State of the University Address—Oct. 9, 2006
Delivered by President David C. Hardesty Jr.
Allow me to begin by stating the obvious. This is the twelfth time I have addressed you to offer my assessment of the state of West Virginia University. While we may be together other times in the coming year, this is my last formal opportunity to share my thoughts with you.
During times of transition, we all feel compelled to say all that we are thinking in the little time that we have. As I drafted my remarks, so many thoughts, images, and memories of my lifetime connection with WVU, and aspirations for the WVU community, came to mind.
For some strange reason, a phrase I learned in high school in Latin class came to the fore: habero in animo. I think it means, “I have in my mind.” Suffice it to say that I will not say all I am thinking, and that is good for me and excellent for you.
How could I possibly begin without saying thanks to you and to our other colleagues in the University community for your support and generosity of spirit toward WVU over the past eleven years?
Presidents who serve their undergraduate alma maters are rare, but they each know what a privilege it is to serve the institution that launched them in life. This is especially true in our case, because Susan and I met and married here, our children have been educated here, and we have spent the most productive years of life in service to a place we love. We are, therefore, grateful to the governing boards of the University and the broader University community for giving us the opportunity to serve, and for supporting us during our service.
During this time, you, the members of the University community, have taught us much, offered excellent advice and counsel, and listened when we have asked for your attention. You have worked hard to improve our programs and to bring even greater recognition to WVU.
This you have done by your collective efforts, but also through your individual efforts to be the best that you could be. You have helped to lead us from one place to another, and it has required hard work and passion.
You have shared tough times with Susan and me, making them more bearable. And you have shared in the joys that we experienced as well. I will always have a deep and heartfelt respect for the faculty, staff, and administration of WVU.
My first message is, therefore, very simple: Thank you, for all you have done and will continue to do.
In drafting my remarks, I was forced to reflect on the challenges we have faced together during my tenure as president, and the manner in which WVU has met those challenges. Our time in service together at WVU has included both the “turn of the century,” a marker reached only twice in the history of the University, and a “new millennium,” a marker not reached in the history of American education.
During my tenure, American higher education has truly been at a crossroads. Looking back a decade, it is clear that WVU faced many transition issues:
- State funding cuts required us to increase both tuition and enrollments in order to maintain excellence.
- State and federal funding priorities changed, and health care, prison reform, public works, and economic development efforts began to compete with education for adequate funding.
- We faced new competitors, around the world and within the United States.
- We crossed the infamous Y2K barrier and invested millions of dollars in required new technologies.
- High school enrollments declined dramatically in West Virginia , requiring a new emphasis on recruitment.
- Buildings needed to be replaced or repaired, and infrastructure and new facilities were required.
- Our constituents demanded more and more, sometimes creating competing demands.
- And in the midst of our transition, the events we now collectively call “9-11,” and the resulting economic restructuring, presented us with new demands.
It truly has been a tumultuous “turn of the century” and an auspicious launch of the new millennium.
It is fair to ask: How have we, the “WVU’s turn-of-the-century stewards,” done in terms of piloting this flagship and navigating for our shipmates and others in the fleet over the past several challenging years?
I have no idea how history will judge us-such a judgment requires wisdom and insight only the passage of time will afford. But I believe that we can say we have done the best we could under the circumstances.
- Enrollment across our campuses grew by 25%.
- Research funding grew 100%.
- Extension clients grew 110%.
- Patients served by our hospitals and practice plan grew by 50%.
- Our private foundation assets grew 493%, and our endowment grew 290%.
Together with our sister campuses and health care system hospitals, we have built or launched nearly a billion dollars in new construction, renovations, and infrastructure improvement.
We have achieved national recognition for excellence of leadership, teaching, research, and service in several existing and new fields.
Our faculty, staff, students, and departments have brought home numerous awards, which have in turn lifted the profile of our university.
Our alumni recognition is as strong as it has ever been, which I was reminded of this past week at the inauguration of WVU graduate and four-star General Doc Fogelsong, as the president of Mississippi State.
Whole systems have been reworked and changed, from the way we purchase, to the way we compensate, to the way we govern ourselves.
And as our fans know, we have become an even better sponsor of intercollegiate athletics – it is no accident that today we are considered a premier intercollegiate athletic program.
And so I assert that we, the “turn-of-the-century stewards of WVU,” have accomplished much in which we can take great pride. And you, as well as many of our colleagues, have played an important role in meeting the challenges we confronted.
But as I prepared my remarks for today, an important question, perhaps the most important question, kept recurring in my mind. I know the challenges we have confronted together, and I know what we have accomplished together. But what have we learned together? What are the lessons should pass on to the next generation of professional and volunteer leaders at West Virginia University?
I want to suggest five such lessons to you today:
? First, we have learned that we must achieve the level of excellence necessary to be truly competitive in a global economy.
