2006 University Convocation Address

Good afternoon and welcome to the Fall 2006 University Convocation.

Most of you have heard of the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclites, who wrote these now famous words, "Everything flows, nothing stands still." While this may not hold true as a metaphysical principle, the constancy of change seems to fit Georgia College.

Think about it. Each year, the student body changes as graduates depart and new freshmen and transfers enter. Buildings go off-line for renovation and people move to new campus locations. Faculty and staff retire or relocate and new talent arrives to contribute to the life of the university. New initiatives are launched and others come to completion. Such changes have predictable rhythms or cycles, but they require us to adjust nonetheless by letting go of the familiar just enough to acknowledge the fresh face and challenge of the new.

University Convocation provides an occasion for looking backwards and forward in order to scan horizons of change. Sometimes, when we are in the midst of it, change is barely perceptible. Consider the aging process. It happens to all living organisms and involves physiological changes that usually only manifest themselves when the effects become extreme. One day we wake up to a face full of wrinkles, when in fact the elasticity of youth has been lost gradually over time.

My theme today is change and with change celebration and challenge. It is also about quality.

For a number of years now, Georgia College has been undergoing a remarkable transformation as the state's public liberal arts university. That's hardly news to those of you who have been in the trenches making this change happen! But today, just for a moment, I ask you to step back long enough to reflect upon the progress you have made and to celebrate what you have accomplished.

Here is a headline: Georgia College is the best public master's university in Georgia and one of the best in the South. I didn't make this up. That's the flash from U.S. News and World Report, and ten years ago we weren't on the radar. We should be shooting fireworks from the stage, really, in celebration of the magnitude of this accomplishment.

Yet our knowledge of how various college rankings are generated gives rise to warranted skepticism within the academic community. A few years ago, the president of Stanford University decried the practice of ranking colleges based on "specious formulas and spurious precision." The deeper question, of course, is what measures the quality of a school. We know that this question is not settled and is, in fact, a matter of vigorous and sometime contentious debate. And so, we cancel the pyrotechnics and retreat to our classrooms and offices.

It is sometimes hard to celebrate in an academic culture where the value and practice of critical reflection run deep. Still, there are genuine causes for celebration at Georgia College that lie beneath the headlines.

This past spring, as part of our strategic focusing process, a group of faculty and staff (led by Beth Rushing and Chesley Mercado) completed an important mission progress review. I would like to share with you a few sentences from the report's Executive Summary. "Almost all data trends point in the direction of fulfillment of our liberal arts mission. We have made important advances in study abroad, interdisciplinary curricula and programming, and in the infusion of liberal learning objectives into the curriculum of all degree programs." Among other things, the report noted significant improvement in first year retention rates, the implementation of theme-based freshman living/learning communities, and increased opportunities for and participation in service learning and faculty led research projects.

To my mind, what makes these accomplishments truly remarkable is their link to widely recognized features of quality in undergraduate education. Beneath the headlines, college quality is about the opportunities that an institution provides for expansive student learning. It is about challenging students to stretch and grow intellectually and providing them with the opportunities, resources and support for doing so. This-and not the headlines-is what excites and motivates educators and makes us willing to move in new directions, experiment with alternative pedagogies, work to create innovative programs, and respond creatively to obstacles of resource, politics, and administration that randomly yet routinely get tossed our way.

In the end, then, it is in the record of accomplishments only partially reflected in national rankings by U.S. News & World Report, Princeton Review, Kiplinger's, Colleges of Distinction and others that we find our occasion for celebration. We have an ample supply of brag points, thanks to your hard work, dedication, talent and ingenuity. So, as Kool & The Gang urged, "Celebrate good times, come on. Let's celebrate good times, come on."

Now if you are Heraclites, the crux of the change thing is that it is always happening to everything--and that's an exhausting thought! In fact, I don't believe that Heraclites got it quite right. But my focus on change today is not about Heraclites but rather about some of the things we will want to attend to if our progress is to continue and our success in providing quality education is to grow.

Not surprisingly, the mission progress review report also contained some cautionary notes. While most trend lines are up, the opposite is the case with respect to the demographic diversity of our students. For example, the enrollment of African American students has declined by 7% since the mission change, even though the retention rate for this same population significantly exceeds that of the white (non-Hispanic) student population.

I am confident the most of you get it: diversity is not just an equity issue but also centrally linked to the attainment of educational outcomes critical to our public liberal arts mission. We know, for example, that diversity on campus and in the classroom is positively correlated with outcome measures designed to capture students' active and critical thinking processes and other intellectual skills and abilities. Not surprisingly, there is even a stronger correlation with outcome measures designed to capture students' involvement in various forms of civic life. Stated simply, our ability to prepare students effectively for leadership roles in a pluralistic society is significantly enhanced by the opportunities we provide for students from diverse backgrounds to interact with and learn from each other.

What will we do? We can start by openly and actively thinking about and speaking of the challenges associated with diversity and by considering what we can learn from the best practices of others. To help facilitate this process, I have established a standing Commission on Diversity. Under the leadership of Yves-Rose SaintDic, the Commission will play a critical role in opening broader campus conversations on the challenges related to diversity at Georgia College.

As a side note, I want to congratulate Paul Jones and Amy Nitsche for efforts that resulted in obtaining a $700,000 endowment from the Goizueta Foundation to provide need based scholarship support for Hispanic students. This gift was the result of a multi-year effort to support the increased enrollment of Hispanic students at Georgia College. As with many such efforts, it was of necessity largely invisible to the broader university community.

