Untitled Document

Provost's Annual Address to the Faculty
Interim Provost Ivy E. Broder

"Despite All Our Plans, We Still Need a Plan"
April 23, 2008

To President Neil Kerwin, the vice presidents and deans, faculty, staff and students, thank you all for coming here today. It is such an honor for me to stand here as provost to deliver this annual address.

For some months, we have anticipated the beginning of a new strategic plan. Nothing captures the attention of the community in quite the same way. The questions are many. What will this university become? What will make it better? How do I fit into those plans?

We have been making plans for AU since we were chartered by an act of Congress in 1893. As you can tell from the title of my speech I will be talking in part about AU’s previous planning efforts. I’d like to thank our university archivist, Susan McElrath, for her help in finding our historical plans.

For the 19 years after AU was founded, all efforts were devoted to fundraising. There were no faculty, no students, and no buildings In June 1912, The Board of Trustees appointed a committee to develop plans. Six months later, the university had its first strategic plan, entitled "A Working Plan for The American University," which created:

A seven member Board of Award that would select Fellows of the American University based on preparation and scholastic standing, powers of leadership and service, and health. These fellows would actually study elsewhere;
An Institute of Research in Washington;
Fellowships of two kinds for study at either domestic or foreign institutions with stipends of $600 and $800 per year;
Degree candidates present a thesis, which AU would legally own.

The plan was approved by the Board of Trustees on May 14, 1913. A year later, the university was officially dedicated on May 27, 1914, with an address by President Woodrow Wilson. Our first eight fellows studied at Harvard, Columbia, and Hopkins.

Nineteen-nineteen was a busy year, with the Board of Trustees acquiring property downtown for graduate study. AU was finally open for business the following year with Schools of Diplomacy, Jurisprudence and Citizenship. The next major planning at AU appears to have been in 1923 when the Board of Trustees adopted the following points:

The existing graduate schools should be the first interest of the university: Arts, Science, Religion, Citizenship, Diplomacy, Jurisprudence, Government and Business Administration;
The College of Liberal Arts would be established on the Campus in the still unfinished building;
Colleges of Religion and Missions, and a School of Social Work or Philanthropy should be established;
$10 million should be provided to endow these schools.

Neither the College of religion or social work nor the endowment priorities were met. But the College of Liberal Arts was established on the main campus, and it developed its own plan in AY1928-29, the year that its first undergraduate students graduated. The concerns of the college were:

Enrollment, especially retention (our comparator institutions included Colorado and DePauw);
Preparation of students for graduate study, which would demand certain advanced courses in the curriculum;
Expanding political science and economics because of the DC location;
Specialized work in education and psychology.

The plan called for hiring six additional full time faculty, three part time instructors, and one graduate fellow, all for a total of $15,000. We should never again complain about faculty salaries!

According to this plan, the work of caring for the buildings on campus was almost entirely that of students. And while this allowed them to earn money to defray their college expenses, the work was not adequately done. Student janitors were invariably not available when they were most needed. So the plan requested a full time janitor. Other features were:

A 10% salary increase for faculty;
And here is the technology plan: two typewriters for the library and apparatus for the science labs;
Reference books because parts of two sets of encyclopedias had recently disappeared, and there was a desperate need for the Oxford New English Dictionary;
And in the way of facilities, housing for young men.

Strategic plans are products of both good and bad times. In 1932, trustees considered a temporary reorganization of the administration of AU to deal with a budget crisis. The point was to free the chancellor from all other duties so he could spend all his time in Depression-era fundraising. One of the outcomes of the budget shortfall was to reduce salaries across campus by 10%. So much for the 10% increase for faculty four years earlier.

At that time, an editorial in the Eagle told us that "the faculty has pledged its loyalty" and asked students to "accept the challenge …and assure the administration of our full cooperation."

Around the same time, discussions began about moving the graduate school to the main campus in order to consolidate faculty resources, pay down the university’s debt from the sale of the downtown property, and establish a summer school to bring in more revenue. One of the arguments in favor of the shift from downtown was that the main campus had good parking facilities.

