Department Chairs, and especially the faculty governance groups at all levels to assure success.

Your work here is a critical precondition for success in our fundraising endeavors. Make no mistake about it; success in fundraising in the end depends on whether we at Roosevelt deliver on the promise of enhanced academic quality and student success. Put another way, financial support is given to those who produce the highest quality results; financial need, no matter how well documented, is now and will be for the foreseeable future inadequate to generate high levels of private support for any university. The rich and successful institutions will become richer and more successful. We can ill afford not to strive to be counted in their number.

The third area of non-tuition revenue, and the second most important one in universities of the highest quality, lies in sponsored research generated through contracts and grants. I reported to you in my January State of the University Address that our numbers here lag behind those of our peers. This is not just a research and creative work issue. Since graduate education, unlike undergraduate education, is a direct extension of the scholarly and creative lives of the faculty, the quality of our graduate programs and their financial sustainability are linked to our performance in this area.

Therefore, in response to the faculty’s desire for greater assistance in your efforts to secure more external support, we successfully completed a search for a new Vice Provost for Research and Dean of Graduate Studies, hiring Janett Trubatch, who assumed the position on July 1.

Janett will work with the faculty and administrative staff to create an infrastructure that will both support and promote the scholarly and creative work of the faculty, and through them, fund in part the enhancement and quality of graduate education at Roosevelt. She will take the lead to help identify funding sources, assist in the preparation of proposals, and put in place an incentive system to increase the success of our faculty in obtaining external funding to support the expansion of all phases of their work here at Roosevelt. There is no reason, given the overall excellence of this faculty, that we cannot succeed in this endeavor.

And so, I personally welcome Janett to Roosevelt and look forward to supporting her leadership in this important area.

Enrollment:

Our greatest broad strategic challenge, and in some ways our most immediate, is to address enrollment issues. In this area there is complete congruity between our financial needs and our aspirations for quality. To attain these aspirations we will need to grow our tuition resource base significantly over the next few years.

I know that there are those among the faculty and elsewhere who think that we need to become less reliant on tuition – which we need to increase the percentage of the expense budget that is funded by other sources of revenue, focusing on private giving.

I wish that it were so simple. While I concur with this aspiration, it must be a long term goal, not a short term and perhaps not even an intermediate term one. Because tuition is such a large percentage of the Roosevelt budget, the ratio of tuition to ALL other sources of revenue is hard to change.

Let me tell you what a simple calculation I had done reveals. If we were to increase ALL other sources of annual revenue by 3% more than we increase our tuition revenue, given the massive size of the former and the much smaller size of the latter revenue streams even when taken as a whole, and assuming that half the new money from other sources were to be used for growth and half for budget relief, it would yield only a 0.15% change in the ratio of the two. So for example, if tuition increases 5% and all of the other revenues go up 8%, the ratio would move from 91.0% tuition versus 9.0% other revenues, to 90.85% tuition versus 9.15% other revenues.

It is important that we all understand the mathematics of this situation if we are to attend successfully to the nature of the real challenges we face in some areas of our enrollment. While we will work assiduously to increase non-tuition revenue much faster than our tuition increases, and as important as these alternative revenue streams taken as a whole may be in real terms, it is still true that private universities like ours with endowments below $1 billion will continue to depend on tuition as their primary source of revenue for the foreseeable future. We can mitigate against this reality on the margins, and in some individual programs we can make significant progress, but we cannot fundamentally alter it overall. Therefore, even as we work to expand that portion of the budget that comes from other sources, we need to be mindful that the quality enhancements we will be making at Roosevelt will depend upon growth in tuition revenue.

How do we enhance this vital revenue stream? This can be done in only one of two ways: charge more to our current students, or recruit a larger number of students to Roosevelt, or some combination of the two. To determine what our best strategy is, we have already begun to address the issues as a community.

Here are some big emerging questions we need to discuss and debate:

1. What are our academic goals on the two campuses? How are they different? Should they be more alike, or less?
2. Who are our prospective students?
3. What should be the mix of full-time versus part-time undergraduate students?
4. How large should our graduate programs be overall? And, what should the mix of full-time and part-time graduate students be?
5. What role should online education play in our university? Is it an enhancement to on-campus programs, or is it a separate enterprise, or some combination?
6. How should we look at enrollment possibilities by college and program; by location: Chicago, Schaumburg and Online, and; by student type: full-time, part-time, graduate and undergraduate.

