Remarks and Speeches
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Family Weekend Remarks
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October 15, 2011
Good morning! UMass Amherst is delighted—and I am delighted—to welcome everyone to our Family Weekend. We have a plethora of activities to offer you this weekend: skating; an open house at the Student Union Craft Center; art tours all over campus; pumpkin decoration workshops; even draft horse rides at the Hadley farm.
Not only are these activities an excellent way to savor fall in the Pioneer Valley, they are experiential, engaging encounters with the vibrant, creative life of our campus.
I’m now in my fourth year at UMass, and I am continually in awe of the creative force of our students—your sons and daughters. You have come here to see what their daily lives look like, to make sure they are safe and that their futures are sound, and also to investigate the intricate and exhilarating way UMass Amherst functions, which is what I wish to convey to you today in my talk. And you are invited to stay for questions—and answers—afterward!
So to begin our conversation: this talk is about the future of your young people and the future of this campus. Those two fates are interwoven, for not only are our students expressive visionaries, they are also problem-solvers. The legacy of UMass, its roots as an agricultural college, show forth in their real, rooted activism, which transforms the very face of our campus.
Let me give you an example: two weeks ago we dedicated the campus’s new permaculture garden, which you can view right out front of the Franklin Dining Commons. The garden is remarkable not just for what it proposes—sustainable agriculture—but for how it was done: it was conceived by students, the use of campus land lobbied for by students, the design of the garden sparked and formed by students, all completely volunteers, and students hauled more than a half-million pounds of mulch to lay the beds. It is and will continue to be maintained by students. It represents the ownership of this campus by its inhabitants and is literally a living example of the power of what students can do when they are inspired and determined.
On the day of the dedication, I called our students “shovel-to-soil activists.” They are enterprising, and compassionate, and the future of our commonwealth and the nation.
So in looking at the health and priorities of UMass, we will begin with what is apparent, that our University becomes more appealing to incoming students all the time. By encompassing and considering the needs of our students in the present, we are making a campus that is embracing students who will come in the future, who will matriculate next year, and for generations thereafter… which is, in turn, a boon to present students because it means that their classmates—their roommates and peers—will have diverse backgrounds and exceptional talents! In keeping with the adage “You are the company you keep, so keep great company,” the current crop of UMass students is great company indeed.
For three years in a row we have recruited a class that broke the previous year’s record for size and achievement. Four years ago, we had just over 27,000 applications for a first-year class of 4,286, and this year, we had over 33,000 applications, matriculating a first-year class of close to 4,700. The average SAT score of our incoming students has increased almost 50 points in five years.
And we are rapidly becoming a more diverse campus, as well: five years ago, 18.4 percent of our undergraduates were minority students; this year students from ethnic minorities are 22.4 percent of the incoming class.
Not only do these figures indicate a greater quality and depth of education through a richer and more various texture of voices and ideas, but pragmatically in the long term, they also make a UMass degree of greater competitive value by enhancing our profile. External sources recognize that we are definitely on the rise: over the past two years we advanced twelve slots among national universities—public and private—and ten slots among public universities in the U.S. News and World Report rankings. Only one public university in the entire country rose faster in the rankings during the past two years than we did at UMass.
Not only in academics, but also in athletics, we are competing at an entirely different level. You may have heard by now that we have upgraded our football program to the Football Bowl Subdivision, and we will become football members of the Mid-American Conference starting next fall. This upgrade is going to give our students a new dimension of experience at UMass and is consonant with our rising prominence on a national stage.
I recognize that a university education is a significant investment for you, so I believe it is important for you to know the facts about the institution your sons and daughters are attending. Facts don’t tell the whole story of the quality education you get at UMass, but in the long run, numbers do make a difference.
So while we are on the subject of numbers, I should point out that just as our attractiveness to students in-state and out-of-state is increasing, so also is our retention: in 2008 we awarded 4,235 baccalaureate degrees, and this year we awarded over 5,000. In 2008 83.7% of first-year students returned for a second year on campus; last year 88.7% continued at UMass. What this means is that UMass Amherst is becoming a more hospitable, welcoming, facilitative environment where students want to complete their undergraduate careers. We are committed to being a place where students feel intellectually and socially supported; we want them to have pride in the campus and be proud to call UMass Amherst their alma mater.