When I was a student here, waiting for Susan after class at the wall in front of Stewart Hall, I would often hear the phrase, “What does that have to do with the price of eggs in China?” It meant that someone just said something unrelated to the group discussion topic, because nothing here – in Morgantown, in West Virginia – could have anything to do with the price of eggs in China.
If that were ever true, it is no longer true.
Today, the peoples of the world are linked by satellite communications, the Web and related technologies, increasing cultural awareness, shared values, international research agendas, international education programs, energy consumption patterns and consequences, global-reach companies, and more.
In this global village, university degrees must be “markers of global excellence.” Our faculty and students know this.
Even after “9-11,” more students study abroad and travel from other countries to study here than ever before. Our graduates living in Shanghai shed tears when they hear “Country Roads,” because they appreciate the value of the education we afforded them. We are helping to found a medical school in Oman, and one of our graduate students is leading an economic development program in Chile. Students in China and Morgantown exchange places to learn the ceramic arts , and business strategies. Many of our colleagues, including some of our best faculty, are immigrants to our country.
Our students are showing intense interest in learning relevant foreign languages, working in the national security arena, serving in the military, living in our new international house, and doing more to learn all that they can learn about the world in which we live.
To this end, I am very excited to announce today a $2 million gift from the estate of J. Vance and Florence Highland Johnson that will establish a Chinese Studies Program at West Virginia University. It will be housed in the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences and appropriately named the J. Vance and Florence Highland Johnson Chinese Studies Program.
The endowment will support the multidisciplinary program with four fundamental components: two professorships – one in the teaching of Chinese in the Department of Foreign Languages and one in Chinese Studies, a student support fund for study abroad, and a library fund. In the study abroad program students will spend the equivalent of one academic year studying in the native language at a Chinese university. Participants will be known as Johnson Scholars.
The library fund will build and maintain a quality Chinese collection to support faculty and students in the Chinese Studies Program. Courses will be offered in a variety of academic areas such as language, culture, history, and politics.
This initiative spotlights the great importance of offering opportunities for our students to understand and compete for jobs in this global village. It also embodies the principle of interdisciplinary work, complementing initiatives in the College of Business and Economics and the Office of International Programs. On behalf the entire University community I thank the Johnson family, longtime residents of Clarksburg, WV, for their generosity, and I congratulate the Foundation, Dean Mary Ellen Mazey, and the Department of Foreign Languages on this landmark announcement.
Through this new program and in all that we do, we must keep this truth in mind – yes, we live, work, and compete in a global economy and it will always demand standards of excellence worthy of the best players in an arena of global competition.
? Second, our actions must exhibit strategic thinking. We must seek to understand the big picture and make principled decisions based on our mission, vision, and values.
We must constantly push ourselves in our colleges and programs to see the big picture. Vanderbilt Chancellor E. Gordon Gee spoke last week on campus and said, “In today’s universities, no department or college can be intellectually self-sufficient.” We have done much on our campus to become more interdisciplinary, and we understand that we avoid such efforts at our peril.
Many of our successes over the past ten years were based upon the work of the task forces we mounted, and our strategic planning efforts, the expert perspectives of people from within and outside the institution, our collaborations with other campuses, our adherence to an identified mission, and our vision to be a more student-centered, learning community.
All of these efforts enabled us to see the big picture.
In my first year as president, we invited a prominent engineering alumnus, George Bennett, to visit campus. A widely known consultant, he urged us to “Look for Waldo” in our planning efforts. Using a popular children’s book of the 1990s as a metaphor, he insisted that we identify that thing or those few things which, if we could accomplish them, could truly change our position as a university. In the book, Waldo is hard to find in the clutter on the page, but once you find him, it is obvious every time you look at the picture. Our “Waldos,” too, have commanded strategic investment, but they have changed our university.
They have included collaborations with other universities, and groups as diverse as the Pittsburgh Symphony and the National Energy Technology Laboratory. Strategic thinking led us to new programs in forensic science, biometrics, integrated marketing, Chinese business, neurosciences, neurosurgery, the Resident Faculty Leader Program, and renewed emphasis on energy and the environment (including the Industries of the Future Program). They also led to a new library, recreation and science facilities, strategic partnerships with federal and state agencies, the parents club, improved 4-H, and more.
Our work has led us to seek new sources of revenue, and to investments in innovation that will enhance learning, research, and service on all of our campuses. Competition for funds and human leadership resources will always be intense. Almost by definition, leadership is the allocation of scarce resources. There is never enough money to go around. Strategic thinking and principled decision-making offer a reasoned way to get stronger despite resource limitations.
In short, the second lesson is this: only strategic thinking, and principled decision-making based on mission, vision, and values, offer a principled way to decide what our future will be.
Always ask, “What is the big picture in this situation, and how can we best allocate the limited resources we have for maximum effect?”
