Convocation Address
President Charles Middleton

CONVOCATION REMARKS, FALL 2008

Charles R. Middleton, President

September 2, 2008

Thank you, Jim.

Good morning everyone and welcome to this wonderful occasion where we have the opportunity to greet all of our new students, faculty, and staff. This is also a time to reflect on successes over the past year, and to highlight upcoming activities. But first, please permit me to give a special welcome to the members of the Board of Trustees who are with us today. Their participation shows their dedicated commitment to Roosevelt’s mission and the success that we all strive to accomplish. Thank you all for coming.

I want to begin my comments today with the words Eleanor Roosevelt used when she first dedicated the University sixty-three years ago, in November, 1945. Usually only the initial phrase, "dedicated to the enlightenment of the human spirit" is all that is quoted.

Recently, however, I found the full text of her remarks, and I’d like to share them with you here this morning. On that November day, Eleanor said that Roosevelt was "dedicated to the enlightenment of the human spirit through the constant search for the truth, and the growth of the human spirit through knowledge, understanding, and good will [my italics]."

My goal today is take what she said and show you the actions that inexorably arise from that statement. The theme of her remarks was clearly all about the work people do as an extension of the values they hold dear. The theme for today is about the accomplishments of Roosevelt people in living that legacy in the 21st century.

Summary of Achievements

As president, I am thrilled to share with you the news that we are right on target for making this new academic year one of the most successful years in Roosevelt’s history — all because of the accomplishments of the people who learn, teach, and work here. If you look back from where we left off a year ago, when I proudly announced our successes up to that point in time, it is quite astonishing to know that we have not only reached our goals over the past year, we have exceeded many of them by giant margins!

Throughout the year, I visit with faculty and administrators and mull over strategic plans, program development, and the general daily operations of Roosevelt. In these meetings I like taking time to hear about all of the wonderful achievements of our students, faculty, and staff. Then, when I am given the opportunity to speak to everyone at Roosevelt, or in any other forum where people will listen to me, I always like to recap those achievements. Today is one of those occasions.

I was overwhelmed by the scope and depth of information that was sent to me by the deans and others to include in my remarks.

Unfortunately, we would be here until tomorrow if I recounted each and every achievement; so I will have to be selective. If I miss something that you feel should have been mentioned, please let me know and I will add it to my files for future occasions. I have many opportunities, you see.

New Administrative Leaders

Before I delve into the details of your accomplishments in 2007/08, I want to take a moment to introduce three new senior leaders whose leadership will have a significant impact on our future successes. First is Miroslava Meija Krug, the new Senior Vice President for Finance and Administration and Chief Financial Officer. Miroslava brings with her more than 15 years of successful accomplishments as a financial executive with United Airlines and most recently as Chief Financial Officer for the Chicago Housing Authority.

When my conversations with Miroslava began, it was clear that she values our mission and purpose, and while John Allerson will be deeply missed, I am confident that Miroslava will step up and make a positive impact on Roosevelt and will work hard to take us to the next level of growth and development in our financial affairs so that we continue to sustain goal #5 of the Strategic Plan, which is to "maintain the University’s commitment to financial sustainability." Welcome, Miroslava! Joining us also here today is the new Vice President for Institutional Advancement and Chief Advancement Officer, Patrick Woods. Patrick has been here since January. He arrived with extensive experience as a senior-level fundraiser in higher education and elsewhere. He most recently served as the Vice President for Philanthropic Services at Marin Community Foundation in California. With our comprehensive capital campaign underway, Patrick has already set the bar high with his extraordinary management, team building, and strategic thinking skills. Welcome, Patrick!

The third person I am introducing to you is actually someone who isn’t new to Roosevelt, though she is new to this role. This past June, Lesley Slavitt accepted a promotion to become the Vice President for Government Relations and University Outreach. Lesley first came to Roosevelt in 2007 as Assistant Provost for Programs of Non-profit Civic Engagement, which followed more than 10 years of senior level management experience at JP Morgan Chase and the Bank One Foundation. Among the many tasks that she has taken on, Lesley will primarily be responsible for government relations, marketing communications, media relations, and community outreach. Welcome, Lesley!

