State of the College Address
January 25, 2007
Thank you Mr. Scofield. I appreciate the kind words. One never knows what to expect from Ryan. He has grown accustomed—at inaugurations and the like—to upstaging presidents and chancellors. Or at least presidents. I must say that I've come to greatly value Ryan's leadership. Though I just had a mental picture of his successful efforts in a pie eating contest a couple months ago. He didn't look quite this distinguished.
I have, like Ryan, participated in my own share of College traditions. I have been rained on at 11 consecutive College events. (At least in January, we come inside.) I've played Campus Golf. I have, just this past week, accompanied 75 of our most persuasive students on "The Road to Richmond." I've joined all of you cheering the Tribe from various sidelines. I've even conducted, at times, the Pep Band. Not since the Blues Brothers has enthusiasm been so badly mistaken for musical ability. And, finally, it's been suggested that I am in a little better shape these days because I'm training for our very own "triathlon." This, I categorically deny.
Here, this evening, we begin a new tradition. I think a good one. I'm grateful that you've all come. I'm not sure this is what one expects for a boring "State of the College Address." But I'm glad you're here. I'm anxious to speak of our aspirations, our accomplishments, our challenges.
To our student and faculty colleagues who may have been on the road, welcome home. Williamsburg is a marvelous and uplifting metropolis. But it's a lot better when you're here. In your absence, both the men's and women's basketball teams have carried forward the cause of the College in noble ways. I look forward to you re-joining us at their games on Saturday and Thursday nights, respectively, in the Kaplan Arena.
Finally, on a point of personal prerogative, I am glad to say that my wife—Professor Glenn George—is here. It is, as the poet says, "a miracle how one soul finds another." And some of us—or, in our case, one of us—has gotten far better than he deserves.
I begin with a word of thanks and recognition to Dave Andrews, Williamsburg's voting registrar, for his recently announced changes in the way student applications will be processed in Williamsburg—opening the door very substantially to fuller participation in the political process. Many students, past and present, also deserve credit and congratulation for their steady optimistic efforts on this vital front. You have done the College proud.
I have been glad to note Kiplinger's conclusion that the College of William & Mary has risen, by their lights, to the third best value—weighing cost and quality—in American higher education. Passing, along the way, Mr. Jefferson's other university. I was also honored to be informed, officially, two weeks ago, that the College ranks sixth among comparable American universities in the number of alumni, a disproportionate 42, presently serving in the Peace Corps.
Our volunteers, friends, alumni committees, university officials, and development professionals brought in, amazingly, a record over $26 million dollars in the final quarter of 2006—assuring, through private generosity, that the College will have every opportunity to meet its charge of being great and public and that good news is ahead for our Campaign. And demonstrating a reality that I have come to know close hand. None love more, care more, or are more powerfully committed to the cause of their College, than the alumni of William & Mary.
These contributions—when added to the increasingly successful campaign spearheaded by Dean Pulley to fund the construction of a new business school, to Governor Kaine and the General Assembly's heartening budgetary support for our new school of education, and to our public-private partnership designed to create cutting-edge laboratory facilities in integrated sciences—these commitments are designed, quite literally, to assure that generations of William & Mary students will enjoy even greater avenues of inquiry and promise than their predecessors. Our twenty-first-century campus is on its way.
We learned recently from the NCAA—where relations have been somewhat less pleasing—that our athletes amassed the fifth-highest academic performance ranking in the country. Proving, again, that the term student-athlete can be reality rather than façade. Demonstrating we can reject the commercialization and academic marginalization that pervades intercollegiate athletics. Pressing competition, strength, courage, and character in a crucible of opportunity and leadership.
And our own continue to do their College honor on the national stage. Robert Gates, Class of 65, adding another chapter to his incredible record of service to country, as the new Secretary of Defense. Justice O'Connor sharing the wisdom of considered judgment even more broadly. George Miller—three times an alum, culminating with his Ph.D. in physics—pressing the boundaries of scientific inquiry at our nation's Lawrence Livermore laboratory. And, just this week, Mike Tomlin, Class of 95, taking the lessons learned next door in Zable Stadium to the Pittsburgh Steelers as one of the NFL's youngest coaches.
