Adjusting the Sails

Adjusting the Sails in Stormy Times

State of the Community Address
Richard H. Wells, Chancellor
University of Wisconsin Oshkosh
September 27, 2002

Members of the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh Faculty, Academic Staff and Classified Staff, students, honored guests, friends of the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh.

In my Opening Day address to the University, I summarized my view of the past twelve months with the observation: This has been a good year in bad times. I noted that we had been through an unsettling state budget dispute and, thanks to our collaborative budget and finance planning, had survived with our critical operations still reasonably healthy and intact. More significantly, in a time of state funding cutbacks, our total student enrollment this fall increased to 11,290, the highest since 1987. This means that we continue to be the third largest university in the state. We serve more students than our nearest colleague institutions: Marquette University with 11,000 students and UW Eau Claire with 10,700.

Finally, our opening day ceremony concluded with my administrative colleagues reporting on achievements in each of their four areas by providing a list of "What's New and Improved," and most importantly, seventeen distinguished members of our faculty, academic staff and classified staff were recognized for their outstanding achievements and contributions.

Since that Opening Day message, our University has marked the one-year anniversary of the tragic events of 9-11, we celebrated our sense of community with our highly successful Fall Fest on the Fox, and we are currently in the midst of the Earth Charter Community Summit. We are one of only twenty sites across the country, the only site in Wisconsin, to host this worldwide event, which expresses our commitment to a "Declaration of Interdependence." Our University's celebration of the Earth Charter Community Summit is unique in the nation in that we have developed an entire week of events-beginning with Green Quest during Fall Fest on the Fox-featuring world-renowned speakers on important local and global issues. Finally, in about thirty minutes, we will dedicate the sixteen million dollar renovation of the Halsey Science Center. As I predicted in my opening day address, we are in the beginning weeks of what we anticipate will be "an even better year in better times."

I would like to elaborate now on the themes briefly introduced on Opening Day.

Two years ago, when I accepted my responsibilities as Chancellor, I felt that I was fortunate to begin my tenure in what could only be described as "the best of times." We lived in a relatively secure world; the greatest nightmare of the twentieth century, nuclear annihilation, had been averted, and an army of cyber sleuths had repaired the Y2K clock in time. Nationally, we were the sole surviving super-power, and our economy was awash in surpluses. On a state level we were a model for the nation in social reform and our state finances were in order. (Remember: the state treasurer was mailing out tax rebate checks). Locally, we were reclaiming our campus from the building crews and re-sodding for the new millennium. After ten years of aggressive recruitment, we had assembled one of the finest faculties and staffs in the UW System, one that I would put up against any comparable institution in the country. Our enrollments were of some concern, but on the rise, and our books were balanced. The waters were calm and we had only to sail confidently into our ever-brighter future.

And then something happened! A confluence of set-backs: 9-11, state and federal deficits, an electorate indifferent to higher education, tumbling stock values, board-room scandals, continued southward migration of some of our manufacturing base, loss of high-paying jobs, a slump in general employment, and, to cap it all off, a narrowly averted baseball strike. The predictable gave way to the uncertain.

In searching for a metaphor to describe my feelings about this "new normal" that we must develop and adapt to, I turned to this quotation from William Arthur Ward.

As you can see there are three ways that we can respond to the unanticipated adversities that accompany social, political and economic storms. The pessimist and the optimist are alike in that they do nothing; they simply complain or wait. The realist does something about the situation: "the realist adjusts the sails."

The new winds we must adjust to are the winds of uncertainty; we can neither complain about present uncertainties nor can we pull in our sails and wait for signs of a more predictable future. We must harness the energy of the storm to push us forward into a future of our own making.

Two years ago our academic community embarked on an Odyssey of re-discovery. We wanted to determine, as an institution, where we are, where we have been, and where we want to go. I feel that we are fortunate that we have completed an important part of that process, and that the Governing Ideas, that we developed together, will now serve as our collective compass.

For our guests and the new members of our academic community, I would like to review briefly the strategic planning process itself and then outline the major features of the most important resultant document.