? We must welcome the many demands for accountability, and use the energy they generate to constantly improve our organization.
We live in an age of accountability. Our students, parents, funding sources, donors-all those we serve-were raised with 800 numbers to call if they were dissatisfied, and guarantees of satisfaction for services rendered.
Today, families save for years and students pay back debt over a large part of their lifetimes to attend WVU. The sacrifice of this investment must be honored through the value of the opportunities we provide. The rest is up to the student to do his or her part.
I am told that purveyors of the martial arts do not try to stop the force behind the thrust of an opponent. Instead they use that force to accomplish their own ends and ultimately victory.
We need to think of “judo” when thinking about accountability to our constituencies.
We must ask: How can we use the force of accountability coming at us to gain new resources, to change our institution for the better, to improve the lives of those we serve?
An essential element of this lesson is the notion of “transparency,” or seeking to provide those we lead, both on and off of campus, with a principled explanation of what we are trying to do and why we are trying to do it. Transparency involves continuous communications. But even more, transparency is a form of trust shared with those we serve. In the end, most of our constituencies know the value of the University. We simply have to offer up our insights, and learn from theirs, in order to reach common ground.
I believe this lesson of accountability, transparency and trust is what accounts for the tremendous growth and positive impact of the Mountaineer Parents Club-which began with a few believers, and grew under the leadership of my wife Susan to an organization of 15,000 families around the nation and on three continents. Together with the parent advocate, the Parent Newsletter, and programs such as the Parent University and Parents Weekend, we have harnessed the brute force of parent-demanded accountability to improve our institution and change it for the better. Today, parents help us recruit, offer ideas for continuous improvement, participate by the thousands in university events, and give us true insights into the quality of the education we provide.
I heard recently that one university has a “parent bouncer,” whose job it is to keep parents out of the university’s business. In my opinion, that university is taking every “accountability body blow” frontally. Our experience has shown us a different and more effective strategy.
Similarly, I think many of our faculty members have wisely connected our research activity to the cries for economic development and the needs of communities within our state. As a result, we have seen better recognition that our research mission is very relevant to the needs of the state’s citizens.
Nowhere could this be clearer than in the health sciences, where high-quality jobs, rural medicine programs offering the best of health care through MDTV and distributed clinics, and a new health care system of hospitals and providers have firmly linked progress in local communities to the flying WV logo. Our health sciences enterprise answered the call for accountability years ago, and the tremendous advances and support they have garnered underscores the value of embracing the push to stand accountable for the resources invested in us.
In years to come, we need to continue harnessing the demands for accountability and leverage them to improve our university.
? Our organization must become and remain a learning organization. To do that, we must learn constantly, in every way possible, and share what we have learned throughout the organization.
Those of us who work in a university environment surely provide leadership to society whether we recognize our leadership role as such, or not. In its most elemental form, teaching is leading, as is adding to the body of knowledge in a discipline, and sharing lessons learned.
The reason we have self-selected into a university community reflects an innate curiosity and a passion for the vibrancy that can be found when the debate of ideas, sharing of knowledge, and the search for discovery are part of the core mission. The example we set in the front of a classroom, our reports of the results of our scholarship and research, our advice to student organizations, our work in the communities of this state, our work in the clinics, our partnerships around the nation and around the world, and in fact nearly all of our work, is seen by others as a leadership activity. As such, we should model and you should encourage those you advise to lead a learning lifestyle.
We must struggle ourselves to continue to be lifetime learners, encourage, reward, and require learning in our departments and divisions, celebrate collective and individual learning milestones, listen to those we serve for their insights and learning about what we do right, and wrong, borrow ideas across domains of expertise, and preserve for others what we have learned.
To this end, we have worked hard in recent years to modernize the personnel systems on our campus, and to foster a culture of development and career advancement that will make this a better place to work and a better servant of society. But there is much, much, more to be done.
To paraphrase Robert Frost, “The woods through which we will travel are lovely, dark and deep, and we have miles to go before we sleep.”
Recently, Margie Phillips, former chief of staff, was asked to lead a new vice presidency for personnel. My hope is that she can, with our help, improve the learning and advancement support we give those with whom we work and upon whom we rely as members of our team.
I readily acknowledge that appropriate pay for work performed is part of this equation. Very few of us feel “overpaid” no matter how much we make. Part of this feeling is just human nature, but part of it is the reality of competitive pay comparisons. The fact is that the global economy about which I spoke earlier will require that over time this university pay its faculty, staff, and administrators, (and student workers) on a national scale for the work they perform. After years of state-driven budget cuts, part of the challenge of the next few years will be finding revenue resources to regain the ground lost to our peers and provide adequate salaries.
In short, we must be a learning organization.
