State of the University Address September 13, 2006 If a president does something once it's an event - twice or more it's a tradition - so welcome to a Roger Williams University tradition my annual state of the university address.  The university is in excellent shape - thanks for coming - and drive safely. I always approach this occasion as if it was my first speech and as if it was my last.

My first because every year, like every day, is new - and a privilege to have another opportunity to welcome new colleagues, praise past accomplishments, and chart a course for the future; my last speech, because we never know how long we are called to serve or how long we'll be here on this planet.
 
I think of Peter Broomhead, our longtime designer, whose memory lives on in all the great publications he produced and the friendships he made along the way and what an impact he had, as all of you have, on the life of this university.

On a personal note, I thank everyone for five great years at Roger Williams.  The life expectancy of a college president is 6.5 years; the good ones stay longer; the lousy ones leave early.  I plan to be one of the good ones.

I have been accused by some of being "bullish" or sharing lots of good news, of bragging about all of you. I confess that is true.  But, as the frontier sage Davy Crockett once said "it's not brag when its fact".  I can assure you that in my remarks I will share a few facts, but the most important part of this university lies not in statistics or buildings but in people.

One of my great sources of pride has been the hiring of 80 new faculty over the past five years.  Could every faculty member who has just joined the university please rise and be recognized.   Welcome. You are joining an already terrific faculty, which will be made better by your presence. And could new staff rise as well.

We have also recently added additional academic leaders; a new provost in Dr. Robert Miller - a former college president at Nazareth (the one in New York - not the Holy Land), a former provost and academic vice president. New assistant deans in arts in sciences, Jeffrey Hughes and Robert Cole, and a new associate dean as well in Frank Eyetsemitan. There is a lot of excitement in continuing education and a new assistant provost, Deb Huntsman - who joins us with a great track record, most recently from UCONN.

Bruce Marlowe has graciously agreed to serve as dean of the school of education for this year replacing Sandra Shreffler -who served as interim dean and has now joined the modern language faculty. But it's not just about new - it's about continuum - like Professor Richard Potter whose leadership in the faculty senate has made a real difference. Both Richard Potter and engineering school Dean Robert Potter had rpotter@rwu.edu as email addresses, so for a few years Richard Potter became an authority on construction management and Bob Potter learned an awful lot about faculty curriculum committees.

Mel Topf - in addition to a full teaching load went to a very good law school - ours - and graduated this past year and recently took the bar exam. I hope he passed since we need the numbers. And, business school alumni throughout the country are in the midst of a fund drive to create an endowed scholarship for Ben Carr.  These three faculty alone represent 100 years of teaching at RWU - and they don't look nearly that old.

Later this year, Bill Grandgeorge will step down as a member of the faculty so I want to publicly recognize him.  Ruth Koelle is stepping down as dean of arts and sciences at the end of this semester, and after a deserved sabbatical, will return to the math faculty next fall. I salute her efforts.

And in this 50th anniversary year, I pay homage to my predecessors - Presidents Gauvey, Bill Rizzini, Tony Santoro, as I do to all the emeritus faculty and staff.

Speaking of staff, we have been fortunate to attract and retain some outstanding administrative leaders. As you know, Jeff Gillooly, my longtime colleague, has left the university to pursue his PhD and work at the University of Rochester.  His portfolio has been divided among VP for Public Affairs Susan Rivers, who takes over his federal relations portfolio; Pete Wilbur his town gown duties; Bob Avery his work with The Board of Trustees.

The university is a $150 million business with 1,000 employees, thousands of customers and all the issues of planning, zoning, business, finance, capital projects and maintenance. I am delighted to have hired a new chief operating officer, Nick Supron, who joins us with an outstanding corporate background nationally and internationally and degrees from Rice University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

This past spring we added an outstanding new HR VP in Jean Hood and added to that staff and promoted Joe Pangborn to VP and CIO.

Dan Gough has joined us as director of campus health and safety; a great new hire has been Matt Clement, Grounds Supervisor, who has worked with the terrific staff in facilities to even further beautify our campus.  And, in addition to this great new building, we have hired Bon Appetit as our food provider.  Paul Bulau and his colleagues come highly recommended, and their values of fresh and healthy foods resonate to us.  I think we are a campus that can be Fit, Beautiful and Intelligent all at once.  And I am delighted that Jon Small accepted my offer to stay here as Associate Director of Special Events and Conferences. My own office has been enhanced by Executive Assistant Brenda Littlefield and Administrative Assistant Candice Roque.

