In the past year you have achieved a significant number of goals and honors that bring renown to this institution and to Kansas. Let me begin with the most remarkable and far-reaching achievement. It is an achievement that has huge financial consequences for the state of Kansas and the nation—very conservatively it will have—at the very least—a $6 billion impact. It is a success of such a scale that no one of us can really fully describe it. It is an achievement that has already changed thousands of lives and will eventually touch the lives of untold thousands more. I refer to the awarding last year of 6,066 degrees.
Congratulations to each of you. Every single one of you had a hand in this remarkable achievement: faculty, staff, and even the dubious group we call administrators. Collectively, we worked together towards this goal, and we deserve to take a moment to bask in that success. We speak at commencement ceremonies of the achievement of the students, but without the work that you invest—every single day—in the enterprise, those students would not be sent on their way to productive, rewarding lives that will enrich themselves and their communities. I understand very well that the repetition of graduations year in and year out can make this seem like business as usual, but we should remember how extraordinary an achievement this is. Because of your work 6,066 lives have been transformed. These students have been given the tools and insight to enable them to make as much of their lives as their talents allow.
These students were given a beautiful environment in which they could learn. The lights worked. There was heat in the winter and cool air in the summer. They worked in safety and security in residence halls, libraries, laboratories, and classrooms that provided them with nourishment and amenities that would be the envy of the world, if the rest of the world could even imagine such accommodation. The delivery of such an environment is possible because of the hard work of this community of colleagues. I am grateful to be a member of this remarkable group of people. Thank you for your good work.
In the past year we were able to plan for and implement a new tuition plan that will provide for greater predictability for our students and their families. The Tuition Compact covers approximately 80% of the cost of attendance at KU. I am proud of the responsiveness and speed with which this community delivered this plan. Student government, deans and the staff of departments and schools, the staff of student housing, student organizations, the health center, institutional research, and many others overcame decades of entrenched ways of dealing with budget projections. The result of their work is an innovative and creative remedy for the whipsaw effect of the cost of higher education. We haven’t made it cheaper, but we have made it predictable.
Under the guidance of Dan Bernstein and his colleagues in the Center for Teaching Excellence we have begun an important and ongoing effort that will, I hope, impact each of you who are responsible for teaching and advising. This past year 12 departments and programs engaged in the interesting question of determining what competencies and skills they expect their graduates to have at the end of their studies with us. This is the beginning of a crucial effort for all of us: making the value of what we do clearly apparent to all audiences. This year 12 more departments have been invited to engage the same exercise.
When I listen to conversations among our colleagues on the question of society’s support for higher education, I hear an understandable frustration verging on anger. I say that this is understandable because most of us know in fundamental ways that the work that goes on here is genuinely important and has the potential to improve, shape, invigorate, and even save society. What we do here is of the greatest importance for the future. We know this with a clarity that makes it frustrating when legislators, donors, and, yes, administrators don’t act to support our work. But we have often skipped a step between our understanding and our frustration. Our audiences seldom share the same depth of understanding that we possess. Legislators, alumni, and donors all have an intuitive sense that what happens at KU or Missouri or Nebraska is genuinely important, often they have first-hand experience. But we sometimes fail to give them insights and knowledge of our work that they can use. This is essential if they are to put our needs ahead of other voices in society.
We must be able to describe what we do in terms that are important to society at any given moment. This should be easy, because what we do IS important. We cannot expect that its importance be self-evident or self-explanatory. WE have to make it clear. Sometimes we have to adapt what we do to society’s needs. One clear example of this can be found in the work of the School of Education and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. We all know of the growing crisis that is the shortage of math, science, and special education teachers. The School of Education and the College are working to speedily create a curriculum that will allow students to acquire a teaching credential and full mastery of content as well as pedagogy in a much reduced time-frame. This has been the work of deans, faculty, and staff. The result will be an increased number of well prepared teachers for the shortage areas each year. Everyone from the Board of Regents to the State School Board to the media to donors and grant agencies have hailed this effort with approval and enthusiasm.
