The following is the text of the annual address to the faculty delivered by Vice Chancellor and Provost Deborah A. Freund on March 26, 2002 in Grant Auditorium.
Hello. I'm very grateful to look out and see so many of the faces that have become close friends. I cannot believe this is the end of my third year at SU. Yes, time flies when you�re having fun.
I am pleased to welcome you to my annual address to the faculty. It has been a remarkable year-both in terms of what we have learned about the world and in terms of what we have learned about ourselves.
The state of the world is dramatically different from the one we knew when I addressed you last year. We have experienced great sadness and resilience as a nation, leaving us to appreciate family, friends and community with a renewed sense of purpose.
As a nation, we are at war against an enemy that could be anywhere. Suicidal terror continues to fill our news screens nightly with scenes of anguish and anger. Our economy has stumbled briefly, leaving a great deal of uncertainty in its wake.
And during this academic year, many of us have experienced a loss that�s rooted in family and home-first at the World Trade Center and now more recently close to SU. I don�t know about you, but when I think about the tragic loss of our graduate student Simeon Popov-and the way in which his classmates played their sweet songs of tribute on a cold winter day in January, I still feel a wrenching heartache deep inside my soul.
Yet we have carried on, forging ahead as we have remembered our fallen alumni, our students who have lost loved ones, and the many who perished as they tried to help others in need.
It is often said that an academic plan is useful in the best of times and essential in the worst of times. These are neither the best nor the worst of times for SU, but they are times that we will not soon forget. If our perceptions of the world have changed, it may be prudent to ask if our Academic Plan should change? Should we, for example, abandon the Academic Plan�s goal of making internationalization and inclusion a �signature� experience for our undergraduates?
Should we jettison the notion of having significantly larger numbers of SU students study abroad? Should we rethink our efforts to infuse international issues and theory throughout the curriculum? Should we back away from the goal of linking theory to practice with involvement in the community?
I strongly believe that the answer is "no."
If there ever was a time to understand the perspectives of other cultures and people-to understand divergent political and religious philosophies-now is the time.
If there was ever a time to understand the importance of the diversity of human experience and its potential to help mitigate difference and conflict, now is the time.
And while we will always be cognizant of student safety, we should not seek refuge in the safe haven of older ideas.
It is even more important that our students pursue and focus on a truth that comes from confronting knowledge and difference in a global world.
We can all take great pride in the way our University responded in the wake of the events of September 11th.
We came together to support each other, to engage in reasoned and passionate debate, and to enhance our own climate for scholarly discourse, as we remained resolute in our desire to stay the course.
We have not wavered from our vision of a better University, and we have made much progress during this past year. In the end, I am optimistic that the realities of September 11th will move us even more toward an excellence embodied in our Academic Plan. So within this context, I will talk with you about our progress during this first year-making a few observations about the many challenges ahead--while addressing the questions of teaching, research and rising research and multidisciplinary expectations.
Specifically, I will concentrate on the perennial problem of excellence in research and teaching with respect to tenure standards, as we reflect upon the road ahead.
Addressing the Balance of Teaching and Research in the Academic Plan
The Academic Plan is fundamentally about moving the University forward through strategic, multidisciplinary research partnerships to leverage the expertise of our very best faculty and programs. We are just now beginning to see the fruits of our many related efforts. I am happy to report that for this year, externally sponsored research awards are up 25 percent and research expenditures are up 11 percent over last year. Once the almost $16 million NYSTAR award has been logged it will most certainly be a record year with respect to our sponsored research programs.
This is good news, but we cannot let up. Selective investment and partnerships between our centers of excellence only increase our ability to improve our research profile. And we can do more.
Yes, I want to assure you that I have heard the cry emanating from faculty who are resourceful in generating external sponsorship. You have said that we must take a look at our overhead recovery process and budgeting in order to provide greater incentives to engage in more partnerships and multidisciplinary initiatives. To this end, I am committed to working with you on a plan to return some indirect recovery costs to you.