There were hundreds of people involved in the strategic planning process faculty, academic staff, classified staff, students, alumni, state and local leaders, donors, and other community representatives. Many draft documents were developed and debated through a series of retreats and open forums. All of the governance bodies Faculty Senate, Senate of Academic Staff, Oshkosh Student Association, and the Classified Staff Council deliberated over, and endorsed the Governing Ideas document.

To give you some idea of the scope of this process, here is the record of the proceedings.

(Hold up two volumes of proceedings.)

And this is one of the major outcomes.

(Hold up Governing Ideas.)

We are truly poets!

The University of Wisconsin Oshkosh Governing Ideas document contains statements about our mission, vision, and values. In addition, it identifies five strategic directions for implementing these ideas.

In our mission statement we commit ourselves to do three things: to provide students with a high-quality, affordable, comprehensive education; to foster scholarship in all its various forms, and to share our intellectual assets with the community we shape and serve.

Our collective vision, which focuses on the engagement of people and ideas for the common good, is based on our conviction that ideas can enrich and improve people's lives and that the pursuit of the public welfare is closely linked with the pursuit of knowledge and understanding. To fulfill this vision, we seek to excel in our leadership, the centrality of the student-faculty relationship, the quality of our teaching and scholarship, and the efficacy of our external partnerships.

The meaning of our six sets of core values becomes clearer when we look at them as a web of complementary and interacting values.

• We value continuous learning because we believe that the pursuit of knowledge does not end with graduation.
• Our high regard for diversity and inclusivity implies that differences enrich us but should never divide us.
• Our commitment to quality in the abstract means nothing without the will to achieve in the concrete world.
• Freedom without responsibility is self-serving.
• The value we place on engagement and support defines our community as a set of mutually reinforcing relationships and implies that working in isolation is not sufficient.
• Our linking of social awareness with responsiveness confirms our belief that understanding of problems without appropriate action is socially irresponsible.

As a community we have endorsed five strategic directions, which will guide us in fulfilling our mission, vision, and values:

• The first commits us to supporting a learning environment that embraces diversity and emphasizes collaboration.
• The second and third identify our expectations for the scholarship of teaching, research, intellectual activities and creative expression
• The fourth directs us toward external collaborations that are mutually beneficial.
• And the fifth guides us in developing effective shared responsibility for the precious resources entrusted to us.

As I suggested before, our Governing Ideas document is the compass that will guide us through present and future storms into, hopefully, calmer seas. It is important to remember that a compass is not a map. A compass will tell us the direction we are going, but it can never account for all the challenges and opportunities that we will encounter on our journey. Those who insist on following a map must be content to revisit the places they have already been.

The Governing Ideas and, in particular, the Five Strategic Directions, are by no means a formulation of pleasant-sounding, abstract principles that have little to do with the real world we live in. Indeed, a major purpose of this address is to show how the development of the Governing Ideas has made a difference in our life as a University community and most notably has helped us to weather the social, economic and political storms of recent months. Now I want to demonstrate how your ideas are working.

To prove the effectiveness of our compass, I want to call your attention to some representative strategic actions both past and future that you, the members of the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh community, have embraced and either are already in place or will be implemented shortly. Some of these action initiatives fall under a combination of several of the five Strategic Directions, and some represent a partnership with your colleagues around the state. This list is meant to be illustrative and is by no means exhaustive. To do justice to all the accomplishments of the past year would take... well Tom Keefe can tell you how much and how long I love to brag about our University! So, for more detailed documentation, I invite you to look at the printed version of the First Strategic Plan Update, which will be available in November.

I will now consider each of our Strategic Directions and the related action initiatives in order.

We are a community of learners with diverse backgrounds and diverse interests. These are some of the accomplishments and programs that we have developed to support such a community.

Fall Fest on the Fox brings our university and the broader Oshkosh communities together and has become a regular autumn ritual. We have enhanced old programs and we have developed new programs that recognize, encourage and feature the important roles played by women, minorities and international students on our campus and in our community.