I promised you I would talk about accomplishments and here are just a few.

Five years ago the university enrolled  2,600 undergraduates, accepted over 90 percent of the applicants, only 36 percent of students who enrolled actually graduated, we had an endowment of $37 million and we were running an annual deficit of $3 million. And we had bad coffee.

Fast forward - through our strategic plan and collective efforts: This fall, nearly 8,000 applicants for a class of fewer than 1,100 - a 100 percent increase in applicants over the past five years.

Over the past five years we improved our acceptance rate by 23 percent - that's phenomenal - the plan called for only a 5 percent improvement.

Over the past 5 years, we have improved our graduation rate by nearly 50 percent; that's unheard of. And, while everyone contributes to these efforts, if this were a sports team, I would use my first draft pick to choose Lynn Fawthrop, our VP for Enrollment & Retention to be on my team.  Her efforts and that of her staff have been extraordinary.

The endowment grew from $37 million to over $90 million, and instead of deficits of $3 million, we enjoyed a surplus this year of nearly $17 million.

We have invested these dollars wisely - $65 million in new campus projects, this building, the recreation center, expansion to architecture, new classrooms, technology and the hiring of a record number of faculty, as well as providing good salaries and an outstanding benefit package.

We've started Phase I toward a new academic building by adding classrooms and gathering spaces and will accelerate that process this year. We have designed an expanded shellfish hatchery and laboratories for the marine sciences and had preliminary work down on waterfront development - a new residence hall that's a true living and learning community - and plans for new playing fields.

Over the next few years, we expect the dominoes to fall as the library, subject to funding, is transformed into an information commons, a new home for education and justice studies found, and additional spaces for both undergraduate and graduate programs developed.

No university in the Northeast has received more positive press these past five years than Roger Williams University.  Our role in providing scholarships to the first women from Afghanistan, hosting the first students from Iraq in 35 years, our program in Vietnam, oyster restoration, law faculty expertise, community service, athletics, the center for macro projects and diplomacy, civil discourse and diversity, career planning and placement - you name it - the local, national and international media covered it.  From CNN, to NPR, from Wall Street Journal to the New York Times to the Providence Journal to Dr. Phil; we were there. Not me, but we.

We trumped everyone with Laura Bush - in her only commencement address in 2006, thanks to Paula Nirschel and our notion of Learning to Bridge the World. Laura Bush, who said, "little RWU, in tiny Bristol, RI is having a big impact on the world."

For two years in a row we were listed in Princeton Reviews best colleges in the Northeast based on student satisfaction.

And, while I often say rankings don't matter - except when you are in them - for the first time ever we were ranked in the TOP TEN in the NORTH in US News and World Report based on our academic improvements, our increased selectivity and what people in the know think about us.  That's a cause for celebration.

We now have AACSB accreditation in business, afforded only 10 percent of the business schools in the world! We have AALS accreditation in law, an accolade afforded all the good law schools in the country. ABET, NAAB, ACS, E I E I O - you name it we have it.  It cost the university lots of money, taken lots of time, but it is only because the faculty embraced these accreditations that it happened.  So kudos to everyone involved in these efforts.

No University, I repeat, no university in America has enjoyed the same kind of success as Roger Williams University these past five years. But, more important than external validation is staying true to our core values.

We are a liberal arts university.

This past year we had people like Nobel Prize winner David Trimble on campus discussing the peace process in Northern Ireland.  Through the leadership of Kate Mele, Bob Engvall and Roxanne O'Connell we solidified our journal of civil discourse: Reason and Respect.

But civility on campus is also a topic of engagement in intercollegiate athletics because of George Kolb's leadership and in Student Affairs, because of Kathleen McMahon.

This fall speakers like David Gergen and Sir Bob Geldof,  who founded Live Aid, and in the spring Turkish author Orhan Pamuk, will inform, challenge and engage us because this speaks to the essence of what a liberal arts university is about.

We were the first campus to have a Socrates Café, and I thank Bob Blackburn and Michael Wright, who really embraced the idea given me by Carl Bogus, from the Law School. One of the privileges for me this past year was to facilitate a lively discourse on censorship and good taste - following the cartoons of the prophet Mohammed in a Danish newspaper that evoked riots and controversy.  Because these issues are what a liberal arts university should be about.

