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September 4, 2002 August
27, 2002 Previous Presidents and Chancellors Office of the Chancellor Phone: (919) 962-1365 |
It’s been a quiet week at Lake Wobegon. It’s been an incredible summer in Chapel Hill. It was just a year ago, September 5, when we gathered in this same space for my first State of the University address. The biggest cloud on our horizon was the gaping hole in the state’s budget. I addressed that issue early in the speech, and then moved on to raise the question of the long-term vision for Carolina, that of being the leading public university in America. I laid the groundwork for a major announcement on University Day of the goal for the Carolina First campaign, and I concluded with thoughts about Carolina’s noble legacy of moral leadership and how that legacy should help define our future. Six days later, a catastrophic act of terrorism changed our world, altering the context of everything around us. To be sure, we still have a state budget crisis, and I shall address that again today, although rather briefly, since there are currently more questions than answers about the state of the state. We still have a great vision for Carolina, and I shall center my remarks on that, with the hope that this will begin a yearlong conversation among all of us about what precisely it will mean to be America’s leading public university. The major portion of this address will attempt to put some real flesh on the bones of this vision, some concrete measures that we can use to mark our progress. But, as I said last year, there are also some intangible and immeasurable aspects of a great university, elements of culture and climate. I shall conclude today with an invocation of ideals that lie at the heart of our culture and tradition — the idea that we exist for a higher purpose, as a bulwark of light and liberty undergirding freedom itself and serving not ourselves, but the people of North Carolina and the United States. From this idea, we became "the university of the people." Most fundamentally, this means having core values that shape our decisions and our actions, values that we are committed to defend and preserve. I concluded my remarks last year with a discussion of these characteristics, so let me begin today where I ended last year. I said that Chapel Hill helped define the new South, and in so doing defined itself, by having the moral courage to support research that challenged the traditional mores and values of the South. "We must be," I said, "a university that holds contemporary culture up to the critical light in the context of freedom. Light and Liberty. Lux, libertas."1 "In that light," I continued, "we have a moral responsibility to our state and our nation as a public university to bring to the public square the great issues of our day, without fear of censorship. Just as Chancellor Aycock and President Friday worked to defeat the repression of free speech embodied in the Speaker Ban Law and just as President Graham spoke out vehemently against the use of the atomic bomb, we must be willing to take a stand on critical issues of the day. We must be tolerant of the opinions expressed by others and ever supportive of their right to express them. But at the end of the day, we must have the courage and the fortitude to stand by our beliefs and act upon them. ..." I am so pleased that we are joined today by two of these giants of our history, President Emeritus William Friday and former Chancellor Bill Aycock, two heroes for academic freedom at UNC. I am also pleased and honored to recognize other former chancellors who could be with us today, upon whose shoulders we all stand. Let me ask Chris Fordham, Paul Hardin and Bill McCoy to stand. The events of the past 12 months have made me proud to be your chancellor. I am proud of Carolina’s response to the tragedy of September 11 — the outpouring of more than 10,000 people in respectful silence in Polk Place; the demonstrations of patriotism and public service that sprang up all over campus; the individual and random acts of kindness, especially those directed toward members of our community who are Arab or Muslim; the seminars and teach-ins that asked probing questions about America and the world. I am proud of Carolina for the courage to choose a book for the purpose of helping our students understand the complex and often contradictory forces that shape our world. Reasonable people can, of course, disagree about the choice of this book, but our intent was unmistakable from the beginning. We should extend our understanding to those who disagree with us. As William Sloane Coffin writes in a new book, "All of us tend to hold certainty dearer than truth. We want to learn only what we already know; we want to become only what we already are."2 On August 19, our first-year and transfer students experienced what the Summer Reading Program intended — the excitement of discussing ideas. I was enormously proud of our students. They came prepared, they wrote excellent short essays, and they acquitted themselves well in vigorous discussion. Because of the national controversy that surrounded this event, it is easy to attach too much significance to it. In the global scheme of things, in the readings and the discussions, we may have moved one grain of sand toward our students’ understanding of the world. But for many of them, it was a beginning. Finally, I have been proud to speak for the entire community in defending our fundamental rights as Americans from any who would seek to limit the scope of free expression and inquiry. In the past 12 months, UNC has shown the world what it is to be a great, free, American public university. Last year, I had no idea when I said we should be a university with the courage of our convictions, that we would be tested within the year. Throughout the controversy over the summer reading program, most disheartening to us has been the charge that we were insensitive to the victims and families of September 11. Nothing could have been further from our intentions. Next week, on September 11, I invite you to come again to Polk Place at noon for a brief ceremony of reflection, remembrance and rededication to the principles of liberty and freedom, human dignity and equality, justice and peace. We shall honor the memory of the six Carolina alumni who perished in the World Trade Center and at the Pentagon, tolling the South Building bell once for each of them. Before and after the ceremony, a volunteer fair will take place in Polk Place with 75 diverse community and campus service organizations available to sign up new volunteers. I hope you will be there.
