FEBRUARY 27, 2003

Good morning, and thank you all for coming out this morning. This is a regular event for Bowling Green State University – our State of the University Address. It is going to be a little bit different – as each year it is – in that we are going to talk a little bit about the State budget. I am sure you have been reading a lot about this. There is quite a bit of information in the paper about the State budget. We will try to get some clarification as to what all that seems to mean at this particular point in time to us. The bulk of the time I would like to talk about the Academic Plan. This is the document that has been in the making for at least eight months to a year. It is a product that has resulted from many, many hours of collaboration and discussion amongst a very energetic and committed group of faculty. It is a document that really gives a clear sense of definition and purpose to our Vision Statement that was developed in 1995 to become a premier learning community in Ohio and one of the best in the nation. It begins to talk about some particulars, such as the undergraduate program, and themes that are very important in helping or assisting in making that vision a reality.

Before I begin, I just want to reflect on various and sundry things. One of the good things about the State of the University Address and the State of the State Address is that there are good and bad things about these opportunities. When you are speaking in front of a large group of people about things that you think are of some importance, there is always some trepidation because you don’t know what exactly you are going to say or how it is going to be received. You know how you think about it and what you want it to mean to people, but you really don’t know what it is going to mean to people. So that is the downside. On the positive side, it is your opportunity for thirty minutes to say anything you want to say, so you get a chance to just let it rip and say what you want to say.

When I was thinking about the University this morning as I was reading the BG News, I was thinking for no particular reason about what really is a university. We are talking a lot right now about budgets, funding, the deficit in the State, its impact on higher education, reductions, reductions, reductions… If you read the Wall Street Journal and you follow the equity market, you know what is happening there. It is about money, figures, and projections. But that is not a university. The $200 million support we get from the state share of instruction and the money we collect from auxiliary services, contracts, grants, and development activities – those really aren’t the university.

The university is really embedded is in a lot of places. In particular, this morning, for me it is right here in the BG News. I was reading the section called “Get a Life” – maybe there is a message for me in there, and it has a list of events. It talks about the Dance Marathon fundraiser; Kappa Delta will be selling t-shirts. Then there are about four or five other events around the Dance Marathon. These are events where students, in this particular case, are coming together to try to do something to make society a little bit better. They are using their organizations, their fraternities or their sororities; and they are using their organizational skills. These are students who are business majors, education majors, arts and sciences majors. They are trying to take the privilege they have been provided, the opportunity to get a college education, and the skills they are learning in their classrooms and to use that to make a difference in the world in which they live. That, in fact, is a university. A place where ideas are filtered through human experience so that they can make a difference.

I then went on to read a little further. I scanned over to a section where they have debates, on the Opinion Page. “What We are Fighting to Protect” by a person who was in favor of a possible war in Iraq. Then there was a counterpoint “Why We Shouldn’t Have This War.” Both of these were very well reasoned statements. I thought that no matter what you agree with, for or against, that’s a university. The university is not a line item in the budget that says that X-million amount of dollars go to Bowling Green State University or Ohio State University or the University of Toledo. The university is about ideas. It’s about people. It’s about vision. It’s about possibility. It’s about discovery. It’s about communication. Those are the intangibles that, no matter what they do with the budget, they can’t erode or tarnish the mettle of a university.

I have been spending a lot of time in Columbus lobbying on behalf of the budget, as all university representatives have been doing – presidents, legislative representatives, Board of Trustee members, Deans. Anybody who has the ear of a legislator has been doing that. I remember distinctly talking to people in Columbus last week at an event related to a commission I was serving on for the Governor. The Governor, right after he found out that the House was not going to support his tax initiative (it was the afternoon of that day), came up to me and asked how I had been doing. I said that things were going okay and that we were managing. The first thing he said to me was “I am really sorry.” What he was sorry about was that he couldn’t protect higher education because, as you know, what happens is that if there weren’t the tax increases, then there was going to have to be additional cuts. And those additional cuts were going to fall disproportionately on higher education and possibly K-12 education so he was apologizing to me because he couldn’t really do things to protect higher education because he believes in what we do. He believes in the importance of higher education, not only in economic development, which we know is important, but the importance of having educated citizens in Ohio – citizens who are reflective, who can analyze, who can make decisions, who can take care of their health so that holistically they can be more fully functioning as people, so they can be mentally and physically healthy, so they can be actively engaged in the community in which they live – and he wasn’t able to protect that.
Then I walked a little bit farther, and Randy Gardner was there, our Senator from this area. The first thing that Randy said to me was, “Dr. Ribeau, I am really sorry.” So there are people who really understand and believe in what we do. They may not understand the university as we understand it from the inside – the nuances and the details. Just as I don’t understand state government from the inside, nor do I understand an accounting firm from the inside, nor a nuclear engineering facility from the inside because they are not my discipline. They understand conceptually what we do and that we are, in fact, important. That importance, when it works well and works correctly, makes a difference in the kind of society we have and the kind of State that we have.