In 1938, a three-point program was proposed called, "Reinforcement of Business, Government and Democracy." This strategy was also prompted by the economic conditions of the time and talked about the university’s conviction as one of furthering social improvement. The point was to train students and other adults in sound economic and political theory and their practical application in public administration, business administration, and citizenship. AU’s advantage as a private institution located in Washington, DC would be fully utilized to:

Promote understanding between government, business, and industry;
Train teachers of the social sciences;
Instruct undergraduate as well as graduate students in current social science issues.

A mid to late 1940s fundraising plan called, "AU: Its Role in the Future of America," furthered this notion that AU needed to be on the cutting edge of educating for a higher level of citizenship and to increase the capacity for "individual happiness." In this plan the university saw itself as preeminently fit and strategically positioned for this role, given our Washington location, its graduate school, school of public affairs, in-service training program, the achievements of its social science faculty, and a college of liberal arts. Accordingly, the plan proposed to raise $22 million to carry out this vision.

Jumping to the 1960s, as part of our 1963 self-study for the Middle States reaccreditation, the university developed a ten-year plan that focused on developing upper division education consistent with our tradition, location, and facilities. So if you are doing some quick math, you know that this would be the strategic plan in effect when Neil Kerwin was a freshman at AU. After stating that maintaining a Downtown Center and completing a Creative Arts Center were essential to the university’s objectives, a ten-point plan was laid out. The themes will sound familiar: curriculum reform, improving retention and admissions, focus on the library, faculty development, and reducing the percentage of the operating budget that comes from tuition.

A decade later, AU received a special dispensation from Middle States: rather than completing a decennial self-study, we were able to focus on the university’s priorities and plans for implementing them. This was as bottom up an exercise as could possibly be designed, with multiple committees and a 90 item survey to the community to decide on goals. The importance of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary programs, and the importance of the social sciences, were among the highest priorities reflected in this exercise.

Now, the several plans that I will mention next are recent enough that many here today will remember them, or may have participated in their design or implementation.

AU85: Building on the Past, Preparing for the Future was approved by the Board of Trustees in October 1980. In the preamble, President Richard Berendzen noted that "the plan is not a radical departure from our past; rather it is an effort to realize our full potential." AU85’s three fundamental themes were Academic Excellence, Institutional Distinction, and A Strong Sense of Community. Highlights of the plan included:

Improving quality and reputation of our academic programs through a new general education program (called "America in an interdependent world"), model programming in experiential education, reviews of graduate programs, and growth in international programs;
Strengthening faculty and reaching AAUP-two salary levels, instituting triennial faculty reviews, encouraging inter-department sharing of faculty, increasing sponsored research, and striving for faculty diversity;
Raising admissions standards, increasing financial aid;
Formulating technology and staff development plans;
Building and renovating facilities to offer new program space and conserving energy (very forward thinking);
Making permanent financial security a goal;
Enhancing student recruitment and fundraising through more effective external communication.

Well, the faculty was not too happy about the proposed deficit budget that the provost submitted to the University Senate for the first year of AU85 implementation. The chair of the Senate finance committee, Professor Harvey Moore, said "it doesn’t make sense," and suggested an increase in student enrollment instead.

Seven years later, the Board of Trustees approved "AU100: Toward 1993 and Beyond" to even further advance the goals of AU85. In this document, President Berendzen stressed academic excellence especially in the area of graduate education and improved facilities. AU100 declared some initiatives that will sound familiar:

Designating several programs as centers of excellence, strengthening the honors program, enhancing resources for graduate programs;
Instituting variable teaching loads with an average of five courses, and faculty development programs;
Setting high goals for student quality, diversity, retention and achievement, building a new home for the Washington College of Law, again mentioning an arts center, improved faculty offices, a more beautiful campus and additional student housing;
Embarking on a new fundraising campaign.

Students, at least, seemed pleased. A headline in the Eagle proclaimed, "AU100 Holds University’s Future: Planning document calls for improvement in all areas."

In February 1991, we began work on AU2000. Because of the interim presidential leadership, the plan was never completed. But the themes bear repeating:

Resolving the tension between teaching and research;
Nurturing the university’s sense of community and promoting connectivity within the university;
Strengthening AU’s presence in Washington; and
Moving towards a global AU.