The State Budget We have all watched with grave concern as the governor and members of the General Assembly have struggled with what many agree is the most critical financial environment for state government since the Great Depression. North Carolina has experienced what some have called "the perfect storm" of bad economic news — a national recession, the decline of traditional state industries, several court decisions with major financial impact, and two major hurricanes, combined with massive tax cuts enacted in the 1990s and other fiscal challenges. In fiscal 2001-2002, the state’s budget woes directly resulted in more than $44 million worth of reductions on our campus. Nearly $10 million of that total constituted recurring reductions. The rest was from non-recurring funds or reversions from our state accounts necessary because of the freeze placed on expenditures last May. Those losses meant we had to eliminate positions and people, delay other hiring, defer maintenance, reduce teaching, and cut programs. I want to say something now about the great staff at this university whose work and loyalty contributes so much to the quality of the campus culture. You are the unsung heroes of a great university. You are the people who do everything from answering the telephones to maintaining the buildings and grounds to keeping our high-performance computer networks running efficiently. We are incredibly blessed with a wonderfully dedicated and underpaid staff. Today, like the rest of the UNC system and state government, we are waiting to see what happens in Raleigh with the current deliberations about a resolution for a new budget for this fiscal year. We simply don’t know what our exact budget cut will be yet, but we aim to protect core educational priorities. We hope to be left with the flexibility to decide for ourselves how to make additional cuts. And we hope the final measure preserves our overhead receipts, which are so vital to our research enterprise, to future growth at Carolina and, indeed, to the state’s economy. We also remain deeply concerned about the impact of no salary increases and rising health care insurance costs on our employees and their families. Enrollment growth in the UNC system has been funded, at least in part, by increases in tuition, by action of the Board of Governors, which increased resident tuition 8 percent and non-resident tuition 12 percent. The leaders of both the Senate and the House have stated that tuition should not be used to fund enrollment growth, and they have committed themselves to including university enrollment growth as a part of the continuation budget in future years. We strongly support this move with the hope that tuition will not be used in the future as a means of funding enrollment growth in the system. These are troubling times, but we cannot lose sight of Carolina’s long-term prospects. Our state funding may be suffering, but we must continually remind ourselves that the people of North Carolina are investing a half-billion dollars in bond funds for new construction and renovations on this campus, guided by a visionary master plan. At the same time, our faculty continues to bring in record amounts of research dollars, and our alumni and friends are making wonderfully generous gifts to the university. We will weather this economic downturn. We are preparing to launch a five-year financial plan. The goal is to align the resources we have in optimal fashion in order to accomplish the key academic goals of the university. In August, a new Tuition Advisory Task Force, composed of students, faculty, staff and trustees, also began its work. This important panel is contemplating how campus-based tuition dollars can most appropriately be allocated to sustain and advance the university’s ability to compete for the best faculty and students. The task force’s charge is to consider a multi-year approach for such campus-based tuition increases while balancing those competitive challenges with our historic commitment to keeping Chapel Hill’s doors open to the sons and daughters of North Carolinians.
