Presidential Address to the Fall Assembly: August 15, 2009

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Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Fall 2009 semester.  I hope that all of you have had an opportunity to rest, reflect, and renew this summer, perhaps by traveling, working on long-delayed projects, or just relaxing at home with friends and family.  Jalinna, Aislinn, and I had the chance to gather with family in Galveston for a week earlier this month, and returned feeling better about the world and our place in it.

It may have been a quiet week in Lake Woebegone, but it’s been a busy summer in Commerce. After sorting through the various outcomes of the legislative session, piecing together the budget, getting two new buildings started and tearing down another, those of us who are on 12-month contracts are relieved to finally see a new semester get under way. Looking back on all that has transpired over the last year, I must tell you that my greatest source of pride is in this room: our faculty, staff, and administrators, especially those of you who are joining us as new members of the A&M-Commerce family. I’m thrilled that our senior leadership team is in place, and deeply appreciate the efforts of those who spent much of the fall and spring involved in time-consuming but successful searches. To all of our new faculty, staff, and administrators, I extend an especially warm welcome as we begin the new academic year.

Looking back at the year just ending, I am pleased to report that the pace of campus renewal, set in motion by Dr. Keith McFarland, has continued unabated. This year, we opened two new buildings: the Alumni Center, in October 2008, and the Sam Rayburn Student Center, in January of this year. Both are marvelous additions to our campus. We are grateful for the staunch support of our elected officials, especially Senator Bob Deuell, Representative Dan Flynn, and Congressman Ralph Hall for transforming dreams to reality.

We are also on the verge of opening another facility – this one to be housed in an existing structure that has been “repurposed.” While the facility itself is impressive, it is the concept which is truly exciting. I’m talking about the new Student Access and Success Center, or “One-Stop Shop,” located in the old Instructional Printing Technology Building. This new facility will gather all essential student support services under one roof, so that students will never again have to wander around campus trying to find answers to their questions. The building, a 100,000 square foot warehouse, was completely redesigned and rebuilt with students’ needs in mind. Dr. Mary Hendrix, vice president for student access and success, conducted a series of focus groups with students and staff in order to determine exactly what these needs are, and the structure was built anew with their needs in mind.

I am also proud of the way that this exciting new initiative came into being. Conceived and created by innovative faculty, staff, and students, it was paid for entirely from within the existing budget. No new funds were necessary. Four new staff positions in the Division of Student Access and Success were funded through a process of internal reallocation, while the renovation of the building was funded using budgeted but unexpended capital improvement funds. I want to extend a special thanks to David McKenna, director of facilities, and the members of his team for getting the building ready in record time, working with a budget of less than half a million dollars. David, I thank you, and our students thank you; thanks go as well to all of the carpenters, electricians, painters, and other skilled craftsmen who worked tirelessly to make it happen. Dr. Hendrix is planning a formal ribbon-cutting and open house on October 9, when I hope everyone will take a few minutes to tour this wonderful new addition to campus.

The pace of campus renewal does not end there, of course. Our state-of-the-art, 25-million-dollar music building continues to rise on the west side of campus, on schedule to open in July 2010. A new dressing room for the football team is nearing completion northeast of the stadium, replacing the old T-Lounge. Exterior renovations to Whitley Hall were completed last year. And of course, the old Sam Rayburn Memorial Student Center now exists only in memory. For anyone consumed with nostalgia for a structure that was indeed magnificent in its day, I have asked the demolition crew to set aside a pile of bricks as mementos.

Not all of the changes taking place are visible, so let me now move on to other achievements from 08-09. I’ll start with improvements to our institutional capabilities, services, and goals. I believe most of you know that we implemented a major administrative reorganization last year, restoring the Division of Academic Affairs and creating a new Division of Student Access and Success. We are honored to welcome Dr. Larry Lemanski as our new provost and vice president for academic affairs, and are equally pleased to celebrate Dr. Mary Hendrix’s new role as vice president of student access and success.

This year, we also renewed our university’s commitment to its founding principle: to change the face of a region through education, a legacy of our founder, Professor Mayo. While the mission that flows from this principle remains constant, the manner in which we deliver that mission must continuously evolve if we are to meet the changing needs of the students, families, and region we serve. And the face of our region has, indeed, changed dramatically since 1889. When Professor Mayo opened the doors of East Texas Normal College, his vision was to provide a steady supply of highly qualified teachers who would, through their dedication and effort, elevate the quality of life of a rural, sparsely populated, and largely undeveloped area of the state. At the time, few of its residents graduated from high school, let alone college. Without Prof. Mayo’s efforts, many generations of families would never have risen from a life defined by subsistence farming and poverty.