Then, in 1997, Building a Global University was the first of Benjamin Ladner’s two strategic planning exercises. Six areas were targeted as strategic priorities:

Quality and support of teaching and scholarship;
Academic qualifications and practical experiences of students;
Quality, diversity and inclusiveness of the university community;
Connections among academic fields and a variety of learning approaches;
Level of staff support and efficiency of operations;
Strength of financial resources and quality of facilities.

Based on the number of articles in both the student newspaper and the newsletter of the University Senate, there was a decidedly stronger campus response to the first draft of this plan than any other plan. In dueling editorials, the Eagle editor-in-chief and the editor-to-be disagreed about the plan. Steph Lewis commended it, and Steve Lott claimed that it resembled AU85 and criticized some of its proposed components such as a foreign language requirement. The American Senator devoted two issues to the plan with comments by 13 different faculty members. Generally speaking, the vision was applauded but there was concern about implementation.

Finally, less than five years later, in fall 2001, Building a Global University gave way to the 15-point plan. There, the message was clear: smaller is better (except in fundraising), fewer undergraduate students, fewer graduate programs, fewer adjuncts, fewer courses taught by full time faculty, a smaller faculty senate, and finally, fewer pounds when we get on the scale. But as The Eagle asked in publishing the Student Confederation response: How will we pay for this?

If plans purport to summarize, predict, or proclaim the core values, identity, or soul of an institution, then some messages have been clear from the very beginning of our university. We could also argue that consistent themes and messages serve to confirm the genuineness of these messages. It is remarkable that American University’s concerns have been relatively consistent through its more than a century existence.

Graduate and professional study has dominated our thinking and our identity, as has the relationship with the city, the location in the nation’s capital, and the advantages and linkages that such a position offers. The concept of a global university, with myriad variations on the meaning of the phrase, first appears in the 1912 plan, and reappears in AU85 and all subsequent discussions. The disciplines of law and the social sciences were mentioned repeatedly as well as the College of Liberal Arts. Technology, not surprisingly, has owned its own place in the recent plans but was mentioned as early as 1927. And, could we imagine an AU strategic plan that never mentioned fund-raising? It’s always been there.

But education is also a dynamic phenomenon and issues particularly reflecting the times also began to emerge over this century of planning: concerns like faculty and staff development, external reputation, community, and diversity.

And now to our current planning initiative. Almost as soon as he was named permanent president last July, Neil Kerwin began organizing a strategic planning process. Two tasks began simultaneously. I asked Karen Froslid-Jones, the head of Institutional Research and Assessment, to begin assembling exemplar strategic plans from other institutions. And second, the president began to develop the scope of the plan which he presented to the Board of Trustees in February of this year. Last September, each of the vice presidents began considering ideas for the planning process with their staffs, and the Faculty Senate convened a working group headed by Professor Leigh Riddick to develop topics important to faculty. The deans also began to engage their units in these conversations. President Kerwin named a Strategic Planning Steering Committee, chaired by Professor Bill DeLone, which had its inaugural meeting in mid-February and has been working since to obtain input from the entire community.

Having surveyed AU’s planning history, I’d like to communicate my own sense of core elements that must be incorporated in our emerging strategic plan. Our "sense of place" is, of course, fundamental to the institution. When the 1912 plan established an Institute of Research in Washington, it did so "to make available for the advancement of knowledge the unparalleled facilities of Washington to graduate students, so that students would utilize the facilities and materials for study and research in the various historical, literary, scientific, artistic and technological departments and collections of the US Government." That plan also recognized the importance of international connections: not only by reference to the use of Washington’s resources as the seat of government which includes foreign relations, but also by providing incentives for study abroad. No matter whom the president or provost, faculty or students, our identity cannot be severed from Washington or from our global connections. These linkages will always form the basis of any strategic plan but they must flow from our history, our relationships and our distinctive strengths.