The Vision for UNC: To Be America’s Leading Public University We have a responsibility to manage this university through these difficult times. We accept that responsibility. I believe that everyone at UNC, at every level of shared governance, is committed to managing our affairs through the current budgetary situation. However, we also have a larger, more profound responsibility to keep our eyes on the more distant horizon, with a vision for the future. Indeed, our biggest challenge today is not to become so totally absorbed in our immediate problems that we lose sight of our long-term vision. This requires a kind of bifocal view of reality — a commitment to both responsible management and visionary leadership. Our vision is simple but profound — to be the leading public university in America. Our Board of Trustees has embraced this vision. The steering committee of the Carolina First Campaign has been so inspired and uplifted by this vision that they have helped us generate over $846 million in new commitments to Carolina — 89 newly endowed faculty chairs toward our goal of 200, more than 160 undergraduate scholarship funds and nearly 90 graduate fellowship funds. This October 11, a year later than originally planned, we shall finally make the public announcement of the campaign’s goals. It is amazing to me that in one of our economy’s darkest periods, we have seen this incredible outpouring of support for Carolina. The Board of Trustees and our committed volunteers are asking us some key questions: "Are we raising the right money?" — a question I interpret to mean, "Has the university clearly established its own priorities?" Related to this question is an even more probing one: "What does it mean to be America’s leading public university? How will we know when we have achieved our goal? Give us some measurable and quantifiable benchmarks that we can use to show our progress. If not U. S. News & World Report, then what? This is the conversation that I hope to begin today. We have already begun this discussion with the vice chancellors, cabinet and deans in a retreat last month, and my desire today is to provoke an ongoing dialogue among faculty and staff, students and their parents, as well as our alumni and everyone who cares about this university. Those people who care deeply include Tim Burnett of Greensboro, who recently was elected to a second yearlong term as chairman of our Board of Trustees. Let me ask Chairman Burnett to stand and be recognized for all that he and his fellow trustees continue to do for Carolina. The key word in this vision is leading — which carries multiple meanings. Leading implies an action, a sense of motion, rather than the goal of an end point. It signals leadership. This past year when we were the first major American university to call a halt to binding early decision admissions, we demonstrated leadership — moral leadership. We did it because it was the right thing to do — right for prospective students, right for their parents, right for America. I believe that others will follow, but whether or not they do, we have staked out the high ground on this issue. More recently, we chose a book because we believed it to be the right book for the right question. We started a national conversation about American values in the age of terrorism. We are leading. The second key word in this vision is public. Some have argued that we should remove it from the description, and some of the public universities created in our image have, indeed, all but removed public from their self-definition. The former president of one of our national peers described the evolution of his university from a state university, to a state-related university, to a state-located university. Another speaks openly about a "remote relationship to the state in which it is located." Meeting with our deans and vice chancellors last week, I was most pleased to hear a robust commitment to Carolina’s status as a public university — a proudly public university. In fact, the question was asked, "Is our vision of being the leading public university compatible with the idea of being ‘the university of the people?’" Are the two reconcilable? I shall argue that they are; that they must be. But I will admit that this is a critical question that we dare not leave unanswered. It speaks to the charge that we hear now and then around the state that Carolina is arrogant and has lost touch with the people. These are the people who looked to Carolina when Edward Kidder Graham said, "Send us your problems." And Albert Coates and Howard Odum and countless other faculty and staff in Chapel Hill responded by shaping their research and service agendas around the needs of the people of North Carolina. UNC was already an engaged university, emerging as the flagship of the South. In describing the South of the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s in his book, Speak Now Against the Day, John Egerton wrote: "The single most glowing exception to broad-based mediocrity in the Southern academic world was the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The university acquired a level of independence and quality that kept it in the front rank of public and private schools in the region."3 We must balance our vision of excellence with our history and tradition of engagement and service to North Carolina. This is part of our genetic code, a core value. We must be, at the same time, a great global university and a university that is grounded with a strong sense of place, remembering that we are owned by the people of North Carolina. Indeed, the excellence and prominence we seek is for the benefit of the people, not ourselves. I have said many times that our vision is more a journey than a destination. There is never an end-point in the quest for excellence. All institutions are constantly in a state of flux. Stasis is impossible. A university is either improving in quality or it is slipping. We need to measure our relative standing with our peers, and then