Going forward, I invite you to share with me your best ideas about how to do this. To help you understand the process, let me explain. Right now, the overhead recovery is built directly into the University budget. The money is used to fund set-up for new and continuing faculty and to fund requests for new equipment and other types of research assistance. If we alter the formula, at least in the short run, because we want to return overhead in the same fashion to our units, we will have to replace in the budget all the indirect costs we disperse. Or, we will cut the budget in some way, or put units at risk. Right now, if we can agree on a first baseline, I promise to return to all units 50 percent of our increases in overhead above that baseline.
But we want to do more. How shall we take the �hits� to get the �gains� later? Let me hear your suggestions!
In the end, our investment priorities must remain focused and highly selective. This does not mean, however, that we can afford to neglect the improvement of our student-centered foundation.
Of all the questions I routinely receive about the Academic Plan, the one I am most frequently asked is: �Do our selective investments in multidisciplinary research partnerships mean that we are de-emphasizing the student-centered University and returning to a time when faculty research was much more important than student learning, faculty teaching, or improving the intellectual environment for our students?�
The answer-and I want everyone to hear me clearly-is an emphatic �no!�
I want both! This, of course, is easy to say. But what do I mean? How can we meaningfully go beyond the rhetoric to make both our teaching and research better?
The first step is to move beyond mere statements of �balance� between research and teaching, to institutionalize values that reward great teaching into the tenure process.
We may give lip service to this, but quite frankly our actions are pretty empty.
I have now seen enough Syracuse tenure dossiers to be certain that, as a student-centered research university, we do not consider teaching strongly enough in the tenure process. We need to reward teaching excellence and be certain that each and every faculty member who is promoted is at least a good teacher.
How might this work? First, where appropriate, and depending upon the scholarly or artistic standards of the school or college, a minimum traditional standard of strength in teaching research and service are absolutely necessary. So far, so good. But here is the key-candidates should be good in all three and among the highest levels of excellence in at least one category. Yes, I want excellence in something!
Let�s strive for, and then reward, teaching excellence. Yes, we recognize excellent pedagogy with our prestigious Meredith award. At my urging, we have expanded the Meredith award to recognize up-and-coming junior faculty. But we can do more institutionally.
Let us remember that there is a scholarship of teaching that can serve as an important tool for evaluation. We should count scholarship that improves teaching. We should evaluate textbooks and syllabi, we should assess the impact of advising, and we should seek external evaluation of teaching excellence. Currently, I seldom see these criteria as part of our standards.
Let�s not be afraid to put someone forward for tenure on the basis of their teaching excellence. We must encourage schools and colleges who have candidates who should be tenured on the basis of outstanding teaching to put candidates forward without reservation or hesitation. I recommend you look at the tenure standards at Newhouse in this regard.
In disciplines where the balance has traditionally favored research, I would like to see more accountability in the evaluation and assessment of teaching effectiveness-both pre- and post-tenure. I would like to see more accountability for the quality of teaching in lower division courses, because in some places I fail to see the accountability.
The question remains, however, �How do we begin to adequately recognize and evaluate teaching excellence in our tenure decisions?� Several changes would help our efforts.
First, we must allow people to �go up� for tenure on the basis of teaching, and then evaluate the case externally, just like we do research.
Second, we should utilize teaching portfolios. I frequently see summaries of student evaluations with no sense of how specific learning objectives have been achieved; with no sense of how current research has been integrated into the course; and with no sense of how an individual has overcome specific challenges to improve their teaching. Portfolios would expand on our effort to integrate our student-centered tradition with our research driven excellence.
Third, tenure dossiers should include the examination and inclusion of the full range of endeavors as they pertain to teaching and University life. This might include, for example, articles on the scholarship of teaching, innovative course development, syllabus review or engagement in the facilitation of learning communities.
Fourth, we need to methodically develop a system of continuous improvement of tenured faculty on their teaching and learning effectiveness.
Finally, we need to act now to make the institution more flexible in bringing in expert practitioners to teach our students. As many of you may know, I have worked with the Faculty Senate�s Academic Affairs committee to draft a proposal to establish the rank of Professor of Practice (POP) at SU. This will enable us to make some high quality appointments that are responsive to the needs of our students and the challenges of our time.