Another irrefutable characteristic of our institution is its tuition dependency. That our operating budget derives almost 95% from student tuition and fees will not change significantly anytime soon. I’d like to give you an illustration about why this is the case: our operating budget is about $400 million. A 1% change in the operating budget is $4million. To reduce our tuition dependency by, say, 10 percentage points, to 85% would require that $40 million be added to the operating budget from our endowment. If we were to take 5% of our endowment for that purpose, we would need an additional $800 million in endowment, or triple what it is now. How likely is that to happen? So, the point of this analysis is that working towards enrollment stability must be a key feature of this plan.

How do we do this? In part, by ensuring that we provide a distinctive and student centered education at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. That we are well along on this path is not in doubt. We know from the National Survey of Student Engagement and other survey results that our academic programs feature strong faculty and student interaction, certainly one aspect of student centeredness. Now with shifts in faculty workload and the addition of a select number of multiyear temporary faculty who present outstanding teaching credentials, we can continue to provide the finest teaching among our competitor set of universities. But there is more to student centeredness than academic work, and we need to ensure that AU’s culture is infused with a student centered mindset. Every faculty member, staff member and administrator must further adopt this approach as we collectively coordinate our administrative operations to provide exceptional service to our students.

So in such a student-centered, globally-oriented institution, with a Washington location, what are the academically distinctive features that we must strategically deploy? Three subjects are key as we describe ourselves. And they are interrelated: First, balance between theory and practice; Second, multidisciplinary work; Third, service orientation.

For the past 15 years, I have closely followed the scholarly, professional and creative activities of the faculty. The breadth of these activities is consistent with that of any great university. But what is most striking is that the range of work reflects a balance between theory and practice. Given our outstanding professional schools, such balance is not surprising, but within almost every department in every school and college, we see this pattern repeated. This blend is also a hallmark of our teaching and a feature that brings distinctiveness to our academic programs. We see this through our highly regarded and formalized experiential education programs and the rich array of activities that take place outside the classroom: in faculty offices, laboratories, on field trips and travel abroad. So we must highlight, support, encourage, and expand this balance in our teaching and in our scholarly, creative and professional activities. We must be deliberate about it and embrace it.

Closely related is the multidisciplinary dimension to our work. The most obvious example on our campus is the School of International Service, itself such an entity with political scientists, economists, geographers, sociologists, modelers, communications specialists and lawyers among its faculty. We have already taken the first step to foster multidisciplinary work: assembling faculty and administrators who are committed to it. We have much to showcase in that regard, with 10 new multidisciplinary degree programs put into place just in the past two years, but we must further communicate and support this as a priority. I have often spoken with faculty who are concerned that their academic unit will be penalized for participating in multidisciplinary programs. Nothing could be further from the truth! When we increase the university’s revenue streams from multidisciplinary work, whether it be new masters certificates and programs, new external funding such as our upcoming title VI funding initiative or other sources identified by our regional and interdisciplinary councils and centers, there are more resources to distribute. It is a positive sum game, not a zero sum game.

From the historical documents that reflected the discussion about the early direction of the university, another thing comes through: the emphasis on service. In 1923, the Board of Trustees voted to establish not only the graduate school and the College of Liberal Arts but also a College of Religion and Missions and talked about a School of Social Work or Philanthropy in the future. Those last few may not have been realized but the point is clear: the founders placed a high priority on a service orientation for the university. And we see that same priority reflected wherever we turn: From our maxim, "ideas into action, action into service," to the Freshman Service Experience, to the high percentage of our graduates who work in the non profit sector, to the alternative spring break and other student projects, to our success in the Presidential Management Fellowship program, to the clinics in the law school, to our work with the DC Public Schools, to our many faculty members who serve on editorial boards and selection committees, advisory committees and government panels, this is at its core an institution committed to the betterment of human experience. We may not be producing missionaries from a college of religion, but we are certainly educating their 21st century equivalent.

So here is how I would summarize our formula: An outstanding faculty rooted in Washington, DC, a center of activity in every discipline we teach, where AU fosters both theory and practice that encourages service through valued multidisciplinary inquiry in a student-centered environment. This must be the basis upon which we enhance academic excellence and our external reputation, and advance towards enrollment stability. We have been steadily moving in this direction since 1912, for almost 95 years. With our newest strategic plan, we need to seal the deal.