mark our progress (or lack of progress) year by year, looking for positive movement. What we are seeking is a dynamic sense of momentum and progress in the areas that we decide are the critical measures of excellence. In October, we expect to see a first draft of the academic plan, which has been developed over the past several months by a broad cross-section of faculty. This plan will guide the five-year financial planning process I described earlier. It will also provide a general outline for more precise discussions about our collective aspirations for excellence in the College of Arts and Sciences, and the professional schools. We will ask each dean to make presentations to the Board of Trustees in the coming months about areas of strength and future potential. That process will be very important as we define and articulate the strengths that will carry Carolina forward in the future. Let me take this opportunity to recognize the great leadership of our academic deans, the vice chancellors, and members of the chancellor’s cabinet. Please join me in expressing our appreciation for all they do. Carolina has a great tradition of shared governance. Let me recognize Faculty Chair Sue Estroff, Employee Forum Chair Tommy Griffin, Student Body President Jen Daum and Graduate and Professional Student Federation President Branson Page. Thank you for all that you do for the university. At our recent retreat with the deans and vice chancellors, we considered measures of excellence in several broad categories. In each case, our intention will be to measure and track UNC’s performance against that of the major peer institutions with which we compete — the Association of American Universities and specifically those top four institutions generally regarded as superior to us in most categories — Berkeley, UCLA, Michigan, and in undergraduate measures, Virginia. In each of these areas we should focus both on the point on the scale for each measure as compared to our peers over time, and on the gradient or direction of the line.
Students, the Quality of the Learning Environment, and Outcomes First, we should measure over time the quality of students attracted to UNC, using metrics that are very familiar to us. More importantly, we should assess, measure and compare with data from AAU peers the quality of the learning environment at Chapel Hill, measuring such things as the percentage of students in freshman seminars or senior capstone seminars and the percentage of students engaged in study abroad or undergraduate research, for example. We must continue to pay attention to what our students are telling us in satisfaction surveys of advising, for example, and track that over time. And we must also constantly strive to build upon our recent impressive gains in improving the racial and ethnic diversity of our student population, which continues to grow both in number and in quality of preparation. And finally, we should track the outcomes of a Carolina education, again measuring and tracking our own record against that of our peers. Beyond the obvious (graduation and retention rates), we should look at the number of significant awards earned by our graduates and their placement into prestigious graduate and professional programs. Similar measures should be created for graduate and professional degree programs themselves, of course, and we shall ask every program to tailor measures to fit their individual programs. Improvement in any of these key areas will bring resource requirements, and that is why we must connect our aspirations with the goals of the Carolina First campaign. For example, I propose that we double the size of the Honors Program, already one of the best and most accessible in the country. With a new endowment of $25 million, we could add the necessary faculty lines to support this expansion of the Honors Program, increasing our yield of high-ability students, and, at the same time, adding faculty to high priority areas of the College. We should recognize that these various aspects of student measurement constitute a reinforcing feedback loop. Improving the quality of the educational experience we offer means we will attract even better students in the future. Attracting more students who are well-prepared for college will, in turn, enhance the intellectual climate across the campus. Certain aspects of university life are intangible and not measurable. A critical aspect of excellence is the degree to which the students at this university grow not only in knowledge but also in character and personal ethics. From our earliest days, the concept of honor has been at the core of a Carolina education.4 The Honor Code, and the history at Carolina of a student-administered system of academic discipline and justice, is one of our most cherished traditions. Convinced that this hallowed tradition was in great need of reform and rejuvenation, last year I appointed a special task force to review the student judicial system. That committee, chaired by Professor Marilyn Yarbrough in the School of Law, has now made its recommendations. The Committee on Student Conduct will solicit input from the Carolina community before sending proposed legislation to Student Congress and Faculty Council. The cynics are saying that the congress and council will talk reform to death. I challenge us all to prove the cynics wrong. Let us resolve to return the concept of honor to the center of the stage. It is clear that we have some major work to do. Moreover, let us find a way to make our commitment to honor measurable, so that year by year we can hold ourselves accountable to a rising standard of performance. In this discussion of students and learning, I have focused on undergraduate education. However, similar and parallel issues apply at the graduate and professional level. I call on every graduate and professional program to apply the same rising standards of admissions and acceptance, quality of experience, and measurable outcomes for graduate and professional programs.