To this end we have invested deeply in fostering the undergraduate experience on campus. This very September we premiered the new First Year Intelligence program. You might very well be the parent of someone in that pilot class! We also implemented a new and more expansive student orientation, so that our entering students could become acquainted with the campus and its facilities before the return of the upperclassmen. Our faculty members have recently innovated a new set of general education requirements that are thoughtful, honed, and relevant, and that will serve as a model for the rest of the country. We have implemented the iCons initiative, which is a novel mode of teaching science using interdisciplinary methods and real-world illustrations. We are running, for the first time, a year-long Dean’s Theme, this year concerning the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, to weave together classes in many different disciplines towards one great topic that demands the utmost of analysis, attention, and problem-solving skills. And we are currently working on an encompassing sophomore initiative to address issues surrounding the oft-neglected and pivotal second year on campus.
As you have no doubt seen and experienced, the flagship campus is a small city in itself, so it is incumbent on us to take advantage of every opportunity to make the learning experience more personal. Launching now at the library are classrooms for team-based learning, which is a method of condensing large classes into smaller, tighter cohorts to make instruction more engaged and personal. We have created first-year seminars taught by our most outstanding faculty members so that undergraduates in their very first semester have the opportunity for intimate contact with faculty and their peers. And we have continued to increase the number and variety of living-learning communities to enable students to associate with and learn from students who have similar concerns and interests.
To foster an enhanced learning environment on campus, we must continue to improve the physical campus with construction projects. I want to impress this upon you: it is a sign of health for any institution in trying economic times to be able to invest forward, instead of being lashed into immediate survival mode. And we are moving forward not just in ways that do the minimum, but in ways that are sustainable and in line with our highest ideals as a green campus. One prime example is our new co-generation power plant, which has helped us reduce our carbon footprint and our emission of greenhouse gases.
We are renewing the physical aspects of this campus in concrete (sometimes, literally concrete!) ways that will last for decades, but always concerned to do so in ways that are sustainable and environmentally sound. I cite as recent examples of our activity to renew the campus: the integrated sciences building with its fantastic molecular playground; the state-of-the-art recreation center used heavily by students well into the late evening hours (from experience, however, I can tell you that you will find it somewhat less crowded at 6 a.m.); our new police building that will provide safety and security for our students during their various activities; and the new marching band building named after our highly respected and dearly missed band director George N. Parks.
In various stages of construction and planning are structures that will change the landscape of the campus in the future, not just physically, but intellectually as well: the Southwest concourse, designed by a UMass alum; two new laboratory sciences buildings that will help us attract and retain the best and brightest faculty; a new academic classroom building that will feature group-based learning classrooms; a new practice facility for our student athletes; and the living-learning complex that will be the home of Commonwealth Honors College. These are structures that many of our current students will actually be able to see completed before they graduate; they will experience, in short, a veritable transformation of the campus and a whole generation of campus architecture.
It’s easy to think that in a time when you can do so much online research—and so much online living—spaces would be interchangeable and optional. But they aren’t. A campus shows its values by how it constructs its spaces. If you want to know what an intellectual hive feels like, go down to the library’s lower level on any weekday or weeknight, to the Learning Commons. It’s an absolute hot spot. The combination of expert support services and technology, as well as the sheer raw brainpower of our students is simply amazing. Close to finals, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a seat—and there are a lot of seats! It proves that, if you build it right, they will come, which goes to reinforce how important physical spaces are to intellectual growth. At UMass we are convinced that research and communication still need real spaces; they aren’t just virtual endeavors.
The facilities of a campus are an important investment, because they are critical to the healthy functioning of a campus and its sense of its identity as a place. And I must note that all these new projects were leveraged by campus funding that was dearly negotiated for, with great determination, persuasion, and perseverance, by many individuals on and off campus.
