Remarks to All College Faculty Meeting
September 13, 2006
I'm honored to be here - for the second time. I trust your summer was first rate. I must say that I found things a good deal quieter in June, July and August. I have an old friend, a law professor at Berkeley, who was hired thirty years ago to start the law school at Davis. Apparently, it took a good while to get it rolling. So he said for five years he had the perfect job - he was dean of a law school with no faculty and no students. I tell you this only to reiterate it's not the way I feel. I was much heartened by everyone's return.
Glenn has asked me to pass along thanks for the good wishes we have received from so many - recognizing that our family is, again, back together - and now living in the rather large house across the Wren yard. Which will, as I understand it, be open this afternoon. I'm not yet accustomed to the tourists walking through, unannounced on Saturday mornings. Though we have taken to offering lemonade. But it is an inspiring and ennobling place. And I'm careful not to sit on most of the furniture.
From my perspective, there are many topics I'd like to discuss.
We could consider, for example, some of the progress we've made in more effectively diversifying the College. I was much heartened by the Class of 2010 - immensely capable academically, with remarkable SATs and GPAs. Twenty-four percent students of color - a not insubstantial change. My congratulations and thanks to Earl Granger and Henry Broddus. It has also been heartening to hear the stories of Gateway students who would not be with us otherwise. We took smaller steps on the faculty and administrative side - but steps nonetheless - and we will make every effort to provide new resources when they can help schools and departments assist the university in its compelling goal of diversifying our membership. This is not the work of a semester or a year or a decade. It is our unfolding challenge to make this ancient university the treasure of all.
Or, I could report my delight with an effort you might have heard less about - our new Murray scholars program. Three years ago, the College initiated its most potent merit scholarship program -- the College Scholars - with a generous gift. Its rationale: that merit scholarships benefit both individual students - empowering those who commit themselves to excellence, teaching the important lesson that hard work can indeed bring rewards -- but also the campus as a whole. The scheme has proven to be a significant success. Our current scholars are actively engaged in programs from Biology and Neuroscience to History and Environmental Studies, and in leadership positions from the Honor Council to the track team. One has participated in a research project with a faculty member resulting in a forthcoming publication. All have contributed heavily to extracurricular activities, yet they have maintained GPAs above 3.8. The program has now been fully funded for in-state students, and named in honor of its donors, Bruce and Jim Murray. This fall we admitted four outstanding students who turned down offers from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton to become what we now proudly designate as Murray Scholars.
Or, we could explore together ways in which I hope that we will continue to press our advantage - as the only great public university in the nation that operates in this small-scale, intimate, engaged, often-Socratic, liberal arts format. Offering, I'm convinced, the most powerful and affecting tool the academy can provide. I'm much taken with the faculty's long proffered suggestions, the planning recommendations, the recent quality enhancement plan of the SACS study - all calling for the increased development of individual and small group, independent capstone learning experiences - to mirror our successful freshman seminar requirement. Linking our upper-level undergraduate program with the initiation of graduate and professional studies that so many of our students will undertake. And turning to intensive, rigorous inquiry in a way that few of our competitors could match. Reforming by digging deeper, demanding more, preparing more powerfully, honing the skills that matter. Nothing could be more like William & Mary.
Or I could emphasize something you already know - that is that William & Mary is a university with an impressive range of international opportunities and accomplishments. From our growing study abroad efforts, to the broad work of the Reves Center, to our faculty's international and comparative scholarly projects, to the international internships that increasingly open our students' lives and prepare them for the global community they will inhabit. We have much of which to be proud. But, you also know, the College is not - or not yet - an internationalized university. Producing graduates whose interests, identities and allegiances reach beyond the local and the regional and the national -- to the global. Articulating a vision of responsible citizenship, of political liberty, of economic vitality, of environmental sustainability, and of social justice that resonates across national borders. Stretching our visions and engaging a world seemingly made small, and close, and interdependent, and remarkable, and flat. I hope, before the close of the semester, to offer -- in consultation with Geoff Feiss, Mitchell Reiss, Laurie Koloski and Carl Strikwerda -- significant proposals designed to re-cast internationalization at the College. And I look forward to your help and, of course, consultation, in expanding and exploring and invigorating our efforts.
