2011 University Convocation Address
President Dorothy Leland
January 21, 2011
Welcome to the 2011 Georgia College University Convocation. For those of you who are new to Georgia College, this convocation is an annual event during which the university president delivers the traditional “State of the University” address. Thank you for being here.
It will come as absolutely no surprise to any of you that this is a time of significant challenge for Georgia College and, indeed, public higher education across our state and much of our nation. By the beginning of the next fiscal year, it is likely that Georgia College will have suffered the loss of approximately 30% of the state-funded portion of its budget. That’s a significant funding loss, and institutional stakeholders have grappled with its impacts, ranging from increased costs to students and their families to heavier workloads and stagnant compensation for faculty and staff. Although we can reasonably hope that next year will be the final year of deep budget cuts associated with the recent economic recession, it is unlikely that the state will restore the funding we have lost as its revenue fortunes improve.
Despite this economic distress, Georgia College has continued to thrive, thanks to the dedication and ingenuity of you--its faculty, staff, and students. We’ve made substantial gains in student success, as measured by retention, persistence, and degree completion. We enjoyed our largest fundraising year in university history, against all odds, in the midst of a deep economic recession. Members of our faculty continue to earn honors and recognitions from state, national, and international peers. Support and administrative staff have been creative in finding ways to deliver services despite a 17% decline in their ranks. These are not minor accomplishments but, instead, are critical components of the rising reputation of Georgia College as a public liberal arts institution that creates an exceptional learning environment for its students.
Based on this record of ongoing achievement, when I am asked about the state of the university, my answer is “amazingly strong.” To be sure, we have challenges. It is increasingly difficult to keep old buildings in good repair; provide sufficient office, laboratory, and instructional space; offer enough class sections to meet student demand, and support our employees with appropriate compensation and balanced workloads. But Georgia College has made it through the worst of times since the Great Depression in remarkable fashion. Each of you has contributed to this success: you have stepped up to make the right things happen even as your salaries were temporarily cut and as your workloads became more burdensome. I have often said—and will say it again now--that you, our faculty and staff, are our greatest strength.
As we move through and eventually beyond years of coping with painful budget cuts, it is important to begin focusing more broadly on the strategic directions and institutional priorities for Georgia College. Last semester, we began a review process; and I am pleased that those of you who responded to our invitation to provide feedback affirmed the continuing relevance of our strategic framework. To be sure, you also offered occasional criticisms and many thoughtful suggestions. Today, I want to return to this strategic framework, address some of the criticisms and suggestions, and touch on a few of the institutional priorities that we will focus on over the next few years.
As you may recall, four years ago, Georgia College adopted six broad strategic directions to serve as a framework for planning and goal setting, for assessing overall institutional health and progress, and for establishing resource priorities.
Strategic Direction 1
Exemplary Undergraduate Learning Experience
Continue to build excellence and distinction in the Georgia College undergraduate experience consistent with the university’s educational values and public liberal arts mission.
This strategic direction focuses on the character and quality of the undergraduate learning environment. It has to do with the academic, social, and personal support that we provide students, and with the ways in which we engage students as active participants in an educational environment grounded in the commitments to reason, respect, and responsibility.
Students who love Georgia College tell us over and over again what it is they value about their experience here: the interactions with faculty who care about them and challenge, motivate and inspire; the wealth of experiences they have to grow as leaders, thinkers and creators; the beautiful grounds and buildings and the student-friendly, “we are a community” atmosphere of the campus. The good news for us is that these are the very same characteristics that students at elite private liberal arts colleges also highly value. In this respect, we have succeeded in becoming an affordable alternative to private liberal arts colleges for the state’s academically talented students.
But our success in creating the atmosphere of a private liberal arts college is not yet matched by student success as measured by retention and degree completion at the best of these institutions. Don’t get me wrong: we have made steady improvements. But top tier private and public liberal arts colleges have long known how to “pull out all the stops” when students are failing academically or socially or otherwise are at risk for drop-out or transfer. These schools have sophisticated and aggressive intervention strategies that succeed in helping academically or socially troubled students stay on track for graduation.