So the university is not any one particular issue or debate. It is embedded in the discussion about the war; it is embedded in students organizing to make a difference; it is embedded in the dialogue that is going to take place in classrooms throughout this campus in another half hour or forty-five minutes. All of those things are, in fact, a university. We can’t lose focus on that. As they were telling me that they were sorry, I said, “You know what. We are going to make this work.” Because leadership is about making decisions, providing insight, providing direction, in the good times and the bad times. It is really easy to lead when everything is wonderful. It is really easy to be head of your family when there is no family crisis. But, when there is a challenge, when things are difficult, when there is illness, when there is sickness, when there is a shortage of funds, that is, in fact, the time when leadership is most needed. That is the time when all of us who believe in what we do – we believe in the importance of it, the value of it – to organize and use our best thinking to make sure that we can accomplish our goals.

So I am not particularly dissuaded. We will manage the situation and we will talk in a few moments about the immediate impact and our short-term plan and the long-term that we are thinking about. The most important thing now is to have a sense of direction and to do the things that we can afford to do to pursue that direction. Everything doesn’t cost additional money. In this Academic Plan that I’m going to talk to you about in a few moments, there are a number of things in that Plan that do not require additional money. Some things do. But what does common sense tell you? First of all, you do the things that don’t cost additional money if you don’t have it and prepare the background or the foundation to do things that do cost money. But you DON’T stop when things get tough. Just like the old deer in the headlights scenario: the worst thing a deer can do when they cross the road is to see the headlights and freeze. They are guaranteed to get wiped out. (Maybe we will get wiped out.) What the deer needs to do is be fleet of foot at that particular time and make a cut to the left or right and get out of the way. What happens though? Wipe out. That’s the same analogy I would use for the University right now, or for any other state agency. I don’t care if it’s prisons, corrections, K-12 – this is the time not to freeze, this is the time to be fleet of foot, to be deft, and to use all of your resources to continue moving forward.

One other thing I want to say just randomly before we get to some slides, which will be pretty much self-explanatory and I won’t have to talk a lot about them, is that collaboration is going to be ever more important this year, next year, and in the years to come in higher education. Since we are in an environment where we have declining resources and we still have important things to do, we have to find other ways to do those things. I am going to mention to you just a couple of examples of collaborations that are in the process of developing and strongly urge you to look for opportunities to collaborate with colleagues throughout the University, at other universities, be it University of Toledo, Owens Community College, Lourdes College, wherever a college might be with whom you can collaborate because collectively we have an opportunity to do much more than we will probably be able to do individually for a few years in Ohio. Let me mention just a couple of these, and then I will get to the slides.

Last fall, BGSU joined the Northwest Ohio Partnership on Alternative Energy Systems. Formed with funding from the National Science Foundation, the coalition includes the University of Toledo, Owens Community College, area governmental agencies and other organizations. The NSF funding is underwriting joint research related to alternative fuels. The Electric Vehicle Institute in the College of Technology and the Center for Photochemical Sciences are key partners in this endeavor. This was funded by NSF to the tune of about $600,000.

This is a wonderful initiative in which we bring together individuals from the College of Engineering, College of Technology, Photochemical Sciences, and other researchers to address alternative fuels, which is vital for the future of our nation. If there is one thing that is important for our nation, it is finding alternatives for sources of energy as fossil fuel is depleted by natural causes and not accessible because of the geopolitics we are facing in our society. For those two reasons, fossil fuel is going away with time. We know that. Geologists have told us that, and geopolitically there is a dynamic going on right now that we really don’t have a handle on in regard to what is happening throughout the nation and the world so we know that alternative fuels are going to be progressively important. This is an example of UT, Owens, and Bowling Green getting together and saying, “Hey. Let’s look at what we can do collectively with our best minds, with our laboratories, with our resources, and become a player in this.” And we know that there will be, in fact, federal money to support these initiatives.

One other thing I wanted to mention has to do with COSMOS. BGSU and the University of Toledo are creating a new COSMOS to enhance mathematics and science education in Northwest Ohio. Combined with significant funding from the two universities, a four-year, $1-million grant from the Ohio Board of Regents is establishing the Center for Excellence in Science and Mathematics Education: Opportunities for Success – one of three such centers statewide. Dr. Barbara Moses, associate professor of math and statistics at BGSU, is director of the collaborative effort, which also includes other partners from education and business.
Again, we know we have a need for math and science teachers. We know we need them throughout Northwest Ohio; we need them throughout the entire State of Ohio; we need them throughout the nation. If we don’t do something about the dire need or shortage of science and math teachers, we are not going to have science and math education in our public schools because right now, not in the future, not with retirements, RIGHT NOW we don’t have enough math and science teachers. I was on the Governor’s Commission on Teaching Effectiveness. One of the areas we looked at was recruiting new teachers or trying to identify the areas where we need to recruit new teachers. Math and science is the area of dire need so we know we need to address that. COSMOS is an attempt to bring together the two universities, Owens, and other partners, to try to address that need.