Now, our 38-county service area, stretching from Fort Worth east to our borders with Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana, and south to near Huntsville, is home to more than six million people. It is an amazingly diverse mixture of urban, suburban, exurban, and rural ways of life, and a melting pot of ethnicities, languages, cultures, and beliefs. While remaining faithful to Prof. Mayo’s commitment to rural Northeast Texas, we must now recognize that our students are as likely never to have seen a cow as they are to have grown up milking one. From these realities comes a commitment mandated by our mission: we must resolve to recruit, retain, and graduate a student body that reflects the diversity of the region we serve. Recognizing that Hispanics are by far the fastest-growing segment of the population of this region, I have committed the university to achieving designation as a Hispanic Serving Institution within three years, a commitment that will require us to increase our Hispanic student population from its current 10 percent of the student body to 25 percent. The goal is both ambitious and modest: ambitious in terms of the strategies we must implement to achieve it, but modest in that the Hispanic population of our service area is, in actuality, closer to 40 percent. Nonetheless, the goal is a critical one if we are to remain faithful to our mission of access, opportunity, and success.

In keeping with this goal, we have increased significantly our financial assistance to students. Last year, in addition the more than $30 million in financial aid we routinely award, we expended an additional two million dollars in special, one-time incentive funds from the State of Texas on direct aid to students. We could have spent this money in other ways, and many universities did in fact spend it on equipment, technology, and infrastructure improvements. But after consulting with the University Executive Council, we agreed that our highest priority has to be students. My special thanks go to Dean Stephanie Holley and everyone in Enrollment Management and Retention for their herculean efforts in planning and implementing the highly successful “Money4Me” initiative. Stephanie, I thank you, but more important, the thousands of students who benefited from this program thank you. The efforts of your team brought their dream of earning a college degree from A&M-Commerce one step closer to reality.

We also increased scholarships in order to add the third year cohort of the Honors College, and have budgeted a parallel increase for the coming academic year.

We also have progress to report in the areas of outreach and strategic partnerships. The success of Texas A&M University-Commerce is very much tied to our ability to form strategic linkages with individuals and organizations who share our vision of transforming lives and communities through education. During the year just ending, we formed alliances with a number of organizations, all of which will help us extend our reach into educationally underserved communities, leverage our limited resources by matching their funds with ours, and raise awareness of the university as an institution committed to excellence and opportunity. For example, we joined with the Dallas Black Chamber of Commerce to award matching scholarships to the winners of that organization’s scholarship competition, an arrangement that has brought a dozen new students to campus this fall. We have similar arrangements with the Dallas Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and the Dallas Asian Chamber of Commerce, as well as the Dallas-based group Education is Freedom. We also have established or extended partnerships with the Dallas Independent School District, several campuses within the Dallas County Community College District, and a long-time friend, L-3 Communications.

A number of academic programs were added, enhanced, or planned during the year. We are engaged in a partnership with A&M-Texarkana to offer an Ed.D. in educational leadership, and are in the early stages of implementing a new degree in construction engineering. We deepened our partnership with the Dallas County Community College District by signing an articulation agreement in industrial engineering, and recently entered into collaboration with Collin College to offer programs at the Collin Higher Education Center. We also received a grant to develop a Math and Science Teacher Academy.

On the international front, we added programs in China and Sarajevo, extending the reach of A&M-Commerce across the globe.

We are already seeing outstanding results from these efforts. As many of you know, our enrollment shows impressive gains for the coming semester. After several years of modest growth, our growth for the fall semester is conservatively estimated at 10 percent, with growth in the freshman class that may exceed 30 percent. We won’t have final numbers until the payment deadline on the twentieth day of class, but these preliminary figures are very promising.

It is important to emphasize that this growth has not come at the expense of quality. We have attracted some very highly qualified individuals for Fall 2009, and in the aggregate, our new students present an increase in both ACT and SAT scores. And we continue to graduate students in much greater numbers than the size of our institution would predict. Last year, we produced an amazing 2,343 proud Lion alumni.

I take these figures as a validation of our mission: we offer an educational experience that students and families are choosing over all other options available to them. Professor Mayo’s creed of ceaseless industry, fearless investigation, unfettered thought, and unselfish service to others resonates as clearly as it did a century ago. When we present ourselves to the world as a university that prizes integrity, innovation, and imagination, we align ourselves with the values and aspirations of those whom we are perfectly positioned to serve.