Thanks to work conducted by the Retention and Graduation Taskforce and also by Student Affairs through its survey instruments, we now have a fairly sophisticated grasp of the reasons students leave Georgia College. For many, it is a personal adjustment issue — homesickness or an inability to make new friends loom large in this category. For others, the stumbling blocks relate to their academic majors — the inability to get into the majors, the lack of course sections in the major, the lack of the major that the student has decided he or she wants to pursue. Very few of our students leave us because they are failing academically, and very few leave because we were not initially a school of choice. Today, thanks to your efforts, we are a destination of choice for most freshmen who come to Georgia College; our challenge now is to put into place the support and intervention strategies that will impact student success as measured by persistence and degree completion.
Our response to this challenge will focus on the ways in which we engage students in the academic and extra-curricular life of the university, the academic and social supports that we provide, and unblocking roadblocks in the majors or providing alternative paths to graduation for deserving students. In addition, it will be important to focus on campus climate challenges as these relate to the recruitment and retention of students from underrepresented groups. Each one of our students reaps life-long benefits from being a part of a learning environment where a diversity of life-experiences and perspectives is valued and supported.
Strategic Direction 2
Acclaimed Academic Programs/Distinctive Colleges & Departments
Continue to enhance the academic reputation of Georgia College based on recognition of exemplary academic programs and the distinctive qualities and achievements of its academic colleges and units.
This strategic direction is unabashedly reputational in its focus: it is about identifying features of our academic programs that set us apart from the crowd and have potential for being recognized as exemplary by higher education peers, future students, and funding partners.
Why is reputation of such importance that it ranks among our strategic directions? Reputation—at least one that sticks for the long-haul—is rooted in actual accomplishments that have been effectively communicated to others. It raises the level of interest in Georgia College and helps to attract talented students, accomplished faculty and staff, and donor and governmental support—all of which are critical to the university’s future success.
Over the past few years, we have made some important progress on the reputational front. We have successfully placed stories featuring student and faculty accomplishment in national higher education publications. Last year, when the Chronicle of Higher Education ran a series on the future of liberal arts colleges, we were one of a select handful of public and private institutions featured. The Discovery Channel featured the research of a member of the Georgia College faculty, and the sculptures of another made news around the nation during the last presidential inauguration. More locally, in Georgia, we have been placing more and more stories about student accomplishments at Georgia College in hometown newspapers. All of this — and much more -- is about building reputation and, with reputation, awareness of and excitement about this very impressive university.
In the academic arena, we’ve focused on a select number of academic “programs of distinction” to also build the reputation of our university. While this strategy has met with some success and should be continued, it is also time to broaden our focus to include a greater number of academic programs. One of our priorities for the next few years will be to get the good word out about a greater number of academic programs, with an initial emphasis on the distinctive learning opportunities and learning resources that so many of our programs provide.
Strategic Direction 3
Respected Provider of Graduate Programs in the Middle Georgia Region
Continue to focus on excellence in graduate education consistent with the university’s graduate mission as a state university, which is to deliver graduate programs responsive to regional workforce needs.
Although almost everyone who provided feedback on our strategic framework affirmed the continuing relevance of this strategic direction, a few raised concerns about our graduate programs. Some suggested that growth in graduate programs is inconsistent with the university’s public liberal arts mission. Some maintained that the emphasis on regional workforce needs is inappropriate for a public liberal arts institution.
While I appreciate these concerns, I want to offer a different perspective for your consideration. Those of you who have been around for awhile have heard me speak about the “missions” of Georgia College — deliberately invoking the plural. I deliberately invoke the plural “missions” because our governing board -- the University System of Georgia Board of Regents — has in fact given Georgia College two quite distinct missions. Georgia College is classified by the University System of Georgia as a state university, and our graduate mission is identical to the 12 other University System institutions that share this state university designation. That mission is to provide graduate programs responsive to workforce needs. We don’t have an option here: this is part of our charter, so to speak -- part of what we are expected to do.
In contrast, unlike all other University System institutions, Georgia College has been given a unique undergraduate mission as the state’s designated public liberal arts university. What a wonderful boon this has been for both Georgia College and the state! It sets us apart with a very special role, which is to provide an affordable, smaller liberal arts college alternative to the large research universities for the state’s more academically talented students. Unlike every other public university in the state of Georgia, we’ve been allowed to cap undergraduate student enrollment growth and to focus instead on enhancing the quality of the undergraduate educational experience. The pride in what we have accomplished thus far with this unique mission is tangible among our students, alumni, faculty and staff, and friends and supporters across the state and beyond.