So I say to you, before I start talking about the budget, that collaborations are going to be progressively important as we go forward. One of the ways that we are going to deal with the budget difficulties that we are facing is through working with other people and maximizing our effectiveness by working in a collaborative effort. If you follow athletics, it’s the difference between a group of individuals who play well and a team. A team can maximize the potential for success. Everybody contributes; everybody is recognized and valued in that equation. So we have some great opportunities. Dean Bulmahn is here for people who want to talk about collaboration. We have collaborated with UT for a number of years, but we are going to be building upon that foundation and doing more things collectively. We have a number of degree programs where we share degrees and programs with Medical College of Ohio and University of Toledo. We are going to need to do more of that.

Let’s go to the slides now and talk a little bit about budgets. If you look at this first slide, Fiscal Year 2003, this is just looking at this year. The January budget cut was $121 million, in general. Higher education’s share was $13.4 million. The budget cut that we are anticipating, and it seems likely it is assured right now, is another $162 million. Higher education’s share of this amount is about $39 million. If you look at these cuts, what you will find is that Bowling Green’s share ($162 million, higher education’s share $39 million) is approximately $2 million. That is a cut that we have to make between now and the end of the fiscal year on June 30 so it is the worst possible cut that you could possibly receive because it is not early enough in the year to do any planning. You are already paying faculty and staff; you have students in classes, and so things are already happening, and it is very hard to make the adjustments.
I was reading an article in some publication recently about tuition increases and mid-year increases. We are not increasing tuition right now because of this budget cut. Students are already enrolled in classes; we have already agreed upon what the tuition and fees will be for those classes so that is water under the bridge. We will meet our obligation, our $2 million deduction; but there will not be any tuition increases immediately. We do not have the wherewithal or the desire to do that at this particular time. But we do, in fact, face a situation where Bowling Green’s share of $39 million is approximately $2 million that we have to identify.

What we are doing and how we are going about addressing this cut is shown on this slide. Two million dollars in budget reductions and savings. Our first priority is to support the instructional areas. We have students here; we have an obligation to assure that the students are provided the classes and the support they need to be successful. To me, it is like a contract. When you admit students to the University, you say “You come here with an expectation. We will do everything we can to meet our obligation so that you can have the classes and matriculate through our system and graduate.” And that is, in fact, what we intend to do so we will support the instructional areas as best as we can.

We are continuing the hiring freeze. As you know, we have had a hiring freeze for a while in anticipation of this. I was talking to our Chief Financial Officer yesterday. We were just talking about the budget and our approaches to it. If you look at salary savings which are derived from the hiring freeze, we have probably saved from $1 to $1.4 million. Now, I am not saying this cavalierly. There is a price to be paid. There are people that we are not hiring. There are things that we can’t do. There are support services for students that we can’t provide. You might wait in line a little bit longer. You might not be able to get an advisor when you need one. You might not be able to get a transcript as fast as you want one so, even at this early stage of cuts, there are consequences. It is not like this is just magical where you reduce services, freeze positions, and everything is the same. It is not the same. You will see a qualitative difference in the way we operate as an institution, and you will see it immediately.
All of those positions that are open, be they in Academic Affairs or Student Affairs or Financial Services or Administrative Affairs, will have implications because there aren’t the people there to do the work that is required. The freeze will continue. You can anticipate some kind of impact on services because you don’t not hire people and not have an impact on services. That is the reality that we face; but it is one that we can and we will manage. It will have implications for this coming year because this cut right here for 2003 does not pertain to the 2004-2005 budget. What is being discussed in Columbus right now is the 2004-2005 budget. That is the next biennial budget. Originally, if you have been tracking this with the media, the Governor in his executive budget had proposed a 4% increase for the first year and a 3% increase for the second year. Well, obviously, that is not going to happen. If we didn’t have the revenues at this point and the legislature or the assembly was not willing to give us sources of additional revenue, i.e., additional taxes, then it is very unlikely that we are going to get additional revenue, or at least there is no visible sign of additional revenue at this particular point. This means that the 2004-2005 budget cannot really move forward based on the assumptions that were provided by the Governor. In addition to that, our budget with this $2 million reduction reduces our base budget so anything that we receive in 2004-2005 would be diluted because what our base budget would be going into that deliberation would be $2 million less than we had assumed if we would not have had this cut. And so the 2004-2005 budget still remains to be negotiated.

What I said the last time we had discussions about serious budgets still holds now, in my view. Let me just share that with you. Our first priority is to support the instructional areas and to accommodate the students that we have. We are going to do this in the midst of some impacts that we have to recognize. In three years, higher education appropriations have been cut $313 million dollars. If you look at per pupil expenditure, you are talking around $1,000 per student that has been reduced or removed from our operating budget. At one point back in 1988, we were receiving as high as $7,000 per student. Now we are slightly below $6,000 per student. It depends on discipline and major, but on average we are around that range. The point is that this is not new. Higher education has continually received significant cuts. The last thing I would say when you do the math on this is that it is not just that we have lost $313 million if you look at our reduction in appropriations in the last three years. We have also in the past five years increased enrollment 12 1/2 percent. Bowling Green has and the entire higher education community. Community colleges have, and our twelve other state universities and free-standing medical schools so funds have been shrinking. We have been getting reduced at the same time that enrollment is going up so there is a greater demand for access, a greater demand for services, a greater demand for accommodating more students and we are receiving less money for students. It doesn’t take an economist to figure out that it is very difficult to manage in that environment.

