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Faculty Convocation 2009

October 2, 2009

More: Convocation 2009 Website

Thank you, Jim, Jack, and Henry for your introduction and kind words, and thanks to all of you for being here today. It is truly an honor to serve this fine institution. I am reminded of our excellence as we gather here to celebrate the stellar accomplishments of a few of our outstanding faculty. Please join me once again in recognizing these distinguished members of our campus community.

This semester I have the privilege of teaching a first-year seminar on one of Friedrich Nietzsche’s most celebrated books, Beyond Good and Evil. Many of you know already about my sustained interest in Nietzsche, his life, and his philosophy, and quite a few people have given me encouragement in citing in slightly altered form one of his more famous quotes that relates to our current situation: “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” Since we are still alive and kicking – and doing quite well in so many different ways – I can only come to the conclusion that we must be significantly stronger!

The notion of facing adversity and not shying away from challenges also has prominent roots here in New England. One of our most noted intellectuals, Ralph Waldo Emerson – who, by the way, was much admired by Nietzsche – asserted the following: “Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.” Being a New Englander, Emerson did bring a certain Yankee perspective to these learning opportunities, which he obviously felt were frequent, since he also posed the rhetorical question: “Can anybody remember when the times were not hard and money not scarce?”

As I considered the events of the past year and this convocation address, I thought of yet another writer, Charles Dickens, whose opening line in A Tale of Two Cities seems particularly apposite in our current situation here at UMass Amherst: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

A great deal has occurred since I spoke with you last year, and what has happened on the campus and to the campus seems to have vacillated between extremes.

I will confess that on occasion I felt fairly lonely as the chancellor. Many of you have lived through and survived the vicissitudes of the institution in previous periods of financial duress. I have experienced them at other universities as a faculty member and an administrator, but never here at UMass Amherst, and never as the leader of the campus, as the person who is the focal point for credit and criticism alike.

At times I came to understand and appreciate the words Tom Cole purportedly spoke while he was interim chancellor: “Half the faculty,” he noted, “think they can run the campus as well as you can; the other half think that anyone can run the campus as well as you can.”

But most of the time I felt supported by the campus and its faculty who recognized the precarious state of the economy and its effects, and were willing to stand by me and my administration as we tried to cope with the crisis. For this support I am most grateful and wish to thank you publicly today.

I want to start with the “best-of-times” report, after which I will turn to the “worst-of-times” and what we need to do to make this “worst-of-times” manageable and even advantageous to the future of this institution.

We have much for which we ought to be thankful and much of which we should rightfully be proud. In terms of enrolled students, for example, it’s clearly been the best of times:

• When I arrived in the fall of 2008, we were welcoming the most accomplished class in the history of the campus. I am happy to report that this year’s incoming class is superior to last year’s. We again broke the record for number of applications: the nearly 29,500 individuals who applied to attend represent a two-percent increase over last year and an increase of 13,000 since 2003. Our selectivity has also improved: in 2003 we accepted over 80% of applicants; for the past two years our acceptance rate has hovered around 65%. The SAT scores of the incoming class improved by 16 points this year and have gone up by 29 points in a two-year period. High school grade point averages and the class rank of attendees have also improved this year and last year.
• While we are increasing the qualifications of the class, I am delighted to observe that we have maintained the diversity that is appropriate for the state’s flagship institution. The proportion of ALANA students will remain at 22% this year, and 52% of the incoming class are women. At the same time we have witnessed a healthy increase in Pell eligible students over the past decade. More than 23% of our undergraduate population received Pell grants last year, and the number of Pell students has increased by 15% since 2000-01. We are proud to serve students from all backgrounds and income brackets on the Amherst campus, and we pledge to continue that commitment. It is our mission; it is our calling as the public flagship.
• In Commonwealth College I can report that the SAT scores of the incoming class increased by 24 points to 1344 and that the average high school grade point average continues to be 4.0. I’ll match this group of outstanding undergraduates against any other cohort at any other institution.
• We have also admitted the best transfer students in our recent history. We had the largest number of applications in the past seven years, and the incoming class will sport a grade point average of 3.25.