Put simply, we have become a university of choice.

In a legislative year, no report on the state of the university would be complete without an update on how we fared during the session.  The 81st session of the Texas Legislature convened amidst frightening predictions about the state of the economy and projections of massive and painful cuts to the state budget – cuts that would have devastated not only higher education, but all state agencies.  Fortunately, this disastrous scenario did not occur.  Because of a variety of circumstances, the budget of Texas A&M University-Commerce actually increased by approximately 8 percent, producing new revenues of approximately $8.9 million.  These funds will go to support a number of important initiatives:

• A merit pool of 3 percent
• The third year of implementation of the Honors College
• Startup funds for a new program in Construction Engineering
• Previously unbudgeted costs of construction for the new Music Building
• Other obligations, including debt service, required transfers, utility cost increases, minimum wage increase, and so forth.

What made all of this possible?  Federal stimulus funds.  Without the infusion of several hundred million dollars of federal dollars from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the State of Texas could not have balanced its budget without making painful cuts.

This act of generosity on the part of the federal government will not be repeated in the next biennium. It is incumbent upon us – and all of public higher education in Texas – to take proactive measures now to ensure that we are operating at the highest levels of efficiency and effectiveness possible.

The Legislature passed a number of other laws that will impact higher education, most having to do with increased accountability. I will not discuss these in detail, but as you see, they add up to more reporting requirements and a greater demand for transparency and accountability. What we see reflected in these new laws is the public’s belief that universities need to do a better job of demonstrating to those who underwrite their efforts – the people of the State of Texas – that we are indeed delivering value.

One of the most interesting actions of the Legislature was, in fact, an inaction. Despite great public outcry about rapidly rising tuition rates, the Legislature did not pass any of the two dozen or so bills filed that would have regulated, frozen, or in some instances, rolled back tuition rates. This lack of action should in no way be taken as an indication of complacency; it was, in fact, just the opposite. Emotions were running so high on the issue of tuition costs that members were unable to come to agreement on how to act before the session adjourned. The issue is still very much alive, and although A&M-Commerce remains one of the most affordable public institutions in the state, the cost of tuition remains a volatile political issue, likely to resurface in the 82nd Legislature.

Moving from the year just ending to the one just beginning, let me offer a few observations about the challenges and opportunities we are likely to encounter going forward. The first is related to the debate over tuition, which I believe is emblematic of a larger issue facing all of us in higher education: a continuing erosion of the public’s faith in our ability to manage resources wisely, respond creatively to new fiscal realities, and produce highly qualified graduates prepared to innovate and lead change. There is compelling evidence to back up this skepticism. The United States, once considered to have the world’s best system of higher education, now has the highest college dropout rate of any industrialized nation. Whereas we once led the world in college completion rates, we are on track to be dead last by 2025, if current trends continue. Furthermore, we in higher education do a poor job of graduating those students who could benefit the most from having a college degree: those from lower socioeconomic strata for whom a college education provides the promise of a better life. In the United States, only 7 percent of students from the lowest socioeconomic quartile who attend college actually graduate; by comparison, for students from the highest socioeconomic quartile, the figure approaches 80 percent. As institutions, we do a good job of talking about access, opportunity, and success, but as a nation, we do a poor job of producing tangible outcomes that support our rhetoric. This is a challenge to which we at A&M-Commerce are well prepared to respond, but doing so will require that we do a better job of understanding the reasons behind both our successes and our failures.

Another challenge we will almost certainly face during the next biennium: serious budget constraints, including the possibility of cuts that may require reductions of people, programs, and services. I don’t want to sound alarmist, but as I mentioned earlier, the FY 10-11 budget for the State of Texas was balanced only through the infusion of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal stimulus funds. Projections for the 12-13 biennium indicate a state budget shortfall of between fourteen and twenty billion dollars. If this happens, we will not avoid the axe. No one will.

Despite these fiscal concerns, our most significant challenge will be to remain responsive to the changing demands, learning styles, financial limitations, and cultural realities of a diverse student body. This is also the challenge that calls out the best in us, as individuals and as a university dedicated to transforming lives and shaping futures. I never grow tired of telling the story of a university that has been educating non-traditional students for 120 years. We know how to create opportunity, and we know how to help students succeed. It’s what we do best, and it’s what we need the world to know about A&M-Commerce. The public’s confidence in our university will not be advanced solely by more effective marketing, but it will be improved by results. We need to continue doing good by doing well what we know works best for students. But more than that, we must demonstrate to an increasingly skeptical public that their investment in our university produces tangible and positive, results, in the form of graduates who leave here prepared to have a profound impact on the future.

