14
Provost’s Welcome Back Address to the Faculty
August 27, 2003
Welcome to the 2003-2004 academic year. I am reminded that I am a member of a research academy so I look at the world as a reductionist and I think that the details are what make things interesting. I was told last year there were too many details in my remarks so this year I am going to turn myself into an impressionistic artist and try and paint a little fuzzier and broader picture.
One of our great social philosophers, Woody Allen, has said that a good part of success, 90 percent maybe, is just showing up, and if that’s true we have already made great progress on having another successful year.
When I spoke with this group last year I put out several ideas or predictions about what the year would be like. Some of them came true. I’ll update you on that and, of course, we were even then talking about how terrible the budget was. Well, it looks pretty good now compared with what happened. We have to admit last year was extremely difficult for our campus, for most campuses at state-supported institutions, but we did survive. We are a strong university. We have been through tough times but I think that what helped us is that we did try to look at this from a broad perspective, not band-aid approaches. We looked at fundamental changes, keeping in mind our general principles - especially protecting our academic core and remaining a student-centered organization. I really think we have done that. We also have to admit that for the first time ever this university laid off staff – maybe not the exact first time – but many of the longer-serving faculty told me no one can remember when we did it before. This is tough. These were friends. They were good people. But we have seen a 16 percent reduction in state funding over two fiscal years. One of the things we talk about in the physical sciences and engineering where I started out was that quantitative changes after a time become qualitative changes. And I think 16 percent of anything is getting on the order of leading into qualitative changes. And, frankly, we could not have balanced the budget and kept focus on our academic mission without the actions that we took. I understand that different people may have done it differently, but I really think that in an institution where 81 percent of the state-support budget goes to personnel costs – wages, salaries and benefits – facing a 16 percent cut means you can’t just do it with operating cuts or one-time fixes.
Last August I predicted that the year would be a planning year that could consume us quite a bit--and it did. We have completed our Facilities Master Planning process and at some point this fall we will be having one or more public presentations. You can find it now on our Web site, but I think it would be useful to have an open presentation with some graphics, some discussion and we’ll have a couple different venues for that. I would be happy to come to any specialized group and talk about that also. I think it’s put out a new vision for us to get us through the next few years and really reaffirm many of the good things we know about this campus and it has given us a new look at ourselves. I think it’s important to bring in professionals who can look at you in a slightly different way. I was really amazed at the first meeting that their first question was, “Where’s the front door?” Because, to them, it wasn’t obvious that the driveway to Holloway was the front door. But yet if we ask our longtime employees “where’s the front door” that’s what we all point to. I really would like to thank the folks involved in the Facilities Master Planning effort and I will get the steering committee back together for a celebration this fall.
Another thing that we were looking at over the past year has been general education. I announced last year the formation of an ad hoc group and appointed Arlene White as the director of this group with a charge to do an inventory – look at where we are and try to map that out with the goals and principles that the campus had adopted several years ago. The committee has done a lot of work and they have also gotten started on assessment of general education – that was the second charge. They have recommended that their work continue this year and I have agreed to that and they asked that their committee be expanded and so we are adding to it two members of the University Curriculum Committee and advising coordinators out of two of the dean’s offices. They will be reporting back to me before the end of the semester on the data and the information they have taken in and digested about how we match up current courses with the learning goals, principles and outcomes. I will then share their report, perhaps with some comments, with the wider community. The target is early in the spring semester to have a variety of open discussions around campus with the goal that no later than mid-semester bringing together a final document for the University Curriculum Committee so that if actions are needed or whatever actions are called for will then be in their hands. The next goal is assessment of all general education courses and, for this, the ad hoc committee will be working with University-wide assessment committee. The great beacon on the horizon for all of these activities is the Middle States reaccreditation visit which is scheduled for academic year 2005-2006. Early in the fall semester we will be naming a chairperson, a faculty person, to lead that self-study process and get working with various campus groups. We’ll assemble a steering committee and next spring the work will really begin to draw up a draft plan for our self-study. Once that’s accepted by Middle States then we move forward to do the work. Many of you have lived through these processes. We will do well. I think we are in good shape but we do have to make sure that we do dot all the I’s and cross all the T’s on this.
Even with our budget problems of last year we had many successes, individual successes by students and faculty and broader successes. I am going to pick several that I think will give a flavor; they are different types picked from different areas of the campus and if I haven’t picked your favorite one I apologize. I think one of our great successes sits here in front of you with the new faculty that we have recruited and brought on board. They are bringing a mix of enthusiasm, experience, and talent. You just heard they come from all over the country, in fact all over the world. I think they will reenergize not only their own departments but also the faculty in general. I think this is one of the most important things that we do. Let’s face it – the faculty is the university and we must continually renew ourselves and so I’m here to celebrate our new faculty. Two of our new faculty members have been awarded the Henry C. Welcome Fellowships. These are named for a former president of the precursor of the Maryland Higher Education Commission. He was a physician in Baltimore. These are very prestigious awards; there were 11 awarded in the State of Maryland by the Board of MHEC. We have two winners, Dr. Darrell Newton in the Communication and Theatre Arts Department and Dr. Jing Quan in Information and Decision Sciences. This is a great tribute to them and the financial support for their research over three years isn’t so bad either. Congratulations to these two people.