? Finally, we have learned that everyone associated with WVU wants to find meaning in their contribution. We must constantly invest in praise and recognition.
This is a lesson that has been demonstrated on our campuses, time and time again, over the past decade. Our colleagues have responded to challenges, time and time again, and rightly want recognition for doing so. Our graduates seek our confirmation of their lifetime accomplishments. Our civic leaders want to be associated with our institution in a positive way.
All of this is easily recognized when we confer an award, send out a congratulatory letter, lift up a name in our speech, thank a student for an outstanding comment, induct a deserving graduate into a hall of fame, promote a deserving colleague, or in some other way confer praise or some symbol of our respect on those we lead. We all seek meaning in our lives, and we seek a sense of belonging and meaning where we work. This age-old principle has been documented by those who study psychology and those who study leadership.
Most recently, this entirely natural human craving was recognized by leadership experts James Kouzes and Barry Posner in their book, A Leader’s Legacy. No one likes to be an assumption. Everyone wants to be significant.”
The key, here at WVU, is that w e all want to feel valued and to find meaning in our life’s work, and we want to know that our university recognizes that we do our job well.
To summarize, I submit that we have learned at least five major lessons at the turn of the century:
The work that we do must achieve the excellence necessary to be truly competitive in a global economy.
Our actions must exhibit strategic thinking. We must seek to understand the big picture and make principled decisions based on our mission, vision and values.
We must welcome the many demands for accountability, and use the energy they generate to constantly improve our organization.
Our organization must become and remain a learning organization. To do that, we must learn constantly, in every way possible, and share what we have learned throughout the organization.
Everyone associated with us wants to find meaning in their contribution. We must constantly invest in praise and recognition.
Over the past decade, “the turn of the century,” West Virginia University, and in fact, all of higher education, has again tried to reinvent itself, to meet the needs of a rapidly changing world. I am sure there are more lessons to be learned from our experiences, more lessons to be documented for posterity. I know I can’t have captured all lessons that we have learned. But I hope I have you thinking: What have we learned? How can we pass it on?
The future is filled with uncertainty and the unexpected. But while there is much uncertainty ahead, there is one truth of which I am very sure: West Virginia University, with all of its complexity and challenges, will confront those uncertainties, and it will continue to serve society.
This is because WVU is a student-centered learning community meeting the changing needs of our state and nation through a commitment to excellence in teaching, research, service, and technology. This is clearly one humbling, undeniable and important truth that welcomes your next president.
Several years ago in a state of the university address, I related an analogy from Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi. I have found myself reflecting on it again. Mark Twain writes about his own experience as a riverboat pilot, who began his first day with wonder in his eyes, standing aboard his riverboat in awe of the mighty Mississippi. He marveled at the trees forming a canopy over the river. He admired the ripples on the water. And, as the day ended, he was thrilled at the beauty of the sunset melting crimson across the horizon. He felt like the luckiest person in the world-because he knew would get to enjoy the Mississippi River every day and get paid for it.
As the years went by, the magic faded. The canopy of trees meant low-hanging branches that could fall and get caught in his wheel. The ripples in the water that were once so peaceful now reminded him that rocks were underneath the surface and could damage his boat. And the beautiful sunset was now just a cue that he’d soon be piloting the riverboat in the dark. The riverboat captain lost sight of why he went to river in the first place – he forgot his dream.
When I talk about Life on the Mississippi, the lesson for any of us, no matter our career, is to remember our dream and why we pursued it in the first place.
I remember my first year like it was yesterday and can honestly say I have never forgotten why I was so excited and honored to be president of my alma mater. It’s most clear at commencement when the pride of the graduates is matched only by the joy of their families.
When I shook the hand of an MD who I remember recruiting out of a rural West Virginia high school, I remembered why I am a part this great university.
When I see Becky McCauley, a first-generation college student from West Virginia, rise to become the only student in the nation to win two of the country’s most prestigious scholarships – the Goldwater Scholarship and the Truman Scholarship – I remember why we work so hard. I hope when you hear her thank the people of the University who mentored her, you will be reminded of how important you are in the lives of our students.
Whether you are the faculty advisor, the person who processes the research grants, or the dining staff member who gives a smile when a student is overwhelmed in midterms, you make a difference every day-your job here is important.
I challenge you to always remember why you came to the “river” – why you wanted to make your life’s work in higher education. I challenge you to remember the great privilege we enjoy. Granted, there are frustrations-sometimes it’s the traffic, or the rush of advisees during registration time, or the long days to audit our accounts. But we should not lose sight of “the river,” of what WVU is all about and how many people depend upon us to help them realize their own dreams.
I plan to work hard this year-as hard as I ever have-never forgetting why I came to work here eleven years ago, and why I came as a student some 40 years ago. I hope you will continue to do all you can to keep our momentum going this year and beyond. People expect nothing less from those who comprise a flagship university.