What One Hopes for at the End of Things

What One Hopes for at the End of Things

Frederick J. Antczak, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences
August 23, 2007

Let me begin by repeating a warm and enthusiastic welcome at the opening of the fourth year of CLAS—the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at GrandValley. Today I want to tell you a story: for those of you who have been away, summer 2007 has been the worst of times and the best of times. I want to take a few minutes this morning to explorewith you in a serious (and as it turns out, hopeful) way that story, its effects and implications. And I want to describe what the way forward together this year will look like for CLAS.

In the summer of ’07, wewatched our state governmentin the throesof trying to figure out higher education funding—and let me just say, it wasn’t pretty. All of Michigan’s institutions of higher education were severely cut, but our University took a spectacular funding hit. Understand thatBEFORE the process began, GrandValley was the lowest-funded-per-studentpublic university in Michigan at $3,345 allocated per full year equivalent student in 06-07. In June, in the 12th month of our budget calendar for last year, the state TOOK BACK some $3.2M—and then they cut us even more for this year, removing almost $9M permanently from our operating budget,and leaving us with only $2,834 per full year equivalent student. Not to put too fine a point on it, we wereback to 1995 funding levels, facing 2007 costs.

Our University’s leaders worked hard all summer to assure adequate levels of funding: I would be remiss if I didn’t recognize and commend our leaders for their hard work and for their tenaciously held academic values. I want to say with a mix of pride and relief that our Trustees, working with Central Administration,acted in our time of need just as we would have hoped, balancing our mission of access and its implication of keeping tuition down with our obligation to bear some of that loss through internal reallocations. The tuition increase they approved was, in view of the state’s action and relative to our sister institutions, modest—9.9%, a little over $600. Our minimum price per credit hour is now $315; in 1982, 25 years ago, a student paid $45 per credit, so, nominally a sevenfold increase; the 1982 level was the equivalent of $97 in today’s dollars, so we must come to terms with an increase in cost per credit hour of 324.7%. But this is the sentence I hope you repeat when you talk with your neighbors and other members of the public: GrandValley's tuition remains 13th of the 15 Michigan public institutions, even though our allocation per student is by far the least.

Our State is undergoing a profound economic shift, and if it seems that recently we’ve constantly been facing financial difficulties, I must tell you that this probably won’t be the lastof them. Yet with the right values, we’ll muddle through—and here’s a historical precedent for hope. In 1574, after a battle in which a Dutch city survived a siege by the Spanish by breaking its own dykes and literally washing them away, William the Silent (AKA William of Orange) is said to have offered the people of that city a choice between tax relief and a university. I’m happy to report that the University of Leyden stands to this day. The tradition has it that “the citizens believed that a tax law could be rescinded, whereas the great universities of Europe had survived for many centuries.[”1]The Dutch got it right then, which gives us hope now for better days to come.

All that said, how bad did things get? While it seem that every year we face some impossible new condition or intractable threat, so far it’s turned out at the end that we have muddled through. This time, is it worse? Has faculty hiring been frozen? Will we have to return to chalk and chalkboard, turn in our laptops and go back to legal pads? Are faculty once again to dye all their fingertips purple at the ditto machine? Will we have to resort to faculty bake sales, and—a prospect even more disturbing—decanal car washes?

No. The opposite is the case: as we begin 2007-2008, the University and the College continue to grow and to thrive.

I’m pleased to announce today that we received significant market adjustments to faculty salaries in a third of our departments, on top of the 4% average raise that faculty received. That happened thanks to the benchmarking that departments began in the “Course Capacity Inventory” I asked of you in my first year, and thanks to the work you completed as part of the strategic planning process last year. Further, I’m delighted to say that CLAS has managed the resources granted by the Provost Office such that we will be conducting at least 39 tenure track faculty searches this year. From a low of 402 full-time equivalent tenure track faculty, we have now grown toabout 470 faculty. The long term context is that CLAS will continue to growto meet our responsibilities, and to take on new enterprises.

Now, your merit raises were fully earned, and the market adjustments were fair—and of course, I’ll continue to fight for more. More faculty are needed to lower class size, to continue the process of bringing more equity to our workloads, and simply to accomplish the work of the College. These truths are so plain to us as faculty so as not to seem to warrant further notice.

