Quality Matters

October 10, 2005
State of the Campus Address
Delivered by President David C. Hardesty Jr.

First, let me thank you all for coming today, and for all you do, individually and collectively, for West Virginia University.

This past July 1 marked the tenth anniversary of the day I became president of West Virginia University. It has been an honor for Susan and me to serve you and our alma mater. Like other milestone occasions, this particular anniversary was a natural time for us to reflect on the past decade at WVU.

Our memories include many great days for the University, such as the announcement of our partnership with the FBI creating the forensic and biometric initiatives.

We also vividly recall some of the more challenging times, like the day 7,000 people (mostly students) stood in Woodburn Circle to contemplate and memorialize the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. I had the responsibility of finding the words to give the tragedy some perspective for our students.

I remember other special moments, like the first time I saw a student whom I had helped to recruit out of a small West Virginia high school walk across the stage to receive a medical degree.

These and similar experiences constantly remind me of how profoundly West Virginia University transforms the lives of students, just as it has transformed many of our own lives. We have collectively traveled a long way over the past ten years.

The enrollment growth, successful capital campaign, and increased sponsored project funding have enabled us to weather a turbulent economy and still manage to make investments in our human resources, technology, programming, libraries, and infrastructure.

Perhaps it is worth all of us looking back, if just for a moment. In 1995, a number of challenges were converging on us. At the time it seemed quite daunting.

First, globalization was increasingly evident, thanks to a relatively peaceful world, rapid advances in communications, and the inevitable impact of market forces at work in the global economy.

Together we correctly saw what lay ahead-ever-closer connections among the peoples of every nation, international competition for business and ideas, the rise of the American military, and the growth of new economies that would challenge our own, especially in China and Europe.

We saw concomitant changes in the local economy, especially what was perceived at the time as the decline of the basic building blocks of the Appalachian economy-coal, steel, glass, and other key industries.

Second, the growing importance of information technology was correctly seen as a trend that would change the world, connecting us instantly with anyone, anywhere, and making it possible to search for even the most obscure data by calling up the new “search engines” of the Internet.

The “Y2K” problem loomed large. We knew that investment would be required, and that in the future, job descriptions would take for granted familiarity with technology unknown to our parents and even many of us at that time. While the investments were important, they were difficult given the many demands on our resources.

Third, we heard new demands for accountability from our parents and students, the public, and state and federal government agencies.

All were asking more and more from colleges and universities. At the same time, public funds were being demanded by prison systems, the health-care industry, and other government and private sectors, so resources were limited.

We faced the proverbial, and perhaps perpetual challenge, of “doing more with less.” In West Virginia, the best expression of this movement was the passage of Senate Bill 547 in the spring of 1995. This bill called for increased salaries but only provided partial funding for them.

We were asked to serve more people through our teaching, research, and service programs while we were also reallocating operating funds toward meeting the salary targets.

Because of our land-grant service mission, we were urged to get more involved in Southern West Virginia and the Eastern Panhandle, and to focus on economic development in new and more intensive ways than ever before.

Similarly, parents-the baby boomers-who had been raised in a consumer-driven era were asking for ever-more accountability in the quality of academic programs, in the responsiveness and convenience of services, and in the amenities of campus. As tuition was raised markedly at public, and especially private, universities, these demands for accountability were amplified.

Fourth, we could see new competitors on the horizon-for both students and research grants. We saw the lightning speed with which these competitors-from private schools and laboratories to increasingly aggressive public universities in other states-would emerge, and we witnessed their ability to react and adapt as the competitive environment changed.

Entrepreneurs entered the not-for-profit world and went after the same projects as our principal investigators and Extension agents, but without the heavy regulation imposed upon public universities. This made it vital to cut out any self-imposed red tape and seek changes that would enable more effective procedures.

Competition for students, by other campuses and new kinds of online education providers, posed a heightened concern because of the then-forecast decline in West Virginia high school enrollments.

We recognized that the University would have to change to meet the challenges of the new competitors, and that the changes foreseen were costly and significant.

Fifth, we anticipated changes in the way we were going to go about our business in the years to come. Most of our constituencies off campus-industry, alumni, donors, and partners-expected higher education to move toward a more “business-like” model, because of their successful experience with the total quality movement, reengineering, and cost reduction measures in their worlds of work.