In sum, we’ve never been blessed with the caliber of students that we find attending our campus today.

It’s also been a “best-of-times” for accessibility and affordability. At the same time that we have admitted stellar classes with students more accomplished than ever before, we have done a remarkable job of keeping the cost of attendance low. Many individuals, including some of our political leaders, confuse the cost of education with the cost of attendance, but this audience knows that there is a great difference between the two. Actually the cost of education for an undergraduate student at UMass Amherst has declined since 1999 by over $3000, or almost 13%, when adjusted to the Higher Education Price Index. Student tuition and fees have increased slightly over that period, but by less than $1000, while state support per student has declined precipitously by close to $4000 or over 28%. Clearly we are doing more with less: we are reducing our costs, and passing on very small increases to our students and their families. We are committed to policies that foster access to affordable excellence for all deserving students.

If we look at out-of-pocket expenses for the lowest quartile of enrolled students, we see just how effective we have been in maintaining access and opportunity for students who merit a UMass education. Over the past five years on the Amherst campus out-of-pocket expenses for students with the greatest need were 11.5% less in non-adjusted dollars in the fall of 2008 than in 2004. If we adjust for the Higher Education Price Index, the decline was almost 24%. Indeed, in general, students at most income levels paid less in out-of-pocket expenses last year than they did five years ago.

Affordability is a point of pride for us. Since 2004 we have increased financial aid by close to $11 million dollars or almost 50%. Last year we were ranked fifth lowest by US News and World Report in student indebtedness among all national universities. 82% of the students on the Amherst campus receive some form of financial aid. For this past year the average cost of enrollment for a student whose family income was under $40,000 was $625 after financial aid. For a student with a family income between $40,000 and $75,000, the average cost was just above $5,000. This year we will maintain this cost structure for lower- and middle-income students by increasing financial aid once again.

The achievements of our current students also indicate it’s been the best of times. Joseph Sklut was named a Truman Fellow; Gregory Su won a prestigious Goldwater Scholarship; Amy Novak, a junior from the UMass field hockey team, won the Wilma Rudolph Student-Athlete Achievement Award; and eight students from the campus received Fulbright scholarships to work and study abroad this year. Our first-to-second year retention rates reached record heights, as did our six-year graduation rate. And eight of our intercollegiate athletic teams won their conference championship.

It’s been a best of times with regard to faculty achievements as well. We continue to excel in faculty awards and in faculty reputation. If we compare UMass Amherst department by department to other public institutions of higher education in New England, we find that we have no peers, and it’s not even close. It would be impossible for me to cite all the honors faculty have received over the past year, but let me mention a few to indicate the breadth of our achievement:

• Andrew McCallum in our Computer Science department was elected a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.
• Sigrid Miller from Art, Architecture, and Art History was elected to the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects.
• Gregory Tew from Polymer Science and Engineering won the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation “Grand Challenges Explorations” Award.
• Linda Tropp was named a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues.
• And Kevin Fu of Computer Science was not only awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship, he was also named Innovator of the Year by Technology Review for his work on security.

Faculty have been extremely productive in research activity, making it the best of times for sponsored projects in the history of the campus. Last year we increased our research expenditures by over $11 million or about 8%. Included among the top awards are grants to establish an Energy Frontier Research Center; to renew our grant for the research center for Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere; to renew the Materials Research Science & Engineering Center; and to support research in nutrition education, polymer hydrogels and vesicles, in the ethics and responsible conduct of research, and the development of new synthetic antibiotics. During the past few months we have learned about more than $36 million in grants from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and we are looking forward to greater success in this area as further awards are announced.