The Faculty Let us turn now to the faculty — whose collective excellence defines a great university. There are a number of quantifiable measures of the quality of a university’s faculty — the number of those elected to the national academies; the number receiving significant national awards; peer-reviewed external funding and publications, all of which can be benchmarked against our peers. Faculty compensation is an area where UNC has struggled to keep up. Our situation is complicated by the fact that our competition is not just the other great public universities, but the well-endowed private institutions as well. Coupled with woefully inadequate benefit packages, we find ourselves each year in a mounting struggle to fend off raids of our best people from other institutions. We are now tracking these contests — about half of which we are winning, and the cost of the retention packages in the successful cases, as well as the known salary gaps in those instances where we were unsuccessful in countering offers. It is, in fact, a mark of excellence when the most distinguished universities in the country want our faculty. As one dean remarked last week, we want to have faculty that the University of Chicago also wants. But we need the resources to match Chicago’s. Ultimately, our goal of establishing 200 new endowed chairs for faculty through the Carolina First campaign will be a critical building block in attracting and retaining the very best faculty. But that success will not lessen our resolve to continue making our case in Raleigh to fund pay raises for both faculty and staff. In the recent past, a major source of funds for faculty salary increases has been campus-initiated tuition increases. The state must recognize its responsibility in this regard. We will do our part in raising private funds and in recommending moderate increases in tuition, but we must be mindful of our commitment to access. We cannot, should not, must not place the full burden of faculty salary increases on our students. We must also recognize that we have some serious work to do internally on faculty issues. Very shortly, we shall receive recommendations from a task force regarding appointments, promotions and tenure. These are the most important decisions we make. We need to be certain that we have a rigorous system of peer review and standards and procedures that are consistently applied across the university. I do not believe that is the case today.
Research and Graduate Education Chapel Hill continues to make incredible strides with regard to growth in peer-reviewed funded research, which increased in 2001 to $438 million, up more than 17% over the previous year. A major factor was National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding, which continues to rise steadily. Last year all five of UNC’s health affairs schools — dentistry, medicine, nursing, pharmacy and public health — ranked within the top 25 of public and private schools according to the NIH. Three of those professional schools were in the top 5. We also broke into the top 20 universities receiving science and technology funding from the National Science Foundation, the only such university in North Carolina so designated. Our research numbers this year are even more impressive. Total awards for 2002 exceeded $488 million, an 11 percent increase. This recent growth in research funding corresponds directly with the legislature’s decision in 1998 permitting the university to retain and reinvest the reimbursements of the costs of research. What a return on investment! Let me repeat those numbers . . . In 2001, $438 million. In 2002, $488 million. I suggest a round of applause for a great and distinguished faculty. In 2001, we made a significant investment in genomic sciences. Since then, we have assembled a world-class team of the best scientists in the world. The School of Public Health was designated by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as one of the nation’s three centers of excellence along with the universities of Michigan and Washington. We continue to build cooperative programs with Duke and N.C. State. For example, we are developing a new Ph.D. in biomedical engineering with N.C. State, building on the strength in science and medicine at Chapel Hill and engineering at State. We have just established a new Triangle National Lithography Center, with significant investments from both Carolina and N.C. State, which will focus on green manufacturing methods and nanoscale structures. The real beneficiary of this new center will be North Carolina’s economy, with the stimulus of new business and job creation. We have additional strengths within UNC-Chapel Hill that will eventually lead to the development of our own new campus at Carolina North. As a first step in that direction, I propose the creation of a new Institute for Advanced Materials, Nanoscience and Technology, building on existing strengths already present in the departments of chemistry, physics, computer science, and other units engaged in this critical technology. Some will argue that we cannot afford new initiatives in the current environment. I would respond that, while we must be very judicious in taking on new projects, we cannot afford not to build on