We sensed an impatience with higher education and began to see changes in the support systems at many institutions. The way hospitals, physicians, and other instructional health-care providers were reimbursed for their work changed dramatically.

Tenure was called into question, our governance structure was challenged, the absence of a merit system for compensation was debated, paper-driven processes were criticized, complaints about student housing, lines, and registration intensified, and other evidence of past practices were not just questioned, but called “unacceptable.” We were asked to develop new programs in what seemed to us an incredibly short time period.

Finally, we saw correctly that the new costs imposed by the drive for global quality and ubiquitous technology on our campuses could not be met by state funds alone.

We knew that all public universities would have to raise more private dollars, find more research and sponsored program support, raise tuition and fees, and charge more for services, all in a very tough and competitive market.

We knew there would have to be a capital campaign led by the WVU Foundation, and that the research establishment on campus would have to step up and dramatically increase revenues.

Globalization, the technology boom, demands for accountability, new competitors, expectations for more efficiency, and other changes, shaped our work here at WVU.

We were not alone. All of higher education has confronted the same challenges over the past decade.

I think most of us saw what was coming, to one degree or another. We also saw that our individual and collective capacity to change would play an ever-increasing role in our lives, if we were going to survive, let alone thrive, in the changed environment of the new millennium.

Looking back, with the clarity that ten years of hindsight affords us, what is amazing is not just that the predicted trends developed, which they most assuredly did, but that they developed so quickly and with a much larger impact than most foresaw at the time.

It hasn’t been the direction in which we were headed that surprised us, but the turbulence and speed of the trip.

Fortunately, we were able to meet these challenges head-on, with planning task forces, new programs, new systems, campus mergers, reorganized programs and functions, new personnel, and change after change after change in the way we do everything from registering students to purchasing a book.

It has been a lot of work, not just for Dr. Bob D’Alessandri, Provost Lang, Vice President Gray, and other senior administrators, as well as our regional campus presidents, but for all of you, and for everyone involved in higher education in this country. I thank you each and every one for your personal contributions to our success.

As we have reported to WVU’s Board of Governors, all of our financial indicators are moving in the right direction. WVU has received excellent bond ratings and clean audit opinions. Notably, for the past two years there has been no management letter, a rarity in the audit world.

The full reaccreditation of WVU this year evidences that we remained academically strong over the past ten years, and also addressed every area of concern from the 1994 report of the site visit team.

Within West Virginia, WVU has been the only institution to receive the highest rating of “excellent” from the Higher Education Policy Commission’s review of the Compact reports each college and university must submit. In fact, in the context of West Virginia, I would say that we have clearly excelled in all categories of measurement.

I also think it is fair to say that we have begun to emerge as a very significant national university, recruiting quality students from all 50 states and 90 countries.

We are demonstrating innovation in several new academic programs, advancing the quality of our student body, improving our athletic programs without a drain on the academic budget, creating more endowed chairs and professorships, and launching new research and economic development initiatives.

Noteworthy among our collective achievements are:

  • the attraction of $54 million dollars to the Health Sciences Center research agenda in less than 12 months;
  • the fantastic success of the biometric and forensic programs;
  • the transition to being a university much more attentive to the needs of our students and parents;
  • the successful completion of a capital campaign;
  • the doubling by Dr. Cote and the men and women of Extension of the number of clients they reach, which now exceeds more than 250,000 annually;
  • our leadership in making West Virginia the first state with a Department of Energy Industries of the Future program;
  • WVU’s partnerships overseas, particularly in the College of Creative Arts and the College of Business and Economics (where we welcome Dean Sears to campus);
  • the steady number of Truman and Goldwater scholars from WVU’s student body;
  • the revision of the General Education Curriculum by the Faculty Senate;
  • the rededication to student life and academic enrichment programming;
  • improvements in our libraries, including membership in PALCI;
  • our basketball team’s emergence as a student-centered, team-oriented program of class that captured admiration across the country;
  • our standing as a national center for excellence in both biometrics and neurosciences; and
  • the very recent launch of a new Web-based recruiting portal that yielded nearly 1,000 users in just the first week, half of whom have already started the online application process as a result.