So our message to the legislature is that, if you want us to continue to serve the State of Ohio as we have been , if you want us to continue to graduate citizens who are educated, who are taxpayers, who are leaders, then you need to find a way to support higher education. In order to do that there are going to have to be some difficult discussions between now and the end of this fiscal year. I am not pessimistic about these discussions. They are ongoing as we speak, and our legislators are listening. They are in a very tough situation. What you can do – each and every one of you here, whether you are a staff member, a faculty member, any member of our community – is to make the case for higher education. Larry Weiss is here today somewhere in this room. Larry can provide you with the individuals who we need to talk to, the legislators who need to hear from you. If you need financial data about the impact of budget cuts in the last three years, in the last five years, in the last ten years in higher education, we can provide that information for you.

But let me just summarize it by saying we have, in fact, been doing a lot more with reduced funds, and we are doing a heck of a job. Our graduation rates continue to increase. We are meeting our end of the obligation, but it is very difficult to do that if we don’t have the resources to continue. My final statement on this is that, if you talk to legislators they will say, “If this is so important, if things are so dire and so bad, if this is so problematic, why don’t we hear from more people in support of higher education?” They hear from people regarding K-12 education. They hear from people in support of child welfare programs. They hear from people who support prisons. But they say they don’t get a lot of responses; they don’t get letters from people who are advocating for higher education. That’s the way democracy works. You need to express your concerns. You need to say “This is something that is, in fact, important to us.” I applaud our Faculty Senate – I don’t know if our Faculty Senate leadership is here – because a year ago they actually started a legislative group and they went to the Legislature and to the Assembly and talked to legislators about higher education and advocated on behalf of higher education. Our students have been very active in advocating on behalf of higher education, but each and every one of you needs to speak up on behalf of higher education with letters, phone calls, and advocacy.

We are going to come up with our portion of the reduction for this particular cycle, and all of the universities are. But it is getting to the point now that we are not going to be able to continue to use salary savings, one-time money, to offset permanent reductions in our operating budget so we need you to advocate on behalf of higher education and to lobby to maintain, if not increase, state support. The hiring freeze will stay in effect, and we going to really lock down that even more aggressively. Reallocate funds to meet the highest priorities. Develop alternative sources of revenue. Protect mission-critical activities. Under developing alternative sources of revenue, we need to do a much better job with raising dollars from the private sector. We need to do a much better job at fundraising. We have done in the past five years a remarkable job. If you look at the percentage of increases in private giving to the University, we have gone from annual giving of a little under $4 million to on average almost $9-10 million a year, but we need to do more of that; we need to be much more aggressive about soliciting funds on behalf of the University.

We have a wonderful story to tell. We have great students, we have accomplished faculty and staff, but we need to get out there and tell that story. Doug Smith and his staff are ready for the challenge, and they are moving forward in that area. I am spending a lot more time on fundraising activities because we need additional revenues. Along with that I would say on the sponsored or funded research side of the equation, we need to bring in more contracts, more grants, more federally funded resources to support the initiatives of our faculty and staff to support our graduate students and the mission of our institution.

Protect Mission-Critical activities. Reallocate funds to meet highest priorities. Our highest priority is teaching and learning, so we have to assure that we have the resources to provide for sections for students who are enrolled in the University. We have to be sure that we can provide the support services. We have 7,000 students living on campus. They have to be able to get psychological counseling and advice if they need it. They need advisors on academic issues. They need a Health Center. They need Food Services. You just don’t bring 7,000 people into your community and say, “Okay, you’re on your own now. Sorry, you have to find a place to eat and a place to get help.” You can’t do that. It is very, very simple. When I go through all the things that we do, we look first and foremost at providing instruction and services for our students. That is the business that we are in.

So that is the long and the short of the budget. Enrollment has been growing consistently. If you look at it, the final figure has been cut over $7 million since 2002. Seven million dollars has been taken out of our budget. I am proud to say that we are still accommodating a record number of students and we are doing a heck of a job. That is because of each and every one of you here – the faculty members and the staff members who are taking this very seriously, who are doing the extra work, who are taking that extra step to assure that we can provide the quality of education that we all know and want for our population. If it is any consolation, I was recently in California on a development trip, and I talked to an alumnus in that area. We anticipate a $4 billion shortfall in the biennial budget. They are anticipating a $35 billion shortfall. I told him I didn’t even know how to think about $35 billion, but that is the magnitude of what they are confronting. They are raising tuition and doing all kinds of things to try to offset the problems they are facing in that state. So that is the budget scenario. We will keep you posted as more information is forthcoming. Of course, we will know for sure by June 30 because the budget has to be balanced by June 30. What we will know between now and then is what the Assembly is proposing. What the final word from the House is, if they think revenues are down and they are unable to balance the budget by additional cuts, they would consider possibly a one cent sales tax increase, but that all remains to be seen. So that is the budget.