And, finally, I offer a word of quiet and awed tribute to Beonko Sampson, William & Mary policeman and Army Reserve staff sergeant, who was recently awarded the bronze star for heroic service in Iraq. Reminding of the most potent meanings of the terms service and sacrifice.
I have spent much of the last eighteen months in conversation about the College of William & Mary. By our accounts, which do not to me seem overblown, we have met with some 25,000 of the faithful. I'm confident that, at least when added to my recently much-elevated correspondence, I have heard more about the strengths and weaknesses, the promise and purpose of the College than many could claim in such an abbreviated time frame.
And I can report, without hesitation or doubt, that we are of one mind about who we are, about what we do, about the fundamental mission and values of the College. William & Mary, as Texans are given to say it, is a university comfortable in its own skin.
We understand that this ancient institution is unique in American higher education. Our graduates have long known it, our donors confirm it, our students experience it, our faculty and staff live it, and my own explorations ratify it. I begin with five pillars of clearly embraced consensus.
The first is size and scale. Our intimate, supportive, rigorous, engaged, dynamic, residential form of liberal arts education is, we are confident, the strongest, most affecting, and likely, the most pragmatic tool the academy has to offer. It is, also, nowhere else so successfully employed in the public sphere. It requires, frankly, that we be small and, despite pressures in various forms, we will remain so.
Second, academic excellence, intellectual achievement, and the highest standards of performance, imagination, and creativity inform all that we do. Our efforts in what are now carefully chosen and honed fields of endeavor—graduate, undergraduate, and professional—are designed to compete at the highest levels of academic attainment. Nothing less can satisfy.
Third, our programs are premised on a culture that promotes deep and sustained faculty involvement in the lives, development, and work of our students. This ennobling learning relationship defines the William & Mary experience. It is, we understand, powerfully transformative—placing the guidance, challenge, and mentoring of students at the center of our professional lives.
Fourth, our high standards of instruction are leavened by a foundational and sustaining commitment to research. We believe in creating knowledge as well as mastering it—in expanding what we know and how deeply we know it; in refining it, criticizing it, inventing it and making it known to our fellows. And we know that at the College we teach the future researchers of the world. We seek, therefore, the academy's strongest scholars who actually want to teach. And we need very substantially improved standards of compensation to make sure that they stay. Our marker is the 75th percentile of our distinguished group of peer universities—the 38th cannot be acceptable.
Fifth, as the powerful statement crafted by our campus-wide Committee on Diversity, and approved last year by our faculty, staff, students and Board of Visitors attests: "The College of William & Mary strives to be a place where people of all backgrounds feel at home, where diversity is actively embraced, and where each individual takes responsibility for upholding the dignity of all members of the community."
And our charge to be great and public entails much more.
The College requires significantly increased support for the growing research efforts of our faculty and students—both graduate and undergraduate. In September, we announced initial steps to break the downward spiral in our basic research funding. We have modified our faculty leave program—underwriting it with $500,000 to date—re-investing necessary overhead income—helping us to sustain and support the work of our scholars. Our early and promising efforts to secure an enlarged faculty-student research fund—including the welcome assistance of the Mellon Foundation—will make us more flexible, agile, and capable in the funding of scholarly endeavor. And the provost, on the heels of many conversations with students and graduate directors, is presently developing a much-needed plan to assure more competitive stipend and health care packages for graduate students.
Improvements in the years ahead should also target unique opportunities to enhance the competitive posture of the College. We already enjoy a record of success in undergraduate research that is the envy of much of the academy. We also provide small-group capstone and individualized research courses—assuring unique opportunities for independent inquiry and oral presentation—for about 70% of our undergraduate students. Following the recommendations of last year's Quality Enhancement Plan, I hope that we can explore vigorously and systematically how we might expand these efforts to bookend our hugely successful freshman seminar program. Allowing the senior year of our undergraduate experience to more clearly serve as unique preparatory ground for the graduate and professional programs so many of our students will soon enter. No other public university could readily make such a claim.