In addition, there are dozens, if not hundreds of other achievements by faculty, staff, students, and administrators.

And, we have done what we have done in the face of two unexpected and massive changes not foreseen in 1995: the tragedy and aftermath of 9/11 and the many ways it has impacted higher education, and, second, the most difficult change in the national financial markets since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

It is a tribute to our alumni and other supporters, as well our state and our university and all of its affiliates, that we raised the money we have raised privately, and that we have maintained stability in a time of such financial turbulence. We are truly grateful for the show of confidence and must remain inspired by their voluntary investment in the work that we do.

We are also grateful to our Congressional delegation, particularly Senator Byrd and Senator Rockefeller as well as Congressman Mollohan, for all they have done to provide much-needed seed money for some of our most significant initiatives.

Now looking over the horizon, as we must do, we are facing yet another decade of change-ever-accelerating change of profound proportions.

First, globalization of the economy will continue, changing the relative position of nations. China and India will continue their rapid growth in economic importance. They will also continue to rapidly excel in higher education and research.

Certainly our businesses, but also our universities, will have to adapt more quickly, seek to be more competitive, lower costs, provide better products and services, and above all, be more innovative in a world that will expect lower costs and crave innovation.

In addition, the energy markets will change and grow significantly, and faster than expected. These changes will alter West Virginia’s relative position in the United States and demand that our attention be given to every aspect of teaching, research, and service related to the production and distribution of energy and the attendant environmental concerns associated with its consumption.

In this climate, we must make sure that as a land-grant institution we are part of a culture of innovation. We must ask ourselves hard questions that challenge the status quo and truly assess whether we can do more in order to adapt to world changes.

WVU Tech’s new President Charles Bayless has already identified energy as a key niche for innovation at Tech. According to President Bayless:

The United States is about 4.6% of the world’s population, yet it uses 29.6% of the world’s energy. As the rest of the world makes the transition from a labor economy to an energy economy, it will put increasing pressure on prices and make finding domestic energy even more important. The United States has less than 5% of the world’s gas and oil reserves but about 25% of the world’s coal reserves. Research into technologies such as coal liquefaction and gasification will allow WVU to be at the forefront in finding new, clean ways to mine and use coal to satisfy our nation’s energy needs and create jobs in West Virginia.

Second, global security, or should I say, global insecurity, will play an ever-increasing role in the life of our nation, and hence the life of our universities.

The National Security Council’s Global Assessment asserts:

At no time since the formation of the Western alliance in 1949 have the shape and nature of international alignments been in such a state of flux.

As an example of how higher education, and particularly WVU, can adapt as the world changes with regard to international relations, I am pleased to announce a new program associated with the Department of Political Science in the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences-which has just welcomed its new dean, Dr. Mary Ellen Mazey, back to her alma mater.

WVU will now offer an Intelligence and National Security Program in the International Studies Program. This new program will be led by WVU professor and nationally established international studies scholar Joe Hagan. The curriculum will draw upon WVU faculty with expertise in foreign policy analysis, as well as experts from the intelligence community.

Such initiatives reflect the way in which higher education is expected to process changes in the external environment. WVU is already well positioned in many areas related to renewed national security interests.

No doubt the national and international reputation of WVU’s research and educational programs in these areas led to an invitation for me to join presidents and chancellors of some of the nation’s more prestigious universities on the recently created National Security Higher Education Advisory Board under FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III.

I am honored to represent WVU’s work and am already calling upon our campus experts to advise me. I also hope to learn about new opportunities and trends that will help us maintain a leadership role in this multidisciplinary field.

Third, our understanding of the mind, the body, and biomedical sciences will grow quickly and more rapidly than we can conceive, putting more pressure on us to provide an ever-increasing standard of health care.

We will have to respond again with the same professional attitudes toward care and excellence with which we have responded to the challenges of the past decade. At the same time, increased competition for health-care and education funding will be strong.

The costs imposed on the nation by the changing nature of our military role in the world, as well as the need to respond to the recent natural disasters, may limit available funding.

As I was reminded at a health sciences retreat just last month, in this environment, the quality of our leadership and the quality of the services provided by health sciences will matter more than ever before.