But I come this afternoon to discuss another matter. The strong call, the present call, for a much more potent, systematic, generous, flexible and dependable regime of institutional support for the research of our faculty and students.
The most astonishing asset of the College of William & Mary is the intense, engaged experience of learning and exploration which constitutes our core - and remains the central aspiration of our institutional life. A favorable faculty-student ratio; a tradition of teaching that demands much - from both sides of the podium, or the laboratory, or the stage; that places students at the center of our professional scholarly efforts; that measures our success in no small way by impact on their lives; that puts the development of a scholarly community above individual convenience and aggrandizement. We seek, as I've heard it put, the academy's best scholars who actually want to teach. Even if that forecloses a good number of otherwise appealing potential candidates. I've always liked a phrase I heard Jesse Jackson use on the stump- "teachers who teach because they can't help it." It is no surprise that faculty members from other institutions across the Commonwealth and the nation so regularly send their daughters and sons to the College of William & Mary.
Teaching, in all its forms, is our lodestar. [I'll even try to do a reasonable job of it again tomorrow morning at 8 over in Blair.] It's our lodestar, and it shows - in the attainments of our graduates, the preparation they boast for the challenges before them, and in the stories I have heard repeatedly, in every corner of the nation over the last fifteen months, from alumni of the College who speak with both emotion and an unyielding affection of remarkable professors who here set their course and touched their souls. Other universities, small and large, public and private, elite and aspiring to be elite, may allow focus on the teaching mission to wane in pursuit of distinct aims. Not the College of William & Mary. Not now. Not ever.
We are also a university with high scholarly aspirations and accomplishments. The Carnegie Foundation has recognized the College as a "research university with high research activity". Our peers include the finest institutions in the land. We believe in creating knowledge as well as mastering it. In expanding what we know, and how deeply we know it. In refining it, reinvisioning it, criticizing it, inventing it, and making it known to our fellows. We find satisfaction and joy in the experience - so pervasive at the College - of students in a classroom or a laboratory where the instructor is shaping the field. We have seen sharp and impressive increases in research funding from an array of highly competitive quarters. We understand the power of John Slaughter's quip -- that "research is to teaching as sin is to confession. If you don't participate in the former, you have very little to say in the latter." And we know that, particularly at the College of William & Mary, we teach the future researchers of the world.
When I came to Williamsburg a little over a year ago, I feared that we were providing inadequate assistance - over the longer course - for the scholarly work which is both expected and celebrated within our halls. Simply put, it seemed to me, that in many disciplines we teach more, teach better [in that teaching occupies a more elevated place in our hierarchy of values], have every bit as powerful a set of research aspirations as our competitors, and yet we have frequently been unable to provide the infrastructure of research support available at those institutions. This cannot be a long-term strategy for success - or happiness. I worry, as well, that if unaddressed, it will threaten both the quality of our faculty and our historic commitment to unparalleled teaching. Nothing in the past fifteen months has convinced me that I was wrong in that initial assessment.
I have, though, for several reasons, come to believe, that the problem is perhaps more urgent than I originally understood.
First, in faculty recruiting and retention, we repeatedly encounter pressing obligations to provide not only more competitive compensation packages - but more effective funding and systems of research support - summer grants and semester leaves; conference, travel and research assistance funds; start-up funds; first-rate collections of books and scholarly materials; advanced laboratory space and equipment; and other specialized tools of inquiry. Given the accomplishment of our scholars, and the vineyards in which we now compete for faculty, this need will become more compelling with each passing season. We are not yet where we need to be.
Second, the revenue shortfalls of the last decade have taken a heavy toll on our internal resources dedicated to research. Too frequently, we have propped up one side of our research structure by redirecting crucial dollars from others. In the process, we have consumed cash reserves, been unable to fully fund important research leave programs, often left senior faculty members outside relevant funding pools, used equipment beyond its appropriate life, stressed aging buildings and facilities, and hampered the growth we had hoped for in some of our graduate programs.