How can we do this? We must start with some changes in culture and attitude. First, we need to break away from any sense of inferiority, where these vestiges still remain. It is time for everyone to celebrate our academic excellence unapologetically. What are some markers that point to our progress in promoting the university’s image? The Board of Trustees has established a new committee on communications and marketing. The president is appointing a new executive director of communications and marketing. Our new website to be unveiled this fall will boost our reputation. Our image will no longer lag.

Second, let me state the refrain that I sometimes hear, "there’s no money." I hope this will dissipate as we continue to implement teaching load reductions, increase money flowing from the endowment to the operating budget, and watch the new buildings go up on campus. Are we awash in resources? No. Are there opportunities to support great work by the faculty and funds to attract great students? Yes, both from internal and external sources.

Third, we have begun to eliminate administrative barriers through improved operational efficiencies, especially student-centered services. For example, we anticipate moving towards a one-stop-shop for students, and this spring we are rolling out more online applications such as the new course waitlist feature, the online freshman guide, and other automated processes to assist advising. As part of the planning process, we also need to consider new budgetary scenarios that provide even more incentives for new program development and other faculty initiatives. Some faculty concerns about bureaucracy were raised with me last week. So let me propose a town hall meeting early next semester called "The Paperwork Reduction Forum." (Just to be clear, that’s "forum" with a "u"; not "Paperwork Reduction Form.")

Fourth, we need to open communication even further. Governance changes at the board level give new voice to faculty and student members. I hope many of you here today believe as I do that we have a successful working model of shared governance. A 2005 document issued by the University of Arizona talked about "the success and the positive morale being dependent upon the collective intelligence of the university community which would require extensive sharing of information and an understanding that faculty and administrators strive for informed mutual support through shared governance dialogue." There are two key phrases for me here: "sharing of information" and "shared governance dialogue." That is how we ensure trust and accountability. Such sharing is well underway. Our last two-year budget cycle work involved the distribution of more detailed information than at any time in the past, and I have shared much data with the Faculty Senate and others on enrollments, faculty workload, faculty hiring and distribution, financial dimensions and more. And the recently revived Executive Committee of the Senate will advance such interaction even further. Going forward, it is critical that we build upon renewed trust and dialogue and promote a culture, as well as practices, of more regular communication between the faculty and the central administration. This can take many different forms including luncheons with department chairs, routine school-wide meetings with the provost and other administrators, and perhaps even office hours for the provost. I would also propose as a faculty development initiative that we create a faculty leadership institute.

And so against this scenario of cultural and attitudinal change, as a start I suggest that these overarching themes, along with others recommended by the Strategic Plan Steering Committee, form the basis of our plan. With them, we can develop significant initiatives specific to expanding graduate education, supporting faculty teaching, research and creative work, and service, and developing programs that both tie us more closely to Washington through partnerships with prominent businesses and organizations, and bring AU to the world and the world to AU.

What began in 1893 has led to our distinctive place in 2008, which is the cumulative result of the successes and the failures of all the plans that came before this one. This position will be the basis for charting our course ahead. Symbolically, the history of our planning is represented in the buildings on our campus. Our future can be glimpsed through new and planned facilities that are inspiring to behold. But as scholars and teachers we know that our lasting imprint as a university transcends the concrete forms erected on this hilltop, known as Bellevue to Bishop Hurst. The powerful effect of our work comes from a fundamental principle that was seen at AU’s founding and has been a common theme throughout our history. At the dedication of American University in 1914, Woodrow Wilson described this in the terms of his day. He said: "So we are here setting up on this hill, as upon a high pedestal once more, the compass of human life with its great needle pointing steadily at the lodestar of the human spirit. Let men [and women] who wish to know, come and look upon this compass and thereafter determine which way they will go!" What President Wilson anticipated, we have come to know as the life-changing power of an AU education.

As we set our strategic compass, I hope we will keep as our guiding star a fundamental theme that reflects the purpose and mission of our collective work over the past century. And that is, put simply in 21st Century parlance: To educate with impact.