Our many accomplishments at the undergraduate level are the result of years of relentless focus on the university’s public liberal arts mission. But we have not yet embraced our graduate mission with a comparable degree of enthusiasm and intentionality, and strategic direction # 3 —respected provider of graduate programs in the middle Georgia region — seeks to remedy this situation. Our graduate students deserve the same degree of care and concern for the quality of their educational experience, and we should want our graduate programs to receive equal recognition for educational excellence.
Toward this end, over the next few years, we will focus on ways in which we might more effectively support our graduate students and the faculty who teach in our graduate programs; we will consider the most effective means of program delivery for meeting the educational needs of the students in these programs; and we will look for new program opportunities for responding to the educational needs of the region.
Although our graduate and undergraduate missions are distinct, they are also united by some common educational objectives. For example, whatever their educational level, we want our students to think critically and creatively, to apply theory to real-world issues, to find solutions to complex problems, and to be prepared to work and lead in a diverse and globally interconnected world. Teaching these things effectively is both a noble calling and perpetual challenge.
Strategic Direction 4
Strong Partner for Creating a Better Community and State
Continue to strengthen community and regional ties through programs and partnerships that improve the quality of life or enhance economic, education or cultural opportunities.
Interestingly enough, some of you also questioned this area of strategic focus and argued that it is secondary to teaching and scholarship. But our national peer group — the institutions admitted as members of the Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges — strongly disagrees. One of the salient differences between private and public institutions is the extent to which public institutions see community service, service learning and civic engagement as integral to their missions. To be a public liberal arts institution is not just to be more affordable than private college counterparts; such institutions also exemplify through their programs, scholarship, and service, strong commitments to their communities and to promoting the public good
In a scarce resource environment, I understand why one might question the centrality of this commitment. Your classrooms are more crowded, your advising loads are heavier, and the time and support available for research and scholarship are more constricted. But if we view our communities as learning laboratories — as places where students can apply, test, expand and otherwise explore more deeply the knowledge they learn in the classroom -- the perspective shifts; and our community-related activities emerge less as an optional add-on and more as an enhancement of the core academic enterprise.
Strategic Direction #4 — Strong Partner for Creating a Better Community and State — is about identifying and pursuing the most effective ways of linking the community to the academic enterprise — linkages that not only benefit the community but also support the university’s teaching and research missions. Clearly, we can’t be everything to everyone; and so our focus needs to be on those linkages that have the greatest community and university impact and also lend themselves to funding support from private foundations and governmental agencies.
Strategic Direction 5
Talented, mission-invested faculty and staff
Continue to implement strategies for recruiting and retaining highly qualified faculty and staff and for fostering a work environment that promotes institutional values.
It won’t surprise you to learn that there was considerable support for retaining this item as one of our strategic directions. I think that all of us recognize that without a talented faculty and staff who care deeply about Georgia College and its students, our university would be a very different place. There is a special spirit at Georgia College that prevails despite those inevitable occasions when we quarrel and grumble. I can’t quite capture it in words, but this spirit expresses itself in your commitment to Georgia College and through your collegiality.
I want to give a special shout-out to the employees who worked on our behalf recently when the university closed due to winter ice and snow. Unlike most of us, they skidded out of their driveways to get to campus and worked under adverse conditions to provide basic services and support to students who had already returned to campus when the shut down occurred. Two of our public safety officers -- Sergeant Brian English and Officer Jamal Hicks — deserve special recognition. They responded to a serious sledding accident involving one of our students, and their quick and smart actions as they waited for emergency medical personnel to arrive prevented further serious injury to this student. The student’s friends and family are grateful, as am I, and the entire university community.
These officers were able to do this because they were alert, responsive, and appropriatly trained. Because the safety and security of our campus and people are high priorities, the ongoing training of our public safety personnel continued during the economic downturn. But training in other university areas has suffered, and this needs to be addressed as the economic climate improves.