We have a great new creative writing journal - Roger - because of the work of Rene Soto. As part of our common freshman experience, the author Jumpa Lahiri, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Namesake and wrote Interpreter of Maladies, is coming to campus thanks to VP John King and especially Adam Braver, who is an author himself; all of this in the liberal arts tradition. But we celebrate student-faculty research as well.

Head down to the marine sciences and the floating learning platform - since we can't have a dock in Bristol - it just looks like a dock, and go out to Prudence Island with Tim Scott and Dale Leavitt and Karen Tami and see the start of a revolution in repopulating our waters with shellfish.

Go into the labs and see the enthusiasm of Kerri Warren and Marcie Marston and Avelina Espinosa and their students.  When I see their projects, I think - did former Harvard President Larry Summers really say that women are biologically predisposed to be terrible in the sciences?  For a smart guy, that's pretty dumb.

As recently as last Friday, I had the chance to see faculty-student interaction up close, as we welcomed United States Senator, Jack Reed to campus for a forum moderated by Professor Hans Schattle and five of our terrific students from CT, New Jersey, Egypt, Belize and San Francisco. I was as impressed with their questions as I would have been if I were at Tufts or Georgetown.

Go watch the recitals or catch a play or see the senior projects in engineering. Meet the student teachers in education, or go to Moot Court, Mock Trial, Model UN, the competition of our students in business investment management where they are nationally ranked, and I say wow, I would do this job if they didn't pay me.  I wouldn't actually, but you get the point.

This place is alive with faculty-student interaction - great teaching, scholarship, research, service and excitement. Increasingly, we are known as a university that embraces a global agenda.  Five years ago fewer than 5 percent of our faculty came from global or diverse background.  Today that percentage exceeds 15 percent.

Forty percent of our juniors went abroad last year, and we have over 40 study-abroad opportunities - up for a half dozen in 2000. We have enrolled a record number of new international students this year, and I thank the partnership with ELS and its director, Leanne Kovitch, our new international admissions leader in Didier Bouvet, an alumnus, but most importantly, our increased visibility, reputation and partnerships made by the administration, faculty and staff these past several years.

We are starting to see different faces from different places and it's exciting.  This fall, through the state department PLUS program, we have a dozen students from Palestine, Jordan, Syria and Egypt gracing our campus.  We have new students from Afghanistan and Vietnam, and Ghana and Italy; Turkey and Israel and a host of other places with more to follow.

And, more than just new faces from new places, I am delighted that faculty are increasingly incorporating global themes into their curriculum, the library more books from more authors outside the US, and growing interest in language including Mandarin and Arabic.

We are also making certain not to forget the adult learner.  Thanks to Ken Osborne's leadership and the Continuing Education Faculty, we now have hundreds of students taking course on line - not just in Rhode Island but in the military in Afghanistan and Iraq, and with Pam Downey, Tucker Wright and Pat Lyons' efforts, we have received ABA approval to offer our paralegal program in Newport, in Newport News, in San Diego and at ships at sea around the globe.

We are also looking at potential partnership in Istanbul, in Hong Kong, in Iraq either on the ground or virtual. And, at the law school we are building on the work of David Rice at the unique Portuguese American Comparative Law Center. Closer to home, next month I will host my annual luncheon in Boston for the many consulates located there as a way of spreading the message.

We have an outstanding housing and residential life program led by Jen Stanley and Tony Montefusco and our student leadership program led by Tamara Von George.  These programs are nationally recognized and powerful retention tools.

In this, our 50th year, we have had some extraordinary events - the kickoff at the Biltmore attended by over 700 including many elected officials - including people we didn't even invite.  The night at the Pawsox where, you may recall, I threw a perfect strike.   And last week Watefire - what a great happening. 

Ray Talamo, in the Office of Marketing and Communications, gave birth to a 400-year old cardboard cutout...Little Roger..who has been seen on Kilimanjaro, in Alaska, Dublin, and hanging with Meredith Vieira and me on the set of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire", thanks to Susan Rivers and the Public Affairs staff.

We have had a great 50th anniversary committee. I thank all of them but especially Jackie Pham for her work on Waterfire, for the upcoming Gala, Michele Allaux and the development staff,  and for the whole enchilada, my 50th anniversary MVPS, Allison Chase Padula and John Lindsay.