I mention the need to refine our questions and our data because overall numbers clearly hide shifting circumstances inside the institution. A brief review of the preliminary fall enrollment data demonstrates what I mean. These comparisons are from preliminary data based on registration figures three days prior to the start of classes for fall ‘04 and for fall ’05. Here is what they tell us.

While the number of new full-time undergraduates is much larger than last year, increasing from 625 to 675 (8.0%), that is largely due to the fact that enrollment in the new freshman class is running significantly ahead of registration figures from last year, up from 278 to 312, an increase of 12.2%.

These very positive results, however, mask the fact that the total new student registrations are running slightly behind figures from last year, from 1,680 to 1,639, a decrease of 2.4%. This reflects the fact that new graduate and doctoral enrollment is down from last year from 794 to 741, a decrease of 6.7%, and new transfer student enrollment is also down from last year from 608 to 586, a decrease of 3.6%.

We must be clear every year about what our goals are in each area of a complex enrollment situation. Accordingly, this year we will put into place a new enrollment management plan for the fall of 2006, with firm and attainable goals in each category of enrollment, beginning with retention of continuing students. To do that, the administration will work with the faculty, in the planning committee and in other forums as appropriate, in order to set these goals no later than the end of October.

Some of this discussion inevitably must turn to the academic program. In addition to those questions I mentioned before, others spring to mind:

Should we invest aggressively in programs, continuing and new, with the greatest capacity for growth?

What new programs are desirable and how do we expedite the approval process, knowing, as we do, that delay is costly?

We must be ever mindful that the perfect is the enemy of the good and that other institutions are quite adept at getting new programs up and running in ever shorter timelines. So, do we need to be more nimble and responsive? Do we need to be more deferential to collegiate differences on these matters, and if so, who monitors to be sure that some minimum Roosevelt-wide standard of quality is maintained across colleges?

I’m certain that you will think of other good questions to pose as this discussion evolves. Meanwhile, it is useful, I think, to keep in mind that we are building our future on the strength of our past successes. It’s easy to fall victim to the notion that there are few good stories to share in the enrollment area.

Not so. There is, indeed, good news here. For instance, in keeping with our social justice mission of educational opportunity for all, the diversity in our student population continues. Our 260 International students represent 60 countries, and in domestic students we remain the most diverse private Master’s level University in the Midwest, though we are now tied with Park University in Missouri for that distinction.

To put all of this into perspective, permit me also to share with you some other promising data. In response to our students’ increasing concern over the rising costs of higher education and increasing cuts in state and federal aid, we implemented our flat-rate tuition plan, giving our students a full-time discounted rate on their tuition and an incentive and opportunity to complete their degree in less time. What has been the result of this initiative?

It is not surprising that fulltime undergraduate enrollment is up from 1,847 to 2,057, an increase of 11.4%.

This good news is offset by the continuing decline in enrollment in part-time students overall. There the numbers decreased from 2,014 to 1,891 (6.1%).

We see this decline in part time students most graphically at the Schaumburg campus precisely because that location enrolls so few traditional age undergraduates. In our suburban location, total enrollment continues to decline, from 2,748 last year at this time to 2,605 this year, a decrease of 5.2%.

While the Chicago Campus is up again, from 3,656 last year to 3,917 this year, an increase of 7.1%, part-time enrollments there appear in the preliminary figures to have declined as well.

At the Board of Trustees meeting in June, I presented an analysis of these trends since the year 2000. They have affected both campuses and all colleges except the Chicago College of Performing Arts, but they fall particularly hard on Schaumburg and the Evelyn T. Stone University College. I thank the faculty who were on campus this summer, particularly those in Schaumburg and in the University College, for the calls, meetings and advising sessions they conducted both to get continuing students to register for the fall at Roosevelt and to recruit new students.

I also thank Toni Potenza and Bud Beatty for calling those students who had left prior to last year and for figuring out ways to get some of them to return. In both endeavors, while we have had modest success in individual cases, for which I am grateful, the impact on the trend line was not what we had hoped it would be.

But we made the effort, we learned a great deal, and we are very glad to welcome the new and returning students here today. That said, it is clear that a challenge lies before us. The adult market is large and growing. The competition is fierce, well-funded, imaginative and flexible. I do not know what we must do to reverse these trends, but I do know that we must find ways to do so, especially but NOT exclusively in those colleges and departments that pride themselves on meeting the educational needs of these adult part time students.