Employees not only need to be trained for the work we ask them to do, but they also deserve recognition and reward for exemplary service as well as help to improve when adequate performance is a struggle. Ideally, the annual evaluation system should be a tool in this process. But a number of you have expressed concerns about the fairness and consistency of the processes we use. Faculty and staff alike have expressed interest in a process that more accurately takes into account the work we ask them to do and also reduces the subjective judgment of supervisors. For these reasons, improving the faculty and staff evaluation processes also will be an institutional priority over the next few years.
Another concern reflected in your comments on the strategic framework was related to employee compensation. This is totally understandable as salaries have been stagnant now for three years and too often lagged behind the market prior to the onset of the recent recession. I am pleased to report that the third-phase of the faculty market equity plan was implemented in January, and I remain hopeful that the fourth-phase can be implemented during the next fiscal year. Although the recession interfered with the original timeline for bringing all faculty positions to a more market competitive salary level, this has nonetheless remained a top institutional priority.
For staff employees, in contrast, our challenge lies in a somewhat different direction. Unlike faculty, who can advance in faculty rank, most staff positions do not have a progression of steps or ranks that enable qualified employees to move to a higher pay grade. So, another of our priorities over the next few years will be to develop a position classification system that recognizes and rewards our highest performing staff by providing them with opportunities to advance to higher levels in their job classifications.
Strategic Direction 6
Effective Fiscal and Operational Performance
Continue to seek operational performance improvement and effective fiscal strategies.
Perhaps now more than ever before, effective fiscal and operational performance will be key to the future of Georgia College.
The reductions in staffing we have experienced as a consequence of successive years of deep budget cuts translate into far fewer people to manage campus support operations. While it is good practice to review operational processes on a regular basis, a focus on process improvement becomes even more important under the current circumstances.
Process improvement involves analyzing existing processes and making changes as necessary to meet specific goals — for example, to accelerate response time, reduce costs, improve customer satisfaction, reduce risk or to enhance the quality of the end result or product. For Georgia College, process improvement related to each of these goals is important but perhaps none more so in the current scarce resource environment than reductions in cost and time. If we can reduce the time it takes to process a request, make a repair, file a report, or collect, review, and disseminate information, that frees up time for other tasks. If we can reduce the cost, then resources can be redirected to other critical needs.
As members of the university community, you will have an opportunity to weigh-in on making process improvement recommendations — and if you are in charge of a process that is selected for process improvement, please don’t take offense. Most of us inherited and did not create the processes that we use in the course of our work. A process that more effectively or efficiently produces its desired result will add satisfaction to your work-life and should serve as an occasion for employee pride.
In addition to process improvement in selective areas, we must continue and accelerate our focus on revenue generation. If nothing else, the recent past should suggest to us the wisdom of becoming less reliant on state funding to support the university’s educational mission. Indeed, for at least a decade prior to the current economic recession, the proportion of state funding for higher education relative to other funding sources was shrinking in many states across the nation. There is little evidence to indicate that the disinvestment by states in public higher education is likely to change until and unless states are able to fix structural problems in their budgets. This is particularly true for states such as Georgia with a low appetite for tax increases.
Historically, declines in state support are at least partially offset by increases in tuition and fees. But this funding model is unsustainable for public institutions committed to maintaining affordable access for students. Next year, for the first time ever, it is quite likely that funding from student tuition and fees will exceed funding from the State of Georgia. And so, as we move into this new era of declining state support, we need to accelerate efforts to become more self-sufficient. We can do this by focusing on building alternative revenue streams—for example, through fundraising, grants and contracts, and auxiliary business enterprises.
I want to talk to you for a moment about fundraising, which emerged as an area of interest in some of your comments. Two-years ago, the Georgia College Foundation launched the silent phase of its very first comprehensive campaign. That was a brave action to take during a time of economic downturn when private giving typically declines, and I know that you join me in thanking the campaign leadership for their efforts on our behalf. The campaign -- called Pillars for the Future: Campaign to Sustain Excellence — focuses broadly on endowed scholarships, endowed professorships, endowed undergraduate research as well as on on-going program support through unrestricted and annual giving.