Fourth, our higher-quality student body will have higher expectations of our programs and services, and our efforts to retain and recruit high-quality faculty will result in higher expectations for facilities, technology, salaries, and start-up packages.

As a result, more will be required of administrators and staff as we continually strive to reduce bureaucracy and make investments in everything from technology to higher salaries.

Fifth, to meet the financial challenges of the next decade we will need to grow our campuses in almost every way, which will challenge the communities in which we are located, as well as those of us who work on the campuses.

Our experience over the past decade affirmed the belief that quality is prerequisite to our ability to grow. WVU’s continued growth will be challenged by the same variables that challenged us over the past decade: shifting demographics, the competitive enrollment market, and resource capacity.

The enrollment growth of the past ten years enabled our investments in infrastructure, salaries, and programs. We must manage the growth already achieved and continue toward the goal of 28,500 students on the Morgantown campus, 30,000 for the main campus that now includes Potomac State under newly appointed Provost Kerry O’Dell, and 36,000 for all WVU campuses.

Finally, as leaders of the institution we must together manage the competing demands from the many different constituencies of our university.

Ten years ago I attended the Harvard School for New Presidents, which President Marie Gnage of the Parkersburg campus just attended. I asked the presiding dean: “Who owns the University?” He told me that mine was a question that should not be asked, let alone answered! His point was not to avoid the question, but to underscore how complicated the interests of a university are. Consider some of those with vested interests:

  • 34,000 students at WVU statewide
  • The more than 15,000 people who find their employment with WVU and its affiliates (5,800 on Morgantown’s main campus alone)
  • 165,000 living alumni
  • Donors-50,000 to the capital campaign
  • Governor Manchin and state leaders, elected and appointed
  • Federal leaders, elected and appointed
  • Parents
  • West Virginia taxpayers (from whom 25% of our budget derives)
  • Patients-approximately 650,000 a year
  • Bond holders who have loaned us hundreds of millions of dollars
  • The academic program accreditation boards
  • Federal grant makers
  • Funding agencies
  • Research partners
  • Regional campus constituencies
  • The 257,000 clients of WVU Extension
  • Fans of our sports teams
  • And the list could go on

Every day, you and I, and ultimately our Board of Governors, must balance these many differing interests and do what is right for the University. This makes the leadership of our university today an enormously complex task for all those involved, not just its president.

With regard to salaries and benefits here at WVU, my message today is really quite straightforward. As I have said on many occasions, our goal is to take our classified staff to aspirational salary levels set forth in the statutory schedule and to offer our faculty and administrators very competitive compensation by national standards.

To attract the resources we need-both to build a better WVU and to reach our aspirational levels of compensation and fringes for everyone who works here-we must continue to adapt to changes in society that are shaping our environment.

We must offer the marketplace, whether it is here in West Virginia or nationally, a higher and higher quality in all our services and programs.

We must find ways to be more efficient at the same time. Toward that end, we appreciate the passage of Senate Bill 603 and thank Governor Manchin and the West Virginia Legislature for their vision. We are working to implement the allowable changes in our business practices within the year timeline of the legislation.

We are different than other institutions in our state. That is why we are frequently called the “flagship” higher education institution.

Our jobs are funded, not just by state appropriations, but also by the sale of auxiliary services, donations, research dollars, and tuition revenues. In fact, many positions at WVU are totally funded from nonstate appropriations.

We need to keep this in mind. Since we are committed to providing increases in salary and fringe benefits to all employees, this makes the financial challenge at WVU greater than for other state institutions.

Make no mistake about it, the salary increases we have given, nine out of the last ten years, were made possible by our collective efforts to improve our quality and our size at the same time.

We have improved our reputation among our constituencies, and we have grown our revenues as a result. This has enabled us to do what we have done without taking undue risks that could result in layoffs or jeopardize the quality of our offerings.

We have not put the future of the University at risk. And we will not. This is a good place to work, and if we work together, we will keep it that way.

Because the perceived quality of our institution is so important to the future, our immediate goal is to not only adapt to the challenges that lie ahead, but also to advance our national reputation.