It truly is an exhilarating time here at Roosevelt, and I couldn’t be more excited to have these new colleagues with us to help advance our mission and steer the course of success, especially for our faculty and our students.

Individual Achievements

As I stated earlier, the theme today is our individual and collective accomplishment over the past year. I am going to mention examples of work that represents the Roosevelt community at its best — work that directly impacts our continuing commitment to social justice and/or is an example of our constant expansion of academic excellence.

We’ve discovered that when you put the two together — social justice and academic excellence -- a whole new understanding of teaching and learning materializes and higher levels of achievement emerge across the University.

Over the past year, since our last Convocation, Roosevelt faculty have attained many impressive creative and scholarly accomplishments. These include at least 8 published books, 85 published journal articles, and over 100 conference papers presented around the globe. I want to share with you just a few of them to paint part of the picture of academic excellence that this intellectual and creative vitality of the faculty represents.

Over the past year, four Roosevelt faculty members have received prestigious Fulbright awards:

• Ellen O’Brien, Associate Professor of English, travelled on a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship to attend a summer seminar in Morocco;
• Luis Perez, Assistant Professor of Musical Theatre, was a Fulbright specialist this summer at the Theatre Conservatory in Prague;
• Gordon Patzer, Professor of Marketing, is away this fall on a Fulbright scholar grant to lecture in India at the University of Delhi; and
• Heather Dalmage, Professor of Sociology, won a Fulbright scholar award to spend a semester at Kwazulu-Natal University in Durban, South Africa in the spring of 2009.

No other Chicago university has this many winners of the Fulbright this year. Those of us who were here last fall join with me in telling all of you who are new community members that Professor Steve Meyers in Psychology was named Illinois Professor of the Year for 2007. I’m sure that others on our fine faculty, who are dedicated to teaching as a first priority in their professional lives, will achieve this recognition in future years. Because of his outstanding contributions to the teaching of psychology, Steve has just been elected as a Fellow in the American

Psychological Association and the Society for the Teaching of Psychology. Congratulations, Steve. Bear in mind, however, that this level of commitment to excellence does not always come without risk, both personal and physical. Life as a scholar is not always sedentary; nor is it always undertaken in safe and secure environments on campus. No one knows this better perhaps than Julian Kerbis Peterhans, Professor of Natural Science in the Evelyn T. Stone College of Professional Studies.

Professor Peterhans recently returned from a three-week trip to the Itombwe Forest in the Democratic Republic of Congo. There he conducted mammal surveys in this ecologically rich area where there is a diverse population of rare plant and animal species, parts of which are finally slated for formal protection.

Unfortunately, serious security issues and socio-economic problems remain in that region. This lawless forest is infested with unpaid federal military that shake down all passersby for cash. At one point, Professor Peterhans and his team found themselves surrounded by Mai-Mai militia, who placed them all "under arrest." After some hasty negotiations, and after necessary funds were paid, they were released.

I am happy to report that Professor Peterhans’ work promises some wonderful results, perhaps including the identification of at least two new species of small mammals. His experience exemplifies the hard work and high level of commitment our faculty exhibits in order to advance knowledge and to give our students the promise of academic courses using this information not yet available elsewhere.

Collaborative Achievements

Other measures of excellence come not as individual achievement, but from collective action. Sometimes – no, often in some disciplines – there are several people involved in bringing academic excellence and social justice together at Roosevelt. For instance, in the College of Arts and Sciences, Heather Dalmage and a taskforce that included Nona Burney, Steve Meyers, Pamela Robert, and Lesley Slavitt, spent the entire summer and the early fall of 2007 planning the expansion of the Mansfield Institute into the Mansfield Institute for Social Justice and Transformation (MISJT).