As we work our way through all this budget complexity, as I said in my earlier comments, we need to stay focused on what a university is and what a university does. The way you get through difficult times is having a clear sense of direction and a plan. It can’t be my plan. It needs to be a collaborative plan that is developed by the community so that it is owned by the community and people can make it happen. They can activate it. They can actualize it. This academic planning activity that was engaged in by a number of faculty members and is now a document that is on Web is a really important document in helping to move us forward to the realization of our vision.

Some of you who have been around here a while might remember this. Bowling Green State University aspires to be the premier learning community in Ohio and one of the best in the nation. That came out of the community building activity of 1995, and it is something that has guided much of our activity in a variety of ways since that time. I want to read to you a little bit more from that original statement. The next line reads “Through the interdependence of teaching, learning, scholarship and service we will create an environment grounded in intellectual diversity and guided by rational discourse and civility. Bowling Green State University serves the diverse and multicultural communities of Ohio, the United States and the world…” I have had a lot of people come up to me and ask, “The premier learning community in Ohio and the best in the nation. What does that mean? That sounds like a public relations company slogan. But what does that mean in regard to what we do everyday in our life at the University.”

I decided there needed to be a period of time for people to think about that and work it out. I think that in the last four or five years people have taken bits and pieces of that and developed it in ways that they thought were appropriate. For example, we now have eleven or twelve residential learning communities on campus – Impact, Chapman, and on and on. We have a number of initiatives that did not exist before this vision statement because a group of faculty and staff members got together and said, “Learning community means to me….” They developed something, they made something happen, they created a Springboard, an Impact, a Chapman, or the Health & Human Services Learning Community. They read into that something that led them to create educational opportunities for students that didn’t exist before, and that is a good thing. Because, if nothing else, what a university must be is a place where possibilities find the light of day and become realities, become programs, become learning opportunities for students. We have this. A lot of people have taken it and moved with it in different ways.

But it was time I think, after five years had passed, to really look at this and have a group of faculty members look at this and see how this could be aligned with an Academic Plan for the University, not only for next year but for five years from now, ten years from now, twenty years from now because, although I will not probably still be alive twenty years from now, let alone working at a college or university, there will be a Bowling Green State University. There will be students to teach, research to be done, ideas to be discovered, creativity to be expressed. Just because we are not here, doesn’t mean it stops. We need to be about the business of planning, about what happens after the budget problems of 2003. We need to be about the business of looking at what kind of University we need to have in 2010, 2015, and 2020. What kind of academic programs? What kind of research infrastructure do we need to create to assure that research continues to be done – cutting edge research – fifteen or twenty years from now?

So that was my charge to this Academic Planning Team. Let’s look at where we have been. Let’s look at the Vision Statement, let’s look at the documentation. Let’s look at the Academic Plan from each college and school. Let’s look at the plan from each division within the University and see how all that comes together to give us an academic direction or a set of academic tenets as we move forward. And this is what this group, in fact, worked on.
To achieve this vision, emphasize the character of Bowling Green State University. What they said was that in order to make that vision a reality, we need to look at the academic programs that we have today and say to ourselves, “What is really unique about those? What is really the intellectual substance of what we do in general education? What is, in fact, the substance of the outcomes of our literature programs or our philosophy program or our math program? So what they tried to do on one level was to identify the nucleus or the core of the intellectual enterprise that is part of our academic program at Bowling Green State University. They came up with inquiry, engagement and achievement.

Again, this document is on the web. I strongly encourage you if you haven’t read this, to pull it up and read it. It is a wonderful document. They said some very, very insightful and thoughtful things about what we do, what we can do, and what we should be doing. It really gives a different tone to the nature of our intellectual enterprise at Bowling Green.
I’m going to read to you just a little section of what they have under the “Premier Learning Community” and then talk a little bit about each one of these. “The University’s vision establishes an ideal toward which we strive. Discussing that ideal led to the identification of four ways in which we seek to become premier:

• Intellectual engagement and active participation: Opportunities for intellectual engagement and active participation are foundations for academic and civic performance.
In other words, it is not just enough to learn about. We must use what we have learned to create opportunities, to change things, to discover new things. We need to be engaged. We can’t just sit by and watch. We need to take what we have. As I mentioned earlier, in the BG News the students from different clubs and organizations, different academic disciplines, sororities, fraternities, are using what they know. They have to do something, to engage the community in this particular case, to help individual children in the Children’s Miracle Network.