It’s also been a best of times for facilities. Although many of you labor patiently in facilities that are sub-standard and in desperate need of improvement or replacement, we have made enormous progress on facilities during the past year:

• Last September we opened a new Studio Arts building near the southeast entrance to the campus. It is a state-of-the-art facility that has enormously enhanced our fine arts instruction.
• Last fall we also completed the renovations on Skinner Hall, which houses our School of Nursing. I toured this building early in my tenure as chancellor and am convinced that we now have the best training facility for nursing at any institution of higher education in the country.
• This past spring we finally replaced the dirty, coal-fueled power plant with an award-winning, co-generational power plant that reduces our greenhouse gas emissions, our carbon footprint, and our clean-water usage.
• Opened in January and just recently dedicated is the new Integrated Sciences Building, which provides students with first-class biology and chemistry laboratories, as well as new research space for the Department of Veterinary and Animal Sciences.
• And just completed this fall is a spanking new recreational sports facility that finally takes students out of Boyden and into a building that rivals any recreation center on any major college campus.

Let me add to this list of achievements why it was the best of times for me personally, and why I think we can all look forward to the best of times in future years. I am referring to the new senior staff I have assembled to move this institution into the upper echelons of public research institutions. Five of the six vice chancellors are new to their roles:

• You’ve already met Jim Staros, the Senior Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Provost, who began his appointment on August 1st. Jim comes to us with outstanding credentials: a graduate of Dartmouth and Yale, a postdoc at Harvard, he taught in the medical school and in arts and sciences at Vanderbilt University for two decades before becoming Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Stony Brook University. A biochemist by training, Jim has been awarded major external grant support by the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Caroll and Milton Petrie Foundation, and the American Chemical Society.
• The newest member of the executive team, Mike Malone, the Vice Chancellor for Research and Engagement, is already familiar to the faculty. Mike has been on the campus since the 1970s, when he was a graduate student in the Department of Chemical Engineering. He has served as director of UMass Amherst’s Process Design and Control Center, as department head of Chemical Engineering, and most recently as dean of the College of Engineering. In 2003 he was appointed the Ronnie and Eugene M. Isenberg Distinguished Professor of Engineering. He started his position in Research and Engagement on August 17th.
• Mike Leto, the Vice Chancellor for Development, comes to us from Central Michigan University, where he was Vice President for development and alumni activities, and the director of a successful capital campaign. From 1990-1998, he held a senior leadership position at the Indiana University Foundation in Bloomington, serving as executive director of development for an eight-campus, national research university that enrolls more than 100,000 students. Mike started here on campus at the end of June and has already made enormous progress.
• In appointing Jean Kim as interim Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs and Campus Life, I have also turned, in a sense, to one of our own. Jean has three degrees from UMass Amherst, and has previously served as a senior head of residence in John Quincy Adams Tower, assistant director of Southwest Residential College, and assistant director of the Student Development and Counseling Center from 1979-81. She has vast and varied experience in student affairs positions at several institutions across the nation, most recently as the Vice Chancellor at UMass’s own Dartmouth campus.
• I introduced Tom Milligan, to you last year. Tom came with me from Knoxville, Tennessee, and as the Executive Vice Chancellor for University Relations, he is responsible for all communications activities on the campus. You have probably noticed his handiwork already if you’ve admired our new web site and our halftime commercial. He will be rolling out a new branding and marketing plan this fall. Perhaps Tom’s greatest achievement this year, however, has been his remaking of the minuteman bobblehead – which has already netted over $2000 in scholarship funds and – Tom made me include this free promo – is available now on line.
• I would be remiss if I did not mention the single holdover among the Vice Chancellors, Joyce Hatch, who is in charge of Administration and Finance. Joyce is a veteran of the campus and a pivotal member of the team. Her work on the budget this past year has been extremely important, and her analysis of campus needs in the area of facilities has helped make us all aware of what we must do in the coming years if we are going to achieve our collective goals.

What unites this team are three qualities: a high degree of professionalism; experience and previous accomplishment in the areas in which each vice chancellor is assigned duties; and the ability of each individual to work together as part of a team. I believe this team will serve the campus well in the coming years and prove invaluable in our endeavor to succeed in our quest for enhanced excellence.