As a result, MISJT was awarded $300,000 by the Mansfield Foundation to develop service learning curricula and to expand our social justice studies initiative. That’s an impressive and well-deserved award. I want to thank all these individuals and Dean Weiner for their work in securing this grant.

Another great example of collective success is the $670,000 federal grant from the Department of Energy that Roosevelt was awarded this past year. Again, with the leadership of the science faculty, along with Dean Weiner, this grant will be used to purchase biology laboratory equipment for the Chicago Campus. The University is indebted to Congressman Danny Davis whose timely public support on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives was both impressive and essential to our success. Another very impressive grant was also made possible by the dedicated work of Cornelius Watson and Robert Seiser. I am announcing today that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has just awarded Roosevelt $891,615 in funding to provide five years of support for our partnership with Elgin Community College to get math and science majors, particularly under-represented minority students, successfully through our programs here at Roosevelt after completion of their study at Elgin Community College.

This is the first NIH grant in the history of Roosevelt, and I thank not only these faculty members for their work in securing it, but I also applaud Dean Janett Trubatch for her skillful management of the protocols we had to follow in order to be successful in our engagement of the NIH.

Janett and many faculty members have been working assiduously over the past four years to improve Roosevelt’s performance in securing federal support for our programs, an area where we lagged behind our peer institutions in the past. That hard and smart work is paying off, not just in the NIH grant. Just last Thursday we received word that the National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded us $1.2 million over 5 years, for a partnership with Harold Washington College to recruit underrepresented minority students to be math and science majors at the college named after Roosevelt alumnus and Chicago’s first black Mayor, then to move on to Roosevelt and successfully complete their bachelor’s degrees. Again, many thanks go to Kristen Leckrone and others who worked with Dean Trubatch to secure this award.

These successes – collective and individual alike – are exemplars of many others. I thank everyone on the faculty who contributed to our record of growing academic achievement which is propelling toward our endeavor to enhance the reputation the University not just here in Chicago, but around the world.

New and Enhanced Programs

But we can’t stand still. Nor can we attain our goals solely by doing better in our current programs. We must also develop new and competitive programs in order to evolve. Actually, we do it all the time, as a glance at the course offerings in 1945 and today clearly shows. In 1945, for instance, there were 20 courses in psychology, which included courses like child psychology, abnormal psychology, and my favorite, a course called mental hygiene.

Today, because of the growing interest in psychology and the advancement of psychological research, we not only offer more courses, but the topics include African-American social psychology, drugs and human behavior, and my new favorite, relaxation dynamics, none of which would have been in the mind set of the founding faculty members of the department sixty-three years ago.

Based upon this growth in interest in the discipline generally, and especially in light of the extraordinary success of our Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology, I am pleased to announce publicly here today the first Ph.D. Program in the University – to be in Industrial and Organizational (I/O) Psychology.

Thanks to the generous support of a private donor, who is also an alumnus from the class of 1954, we will launch a search to find a nationally acclaimed scholar as the founding director of this program. With the new faculty she or he will subsequently bring to Roosevelt, we will be able to create this new degree and, what will be equally important, to offer expanded coursework at the Masters as well as the Bachelors levels so that the department can continue to grow in enrollments and overall excellence.

In Schaumburg, where we have been developing strong science programs to complement the bio-tech industries that are located in the Northwest Suburbs, there has emerged the need for a significant new initiative focused on healthcare professionals. After much study and many conversations with state and local leaders, and with some seed money from the State of Illinois, we will work with the faculty to create the first new College at Roosevelt since the College of Education was established in 1972.

The College of Pharmacy’s founding Dean will be recruited this fall. With the help of Senator Dan Kotowski, whose district includes the Schaumburg Campus, we have received a grant from the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, which will help fund the position. This new Pharmacy Program, which will be located exclusively on the Schaumburg Campus, will focus on educating community-based pharmacists, not research oriented pharmacists, with an emphasis on providing pharmacy services in under-served areas and with a goal of tapping into the Latino and other under-served communities to recruit students. Again, this is another great example of our social justice mission in action.