Another important result noted in the Mission Progress Review report relates to general education. Respondents to the stakeholder survey rated general education as one of the most important features of a liberal arts institution. And yet these same respondents gave low marks to our performance in general education in terms of academic challenge and distinctiveness.

That looks like a mandate for change, but after nearly five years we have not come to agreement on how to fix the problem. Luckily, a truce has been negotiated and there is now a proposal on the table to be fleshed out by considering what its implementation might entail. Next week, I will charge a committee led by Mike McGinnis with this task, and faculty should have a final proposal for consideration during the spring semester.

Georgia College students will benefit enormously from a general education curriculum that engages them in intellectual work that is challenging and significant and invests the first two years of college with a greater sense of purpose and coherence. I challenge faculty to work collaboratively during the upcoming year to make this happen.

A third challenge emerges from the Mission Progress Review Report, at least on my reading of it. This is the challenge of knowing what is working and what is not and of determining whether we are creating learning opportunities for students that effectively engage them. Here I am not talking about academic degree programs but rather the myriad of other things we do. For example, we simply don't know how many of our students participate in service learning, cultural programs, undergraduate research and similar activities. Nor do we assess, as an institution, learning outcomes associated with such programs. Under these circumstances, it is difficult to know where we might want to put our energy, focus and resources to better achieve our educational goals.

This may be a symptom of a more general challenge, which is the need to know what happens to students while at Georgia College and beyond. We know quite a lot about the characteristics of the students who come to Georgia College. We know much less about the students who graduate from this institution. For example, the mission progress review workgroup found itself unable to answer the question of how well we prepare our students for graduate study and careers. With the exception of a handful of professional programs, data required to answer the question was absent.

Ernest L. Boyer, the late President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, once said, "In the end, a high-quality college is concerned about outcomes." He was right, and thus we have another opportunity for improvement.

I imagine that Heraclites would have liked quality as it applies to education, despite our tendency to think of quality as a definitive trait or state of a thing. That's because educational quality is less akin to a perfection that can be achieved than to a moving target. Educating a student is not like making a perfect widget-shaped, ground and polished according to precise specifications. We educate students for life, which is enormously complex and always evolving, and we are constantly trying to catch up with what we should be doing. That's why a high-quality college engages in continuous self-reflection, assessment and improvement.

Thus far, I've talked about quality. Quality is what Georgia College is about. We have a lot of it and more to strive for.

But what about distinction and distinctiveness? This is the theme of our ongoing strategic focusing process, and one or two of you may have wondered how this fits in.

Last year, when I introduced the strategic focusing process during the Fall University Convocation, I discussed external challenges associated with the long-term sustainability of our public liberal arts mission. In particular, I focused on the need to develop strategies that will render Georgia College less vulnerable to pressures for rapid enrollment growth and enhance our opportunities for funding that are linked to quality rather than growth. I further proposed that one important strategy must be to achieve distinction and distinctiveness as a public liberal arts university, and I explained this with the following words:

"In the simplest terms, we must be so good that no one questions our value to the State of Georgia. We must demonstrate that we are competitive with out-of-state liberal arts institutions for Georgia's most academically talented students, and we must show that we can achieve remarkable results by virtue of our low faculty/student ratio and moderate size. "

Distinction and distinctiveness are about quality with a special twist. Allow me to explain.

If a student graduates with distinction, he or she has performed very well academically. The student's cumulative GPA is better than average-indeed better than the GPA of most other students. This achievement thus marks the student as distinctive, as someone who stands out from the crowd academically.

The strategic focusing processing is about discovering what might make Georgia College stand out from the crowd by virtue of the things that it does extraordinarily well (with distinction). In our case, "the crowd" consists of colleges and universities across the state and nation that compete for our students and state, federal and private dollars.

We are looking for the pillars on which to hang our reputational hat, and we are looking in two directions.

The first direction is educational experiences that our undergraduate students share in common regardless of their majors. We have called this the "total student learning experience." The second direction is academic programs, program clusters or themes.

I invite those of you who are new to the university, or newly interested in this process, to visit the strategic focusing website. You can find it on the Georgia College website, Office of the President under Special Initiatives (http://www.gcsu.edu/administration/sfi/).

Someone suggested to me that the strategic focusing process is just about marketing. I beg to differ. It is about identifying those potential areas of extraordinary quality on which we can build our reputation nationally. I refuse-as I am sure that most of you do-to construct a house of cards. That's why the pillars of distinction selected for Georgia College need to be central to our core educational mission, build on existing strengths, gain broad faculty support, be sustainable over time, and have the potential for external recognition as exemplary.

I am nearing the end of this talk, even though I haven't begun to exhaust the things that signal continuing change for Georgia College! But then, as Heraclites might say, change is inexhaustible.

Like aging, some change is involuntary. It happens without our asking for it, and our task is to adapt as best we can.

Other change is voluntary and intentional. We put it into play because we want to make something happen. For the most part, that's what I have talked about today. The change I have discussed is about enhancing the quality of what we do with respect to the student learning experience at Georgia College, and sometimes at an extraordinarily high level. As educators, this kind of change can energize our passion and mobilize our thought and imagination.

You, the faculty and staff of Georgia College, are the agents who can put this voluntary and intentional change in motion. With your extraordinary talent and dedication to student learning, I have no doubt that your efforts will continue to improve the quality of education at Georgia College and, as a side effect, continue to produce flashy headlines. To that, I say, "Let the celebration go on!"

I appreciate your willingness to listen to a talk built around the thoughts of the ancient philosopher Heraclites-an unexpected muse who both surprised and delighted me. It just goes to prove that you can take the philosopher out of the classroom but not out of the president. Thank you.