Like the rest of our community, I have read the Fisher report with great interest. I was at first very concerned about what the tenor of their report would be given the rather substantial ideological trail Mr. Fisher in particular has left. And, to be frank with you, my concerns were not wholly without basis. The group's comments on the graying of the faculty, on the lack of community respect for the Academic Senate, and on the relation of tenure to academic freedom are all simply wrong, from my perspective. Although I would add that as a modestly graying forty-seven-year-old professor of English, I wouldn't discourage you from helping to make attractive retirement packages available in, oh say, eight years.
But my real purpose in speaking to you is to say that I found the Fisher Report stunningly right in its description of the history of this institution and its current muddled sense of its own identity. I also find myself in emphatic agreement with its prescription for the future: ISU as Public Ivy. Illinois State has never really found a way (although we've been looking for thirty years) of moving beyond its past as a teachers college. This has been the fault of administration and faculty, both of which have been at critical moments inert.
What I like in the Fisher Report is its vision of a middle path in which Illinois State can continue to be the largest teacher preparation university in the state but in the context of a high caliber liberal arts undergraduate curriculum (the first piece of which we've already put in place with our new general education program) complemented by select graduate programs of very high quality which are allowed to function more like graduate programs in research institutions.
By lowering enrollments, raising ACT scores, enhancing faculty salaries, continuing to re-shape curriculum, finding ways to reward excellence (which this university does very poorly), and discovering new commitment to, and purpose and resources for select graduate programs we can, I believe, in a fairly short period of time--say, five years--remake the image of this university so that our frequent appeals to excellence have real substance to them.
What I would propose is a joint administration/faculty Action Committee to put forward a general plan to this Board by the fall of 1999 moving us forward on all of these fronts. With a clear and innovative package of programs to present to the IBHE and the legislature, I think we can hope to gain considerable support for our ambitions.
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