Our newly revised vision statement asserts that we will not only be student-centered and meet society’s changing needs, but that we will be an institution with a national reputation for excellence while doing so.

We aspire to be nationally recognized for excellence in teaching, scholarship, discovery, performance, service, health care, athletics, and every other area of our collective endeavors. We will follow WVU’s 2010 Plan, recently approved unanimously by the Board of Governors.

I want to publicly thank Provost Jerry Lang and Professor Larry Hornak for their leadership. I also want to thank everyone who served on the committees, all those who provided input, and the WVU Board of Governors for its guidance.

The 2010 Plan has five primary goals:

  1. Attract and graduate high-quality students
  2. Recruit and retain high-quality faculty committed to the land-grant mission
  3. Enhance the educational environment for student learning
  4. Promote the discovery and exchange of new knowledge and ideas
  5. Improve West Virginia’s health, economy, and quality of life

We are all fully aware that this will take funding.

It will not be easy, but consider the fact that beginning in 1995, we reallocated $38 million from operating dollars to salaries and we shouldered millions more in base appropriation cuts and insurance cost increases.

Yet, we grew enrollment (by 5,000 full-time students) and expanded sponsored projects and research (by 135%), which grew our resource base and enabled us to invest in technology, academic programs, new initiatives, libraries, University-wide salary and fringe benefit increases, and a renewal of the campus infrastructure.

I would also make special note that despite the significant budget challenges of the past ten years, and especially the past five, USA Today recently noted that WVU’s in-state tuition rate is the 10 th best among national flagship universities and 14 th best for out-of-state tuition rates. WVU’s tuition increases also ranked among the lowest in the country. Moreover, WVU has recently again been named to the list of America’s Best 100 Buys in higher education.

What is important about this particular list is that only schools with above-average student academic credentials can be considered and then the cost of attendance is valued.

These two recent reports affirm that WVU has been an excellent steward of resources and maintained its land-grant responsibility to the people of West Virginia: offering a top-flight education while keeping costs down.

Upon this foundation of success and stewardship, we are well-positioned to pursue the 2010 Plan goals. The implementation team has already started meeting because this 2010 Plan is only as good as the follow-through.

We will have measures of our progress, and we will report those to the Board and to the campus community. If you have suggestions for metrics, I urge you to share those ideas with Provost Lang or Professor Hornak.

We simply must keep the momentum going and turn the plan into a reality that we can be proud of in five years. I have every confidence that we will.

It is fair to say that our state’s leaders, and increasingly our national colleagues, are recognizing our ability at WVU to navigate the rough seas of the environment in which we must sail.

In the end, perhaps what matters is not so much the destinations we have reached or that we will reach in our travels, but the purpose for which we travel-the noble purpose of making this world a better place. It is our mission, the purpose of our journey, which gives us all a sense pride and satisfaction.

We are all privileged to be at West Virginia University as it crosses into the new millennium, at a time that is as challenging, and at the same time as satisfying, as any other in our 138-year history.

It is a joy for me to travel with you, and as the designated leader of such a distinguished group of leaders, I thank you for your service to our university, our state, and our nation. And I challenge you to navigate as well during the next decade, as you have in the last.

As much as things change, (and change has been a theme of this particular address), there are some things that do not. Universities have always been and continue to be the beacon of hope and understanding in our world.

What happens in our classrooms and laboratories, as we educate tomorrow’s leaders, carries on a long and rich tradition of education in this country. What happens in our hospitals and clinics literally saves lives and provides hope for our children’s generation. What happens in the communities of West Virginia, when we promote solutions and develop the economy, carries on the land-grant tradition that sired this institution. These traditions of education, research and service are enduring.

In the 1920s, West Virginia’s Education Secretary said an institution such as WVU “must seek to conserve all of the worth-while knowledge that man has discovered, and [yet] endeavor to enlarge the bounds of understanding. Indeed the university turns the searchlight of the past upon the future to give glimpses of what is to be.”

Indeed, this notion is still the roots of our mission, no matter how much the world changes.

I’d like to end with a video that we produced to show at a large alumni gathering this past summer [a 13-minute video was played]. It reflects on the past ten years and, I hope, reminds us all of why we are fortunate to work here at WVU—a special place in the hearts of so many.