A great public university must, as well, be a beacon of fairness and opportunity for all of its members. The staff of the College—professional, hourly, and classified—literally enables the storied William & Mary academic and residential experience. Technology experts, policemen, housekeepers, facilities managers, residence life professionals, and a host of other dedicated employees commit their lives and their careers to the service of the College. The College, in return, must assure that they are compensated fairly, treated with dignity, and given the tools and training they need to thrive and be promoted. Here, often, we have long rows to hoe. And progress must be quicker. Our restructured relationship with the Commonwealth should allow greater independence in our employment efforts. We must assure that flexibility resounds to the benefit of the entire William & Mary community.
And we must continue the progress we have made in opening our doors to all. I have received no better news since arriving on campus than learning that the Class of 2010—immensely capable academically, with remarkable SATs and GPAs—is the most diverse in decades. Almost a quarter students of color. It has also been heartening to hear stories of Gateway students, from very low income families, who would not be with us—but for the generous scholarship program introduced last year. This spring we have enrolled an additional eleven Gateway transfers—above the 77 who joined us last fall. And our first cohort of co-enrolled community college students joined us on campus last semester—achieving GPAs comparable to those of beginning freshmen.
The challenge of economic access remains a daunting one—for us and for many of the most accomplished universities in the nation. The Spellings Commission recently concluded that "persistent financial barriers unduly limit access" to universities; and that "gaps between the college attendance … rates of low-income Americans and their more affluent peers" constrain meaningful opportunity.
Worse yet, last month's study by the Education Trust concluded that the nation's marvelous public research universities are now spending more of their own institutional aid funds on students from the top of the economic ladder, on average, than those at the bottom. We seek, in the next six years, to double the number of Gateway-eligible students at the College. Our renewed commitment to need-based financial aid, in partnership with the Commonwealth, must also extend more successfully beyond the poorest students to all those facing potent challenges resulting from the increasing costs of higher education.
The diversity of our broad community, of course, includes an increasing religious diversity. As you know, late last fall I modified the way in which the cross is displayed in the ancient Wren Chapel—seeking to assure that the marvelous Wren—so central to the life of the College—be equally open and welcoming to all.
And though the decision has received much support—particularly within the campus community—many, many have seen it otherwise; asking in the strongest terms that the action be reconsidered. In the heat of the dispute, broader questions than the placement of the cross have been implicated as well. Does the separation of church and state at public universities seek a bleaching of the importance and influence of faith and religious thought from our discourse? Are modern public universities congenial to those of strong religious conviction? Can a public university honor and celebrate a particular religious heritage while remaining equally welcoming to those of all faiths? How does one square the operation of an historic Christian chapel with a public university's general charge to avoid endorsing a particular religious creed?
Given the challenge of these questions, the controversy that has ensued about my decision, and given the fact that this is a great university, it is my hope to probe and explore these issues in the most thoughtful way possible. So today, having had discussions with many, on campus and beyond, including members of our Board of Visitors, I announce the creation of a presidential committee to aid in the exploration of these large questions. I will ask its members to examine the role of religion in public universities in general, and at the College of William and Mary in particular—including the use of the historic Wren Chapel. It will be co-chaired by two of our most distinguished faculty members—Dr. James Livingston, emeritus chair of the College's religious studies department; and Professor Alan Meese, accomplished legal scholar, teacher, author, and leader in the Faculty Assembly.
The committee will be balanced—as the appointment of these co-chairs suggests. It will include an array of alumni, students, staff, and faculty. I will ask that they report back to me by the end of the semester. I have also requested that the provost consult with the chairs and invite, during the course of the year, experts, scholars and activists from varying perspectives, to explore such broad-ranging claims and their ties to our mission as a public university.
And, finally, I would point to our aspirations—both now and in the years ahead—for the College's marked impact on the Commonwealth and the world. I am immensely enthusiastic, for example, to consider the contributions scholars at VIMS and on the main campus will make in preserving, protecting, and understanding the unparalleled marvels of the Chesapeake Bay. Or our School of Education's path-breaking professional development work for Virginia teachers. Or our major initiatives in acoustic, molecular, magnetic, and computational imaging—and the applications we're confident will result from them. Or the Sharpe program's efforts to support public services in the cities and counties our staff members call home.