I would like to point out they are joining good company. We have several other Fellows from previous years in this room who are doing very well in that respect. Our Board of Regents also honored three of our faculty members this year. The Regents give out Faculty Excellence Awards in several different areas and we have three of the 12 winners across the USM System – Memo Diriker, Judith Stribling, and Kim Hunter. These folks have been involved in a variety of activities in winning each of their categories, but once you think about how large the USM System is, the fact that Salisbury garnered 25 percent of those awards is a real tribute to the quality of the faculty here and I would like to publicly acknowledge these three folks.
There were a variety of student successes over the past year and I’d like to highlight the team of students in the Perdue School who won the Federal Reserve Collegiate Challenge from the Federal Reserve Bank in Richmond. They put together and defended a case study last spring. In March they were selected as the top team over quite a few very skilled and experienced teams from other universities both private and public. And what really has impressed me is that their topic was the danger to this country’s economy represented by deflation. Back last February and March you didn’t see the topic of deflation being mentioned in the national news. Well, of course, it flared up in great discussion and concern and even Greenberg spoke in front of Congress about it later in the spring and over the summer. I think this is a real tribute to the students and the leadership by Professor Ying Wu that these students saw something on the horizon before it became conventional wisdom.
This year also we celebrated the 30th anniversary of the journal Film & Literature Quarterly. Your colleague Jim Welsh and former colleague Tom Erskine nursed that baby along and it is a thriving, growing concern. We are looking forward to a healthy future for it. We did celebrate that with a modest event in the spring and I wanted to let you know that not everything that goes on is brand new here. Some things have a long, deep history at Salisbury.
Once again this year, and this is just getting to be routine, over 20 percent of all of the Maryland teachers who were selected by their districts as Teacher of the Year were Salisbury University alums. That just seems to be the way it goes. We are the third largest producer of teacher-certified graduates in the State of Maryland, but I think our alums win more than our share of those types of awards.
It’s one year ago today that the contractor turned over the keys of Henson Science Hall to the dean. It’s been a whole year and he hasn’t broken it yet. We are really celebrating that building and what it has meant to the students and faculty in the Henson School. This is a state-of-the-art building. If you haven’t had a chance to wander through, it is very exciting. But what’s really exciting about the building is that the faculty was involved in designing the teaching spaces and lab spaces and their own office spaces right at the beginning and they used that to invigorate and redesign the curriculum to take advantage of that. I think that shows a real forward-looking attitude. We are going to have another such opportunity in the coming several years. Dean Pataniczek is now either part of or leading the team for the design and planning of the recently-approved and funded replacement for Caruthers, our new Teacher Education and Technology Center. For the faculty who will be involved in this building, you will have opportunities this year and next to be involved in the real nitty-gritty design aspects of that building. You may not want to offer opinions of where the electrical receptacles ought to be on the wall but ultimately it does have an effect. Talk to your colleagues in the Henson School and they will give you an idea of what you’re in for. This is exciting for those faculty.
With the opening of Henson we had the opportunity to do a kind of quick face-lift and renovation on Devilbiss Hall. It’s almost finished, but the people are already there and for the first time ever we now have the faculty from Nursing, Medical Technology and Respiratory Therapy in offices and teaching space on the main campus. They are no longer wandering in the wilderness over by Power Professional building and we are very glad to welcome them.
I would also like to acknowledge, thank and recognize those faculty who have gone the extra mile and written proposals for external funding. You set a record last year: 107 proposals were submitted verses 85 the year before that. Of those submitted, 73 have been funded. That’s a 68 percent funding rate – that’s fantastic. My entire career as a research chemist I depended on funded grants. I was never more than 25 percent successful in my entire career so I really, really admire the 68 percent funding rate. Total awards are something like 4.5 million dollars – some of the awards are multiple years, but that’s a nice chunk of change. There are additional types of external grants that are coming from corporations and private foundations that don’t go through our Grants and Research Office, they go through the Foundation. If you throw those in we actually brought in about 5.5 million dollars of this external support in the past year. This is a lot of hard work on the part of faculty and staff to do this, but of course it enables you/us to do things that state-support would not allow. Now, I know that there’s a controversial aspect of the proposals that go through Betsey Corby’s office in Grants and Sponsored Research and that is my insistence that if the funding agency allows indirect costs recovery that we get indirect cost recovery. If it comes from the Feds we can get it at a higher rate. The state is a lower rate but unless it’s prohibited I want to see it come. And there is good reason for that. That indirect cost money helps support the infrastructure at the university. A portion of it stays in Betsey’s office and she uses that for a variety of expenses such as workshops, helping prime the pump for more research grants. But the bulk of the money returns to the dean and the department from which the proposals originated to be spent as they see fit. I think that’s appropriate. There’s been a small amount for the Provost and the Provost has been a skinflint so my fund has grown to a reasonably healthy size because I haven’t been spending it. However, I feel that this is the year to begin using those funds because travel funds across campus have been cut and this puts our faculty in an especially double bind inasmuch as we are hoping and asking you to be involved in professional development, scholarship, etc., and yet travel funds are being cut. After talking with the deans and others, we are going to transfer not as much as been cut, but we are going to have $39,000 that will be transferred into dean’s accounts and it will be based on the number of tenure-track faculty slots in each area. We will include the library, Alice, for your faculty. This is going to translate into about $150 per slot. You’ve lost about $80,000 so it’s not a total replacement. We hope your loss this year is one time. The cut affects us all – administrators as well as faculty. We hope to restore it next year. My funds are one-time also but I’m reinvesting these indirect costs in faculty scholarship which I feel is the best use we can make for that.