As I said last year in unveiling of the Academic Plan, the scholarship of pedagogy has taught us that learning is enhanced when theory is applied to practice. Students are excited to learn from people in various professions who have accomplished work of distinction. Distinguished practitioners who become part of a university community can, by their presence on campus, inform scholars, teach students and connect us to various publics through their writing, lectures, and professional networks.
The new rank of Professor of Practice will provide schools and colleges desired flexibility to pursue expert practitioners, without detracting from current professorial ranks or compromising our cherished values of academic freedom.
Now I know there are some concerns out there, but I encourage you to read the proposal on the Web. These would be non-tenured positions financed by one-time only funds so that the numbers in our tenured ranks are not depleted. I have in mind persons whose accomplishments in the world of work are equivalent to that of someone in academic life whom we would eagerly recruit for a full professorship at SU.
I envision that each school or college can decide how to implement this proposal and will specify how a POP is to be accorded the right to a voice in governance and procedures.
I also envision a University-wide cap on the percentage of faculty in any school or college that can be appointed as POPs. This maximum would ensure that regular tenure ranks will be neither depleted nor weakened, nor will it be used inappropriately for less distinguished individuals.
Progress on the Academic Plan
Proposals like these are consistent with what we have started to implement over the past year in the three main areas of the Academic Plan. We have posted on the Web an overview of our progress to date on all of the individual initiatives, but let me take a moment and highlight just a few things to give each of you a sense of our success to date and the challenges that remain.
Faculty Success
Thinking about other initiatives that secure our foundation, we remain focused on the need to increase the number of named and endowed professorships over the next five years. In anticipation of initiating a new fundraising drive, I have asked each dean to formulate a clear plan for raising the number of endowed professorships and chairs in their respective departments. The key thing here will be to build upon both donor interest and institutional strength to leverage our strategic investments, thereby attracting more world-class scholars who are the absolute best in their field.
On the issue of extending the University�s fair wage policy to part-time faculty, I am please to report that we have been able to increase the pay for the lowest pay groups and are on track to take more actions over the next several years.
Student Success
We have been very diligent in our efforts to ensure greater student success by maintaining quality in student admissions. We have increased our financial aid merit awards for 2002-03 to increase our ability to compete for the very best students. And consistent with the need to provide a more challenging academic environment and to see our students earn more international awards, I was pleased to see that for the first time in 16 years, a Syracuse University student, Grace Yu, was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford.
This is fantastic for Grace and for The College of Arts and Sciences, and it shows that our concerted efforts to identify, attract and mentor the very best undergraduates will pay off if we are committed to connecting these students with faculty mentors and the highest quality academic experiences.
I think we have also made great, great strides in expanding the opportunities for intellectual discourse and community through our enormously successful University Lectures series. Enthusiasm for the lecture series has continuously grown since the first speaker, former Sen. George Mitchell, spoke on campus last fall, and has produced standing-room-only crowds. Simply put, they have been a wonderful series of talks-authors Salman Rushdie and David McCullough, media mogul Barry Diller, cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, Essence Magazine editor Susan Taylor, journalist Juan Williams, and many, many others. Many faculty have told me that they cannot recall a more enriching and stimulating environment for their students! We will keep up the good work here, as we attempt to let people know that this is a place where brilliant and exciting people come to speak and interact with our students.
Yes, we are making progress. But we still haven�t done enough to step up our expectations of undergraduates to challenge them in all the ways I know we are capable.
Concerning our goal to increase the student retention rate, I remain quite concerned about the loss of some of our most academically capable students, because we don�t challenge them enough or because they are too often closed out of areas of study that they want to explore. We continue to find ways to address these questions but ultimately we are going to have to selectively free up resources to expand the availability of our best programs to the most talented students.
