I want to thank the Board of Trustees for providing me with the opportunity to speak this morning. Like all members of the Illinois State community, I anxiously awaited the arrival of the Fisher report and its audit findings.
In reviewing the Fisher report, as is the case when assessing any external review, we need to look for overarching themes that echo and validate campus discussions. In addition, the Board, President, and all campus constituencies must come together as a community to work on those specific, detailed recommendations that will make us a more excellent institution. We must reject those that are invalid, factually incorrect, or inappropriate to our aspirations
The most significant overarching theme found in the report, in my opinion, is the suggestion that we must continue to define an agenda for excellence at Illinois University. While the Fisher committee refers to this as the "public ivy" concept, we must define more clearly what we believe is our unique niche and what Illinois State's specific agenda for excellence will be. We need to bring all of our outstanding campus initiatives together as a coherent whole.
We have talked about carving out a niche and striving for excellence for the past two decades and have made significant inroads during that time period. In the past decade we have acted in ways that reflect our desire to focus on an agenda of excellence.
The strategic planning done in the late 1980s led us to establish the goals of providing a premier undergraduate experience and focusing on select graduate programs of excellence.
We are in the midst of innovative General Education reform that is helping us to redefine our undergraduate experience, and we have begun serious discussion of redefining the junior and senior year experiences of our students.
Recently, NCATE visits brought together all members of our teacher education community to assess teacher education at Illinois State.
That said, the Fisher report is correct about our need to define who we are and what we are striving for in order to enhance the reputation and quality of this institution. We must stop generalizing and take even more specific actions; we must articulate our vision and action plan more clearly.
As I said when I interviewed last spring for the position of Provost, and throughout my fall semester campus presentations, this will require administration working with faculty, students, and staff to define what we need to do to make Illinois State a recognized institution of excellence. We must answer the following questions: What should be the profile of our students, faculty, programs, research agenda, and public service agenda? What are the indicators of excellence that we value and how are we going to assess our progress toward them?
What makes Illinois State University unique in the state of Illinois? What is Illinois State University's special niche? How do we make our excellence visible to the state and to the nation?
Students are the key to our agenda for excellence. Although the Fisher report does not focus significantly enough on students, in my opinion, we need as an academic community to identify the profile of students we are going to recruit and define the type of students we are graduating.
Students need committed faculty mentors and Illinois State is recognized for its strong outstanding faculty. While the Fisher report focuses on the graying of our faculty, in ways that as President Strand has pointed out are not appropriate, the real challenges identified in the report are how to improve faculty compensation and rewards so as to improve recruitment, morale, and retention. We have started this year with the 3% compensation review but we need to do more.
In addition, how do we make certain that we hire, mentor, and retain the best and most diverse new faculty possible, given the large number of hires in the past few years and the continued hiring we will do in the foreseeable future? The numbers are astounding: we are in the midst of searching for 60 new tenure track faculty this year. What do we want the profile of our new faculty members to be? This, rather than the graying of the faculty, is the key issue facing Illinois State. And how do we continue to build on the progress that we are making in faculty development through, for example, the Center for Advancement of Teaching and our new faculty orientation programs, which should be the envy of other institutions?
The Fisher report is correct in noting that we need to clarify how we evaluate and develop our curricular and research programs. We have been statewide leaders in program review. I believe we must take seriously the charge to evaluate programs and collegiate organizations, but this must be done in relationship to the agenda of excellence we set for Illinois State and our institutional vision.
We must examine honestly our commitments to graduate programs in light of our definition of excellence as well. We must continue to assess how well any new programs are serving us as we move toward the vision we establish (such as we are doing with general education). We must also be careful not to reject our historic niches and strengths, particularly teacher education.
In order to be an institution of academic excellence, the report is correct in noting that we must assess our commitments to technology; we cannot afford to ignore this challenge. Academic Affairs has recognized the need for planning in this arena and the need to ascertain the amount of technology personnel required to support our institution. Prior to the arrival of the Fisher report, the Provost's office had already assigned Professor Jack Chizmar to undertake a planning initiative for technology at Illinois State. One of the charges to Professor Chizmar is to recommend the amount of personnel needed to move this institution forward in its technology agenda.
And as President Strand notes, we must resolve governance issues so that we can focus on developing our agenda of excellence for this institution. We must use the President's and Senate's governance committees to set protocols that shape our governance processes. We must support President Strand as he works with these committee's recommendations. We must rebuild trust between Board, administrators, faculty, and staff by focusing on our vision for the institution and the belief that we are all striving for institutional excellence together.
I know that for the 21 years that I have been at Illinois State University, there has been a strong desire to carve out a niche and establish a clear vision of excellence for this great university. We have made significant progress. As the first public institution of higher education in Illinois and one that has a distinguished history, Illinois State should have a unique place among Illinois institutions of public education. We already have programs of excellence; many, but not all of these, are cited in the Fisher report. What is needed is a coherent, clearly articulated vision of excellence for the future and a specific action plan to get us there. Then we all need to be held accountable in meeting the goals of this plan.
I hope that faculty, staff, administrators, and students will pledge to work together on moving us in this direction and helping us define our agenda of excellence. I have already asked the Deans and Provost staff to begin discussions of defining our niche at our January retreat. Academic Affairs is willing to accept the charge to work with faculty and staff to focus our academic vision and to establish a clearly articulated action plan so that this outstanding University becomes a greater and more recognized institution of higher education in the next century.
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