• Clear expectations: Students, faculty, and staff have clear expectations regarding the purposes of education and the level of performance necessary to be successful at the university and in contemporary society.
This is something that I think is essential to any kind of endeavor. It could be in a College or a University, it could be in a corporation, or it could be in your own family. You need to know what you expect to get out of a situation to have a high likelihood of achieving it. What are our learning expectations? When a student finishes Biology 101, what should she know and be able to do? When they finish their first semester at Bowling Green State University, what should they be able to know, think, do, believe? But other than just filling them up with information, filling them up with charts and graphs, and having them memorize things, we need to turn them around to another angle and say, “Okay, what, in fact, should be the qualitative difference? What are our expectations as a result of this?” That they will know the principles of accounting and be able to apply those in a limited set of circumstances and as a result of that, on and on and on. But to be a premier learning community, you need to have clear expectations. I think there was a time in higher education (and for those of you who are experts in the history of higher education, you could talk a lot more about this than I) when people believed that things should just float. You know, you just kind of discover things, gain an insight, think about it a little bit more. That is not the nature of the society in which we live today. That is not the nature in which colleges and universities operate. It is not the structure of our political economy in the United States, and clearly not throughout the world. It is not just the limitless discussion of ideas. I will give you a really clear point to illustrate that. If you ask the student at Bowling Green State University, any student that is in this audience today, how many have come here just to hang out for four or five years and see what they learn; most of them will say that they want to learn but that they also want to become an accountant, a teacher, a lawyer, a doctor, etc. They have linked the educational experience with some kind of outcome. It doesn’t matter if it is right or wrong, good or bad. That’s what they want to do. They are not here just to experience. They are here to get new insights, they are here to learn, they are here to get a good education. But their expectation is that then they can take that and do something with it professionally and hopefully personally. A premier learning community, in addition to engagement, needs to have clear expectations.
There are two other things that deal with transformation in the document.

• Personal and professional transformation: The university learning environment encourages and nurtures personal and professional transformation among students, faculty, and staff.

• Institutional transformation: Similarly, the university recognizes that institutional transformation is necessary to respond to the ever-changing intellectual, social, and cultural demands of our global society as we prepare our students to participate and lead.
What you know, what you are able to do. The institution should, in fact, be changed as a result of it. So to achieve the vision we need to emphasize the character of Bowling Green State University. We need to look at inquiry, engagement and achievement. You can read about these in the document itself.

Inquiry is self-explanatory. Inquiry is the cornerstone of what we do at the University. The idea is that inquiry undergirds all of our academic programs. I don’t care whether it is an academic major, general education or a graduate program. Inquiry is a foundational tool for an academic and intellectual community.

Engagement. The idea is that we need to engage. We need not to just be passive recipients of information, but we in addition need to be able to use that, engage that. Going back to the Dance Marathon is an example of how our students are taking what they know and engaging this community and the larger community. They are out there helping hundreds and hundreds and thousands of kids and their families.

Achievement. Provide an educational environment that develops culturally literate, self-assured, technologically sophisticated, productive citizens who are prepared to lead, to inspire, and to preserve the great traditions of our democracy. This is quite a lofty statement. Basically, what that statement says to me – and I remember when we drafted this at the beginning of the project – is that we want to have citizens who live next door to us or sit next to us in this auditorium or in a classroom that we feel are intellectually, active, alive, who we might not agree with, but we respect, who are making a contribution to the fabric of our community and our society. You can do it in different ways. Jarrod Hirschfeld, our student Trustee, who is graduating in the not too distant future, can accomplish things in the business community that I could not even imagine. It’s different. His political views might be different, I might be conservative, he might be liberal – that’s a joke – but the reality is that I respect his knowledge, his work ethic, his discipline, and he is on that long list of technologically sophisticated and productive citizens. It’s okay that we are different as long as we are engaged in the process of dialogue and discourse and we believe in a set of democratic principles that allow us to function collectively.

So what we want to say is that when Bowling Green graduates leave here – we just admitted 3,600 new students last fall and will graduate over 2,000 in May, they are people who are thoughtful, who are sensitive, who are aware of the benefits derived from the arts, who are technologically sophisticated enough to use new technologies but sociologically refined enough to know that the implications need to be evaluated or investigated. We need to have the whole package, and that is what we want our graduates, in fact, to be able to do.

The committee thought that in order to do this there are certain themes that really resonate with our program mix, our history, and the future opportunities for this institution. They came up with these themes, which lead to the transforming of our institution as we move into the future. Again, I encourage you to read these carefully. I will just talk about them very briefly.
The first one: Leadership in Learning. These are some of the things – and the discussion is much more exhaustive in the document where this can be found on page 13: Reinvention of the general education curriculum and requirements. Learning outcomes and electronic portfolios. In order to provide leadership in learning, there are things that we need to think about, and things that we need to do. The general education program needs to be revisited, and in there is a very good discussion about our general education program, what it does now, and how it might evolve. We have begun establishing learning outcomes for all the majors in our university. We need to make sure that we extend that. We need to look at utilizing our new technology – utilizing the SuperNet to do things that allow students to be active learners. Some of you are familiar with electronic portfolios and know their potential.
Sharing responsibility for teacher education, redefining graduate education, and strengthening of learning environment. Redefining graduate education is one that is important. What’s happening is that if you look at traditional graduate programs and masters degree programs that were intended to lead – they weren’t terminal degrees in many cases – there were some professional masters that were, but most of them, or many of them, led to a doctoral program. What we are finding now is that there are different expectations in the greater society. There are expectations for life-long learning so that one can move forward in his or her profession, be it business, education, or some technology related areas. So we need to look at the needs in our professional discipline and throughout our academic program and develop graduate programs at the masters level that are consistent with the needs of the larger society.
People talk about economic development and university relationships. That’s one way in which this university can be sensitive to the evolving, changing needs of the external world and the business community. Strengthening the learning environment. We need to do more to create a learning environment that is exciting, that is engaging, that is creative – one where students feel not just obligated to go to class, but excited about going to class where the ideas and the nature of the instruction in the class brings them back. It is a two way street. Students have to come to class prepared to learn. Faculty have to come to class prepared to teach. I taught for eleven years before I moved into administration as a department chair. It is difficult if you teach a course for five years, ten years, fifteen years, twenty years, to breathe life into it every time that you do it. But just as students need to come prepared to learn with the skills and the motivation to learn, faculty members need to come to class prepared to teach and excited about their teaching and learning environment.