We have been in the “quiet phase” of the campaign — a time during which we visit with potential donors to ensure that the campaign goal is attainable. I am pleased to tell you that the campaign has achieved 60% of its goal and is on track for a successful completion next year. Many of the gifts have been pledged over a 3-to-5 year timeframe, which means that their positive impact on Georgia College lies just a bit into the future. We have begun to post stories about campaign donors and their gifts on the News & Events page of the university’s website, and you will see more information about the campaign as it moves into the public phase, when we will reach out to many more alumni and friends and the campus community as well.
Grants and contracts are also important sources of revenue that can be used to support university programs and faculty scholarship; and Georgia College has set the stage for marked improvement in this area with the hiring of an experienced, full-time sponsored research director. The task now is to ensure that we have the support and incentive structures in place for producing competitive grant proposals and expanding the flow of grant and contract revenue into the university.
In addition, we need to explore potential areas, based on faculty expertise and research, where we might be successful in developing practical applications of research and bringing these applications to the marketplace. Although this is common in the research university environment, there is no a priori reason for thinking that our own faculty research can’t occasionally yield marketable applications.
Other sources of revenue potential lie in our auxiliary business enterprises and continuing education programs. These are “off-budget” areas, which means that we do not use state funds to support their operations, and the revenue they generate must cover their costs. Our challenge now is to better leverage the revenue generated through auxiliary business enterprises and continuing education to support the core academic mission of Georgia College.
The Campus Theatre project provides one interesting example of what I mean. As you know, the Campus Theatre contains both retail and academic space. The retail space consists of a bookstore and coffee shop. The academic space consists of offices, teaching, and performance spaces for the Department of Theatre. What you may not know is that the retail space is paying for the academic space. I won’t bore you with the details except to say that the renovation of the Campus Theatre was financed through a revenue bond that guarantees repayment from revenues generated by the bookstore and coffee shop.
More generally, I think that leadership across all areas of the university will need to focus more attention on developing revenue streams to support divisional missions. Last semester, I challenged each of the university divisions led by a vice president to develop plans for generating additional revenue equal to at least 2% of the current base funding in the division. I added some easy-to-follow rules to the challenge: for example, they weren’t allowed to generate the revenue by charging students or other university areas for services, and revenue generating initiatives had to be consistent with the university’s mission. So, for example, the consistency with mission rule would rule out a deal with a fast-food chain requiring health sciences faculty to market unhealthy food items to their students. But it was okay to consider opening up new student markets through online graduate programs —as is the current plan of several of our academic departments.
I confess that this has been somewhat controversial. Some of you have suggested that this focus smacks of a misplaced emphasis on raising revenue rather than improving education quality. But quality costs, and I am open to better alternatives for supplanting our dwindling supply of dollars from the state. Others have expressed concerns about online program quality and the compatibility of online instruction with our primary focus on face-to-face instruction.
I won’t pretend to resolve the debates here — that resolution is ultimately for the faculty to determine. But I will offer a few observations. For some time now, prior to my arrival here, we have offered a limited number of online graduate programs, and our undergraduate emphasis on face-to-face instruction has not suffered as a result. Is there a tipping point? I’m not sure, but it is hard to believe that we are now close to it as we offer fewer online courses and programs than most of our state and national peers. As for the quality issue, my sense is that resolving the matter should depend on the normal faculty review and approval process and also program results. Does the program effectively engage students in the learning process? Does the program meet appropriate standards related to student learning outcomes, academic rigor, and subject matter content?
These issues bring me--at long last-- to my closing theme. In the words of Bob Dylan, “the times they are a changing.” If you are as old as me, you will remember the song.
Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.
That’s my message. We have created a unique and very special place for students to learn and grow intellectually and socially at Georgia College. And this is worth “swimming’” for, as Dylan would say. This is worth saving. To do this, we need to continue our focus on the undergraduate student learning environment and student success; we need to continue to build the reputation of Georgia College as the state’s public liberal arts university in order to attract students and support; we need to give comparable attention to our graduate programs and students; we need to pursue initiatives that connect our teaching, research, and service to the community in ways that make a positive difference; we need to support the faculty and staff who day after day deliver and support the instructional mission of the university; and last, but not least, we need to do all of this in a radically altered funding environment.
The Bob Dylan song reminded me of the slogan that any self-respecting student of my generation slapped on car bumpers, books, and dormitory walls: “Question Authority”. It’s your turn.
I welcome your questions and comments.