But what a spectacular accomplishment to find the funds to make all this possible, in this nightmarish summer of 11th hour withdrawals, disproportionate rollbacks and multi-tiered funding! I want to give credit to three people: certainly to our Provost, who carries forward our values into the decisions of the institution; to President Haas; and to our new and so far excellentVice President for Finance Jim Bachmeier. These are the times that try administrators’ skill—and these are the administrative functions in which their skill, tied to grassroots academic values, make so much difference.

So if it’s not quite the best of times, our situation, short term, is good, at least if we make the most of it. Yet I can’t close this chapter of our story without a cautionary message that I hope you take forward to your neighbors: a continuing spiral of disinvestment in public higher education would be a very real threat to GrandValley, certainly to its mission of access.

Still, with the fall semester a new chapter begins, and new protagonists take the stage. This crossroads is a good moment to ask what we hope for at the end of the story—both long term, and this year. Not to give too much of the plot away, but I want argue that long term, though our enterprise may be genuinely threatened, our best hope as faculty is to do what we do as best we know how do it—as Pindar taught the ancient Greeksto put it, “straining every nerve” to accomplish our mission. But then I want to point out where this year, there are shorter term opportunities and challenges in teaching, scholarship and service that we need to recognize.

First let’s look at the long term. In yesterday’s teaching conference, keynoter Dr. Lee Fink told us that “[t]here is no profession in the world right now more important than ours.”[2] Well, there is surely none more important to Michigan: we know that only 22 percent of adults in Michigan hold a bachelor's degree, and that's far behind the leading set of states. At the end of things, surely, we should want to have succeeded in pushing this number far forward—not just pushing the percentage of educated adults toward 30%, but changing the public attitude toward education.

And in a long term way, GrandValley already is doing so, by our doing what we do as teacher-scholars. At a time when institutions reach desperately for an “edge” in recruitment, students flock to Grand Valley for the education they can get—increasingly good students in increasing numbers from an increasingly broad recruiting region every year. They do so in part because of the beauty and facilities of our campus and partly because of the affordable education,but in largest part because of the confidence we have instilled (notwithstanding that 45% of our students are first generation in college) in the valueof a liberal education, GrandValley style.

And so in the future, the best way we can engage the challenges that face us is to affirm the principles on which we started out, that professing our knowledge isfundamentallyworth doing, and that at GrandValleyteaching is, to invoke a famous Michigan phrase,“job 1.” Let it be said of us at the end of things that we were true to what we started out doing—and were committed to continue doing it better. That commitment to improve makes us ask every year the shorter term question, what can we dothis year to make our teaching and curriculum better?

In teaching and curriculum, I hope we can move forward on the Cultural Competencies Certificate, already in the works for a year, I hope that we move forward on a long discussed Religious Studies certificate, and eventually a Center, in our College. In the case of particular interdisciplinary areas like Cognitive Science and Neuroscience and Bioengineering, I hope we explore our opportunities todevelop 3/2 and 4/1 programs that articulate specifically with doctoral programs. The way opportunities align with possibilities now, it may in many instances be best for our faculty to look for such articulations first with the University of Michigan. I’ll be talking more about this strategy as the semester opens up.

To undergird the curricular with the co-curricular, I hope we snap up opportunities like the CLAS Alumni-in-Residence program. I can report three facts to you this morning: the College has offered for the first time this fall to bringone alum from each department; the deadline for nomination is August 31; and the total number of nominations so far is exactly one. This program supports our curriculum and raises our profile—I encourage every department not to let this opportunity slip any further.

All these things and more support teaching, and we must remember that Teaching is our first duty. But as the Administrative Manual says, “research, scholarship and creative activities are central to fulfilling the mission of the University.”This year, it’s time to hitch the humble wagon of our reputation to the star of our scholarly excellence, and TO LET THAT STAR RISE. So little of what we do gets more broadly known. Did you know, for example, that our colleague in Writing Ander Monson has been named the 2007 recipient of the John C. Zacharis First Book Award for his novel, Other Electricities? Congratulations, Ander! Ander stands, as do all the faculty whose scholarly books are on display in the Bookstore, in a very long line: the truth is that we’ve always been highly accomplished in a whole variety of scholarly ways—but it’s still the case that hardly anyone knows. What’s different now is that in a competitive environment for diminishing resources, that anonymity is increasingly a problem. So, we have an extrinsic motivation for our scholarship this year. The motivation is intrinsic too, for as our University’s mission statement indicates,

excellence in teaching at the university level depends upon active scholarship by faculty members. Through basic and applied research, artistic expression and performance, and other forms of scholarship, faculty members contribute to the development and application of knowledge, and create a dynamic environment for learning.[3]