At other times, we are already doing what society needs, but they have little understanding of it. Here the list is long. A few examples—our drug discovery and delivery program, the Commons (a collaborative between Natural History Museum, the Hall Center for the Humanities, and the Spencer Art Museum), The Lied Center’s Creative Campus initiative which involves the arts and the sciences in wonderfully effective ways, and many, many more interdisciplinary and creative efforts that are shaping our understanding and our teaching. And that brings us back to that most remarkable achievement—the successful graduation of more than 6000 students.
This is both our most important and our most lasting contribution to society. In order to enhance our effectiveness we will be doing a number of things in the coming months and years. We will continue to focus on increasing the number of students who graduate in four years. We will seek to reduce the number of students who leave the university during their first year of study. We will seek to grow our graduate programs in both number of students and in the quality of that experience.
As part of the effort to continually enhance the effectiveness of our work, I have asked each dean to embark on a systematic and thorough review of each department and program under their purview. We are doing similar reviews of the administrative and service units at KU. The purpose of these reviews is not to find fault or to implement radical change, but it is to help us to be sure that we are investing our treasure—our money, to be sure, but more importantly your effort—as effectively as we can to achieve our goals. As part of this, I am asking each of you to identify efficiencies that we can implement, and to communicate those suggestions to your colleagues. I am particularly interested in enhanced use of technology to make us more efficient. We are about to beta-test a new advising tool that will take much of the drudgery out of such things as degree checks, course scheduling, and the like and will allow us to use more of our most valuable resource—your time—for the work of advising students, not in handling paper. We need to look at all of our processes and routines—from purchasing to requests for travel authorizations to find better ways to do things. I am convinced that this community is not using technology to its fullest benefit for these kinds of tasks, and I seek your help in identifying areas where we can achieve greater efficiency.
In that connection, I will tell you that we are also embarking on a sustained information management program that will touch each of us. As you know, the greater the accumulation of information about people, the greater the risk to their well being if that information is stolen and/or misused. We have enormous amounts of information about students, about ourselves, about patients, clients, subjects of all kinds. The risk that we experience daily in our handling of that information is too high. For some of us, this new information management program will represent a fundamental change in how we conduct our daily business. This will be disruptive at first, and I ask your patience and cooperation. We will seek to reduce that risk for you through an ongoing program of education about how to handle this sensitive information.
I want to remind you, finally, of the necessity for us to recruit faculty of color. This is a necessity for KU not because it is politically correct, but because it is a necessity for the state of Kansas. For example, the fastest growing demographic in Kansas is the Hispanic community. We have a growing obligation to educate the children of this community. Unless we have a critical mass of Latino, African American, and Native American faculty, the sons and daughters of those communities will not be attracted here. The need to recruit faculty of color is not an abstract idea. It has a real face—the face of Raul who was born in Mexico City and whose family moved to Kansas City when he was 16. With a grand total of six months of ESL under his belt, Raul managed to graduate from Wyandotte High School. Raul had no role models to help him engage the idea of a university education, but he understood the need for it and set out on his own. Just as he was embarking on his quest for a college degree, both his parents became unable to work. Raul dropped out of college, worked 75 hours a week to support his family in this time of crisis. As the crisis eased he continued to work two jobs sleeping only two hours a night in order to accumulate some money to pay for his education. Raul will graduate from KU this year. He is a member of Sigma Lambda Beta fraternity, the International Student Association, and the Hispanic American Leadership Organization. Because of Raul’s experience at KU, his younger brother now wants to come here. We must repeat this story tens of thousands of times. Recruiting faculty of color is essential in order to enhance our chances of meeting this obligation.
All of these goals will require hard work and resolve on our part, but they will also require the support of the entire KU family: students, faculty, staff, alumni, Regents, and the Kansas Legislature. I am confident that we can achieve these goals. I am especially confident that they are achievable if the entire KU family knows—as I do—of the hard work, the dedication, the brilliance of the talented people who make this place as wonderful as it is. You are those people. You are the ones transforming lives by the thousands every year, and I thank you once again for the opportunity to be your colleague.
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