Next month, Elizabeth I comes to campus - the event - not the person, thanks to Christine Fagan's efforts. So Elizabeth will be shot with Little Roger, too!

I could go on and talk about the countless hours Jim Azar puts into the counseling center; I can never say enough about Laura Choinierre and her academic support colleagues; or the transformation of career planning and placement under Robbin Beauchamp's leadership; or the work of the development staff in helping us achieve the best year for gifts and grants ever; or the work of unsung leaders like Gordon Wood or Lori Barry or Kate Tobin or John Moffa, all of whom I have recognized as unsung heroes.

But the hour will get long and I learned early on in president's school never to stand between an audience and cocktail hour.

In case you have not been paying attention, the university is in excellent shape. We have gone through a dramatic transformation relatively unscathed.  There is excitement in the air,  the place looks good and it feels good. We have matured - maybe in the way a child becomes an adolescent or an adolescent an adult.

So, what's next?

I am not suggesting we slow down - its not in my nature - but is time to redress some of the issues we haven't yet solved and prepare ourselves for the challenge that both success and the demographic/fiscal reality of the next decade portends.

Systems
It isn't sexy stuff but we need to strengthen the basic processes of the university; hiring should be easy; forms readily understood; decision-making transparent; the ordering of paperclips or getting a parking space or getting paychecks for adjuncts simple. Deans call this administrivia. We've improved but can do better.

Service
We have outstanding student service programs led by KC Ferrara and engaged in by some parts of the university. But unlike the liberal arts university, student-faculty research, global and international programs and civil discourse, the culture of service has not yet permeated all aspects of Roger Williams.

We have moved past the "it's the end of my senior year I need to find a soup kitchen to work at for five hours to fulfill my meaningful service requirement" , but we haven't move to anywhere yet.  

This year, with faculty and staff engagement, we are going to ask questions about what is service, what is service learning, what is civic engagement?  How do we count it, credit it, and value it for students but also for the faculty and staff.  I look forward to that discourse.

Inclusive Excellence

Corporate America has dropped the phrase diversity from its vocabulary.  The word diversity evokes a mixed response and sometimes leads to programs that focus on form and numbers rather than on substance and culture. 

Under the leadership of Jason Pina, we are engaging in a dialogue and action plan on inclusive excellence, changing our approaches, questioning our assumptions, altering the culture in order to include - in enrollment, retention, hiring, curriculum, and amenities - those historically excluded from Roger Williams University.  I'm impressed with the quality of discussion and engagement thus far and look for this initiative to be, along with service, on the front burner.

As the population of our country changes, inclusive excellence is a demographic necessity, but as educators and socially responsible citizens, it is a moral imperative.

Our campus is pretty, but our curriculum is substantive, proving you can be attractive and smart.  We have a great campus recreation center, new trails for walking, and new and healthy dining. Under the leadership of Mike Gallagher, Kim Teves, and Mark Andreozzi, and with support from Human Resources Counseling and Dining, our goal is to make RWU a campus committed to health and simply wellness. You'll be hearing about this initiative in the months ahead.

Early in my presidency I began a participatory strategic planning process that engaged nearly 25 percent of the people who worked at Roger Williams.  Many of you were here then and involved.

It was the best thing I could have done. We talked about our values - what we were - where we were heading.  We cross pollinated offices, people and ideas. It was hard work; it was important work. It provided a blueprint from which we are building a great university.

This fall I am going to engage faculty, staff and the university community in a new strategic planning effort called Roger Williams 2020 - a plan that takes advantage of our now new position of strength and asks these questions: What kind of university do we want to become? Why? How do we celebrate excellence in teaching as a paramount value while recognizing that service, advising, keeping current and active in scholarship and research and bringing positive recognition to the university also matter? Does the present academic structure of schools, colleges, departments enhance or inhibit our being all we can be? What commitment do we make to our students for their education and growth in the classroom and in our co-curricular, and are we delivering on that commitment? And, how can we insure that the legacy of Roger Williams, the man, and our core values of love of learning, service, faculty-student research, a global perspective and a respectful, civil environment endure?

It's been a fascinating fifty; for me an exciting five and in the words of the late Frank Sinatra "A very good year".

Thank you all for your efforts and leadership and for making a very good place even better, and I'll see you across the street to thank each of you personally.