The UW Oshkosh Student Compact was one of the most important action initiatives developed through the strategic planning process. This Compact recognizes the University's responsibility to provide a high quality, holistic education and personalized services to our students. Among the action initiatives being implemented to support the Student Compact are an improved academic advisement model, a student-mentoring program, and a systematic integration of academic support resources.

Our Vision statement recognizes the centrality of the student-faculty relationship, and this teaching-learning relationship extends to all corners of the campus.

A university is certainly more than bricks and mortar, but the learning environment and the effective use of technology does make a difference. For this reason we have invested $16 million in the renovation of this building. At the other end of the campus, the almost twenty million dollar renovations of Reeve Union and Blackhawk Commons have provided exemplary spaces for faculty, staff and students to share experiences, aspirations and ideas.

The two new majors, Environmental Studies and Theatre Arts, which the Board of Regents approved this past year, were the first additions to our list of undergraduate majors in many, many years.

And the two additional majors Athletic Training and a very innovative Master of Social Work developed in partnership with UW Green Bay will undoubtedly receive final approval by the Board of Regents at their October meeting.

Our deans have done a great job of recruiting and supporting outstanding faculty members, who have been extremely productive.

In fiscal year, 2001-2002, our faculty and academic staff will have generated over fourteen million dollars in outside funding. This is a 50% increase over the previous year and an astonishing 60% success rate when we compare the total dollars requested to those actually received. This success rate is twice the national norm. What this tells me is that, more important than the dollar amounts, this is a validation of the quality of our work by major government and public sector agencies such as the US Department of Education and the National Science Foundation. It also tells me that we should ask for more because we would undoubtedly get it!

Our scholarly output is truly impressive. In any typical academic year, our faculty produces hundreds of articles and books. Their artistic output results in numerous exhibits and performances. A walk down the corridors of Dempsey Hall, which are lined with the published works of our faculty and academic staff, or a visit to our art galleries, concert halls and theatres, will attest to the extraordinary quality of the scholarly activity on this campus.

To preserve and enhance our faculty's high level of scholarly output, we have established a task force to develop what we call the Faculty Compact. This Compact will establish additional avenues of support and development for faculty research, creative activities and teaching.

As members of the engaged academy, we are all stewards of the resources that have been entrusted to us. One of the principle ways in which we accomplish this role is by forming partnerships with out sister institutions and with business and community organizations throughout our region and beyond.

I will let this impressive list of past accomplishments speak for itself.

NEW ERA is a recent outgrowth of the state's first economic summit. This new partnership, which we helped to establish, seeks to leverage the resources of the thirteen public institutions of higher education in our region in order to address the needs of businesses and other community organizations for the benefit of the 1.2 million people in Northeast Wisconsin. These are just a few of the projects that NEW ERA is developing. The partnership with UW Stout, in particular, could have significant implications for developing new student-faculty programs and for serving the needs of the very extensive manufacturing sector of the region as well as developing new sources of financial support.

Strategic Direction Five is the most comprehensive in that it has an impact on everything that we do. It is the foundation for all our strategic initiatives in that it specifies the means we will use to make decisions, and establish our priorities, and it insures institutional-wide ownership of our plans and actions. These are some of the things that we have accomplished by applying sound principles of shared governance and responsible stewardship.

Through collaborative financial planning we were able to provide $600,000 for additional classes to meet the increased student need for courses, and we re-allocated $340,000 to finance some of the 2002-2003 action initiatives that came out of the strategic planning process. Our contingency budget planning staved off the worst effects of the budget repair bill and allowed us to "bank" $192,000 for any possible "lapses" during the current academic year.

You saw some of the very impressive results of our facilities master plan as you came into this building: the improved signage across campus, new lighting and landscaping. And most important, we have added 180 new parking spaces.

A task force of faculty and academic staff has been charged with reviewing existing policies in the light of sound academic principles. Improvement of the academic calendar is one possible outcome of this initiative. A comprehensive review of the Faculty and Academic Staff Handbook has already resulted in innovative proposals that the various governance bodies will deliberate over during the coming year.

And we will have a ten-year plan to improve parking!