I also believe that we haven�t done enough to address some of our unique issues regarding student satisfaction with lower division math and science, advising and writing. Not that there hasn�t been leadership on a number of fronts from The College of Arts and Sciences on these matters-The Writing Program, for example, has undergone extensive changes to raise standards for all students. The curriculum has become more intellectually rigorous, but we must remain serious about addressing questions of student satisfaction while continuously improving the quality of academic life for our undergraduates.
Graduate Education
On the graduate front, our efforts to focus our graduate programs at Syracuse are improving. I have had many discussions with individual deans and department chairs to bring a tighter focus and higher standards to several of our graduate programs, all while keeping the promise that I made last year to strategically increase graduate stipends in those Ph.D. programs which have the best potential for national excellence.
Even more impressively, we have essentially rebuilt graduate admissions from the ground up, leading to economies of scale that have resulted in much more reliable processing of graduate applications, financial awards, student records, and accurate admissions information at the department level.
In fact, as of today, compared to the end of the last year�s recruitment season for spring and summer terms-if we did not receive another application this year-we would be 15 percent ahead of last year in applications to our graduate programs. This is good news. And I am confident that our graduate enrollment will move in a positive direction for the foreseeable future.
Diversity
Concerning our efforts to improve diversity on campus, I am pleased to report that we have. It has been a �banner year� in terms of faculty of color recruitment to SU. Over the past year, we have hired some of the top candidates from several of the most prestigious graduate programs in the country-and we have done this in schools and colleges where we have traditionally come up short. This shows me what we can do when faculty work together to diversify their ranks from within with leadership from above. And I think we are beginning to see a shift in our expectations around these issue where we are more confident of our abilities to attract the very best faculty of color out there. Let�s come together to keep the momentum on this one. And let�s not forget that working to make this a welcoming climate for persons of color goes hand-in-hand.
This year we devoted the resources of the Vision Fund to projects that contributed to the diversification of the curriculum. We funded nine innovative faculty projects designed in one way or another to enhance our students� experiences with difference and diversity on campus. It was a nice beginning, but overall I was not pleased with the types of proposals we received. I would like you to take on bigger issues. To this end, I look forward to announcing at some later date a more competitive, but larger set of incentives for departments, schools and colleges, to work on the critical issue of diversity and internationalization.
We are doing well but there is always room for improvement. And I would be remiss if I didn�t extend my annual challenge on diversity. Each year you hear a challenge from me on the issue of diversity, because I feel deeply that we must continue to make progress, even if we experience setbacks.
To this end, I believe the time has come for us to think carefully about how we might better welcome faculty and students with physical disabilities as full scholarly colleagues to our University.
SPIRES
Finally, we come to the area where most of our Academic Plan resources will be committed.
As most of you know, over this past year, faculty leadership committees have been meeting to map out our strategic priorities with respect to key areas for future research investment. These Strategic Partnerships for Innovation in Research and Education-or SPIRES as they have come to be known-represent some of our most innovative thinking impacting our overall research profile and international reputation.
The SPIRES are strategic. While they are broad and multidisciplinary, they have not included participation from every unit or department on campus. This is a function of limited resources and strategic priorities, though in doing so I have been mistakenly accused of neglecting whole areas of the University and, more painfully, of not valuing the contributions of my faculty colleagues in places like the sciences and humanities. This, I think, is a misperception. First of all, we have continued to make selective investments in our strongest humanities and sciences as we have worked hard to defend raids against us. Here, philosophy and physics come to mind. On the sciences, please also rest assured that I know that the biology facilities are in desperate need of attention. Behind the scenes I have placed a no-holds barred priority on making sure the new building will happen.
Since the SPIRE committees are still doing their important work, it would be premature to fully report on their findings. However, there are some exciting developments emerging in our discussions that I would like to share.
In some of the SPIRE areas, there is a great deal of thinking around the creation of �institute space� for both multidisciplinary exploration and convergence, through partnerships between schools and colleges. In other areas, existing centers and programs provide an adequate infrastructure to bring faculty together for collaboration, but greater leadership and consensus on what to build is needed.