So leadership in teaching and learning. There is a lot of discussion here about the consideration of a doctoral degree in teaching and learning since we have such a strong program in the College of Education. We have a wonderful program with a great reputation. That is one thing we might consider. Leadership in learning. As you can see, this cuts across a number of disciplines and colleges and schools and is something that has to do with the overall learning environment for the University.

Critical thinking about values. This is something that I want to quickly refer you to on page 15 in the document. There has been a lot of discussion about this, but I think that the Committee has done a wonderful job of capturing how and why this is important to the University. “Bowling Green State University aims to educate citizens who can exercise critical judgment in their work and civic responsibilities….we need to equip our students to recognize how values work together with information to affect decisions, strengthening both the ability to identify value conflicts and also the critical thinking skills necessary to make intelligent choices. An education that engages BGSU students in critical thinking about values will prepare them to identify and reflect on value conflicts inherent in the personal, ethical, political, social, scientific, and professional issues they encounter. It will also help them in comprehending others’ values. In addition, it will challenge them to articulate their preference among competing values in particular situations, support their preferences, and help them understand that their value preferences might change in light of different circumstances.” They go on to talk about the issues that all of us face today – should taxes be cut, should the environment be protected, should health care costs be reduced? We are constantly bombarded with values propositions and issues. How do we prepare students to make sense of those and make judgments about those things?

Embracing the arts. Really quickly, we have wonderful programs in the arts – in the College of Music, the School of Art, Dance, Theatre – just wonderful programs. But I don’t think that we have really capitalized on the synergy that exists among the arts and our strengths in each one of those individual disciplines. We need to assure that everyone who graduates – and that is what they are getting to here (life-long love for the arts, to make informed aesthetic judgments, and contribute to the artistic climate of one’s community) – all of those things I think are critically important intrinsic values of the arts. In addition to that, I think on a personal level, the arts humanize us. They sensitize us. They put us in touch with our feelings and our emotions. They put us in touch with many sides of a personality that we have intentionally ignored for many, many years or unintentionally been directed away from. The arts are critically important in our ability to function holistically.

I was in an airport yesterday and a faculty member from Bowling Green who had read this document on the Web came up to me and said, “You know, I really like the tone and the direction in which this is going.” And then there was the “But….” There were things that she wanted added, but they were great things. They were things that should be added. They were ideas that were critically important for us to consider. And that is what this is about. To have that dialogue. And what she thought should have been added is that we talk about the holistic education of a person: your intellect, your cognitive skills and ability, your aesthetic sensibility, your health, your psychological and physical well-being. How is that considered in the whole equation?

So the fact is that embracing the arts is critically important and there are programs that are being discussed and there is a group working right now talking about very specific things and very general things. The specific things could be as specific as creating a program in musical theatre, a program that we don’t have, where you bring music and theatre together because there is a great demand in the artistic community for people with specialization in musical theatre.

The general appreciation of art. I remember when I was an undergraduate and they took me to the Detroit Museum of Art and I struggled and blinked. But, believe it or not, I am the person I am today because of that.

Understanding cultures and nations. You can read through this section. Our Board, about five years ago, passed a resolution reinforcing the importance of diversity. The world is more complex. If nothing else, no matter where you are politically on this whole discussion about what is happening in Iraq and what is happening nationally; different cultures, different nations, different people are a part of our every day lives and will, in fact, impact our lives whether we want them to or not. We need to begin building on what we know. We need to begin preparing students to function in that very complex, multi-national, multi-cultural world.
Everything in the document they talk about from exchange programs to more visiting professors at Bowling Green State University to taking our students and our programs elsewhere. Also, developing instruction to help us make sense and unravel the complexity of intercultural relations.

New media and emerging technologies. You can read through that. This is an area, I have to admit, that is much discussed, but I am not really sure that everyone is comfortable with how technology is impacting the way we think and the way we work and what we do. There is a myriad of things that we can do in the area of media and emerging technologies. One half is on the side of developing those and adapting those and using those in more effective ways in a variety of different disciplines – in management information systems, in computer arts, in library science, and on and on. Another dimension is bringing people in and training them. We have a very sophisticated SuperNet. We have software and hardware and specialized labs, especially labs that can do a lot of things. But on the other side of it, equally important, is the social implication of all this. What does all of this mean to us as a people, as a nation, how we do business? What I don’t want to see us get swept up in, us being Americans at colleges and universities, is getting so busy jumping on the bandwagon of technology that we forget to figure out where it is going. Technology is wonderful, but it has a place. It is not end. It is not a destination. It is a tool. As we develop and understand all of these new technologies and how we use them and we can do things with animation, video streaming, and I can send messages from my office to the entire University community, we need to understand that it is not the technology that is important, but it is what I say when I send a message through video streaming to the entire University community. So the sociological impact of all those things is critically important, and there is a variety of new things in media and technology that we can do.