As I was developing the metaphor of "adjusting the sails" for this address, I was also reminded of another kind of sailing metaphor, one that we have adopted from classical literature for our freshman orientation program. We invite our incoming, first-year students to think of the journey that they are beginning as an Odyssey. In our Odyssey brochure that is sent out to all new students, there is a letter that begins: "Dear fellow Titan," another classical reference.

And shortly after I arrived in Oshkosh, one of our distinguished faculty filled me in on a little know fact about this region. Before the name Oshkosh was adopted, there were two pioneer communities on the banks of the Fox River where it flows into Lake Winnebago. The pioneer community to the south was named, oddly enough, Brooklyn. And the pioneer community to the north, the space that we now occupy, was named, prophetically perhaps, Athens.

Academia has always been proud of its classical roots going all the way back to the original Academy founded by Plato in the original Athens. I am not suggesting, like the father in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, that all words have Greek origins (nor that Windex is a panacea for all that ails you), but how often do we turn to our rich classical heritage to make sense of the world around us? Myth making is a method of constructing meanings from the bewildering array of experiences that make up the human condition.

Now for some real Oshkosh trivia. In 1937, Tom Lynch of Fond du Lac, a student of the then Oshkosh State Teachers College, won a contest for naming the athletic teams. Since then we have been known as the Titans. The original Titans, of course, appear in Greek mythology; they are an important part of the Greek creation myth. It seems that Gaia, the earth mother, gave birth to three races of children. The first two either had too many heads or too few eyes so they were locked away in the underworld. Finally, Gaia gave birth to the Titans. To settle a marital dispute, Gaia persuaded the Titans to rise up and overthrow their father, to whom they did nasty things. The reign of the Titans ended when Zeus, with the help of his mother, Rhea, supplanted the Titans with the Olympian deities, who dominate the balance of Greek mythology.

So why do we identify ourselves with this race of strong and sometimes brutal Titans? But wait the story is not finished.

Like all cultures the ancient Greeks had a myth to explain the origin of the human race. Enter Prometheus, the smart Titan. He is accompanied by his brother, Epimetheus, the dumb Titan. It seems that Epimetheus, his name means backward thinking, had given out all the good qualities like strength, speed, flight, to the animals. So when Prometheus, his name means forward thinking, came to create humans there was only one quality left, the ability to think. In another version of the myth, he gave man (and woman) fire. And it is this intellectual fire that sets us apart as humans.

So I am proud of being a Titan, because we are the modern day purveyors of that Promethean fire. The power to think, and reason, and criticize, and question. To feed the fire within us and to encourage others to embrace its opportunities and its dangers, that is what we as an academic community are all about.

In times of adversity, it is well to remember that Prometheus, the rebellious fire-giver, paid dearly for giving this gift of intellectual fire to humankind.

Zeus had him chained to a rock in the Caucasus where an eagle pecked on his liver every day. The next morning the liver was restored and the routine began all over again. For anybody who has been in the academic environment for any length of time and suffered through the uncertainties of economic cycles, this is a familiar experience. What is restored at the beginning of the biennium is often taken away by budget repair bills and lapses midway through the academic year.

But there is a happy ending to the Prometheus legend. A hero arrived in the person of Hercules, a renegade Olympian deity and a real can-do kind of guy who could take on any task. He released Prometheus from the cycle of torment that Zeus had condemned him to.

Prometheus will always need Hercules because the struggle with Zeus will never end. The power-hungry Zeus will never be comfortable with the Promethean fire, for tyrants, in any form, be they terrorists or corporate criminals are never comfortable with a populace that can think for itself. The Promethean fire is not easily controlled. As keepers of this intellectual fire, we often find ourselves at odds with the Olympian values that sometimes confront us. As an engaged University, we embrace with enthusiasm and joy our commitment of service to the larger community, and as keepers of the Promethean fire, we strive to shape the communities that we are engaged with.

Prometheus' dependence on Hercules was a sign of his strength not weakness. We are always looking for those enlightened Olympians out there, our Hercules, who recognize that it is no accident that the strongest nation in the world also has the best system of higher education in the world. Let's keep the Promethean fire alive.