Third, in visiting an array of faculties at the department level last year, I was impressed beyond easy description by the quality of undergraduate research occurring across a broad swath of the campus. I heard, and witnessed, story after story, of independent student investigation, of co-authored student-faculty papers delivered at national conferences, and of the publication of student articles in refereed journals. Time after time I was heartened and, frankly, surprised, by these efforts. That was the good news. And very good news it is. Too often, though, travel or other support funds for these student ventures was exceedingly difficult to find - or it required such a relentless pursuit of small amounts of funding from so many different pots, that faculty members and talented students could, understandably, abandon the enterprise. And too often, summer stipends and part-time school year positions that would allow undergraduates to engage in research earlier in their careers are too limited or are foreclosed. Undergraduate research is an ample and growing part of our academic culture. We require increased resources to sustain it.
Fourth, one need not have been here for decades to understand that in many fields - perhaps all - our graduate stipends are too few and too low. And they often carry inadequate benefits - thus hampering our ability to expand and improve various essential programs - straining the contributions and the quality of life of some of the most crucial members of this intellectual community.
Accordingly, I am anxious to move forward quickly to help secure more powerful and sustained footing for our essential research programs. Our initial effort - and it is only an initial one -- will take place on two fronts.
First, over the next five years, through concentrations of private funding and the development of other university and ancillary resources, we will move to fully fund the College's Summer Research Grant [SRG] program and its new [SSRL] Scheduled Semester Research Leave program - which, taken together, now draw almost a million dollars per year from F&A, or Facilities and Administration, receipts -- eating, in effect, much of our research seed corn. Returning these indirect cost recoveries to the Office of the Vice-Provost for Research will be a vital and effective method of flexibly supporting research at the College. In many respects, it is the venture capital we invest in the talent and promise of our scholars. This has been, over the years, the seed money that has fed our remarkable acceleration in research. Strategic allocation of these funds over the past decades has nurtured initiatives in archeological research, super computing, environmental science, public policy, philosophy, English, the humanities, the social sciences and the arts. It may be used to fund conferences, to provide start-up resources for young faculty members, to make essential equipment purchases, and to provide a security cushion for research groups when the timing of grant renewals might otherwise mean the loss of support for graduate students or lab technicians. Indirect cost recoveries have provided the grease to keep the research engine lubricated -- returns on our investment in the intellectual and human capital that propel us toward greatness.
Second, we will also create, over the next five years, through a combination of annual gifts, foundation and endowed support, a William & Mary Faculty-Student Research Fund of at least $25 million. These resources will allow us to be agile, flexible, strategic, and, frankly, more generous, in sustaining research opportunities, for both faculty and students, across a broad array of venues. Start-up packages, travel funds, conference support, colloquia and lecture series, additional faculty lines to support research efforts, more appealing graduate stipends, technology expenditures, matching funds for interdisciplinary centers, research-management staff support, funding for exhibitions in the arts, for graduate house assistance, stipends for undergraduate student projects, for teaching post-doctoral associates, and bridge funding for research faculty are but ready and obvious examples of the sorts of scholarly assistance that might receive support from the Fund.
There will be other occasions, of course, to consider the ways in which such resources will be allocated and deployed. For now, it is enough to say that the College intends to provide support mechanisms for research that match the attainments and aspirations of a world-class faculty. Complete College funding for our evolving Summer Research Grant and Scheduled Semester Leave programs, along with the initiation of an ambitious William & Mary Faculty-Student Research Fund will be potent steps in the right direction. There will, necessarily, be others as well. We are confident that cutting-edge research can be carried forward in a scholarly community that places the teaching of highly motivated students at the center of its professional life. I have no doubt that will require the dedication of considerably more economic resources. I will make the achievement of these funding goals a consistent priority of my work.
Thanks.