We are making it a top institutional priority for 2005/06 to figure out what we can do to reverse these trends and to take action to do so in a timely manner.

Already, Roosevelt faculty has made some important decisions in this effort. I applaud those departments that have created new programs such as Certificate and Fast-Track programs in areas of high demand. A look at our competition shows that many are offering adjusted class schedules and fast-track certificate programs to minimize class time for these busy learners.

We must also look for ways to respond to those who do not want degrees but who do want to take a course or two.

Should it be easier than it is now for these people to take classes without becoming degree students, at least initially?

How do we respond to the research that shows that adult learners value programs that they can complete over shorter periods of time?

How do we honor what employers are telling us when they say that it takes better, more dedicated and efficient students to go through faster-paced programs and that they will hire graduates who succeed in these types of programs?

What does it mean for academic quality to have new types of course scheduling?

These and many other questions will no doubt arise in the course of our deliberations and will spark much debate, I’m sure. But in the end this is a problem-solving exercise and that is just the sort of thing we at Roosevelt excel at.

I said in my first Convocation address that together we could and would do remarkable things. I never said it would be easy; I never said that we wouldn’t make mistakes; I never said that we wouldn’t have moments of uncertainty. In some senses we’ve now done the easy things, many of them in areas where just a few years ago nobody thought Roosevelt University could succeed.

Not surprisingly, the more difficult challenges await us.

This discussion we are having is not about doing the easy things for short term rewards and then calling it a day. This is about our long-term collective responsibility as stewards of this very special, value-laden place deeply committed to social justice and educational opportunity for all. It is about our collective responsibility to do what we can to assure that Roosevelt prospers in the future.

Permit me to conclude with a couple of stories that reinforce, for me and I hope for you, why it matters that we do this work well.

Saturday I was at a picnic and met one of our adult students who are finishing his Bachelors of Professional Studies degree in December. He is a police officer in Arlington Heights who aspires to be a chief and who needs a degree to be eligible for consideration for that important job. Without my asking he volunteered that he decided to attend Roosevelt because it was the only place he visited where people made him feel instantly at home. But his greatest praises were reserved for the quality of his faculty, and he was very proud that his senior thesis will be published by a professional journal in policing.

For the second story, let me just quote an excerpt from an email I got last week.

“Dear President/Professor Middleton,” it began, “You may not remember me in your busy life but I emailed you a few weeks ago asking for information regarding transferring to your institution; with a specific interest in your History program. You responded back quicker than I ever thought possible. You also forwarded my queries on to someone who gave me the information that I needed. For that, and for the information that I received from Margaret Rung - in so prompt a manner as to astound me – I thank you very much.

I decided to visit Roosevelt after your email and the follow up by Margaret Rung. I set up an appointment with the Admissions Department and I am now registered for the Fall 2005 Semester at Roosevelt.

The amazing part of this whole adventure was that I had applied to other schools or called them for information and they all seemed like they were disinterested, I was just a number, or just another student trying to get into their school. At Roosevelt I felt, for the first time, like I wasn’t an anonymous no-body but rather someone that they took an interest in. All the people that I’ve had contact with talked to me and treated me as if I were a family member.

I came to Roosevelt without ever dreaming that I would ever be able to get in, and if I did manage somehow to get accepted that I would not be able to afford attending such a prestigious University. These people, Kate (Wymore}, Julie (Stock}, and Walter (O’Neill) not to mention all the others that I’ve had contact with not only made me feel as welcome as if I were a member of their family, but they did all that they could to see that I would attend Roosevelt University. I have a cousin who is a freshman this year at Roosevelt; I am a new transfer student, and my uncle is a judge who has decided that when he retires in 3 years, he is going to pursue his doctorate at Roosevelt.
Have a great day!

Matt.”

Let us all remember both of these students and so many others who are here now and who will come here in the future as we tackle the toughest challenges together. We will do so collaboratively, with mutual commitment and mutual respect. Everyone has something to contribute, both to the deliberations and in the implementation of our decisions. In the end, we will be remembered as the people who assured the long-term success and vitality of Roosevelt University and all those who came after us.

Thank you for your time, and I wish each and every one of you good fortune as we begin this academic year together.