These are the individuals who worked so diligently to make all of this happen. The committee members are as follows, and I want to publicly take a moment to thank them for all the work that they have done in creating this document. If nothing else I said today makes a lot of sense, I hope that it has encouraged you to read the document. If it does that, and I encourage students – I see a reasonable number of students here – to read the document because I would be really interested in hearing what you have to say about this document and how it lines up with the education that you are receiving and the education that you think you would like to receive at Bowling Green State University. These individuals represent a lot of different disciplines and a lot of different backgrounds.

I would conclude by saying that if you start back about fifty minutes ago when I started, a university is much more than any academic program or any individual in that academic program. It is a place of ideas, it is a place of possibilities, it is a place where expressive forms take shape, it is a place where we learn about ourselves, not just intellectually but aesthetically and emotionally. It is a very, very unique place. You can’t find what we do at IBM or Microsoft or at General Motors because that is not their business. Ours is the business of ideas, excitement and possibilities. It is also a place of optimism and hope, and I underscore the part about optimism and hope.

I was talking to Ed Whipple, our Vice President for Student Affairs, as I was walking over here today. This has been a particularly busy time, as I have been on the road a lot, and I am getting ready to run, if I finish on time, to catch a plane in a few minutes. The hope that is embedded in the smallest dream of one of our students is worth all the hassle and travail that we go through lobbying and fighting with people about money, accrediting agencies, and compliance officers. For those of you who don’t have an opportunity because of your activity at the University, just talk to students about hope. The nine Impact students who are part of an undergraduate research initiative are presenting papers at a conference. I was reading through the topics of those papers. The big ideas and the excitement. I remember papers I wrote when I was an undergraduate. I look back on them now and say, “Oh, no, I wrote that!” But, you know what, it wasn’t the particulars in my papers, it was the possibilities. And that is what a university is – a place of possibilities. That is why the budget doesn’t dissuade me. We are going to do the right thing. We are going to protect our core mission, our faculty and our staff. We might not be able to grow in this environment, but we are going to do the things that we can do, the things that we can afford to do. We can look at our general education program. We can collaborate amongst departments in the arts. We can do things that don’t cost a lot of money but take time and intellectual capital.

The intellectual capital is as important as the money that we raised to build this building that we are sitting in. It is what takes place in the building that is important. It is the ideas and the possibilities that are spawned and incubated and turned into differences and changes in our society. We will keep you apprised as we always have about everything that is gong on in the University regarding the budget. Rest assured that the financial well-being of the institution is in good hands – Chris Dalton’s – and not mine. The Faculty Senate Budget Committee will be apprised of all the deliberations; Classified Staff Council, Administrative Staff Council will be apprised as we move forward. At this particular point, we are depleting reserves, we are adjusting services, we are not filling positions, we are not going to be the same. We are going to have to find new ways of doing things, but we are committed to meeting the obligations of the job that we have chosen to do.

As we move forward into 2004-2005, if the budget presents another set of challenges, we will look at those challenges; we will deconstruct them; we will get people together collectively, and we will make decisions, but we will move on. I am not one who gets intimidated or panicked. I was thinking about that this morning. There have been a couple of incidents in the national media, the fire in one club in Rhode Island, and then in Chicago people were crushed in another club. I was thinking about the case of the people in Chicago that were crushed coming out of the club. If I have this right, what happened was they were in this club, and there was an altercation; the security guard sprayed mace, and people thought it was some chemical or biological weapon as a result of terrorism, and they panicked. Basically, because they did not have enough exits; they crushed one another and were unable to get out of the place. Well, it wasn’t anthrax, it wasn’t a chemical or biological weapon. What happened is that they panicked. As a result of that, added to the fact that the facility was inadequate, it turned into a death trap. But, if they wouldn’t have panicked, if they would have figured out what was going on, they would have seen at some point that it was anything but dangerous and that the only danger was their reaction to an unanticipated consequence or outcome. I stand in control of that, and I am at the center of my own behavior, and what I do or not do has an impact on what happens to me. I use that analogy to conclude to say this budget confrontation is not under our control. The Governor is going to fight his fight, and the legislature is, and we are going to try to get revenues up in the state. But our reaction to it, we do control. What we do determines what will happen with and for Bowling Green State University. Confident in the fact that we have committed faculty, staff, and wonderful students, we will find out how to do the right thing and not panic and try to fit ourselves into a mold that can lead ultimately to the destruction or diminution of this institution. I am confident that we can do that, and we will do that.

Thank you for your patience. I always say I will be short, but I never am.