When I spoke to you last year, I outlined briefly areas in which I believed we must improve if we are going to move into the upper tier of public research institutions. Together with the senior staff, senior managers, deans, and department heads, we completed a document this past year that provides and is entitled a “framework for excellence.” We are gathering more input on that document this fall, in particular from the faculty senate, and we anticipate that the framework will give guidance to all units on campus as they develop their own strategic plans.

Let me turn now to the worst of times. No one will be surprised to learn that we are in the midst of the largest economic downturn since the Great Depression, and that revenues in the Commonwealth have plummeted. Although we were forced to absorb over $13 million in mid-year cuts last year, and although our base budget for the current fiscal year is over $40 million less than the starting budget for the previous year, the stimulus funding from Washington has thus far mitigated the most deleterious consequences.

We did reduce our base budget by around $14 million this year and last year, and those reductions will no doubt be felt across the campus. But the real impact of the economic crisis will not hit us fully until next year, when the absence of stimulus money and the low level of current state support will force us either to conduct ourselves in a different manner or to slash budgets to the point that the campus will no longer resemble the institution we cherish.

I ask us today, as a community, to take the longer view and reflect upon the great many changes that have occurred already at this fine institution since its founding in 1863. It is hard to imagine in previous economic downturns of great magnitude, such as the Long Depression at the end of the nineteenth century or the Great Depression during the 1930s, that the leaders of the Massachusetts Agricultural College saw a rosy future, or could have fathomed that from their college would emerge a truly comprehensive research university. Yet here we are today with the most qualified students, the most distinguished faculty, and the most accomplished staff that we have ever had in our long and proud history.

Our university is a much different, much better place than it was even a few decades ago, and we owe our success to those who have gone before us, those individuals who had the faith that even in the face of challenges we should never relinquish the goals we have set for ourselves.

My message today is simple: if we do not change the way we do things on the campus, we will be unable to fulfill the goals we have set for ourselves. In the past the University of Massachusetts Amherst has weathered lesser, but significant, financial downturns, and spent much of the ensuing time rebuilding lost strength. But during the past three decades the support from the Commonwealth has steadily decreased in purchasing power, and once we encounter economic duress, we never regain the level of funding we had attained prior to the downturn, before we are confronted with yet another economic crisis. We have therefore experienced a series of downward spirals with regard to state funding. And we have thus far apparently not learned that the business plan we have had in place has been ineffective for maintaining, much less enhancing, the excellence of the campus.

During the last summer I read Thomas L. Friedman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded, a book I would recommend to everyone here today as a guide to the greening of our country and the obstacles in our path. At one point Friedman points to something germane to my concerns in this address; he reminds us of what they say in Texas: “If all you ever do is all you’ve ever done, then all you’ll ever get is all you ever got.” We clearly want to do better than “all we’ve ever got,” and for that reason I believe we must take advantage of the grace year we’ve been given by the federal stimulus funding and find new ways to fund the institution.

Let me be clear that I’m not suggesting we ignore lobbying for state funding. We need the support of the Commonwealth, and I have been aggressive, and aim to continue to be aggressive, in insisting that we receive appropriate funding from Massachusetts. What I tell legislators regularly is that we are not asking for a handout or for charity; we believe that we are a sound investment for the state and its citizens, and we have the data to prove it.

But past experience tells me that if we focus solely on the legislature and the executive branch, hoping for adequate funding, we will be disappointed. Besides, as Tom Milligan always reminds me, hope is not a strategy, and it certainly has not shown itself to be a successful one. If we depend on hope, all we’ll get is “all we ever got.”