With these considerations in mind, I would like to close by calling upon all members of the university community to join me in working toward three goals that I believe will make us a stronger, more effective, and more widely recognized institution of higher learning.

First, I ask that all of us renew our institutional sense of vision and mission by re-engaging and revitalizing our strategic planning process. We continue to be an institution that questions its identity. While we have much to be proud of, we wonder where our greatest strengths – and therefore our future – lie. The answers to these questions will not come from the governor, the chancellor, or the president. They will emerge from the thoughtful deliberations of those gathered here today. Toward that end, I am working with the President’s Advisory Council to develop guidelines and a charge for the Strategic Leadership Team, whose broad task will be to review, revise, and refine our existing Strategic Plan, so that it becomes not just a binder on a shelf but a true, living document, providing an affirmation of who we are and a map that will guide us toward the pursuit of our future.

Second, we must make a collective commitment to establish a culture of assessment, performance measurement, and continuous improvement. We must come to know ourselves as an institution that is always hungry for information about how it is doing, and one that uses that information as a precious resource in our never-ending quest to improve. In the language of assessment, we must do a better job of not just collecting data, but using that data to “close the loop” in a way that leads to self-improvement.

Toward that end, I am working with the President’s Advisory Council to establish a series of committees that will take charge of assessment activities at the unit level. Each academic department, college, and division will have a planning and assessment committee, whose efforts will be guided by a university-wide committee that will monitor and coordinate activities in relation to the university’s broad strategic goals. While this structure is necessary to satisfy accreditation requirements, I want to stress that our work will be driven not by compliance mandates, by a deep desire to be more effective educators – individually, in the classroom and virtual environments, and collectively, as a university that is urged on by a relentless thirst for excellence. We can always be better tomorrow than we are today; the process of assessment will help us stay focused on achieving tangible results.

Third, we must sustain our commitment to efficiency, effectiveness, and wise stewardship of public resources. We dodged the budget bullet this year, but there is no assurance that history will repeat itself; there is, in fact, every reason to believe that budget constraints will become much more severe in the next biennium. All too often, institutions respond to financial challenges by going into hibernation. They slice away expenses around the edges, like trimming fat from a piece of meat, and then go into a kind of suspended animation, postponing their visions and aspirations until good times return. Our university does not have to put innovation on hold while the financial markets sort themselves out. Our best defense against anticipated budget cuts – and remember, we have plenty of warning this time – is to engage in a process of self-examination to ensure that the resources entrusted to our care are closely matched to the realization of our mission. We must innovate from within, constantly paring those functions and activities that no longer move us forward, and redirecting resources toward new, innovative programs and services that do. Toward that end, I am instructing the Budget Review and Development Council to identify 1 percent of the FY 2010 budget for reallocation. This exercise should produce $500,000 to $600,000 in revenue that we may use to fund innovation and the pursuit of excellence.

As I reflect on the achievements of the year just ending and contemplate what the future may hold, I am both elevated and humbled by the legacy of those who have gone before. In my mind’s eye, I see Prof. Mayo surveying the vacant fields surrounding Commerce, and imagine him bargaining with city leaders to get the very best spot for the college he knew would flourish long after his service as president had ended. Each day, I am reminded of the legacy of the gifted faculty and staff who have devoted their lives to the ennoblement of this extraordinary institution. I see their bequest in creative and innovative programs, in research, in a campus that grows more beautiful with each passing day, and of course, in the lives of students whose futures have been shaped by their engagement as citizens of this university community.

As we survey the legacy of this venerable institution, there can be little doubt that our students and alumni comprise the most vital expression of the worth of our mission. Theirs is the future we toil daily to transform, and to them, we bequeath the fruits of our labor. The British poet Robert Browning reminds us that “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, else what’s a heaven for.” To all current and future Lions, we offer a simple injunction: never rein in your dreams. The world is your canvas. Paint on it what you will.

I would like to close by sharing with you a brief video presentation, developed by the incredibly talented staff in the Marketing and Communications Department, that is built on this theme of legacy. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

President's Video

Thank you for being here today, and for your engagement in the life of this great university. Please join me on the pedestrian mall for the Pride Walk.

 

Dan Jones, Ph.D.
President