International Program Expansion

Not only are our programs expanding here in Chicago, they are also expanding around the globe. Our initiatives in International Program Development continue to grow rapidly.

As one local example, held in early May 2008, the European Union selected Roosevelt University to host its annual European Union Day, an event that brings to Chicago over 100 dignitaries annually from around the globe. We worked closely with the representative of the Presidency of the Council of the European Union, the Consul General of Slovenia, to develop a magical evening of music, food, and camaraderie -- and the usual speeches. It really was an amazing time, and I want to thank

Professor Emerita Ludmila Lazar for her efforts in helping to coordinate this event with the Slovenian Consulate. On the academic front, strong efforts are being made to expand our presence to the international scene. Roosevelt has invited two new international graduate students, Gorma Minnie and Musu Dixon, both from Liberia in West Africa, to pursue their Master’s degree in Education this year. They were selected by the Liberian Ministry of Education, and are being funded jointly by a partnership between Roosevelt University and the Children’s Defense Fund in Washington, D.C., headed by Marian Wright Edelman, with whom I have had the privilege of working to bring this opportunity to pass.

In addition to welcoming all of our new international students again, with whom I met last week, I want to extend a special welcome to these two new Liberian students and say what a privilege it is to provide educational opportunity for them. We at Roosevelt strongly commend Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, President of Liberia, for her efforts to bring democracy to a war-torn country. The University is privileged to play a role in support of her extraordinary and courageous leadership in there. We are continuing to grow our enrollments of international students with 261 from 56 countries enrolled this fall, while last year we experienced a significant increase in Roosevelt University students studying abroad – 31 in the College of Arts and Sciences alone.

It really is an awesome thing to see our students involved in our international initiatives, and I want to thank Mary Hendry, Rubee Li Fuller, and many faculty members in all the Colleges such as Gerry Bober and Ken Mihavics for their dedication and efforts in these areas.

Campus Differentiation

As I said last year, our overall success is built on the success of each campus independently. The programmatic differentiation of both campuses makes each campus distinctive and, in its own way, very special.

As we continue to pursue campus differentiation in order to better serve our students and to make more effective use of valuable faculty time and effort, we began by recognizing in the College of Education that the majority of their students are enrolled at Schaumburg. Accordingly, the Dean arranged for four additional faculty members to be housed on that Campus. In Sociology, because the enrollments were small in Schaumburg, the program was moved exclusively to the Chicago Campus to better serve the students here.

While larger programs will continue to be offered on both Campuses, consolidation of programs with low enrollments on one Campus enables us to establish a critical mass of faculty and students where the heavier demand is located. Concentration of faculty is a vital component of assuring academic quality. It is also responsive to the desires of our students who do not wish and should not have to go to both Campuses to complete their degree. It’s a waste of gas, time, and money for everyone involved. Whether we offer a program on one Campus or on both, our students should be able to complete their degree on the Campus where they reside, especially given our capacity to teach both in online courses and in courses taught by video-conferencing.

Schaumburg

The changes associated with campus differentiation are perhaps most profound in Schaumburg. In 2007-2008, we offered 9 programs for our Saturdays in Schaumburg. We’re continuing the series this year and adding 2 new programs to the list: Paralegal Studies and Criminal Justice Leadership.

Under the leadership of Bud Beatty, the Center for Campus Life (CCL) was created in 2008 to streamline student life functions and encourage student-led activities. Since then, the number of student clubs has more than doubled, including organized intramural athletics and social and cultural programs.

With the increased demand for recreational activities, two new on-campus recreational spaces were created: a basketball court and a playing field. The rumor that the President shot a miserable one for five free throw attempts at the dedication of the court is not true. It was one for eight.