I propose that we use this grace year to develop additional revenue sources. There are many opportunities we have yet to exploit, and we need to look at them all. Every dollar we receive in additional revenue means one less dollar that we have to eliminate in budget reductions. Let me suggest a few areas in which we can – and must – do better:

• First, many state schools of equal or lesser quality are able to support themselves more fully on revenues received from out-of-state students. There is no reason that we cannot do the same. We will not abandon our responsibility to students from Massachusetts; indeed, we will plan to keep the number of resident students at the same level. But if we are successful in attracting additional out-of-state under-graduates to Amherst, we will not only increase our geographical, cultural, and ethnic diversity, but also provide ourselves with a more secure funding base going forward.
• Second, we can also do more with our summer session, both in the area of distance education and in residential offerings. We now have some great facilities on campus that are largely unused from June through August; we can take advantage of our beautiful natural setting in Western Massachusetts and our stellar faculty to attract students to us during the summer months.
• Third, on many campuses in select disciplines faculty members buy out their research time with grant monies. We have very little participation in such activities at Amherst, but we could save significant amounts of base funding with a fair and fairly regulated program of faculty buy-outs.
• Fourth, we have developed programs in continuing and professional education in some areas, but we can do more by including other sectors of the campus, and by revising our operations to help incentivize units and faculty members to participate.
• Fifth, on many campuses five-year Masters programs are attractive alternatives for students and revenue generators for the campus. We have not been as active in this area as we could be, and we should begin immediately to explore the potentials of new M.A. programs, especially in professional schools.

We also believe that with greater central campus support, fundraising and overhead recovery will increase significantly over the coming years and contribute a steady flow of income to our base budget. And there are also efficiencies we can achieve in our normal practices and in our delivery of the curriculum. Jim Kurose, for example, successfully challenged his faculty, when he was dean of the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, to think about how they can provide instruction with blended methods, part distance learning and part classroom instruction. Certainly other ideas may emerge, and we welcome suggestions from the faculty or from the campus community on how we can increase revenues and reduce costs, and thus stave off devastating budget reductions.

I am therefore making a plea to you today to assist me, the executive team, and the campus in instituting an array of changes at UMass Amherst that will save us base budget money, increase revenues, and thereby provide a sounder foundation for progress toward our collective goals. Change was the theme of the most recent and recently successful presidential campaign, but we have seen that campaigning on the platform of change and implementing it are two very different propositions.

There are many reasons that change is resisted. Some individuals simply see themselves better off with the status quo; others fear the uncertain and unknown consequences of change; still others are advocates of change in the abstract, as long as they themselves don’t have to participate in it. Many individuals do not want to admit the merit of anything brought about by change until it has already been proven, and since real change necessarily involves boldness and risk, they will demur because the results of change cannot be demonstrated beyond any doubt. John Kenneth Galbraith probably had considerable insight into the mental resistance to change when he stated: “Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.”

But of this much we can be certain: if we do not proceed along a path of change, if we do not change our minds and our actions, the consequences are well known and wholly undesirable. I therefore urge you to join with me, employing your creativity and resourcefulness in exciting new enterprises that will move the campus forward and secure our financial stability. The faculty is obviously an essential part of any change that will occur. The administration can assist and exhort and manage and oversee; it can reduce roadblocks and help with logistics. But only the faculty can develop the ideas and the programs, and then can implement and participate in them.

We have the future of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in our hands; we control our own destiny, and we have an obligation to the past and a responsibility to the future. We could choose to wallow in the worst of times, lament our misfortune, and seek to blame others and each other for this fate. We can seize upon every misstep as proof that failure is imminent. We can criticize every measure that fails to solve completely our problems as not worth doing, and fight changes with dilatoriness and subversion. We can fall back on the usual methods of coping with crisis and thereby condemn ourselves to a modest recovery that falls short of our goals. But let me return to our own Emerson once again, who pithily summed up the psychology of the nay-sayer: “As long as a man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way.”

The alternative is that we reinvent ourselves, breaking out of familiar patterns, and find ways to cope with our needs and to move forward together. It will require a concerted, communal effort to change our orientation, and make no mistake, we will confront problems and experience disappointments: but I am absolutely convinced that we have the wherewithal to rise to the challenge of serving and securing our shared future. I am asking you today to join with me and affirm that we will do everything in our power to continue the not insignificant progress we have witnessed in the remarkable history of this institution, so that we can be certain that the best of the best of times still lies ahead.