Or our government department's research on the cultural aftermath of human rights abuses, the law school's work on poverty and the administration of justice, our bold efforts in conservation biology, in environmental sustainability—and on dozens of other fronts that teach much about the way public universities can use their rich intellectual resources to serve the felt needs of the communities that sustain them.
But, I'll concede, I'm much mindful of having just returned from the William & Mary Medical Mission Corps' work in the Dominican Republic. It is, without doubt, a potent metaphor for the character, ambition, determination, and heart of the College. A committed and determined professor, David Aday, preparing his charges for sophisticated ethnographic studies in public health. Selfless and tough-minded alumni, now doctors, like Mark Ryan, Class of 1996, planning and directing a medical clinic, seeing hundreds of impoverished and jeopardized patients, without interruption, for more hours, day after day, than one would want to count.
And maybe most heartening, 13 undergraduates, led by Chris Lemon, chosen from over a hundred applicants—using their imposing skills to screen patients, construct histories, operate a pharmacy, assist doctors, and organize field trips into desperate communities—all, of course, in Spanish—providing essential medical services to hundreds of Dominicans without access to care. Doing so in the face of deprivation and hardship, and, sometimes even danger, to make a contribution to the quality of someone else's life. Discovering, through a process of exhaustion and joy, that the providers were also actually beneficiaries; that the students were the teachers; the patients the purveyors of hope; the president, perhaps, the most wide-eyed and astonished of all. Proving their mettle; launching lives of deep personal meaning and powerful social consequence.
And understanding that such stories could be replicated, with equal passion, from College and Reves Center efforts in Ghana, Romania, Bosnia, Kenya, Tanzania, Nicaragua, India, Mexico, Uganda, Romania—Petersburg, on the Eastern Shore, in Latino communities in Williamsburg and James City County. Lists too long to convey. We will be known for many things in the years ahead. Skill, rigor, intellectual demand, sheer academic firepower. The intensity of discovery. The pull of imagination. But we will also be known for where we go, what we do, who we serve, and why we serve them.
I hope that over the course of the next academic year we will explore ways to deepen, sustain, expand and make defining the College's burgeoning commitment to civic engagement. Providing a powerful legacy to the celebrations of 2007. Assuring, remarkably, a student experience outside the classroom as compelling as we have traditionally provided within. Offering a new generation of leaders for a complex and frequently troubled society. Raising our hands and lifting our hearts. Robert Maynard Hutchins worried that "the death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.. Dr. Hutchins did not have the good fortune to know the students and faculty of the College of William & Mary.
I came to Williamsburg eighteen months ago drawn, in no small measure, by the remarkable history of the College. No institution is so intimately tied to the marvels, possibilities, and contradictions of the American story. But affections rooted in history are here quickly outpaced by the power of promise. Believing in an institution that, quite literally, at its core, provides the strongest educational experience of any public university in America. That takes that ascendancy, sees it, embraces it, and is unsatisfied; confident that it can do better. Placing the mind in powerful service to society. Creating a community of head and heart—that pushes past old exclusions and separations and polarizations—to face a global set of challenges and opportunities that are boundless, and evolving, and, in many particulars, unknown.
And attentions rooted in the College's story were, for me, quickly subsumed by the power of its people. Those who believe in pressing themselves and their boundaries ever more fully. In seeking the larger contribution. Understanding that we make a living by what we get, but, as it's said, we make a life by what we give. That for those to whom so much is readily offered, much, beyond much, is required. That the price of greatness is, indeed, responsibility. A responsibility embraced with joy and enthusiasm—enthusiasm and hope. Hope not as a mere prediction of success or description of the world around us. But hope as Vaclav Havel dreamed it—a predisposition of the spirit, a habit of the heart. A conscious choice to live in the belief that we can make a difference in the quality of our private and public lives. Embracing the nobler of hypotheses.
Together we have much to do. I came believing in a College. I work each day believing, as well, in you.
Go Tribe. Hark Upon the Gale.