I talk about these things because you, the students, need to know that we are listening to you. And while sometimes it takes longer than either you or the faculty or I would like, we do respond as rapidly as we can. Enrollment and Student Success

All of these changes come down to an overarching goal: to assure greater student success for a growing and exciting student body on both Campuses. This fall, as of last Friday, we have just over 2,500 new students, the largest group ever, except in 1945 when everybody was new! And even more impressive, we have nearly 70,000 registered credit hours! The number of students living in Roosevelt housing in Chicago has increased from 250 students in the fall of 2002 to as many as 700 this fall, which would be an increase of 180%. That’s incredible, and it is a testimony to our growing prominence! You new students will have many successes just like our returning students who are here today have already attained. Here are two stories to inspire you.

First, Andrea Jones, who will be graduating with her Bachelor’s Degree this year, submitted an entry for the Chicago Loop Alliance’s logo contest last spring. Out of 12 submissions, all by students at various institutions in the Loop and all judged by a panel of marketing experts who did not know where the contestants were enrolled, Andrea’s was selected as the "gold" winner. You will see it soon on merchants’ windows and elsewhere that you can get student discounts in the Loop. Second, Gabrielle Worley, who is a sophomore majoring in political science, has just returned from the Democratic National Convention in Denver. She was there on a scholarship provided by Roosevelt alumni through the President’s Fund for Excellence, which enabled her to participate in a seminar on Contemporary Politics offered by the prestigious Washington Center’s "Campaign 2008 National Convention Seminar Series." Gabrielle will be making a public presentation about her experiences later this semester so that we can all learn from her experience about this transformational political party convention.

In closing, I want to address a few remarks to our new students who will be formally matriculated into the University in just a few minutes. Many of you are entering your very first year of College. Some of you are continuing students, transferring from other institutions as a sophomore, junior, or senior; and many are new graduate students embarking on a whole new level of study.

To the freshmen I say, some of you may feel apprehensive about coming to a new place and starting a journey that will shape who you will be and what you’ll accomplish for the rest of your life. That’s really excitement that you feel – excitement about the prospects of being a college student and striking out on your own as a young adult.

Maybe some of you transfer students feel the same way as you change institutions. I know that some of the graduate students do.

I have to confess that I was scared to death when I went to college and then again to graduate school, and I remember asking myself, both as a freshman and as an entering graduate student, "what have I gotten myself into?"

But we all adjust. To help you do that here, permit your President to give you a goal to help you move beyond these initial reactions to a new place and a new set of challenges in your life.

Here at Roosevelt, we strive to live up to all of the "Just Watch Me" quotes you see posted around the campuses. "Just Watch Me Take the Lead." "Just Watch Me Succeed." "Just Watch Me Build My Career." All of these statements are lived and experienced by our students.

Today, I want to focus especially on one of them: "Just Watch Me Finish What I’ve Started." This means many things, but most important among them, it means that you must aspire to complete your degree. It won’t always be easy; nothing worthwhile ever is.

But you see, it matters that you’re at Roosevelt University. It matters because of our values as expressed in our mission statement. That statement is our promise to you and to ourselves of "educating socially conscious citizens for active and dedicated lives as leaders in their professions and their communities."

We — you and your Professors and all those who support your work here — have just one goal in mind. It comes down to your success as refracted through our mission. The time spent with each other, the time spent with your mentors and your Professors, and the time spent in service to your community are all important to you both as an individual and as part of your academic success.

At Roosevelt, you will not only be obtaining your formal education, you will also be getting an education to prepare you for a rewarding and meaningful life.

With that prospect in mind, on behalf of all of us who came here in the past, we are indeed proud to welcome you to the Roosevelt community. Together we will work hard to make sure that you finish what you’ve started and that you walk proudly across this stage as you leave here with your degree in the future.

I wish you well as we all begin another academic year. Thank you for coming today.