Our campus is on a track of steady and profound evolution. We are seeing young people who are even more conscientious, more aware of themselves as part of a larger whole. One way we are fostering these proclivities is to include within the new first-year experience an awareness training about belonging to the town of Amherst as citizens and neighbors, so that our students will have a better idea of what it means to be a member of a broader community, with all the attendant rights, responsibilities, and benefits.
We have an admirable heritage of cooperative effort at UMass and in the Pioneer Valley: a hustle through the bustling Student Union during a weekday lunch hour will show you co-op concerns like a bike repair shop, a vegetarian buffet, and natural foods store that are all managed and operated solely by students and have been for decades. Many of you may remember EarthFoods and the People’s Market from your days here, if you are alums! We continue to adhere to our heritage by being intellectual populists, and green innovators.
As you may know, this is my final year as Chancellor at the Amherst campus. I am proud of the developments that have taken place under my tenure, proud that they set the trajectory for us to move toward our best vision of ourselves as a great research university. Those developments have taken time, commitment, and energy from many contributors on and off campus, and above all a fundamental, abiding belief in what UMass Amherst can be and do and is. This dedication has helped sustain, and even improve us, across a critical period in time.
Right now, we are looking out across a global economic landscape that seems to reconfigure itself daily. An astonishingly greater percentage of our incoming students have qualified in the past two years for Pell Grants. In our drive for excellence, we are also committed to access. Our institutional financial aid has risen from $30.8 million to $54.6 million over the past five years. Here too we remain faithful to our legacy of providing expanded educational opportunities for all students who have merit and the desire to improve themselves.
In the upcoming months UMass will be launching its first capital campaign in more than a decade. Students will be able to participate in the campaign through the Piggy Bankit scholarship fund, which will allow them to contribute to their campus community by ensuring that all qualified students will be able to afford to attend classes here. Students will be helping their own, in a way that is accessible, undemanding, and easily dovetails with their natural inclination to give, and the commitment to financial aid that is at the core of our land-grant mission.
Our innovation and our problem-solving ability have allowed us not only to survive but to thrive inside shifting financial conditions in our country and on our globe. The collective actions of the campus over the past three years have helped us withstand the worst economic downturn in the last 75 years, and we are emerging stronger and better positioned than we were even in 2008, when the downturn began.
Each one of you has an abiding interest in how this University prospers. You have already made an investment in us, and entrusted us with the education of your sons and daughters. You need to know what we are doing on their behalf, not only for the reputation of a UMass degree in the future, but also for the actual quality of their education and their day-to-day life on this campus. You deserve to know that we are, that I am, doing everything possible to make a UMass Amherst degree an enduring mark of excellence and achievement.
The more adeptly we manage the university, the stronger an engine it becomes for Massachusetts: it generates new research in deep collaboration with our commonwealth’s private industry; and also and most importantly it creates new generations of citizens who are educated critical thinkers—an electorate of people who have the tools to make enlightened decisions as citizens on their own behalf, and also the ability, expertise, and training to contribute their best gifts to society.
Our students are the reason we exist. They are the future of our commonwealth, of our country, of our world. Here at old “Mass Aggie” they, and we, have retained the clever farmer’s knack for solving problems. I am confident that our students will contribute to the solution of the world’s problems. They have the capacity. It is our task to make sure they have the tools.
Before we move into questions and answers, I would like to say one more thing relating to the commonwealth, what it means to live in a commonwealth, especially since there are only three others in the United States. Before I came here, I was at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Tennessee is a “state,” which, as words go, is more vague than a commonwealth: what kind of state? What state are you in? Do you know?
But to belong to a commonwealth implies a special orientation and dedication to the whole, which I think aptly characterizes Massachusetts and UMass. Here we have an acute awareness that the parts serve one another, and serve the whole. Massachusetts sets its intention for the future through what it declares itself to be.
And in this commonwealth we are the flagship, at the head of the fleet. We have a great responsibility. We raise our sails together.
Go UMass!!!