In CLAS, as this year’s promotions demonstrate, we recognize all four of Boyer’s forms of scholarship. But every form of scholarship implies the duty of propagation—both to put findings before unbiased experts for scrutiny by the current standards of the discipline, and to make available beyond one’s campus the benefits of the scholarship we are generating. As Professors Eileen Bender and Donald Gray—the leaders of FACET, the state of Indiana’s college teaching development program—have written about the scholarship of teaching,

The scholarship of teaching is not merely teaching our scholarship. Nor is it simply teaching well…we must make what we learn about our teaching one of the essential topics of conversations within our disciplines.

As it is with the scholarship of teaching, so let it be with every form of scholarship, so that for our students’ sake, we might let our light shine.

There are many other ways to feed the flame. Last year, our English Department brought their discipline’s national attention to GrandValley with a wonderful conference on the writer Flannery O’Connor. Many faculty helped make the conference a success, but it’s not too late to recognize the crucial contributions of the organizer, our colleague in English Avis Hewitt. This year, a number of our colleagues continue to bring the state and region here, to see what we’re all about. Led by Steve Schlicker, our colleagues in Mathematics will be hosting the Michigan section of the Mathematical Association of America; and once again the Great Lakes History conference, led by Craig Benjamin and Jason Crouthamel, brings the region here with the themeHistory of Racism, Slavery and its Aftermath: Recognizing the 200th anniversary of the Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade. And in that connection let me also commend our colleague in History Steeve Buckridge for his leadership on the year-long multi-institutional commemoration of abolition that is moving towards its completion in the next few months. I encourage you this year to look for other conference opportunities to let our light shine to the state, the region, and the nation.

This imperative can alsobe met in service to the community. This includes everything from History’s oral history project, to John Gabrosek’s projects of mobilizing his student to assist Grand Haven and RooseveltPark with statistical analyses, to providing strong development forMichigan’s K-12 teachers.

With an eye to a more immediate goal, we need to do all we can to prepare for the accreditation visit, for our students’ sake and our own. Which means, of course, to apply our assessment plans, complete the workload plans, and go to work together achieving the strategic plans we have written.

And let me just say this about CLAS strategic plans, workload and assessment. Last year we worked very hard at these plans. To an extent that sometimes surprised people, we debated vigorously, dissented articulately and in good conscience, and tried honestly to do our best by our students. Now as the dust clears on the process, it is evident that in so many places, we in CLAS are leading and driving the University. I am proud of what we did together last year. Let’s finish that job with the same commitment this year.

You know, it is an irony: the story of our time is one of defunding, of de-emphasizing public education just as the State needs it most. Make no mistake, these external conditions threaten our enterprise, and our University leaders may not be able to work the same magic every year. But the story hasn’t yet been entirely told, and it may not turn out to be a tragedy after all. Asprotagonists in the drama, we will help write our own destiny. At its core the story depends on us; it depends on whether at the end of things we can look back and say we did what we do best. What a privilege it is—how lucky we are—to be part of a profession where excellence in what we love most turns out in the end to be what is most urgently needed! Our survival, our state’s survival, depends on our commitment what we do, undeterred by the challenges we face.Let it be said of us of us that we adapted conscientiously to the conditions of our labor and so engaged the world effectively, and even moved it a few degrees against the current of the day toward the direction of our ideals. We know that our commitment as teacher-scholars is a commitment both resolute and nimble, both engaging with the contingencies of today’s world and leading our students to envision and work toward a far better one.

I’ll tell you what I hope for, and what I envision:We will survive; we will succeed. When I look into my crystal ball, I see us at the end of things having developed what Cardinal Newman described, “… a flourishing University, which for a while had to struggle with fortune, but which, when its first founders and servants were dead and gone, had successes far exceeding their anxieties.”

Let us celebrate those struggles and anticipate those successes by breaking bread together as a College faculty—and adapting to current conditions, we’re moving lunch from under the soggy tent to the dry Grand River Room. For what we should hope for at the end of our story, this year and all the way along, is that we never miss our chance, no matter how surprising or challenging, to begin again.

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[2] L. Dee Fink, “The Joy and Responsibility of Teaching Well,” at “Teaching Well at GrandValley,” the 13th annual Grand Valley State University Fall Conference on Teaching and Learning, August 22,2007.

[3]http://www.indiana.edu/~rcapub/v22n1/p03.html