In either model, we must:
- nurture our current resources and faculty, with prudent hiring and selective investment
- increase cooperation between faculty across schools and colleges
- encourage our faculty to focus on external sponsorship to sustain efforts once the initial investments have started to succeed
- change our tenure and promotion standards so that faculty engaging in this kind of research are not penalized
In the Collaborative Design SPIRE, the committee has been primarily focused on outlining the structure and role of a new Design Center. The idea here would be to investigate the creation of a nationally recognized center of design leadership that marshals our resources in art, architecture, engineering and other units.
Faculty leaders on the Design SPIRE have contacted consultants to work on this vision and have begun a number of off-campus visits to seek possible collaborators.
In the Citizenship and Social Transformation SPIRE, there is a clear sense that SU is well positioned to become a national leader in the scholarship of citizenship, governance and civic engagement. Throughout our current centers and institutes, we have faculty whose scholarship addresses issues of building an inclusive society, of political mobilization in a global world, and the impact of social policy.
In probably our most advanced SPIRE, Environmental Systems and Quality, faculty have identified four areas for future collaborative research: Hydrology and biodiversity loss, climate change, the quality and supply of fresh water and urban and built environment sustainability. Now they will tackle how to bring us worldwide excellence in these areas of demonstrated capability.
In the Information Management and Technology SPIRE there is recognition of strength in information exploitation, systems assurance, digital literacy, organizational design and performance, and the ways information facilitates social transformation.
I am pleased to report that this committee has worked very hard to develop a proposal for an Information Management and Technology Institute, and they have suggested a process to facilitate further research collaboration among the faculty. This would involve an academic yearlong symposium to examine specific proposals and partnerships for investment in the key areas of strength. I also like the metaphor they have developed to recognize success. It's the metaphor of the portfolio, with the University as the holding company managing the portfolio of academic excellence.
All of these are good starts, and I am pleased with the dedication, energy and direction of the committees.
Conclusion on the Academic Plan
We are making good progress. Despite the uncertainty of the past six months, our University is still well positioned to move forward with the Academic Plan. We have begun to position ourselves for international leadership through our strategic investments. We have made significant progress shoring up our student-centered foundation, while identifying new areas for improvement. We remain clear in our vision for the future, and resolute in our desire for greatness.
University Professor Awards
I have saved the best for last! Fundamentally, the Academic Plan challenges us to consider ways in which our research can cross borders and disciplines, to achieve world-class recognition for the excellent work we do at Syracuse. The two individuals we recognize here are, quite simply, exemplars of these practices. We humbly add to their distinction by designating them as University Professors.
Robert Birge
Listed among the 50 "Cyber Elite" by Time Digital, Robert Birge is a pioneer in molecular electronics. He works at the interface of chemistry, biology and physics, advancing our understanding of the fundamental science involved in adapting proteins for use in computer memories. He is author of more than 170 scholarly publications, editor of the book Molecular and Biomolecular Electronics, and co-editor of three other research volumes. His work has been continuously funded since 1975 by NIH, NSF and other public agencies, as well as private sector companies. He holds four major patents. And if that is not enough, two of his experiments flew on NASA Space Shuttles! Wow! Thank you, Robert.
Charles T. Driscoll Jr.
Charles T. Driscoll Jr. is nationally recognized for his leadership in pioneering engineering studies of "whole" environments, such as entire watersheds and larger regions. The hallmark of Driscoll's work is his use of integrated, multidisciplinary approaches to understand how whole environments respond to multiple disturbances, including pollution from various sources, changes in land use, and climatic events. He has published two books and more than 200 peer-reviewed papers. He has contributed leadership to more than 60 sponsored research projects, including NSF�s Long-Term Ecological Research Site Project at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest (HBEF), one of the world�s best-known and long-running environmental research sites. Thank you, Charley.
The University Professor designation is one of the highest honors we can bestow on our colleagues. The careers of these most distinguished scholars signal to all that excellence in research is frequently defined by questions that are invariably complex and multifarious; cutting across boundaries between fields of study and between areas of endeavor.
In conclusion
We have made great strides. There remains much to do.