our strengths to be the very best that we can be. I think we should all agree on one thing — that we will start nothing that we are not willing to support sufficiently to make it a top-10 program within a reasonable period of time. We must be willing to pull the plug of life support on new programs that fail to meet that threshold. We should not only invest in big science, in programs that span the traditional disciplines, we should do the same in the humanities, the social sciences, and the professions. Our library is one of our great strengths and we must continue to build it. And somewhere in this audience is Ben Jones (class of ’50 and generous donor to the university). Ben brought me this morning a copy of the 1612 first edition of the King James Bible for the Rare Book Collection in Wilson Library. He bought this book at an auction in Hendersonville, North Carolina, outbidding all of the other bidders. Finally when he announced that the book was going to the University of North Carolina, they broke into applause, stamping their feet. I said to Ben, "Either the room was filled with Tar Heels, or they were relieved that, at last, the infidels in Chapel Hill were going to have a Bible." I am enormously proud of our social scientists who have teamed up with the Chinese Academy of Social Science to make UNC the lead institution in the study of the impact of the Olympic Games in the urbanization of China. We have invested in the Center for the Study of the American South, and Chapel Hill is once again the "go-to" place for study of this region. The School of Law recently created a new Center for Civil Rights, which is committed to the study of civil rights and social justice, especially in the American South, and is directed by Julius Chambers, a UNC law graduate and one of the nation’s great champions of civil rights. This new center just hosted with Harvard and other partners a major conference examining the resegregation of Southern schools. The Kenan-Flagler Business School has launched its new OneMBA program, linking it with partners around the world for a truly global program in executive education. Next month, we shall open with pride the new Institute for Arts and Humanities, built entirely with private support. Long one of the jewels of the Carolina culture, the institute will now be housed in a jewel box of a facility. Later in the fall, we shall unveil the plan for the arts common, a truly visionary plan that will provide the footprint for an orderly build-out of new and renovated facilities for the arts spanning the next 50 years.
Conclusion This is the vision of a great university that has captured the imagination of those who love Chapel Hill. But does this vision matter to the people of North Carolina? And why should it? The answer, I hope, is obvious. As a proudly public university, we should mark our progress not only by measuring ourselves against our peers. We must also judge ourselves by what we contribute to North Carolina. This commitment is best expressed through our engagement with the state, a mission that transcends public service, linking our research and creativity to the felt needs of the state. I want to go further and suggest, in conclusion, an even more profound relationship with the people that goes back to the very 18th-century conception of the university. Peter Gomes, the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Minister to the Memorial Church at Harvard, in his new book The Good Life, quotes a Harvard student, who asked, in despair over some of Harvard’s own policies and actions, "Why can’t Harvard be both great and good at the same time?"5 Let me re-phrase that question for us: Can Carolina be both great and good at the same time? That suggests a university with a moral compass, a university with a sense of public virtue. As I study the history of this place, that is the characteristic that shines through in our greatest moments. From our earliest days through the recent past, Chapel Hill has been both a rock of stability and an agent of change always characterized by a culture of civility and humanity. The words of the prophet Micah are inscribed on Gerrard Hall, the second chapel erected on this campus in 1822: "What does the Lord require of thee, but to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God." We can pursue a vision of excellence — of being America’s leading public university — and not lose the faith of the people whose university this is — if we maintain that spirit of doing justice, loving kindness, in a spirit of humility. Excellence without pretension. There is no standard set of metrics for that kind of university. But we who love this place know the feel, the smell, the sound of such a university. Thomas Wolfe called it magical. Frank Porter Graham talked about the music in the air. As we begin a new academic year, we must remind ourselves that each year we must re-create this culture of excellence and engagement, of creativity and commitment, of being rather than seeming; doing justice, loving kindness, and walking in humility. Grounded with that moral compass, we can shine as a true light on the hill. The brightest star of all.
1 Moeser, James. "State of the University Address." Chapel Hill, N.C. Delivered September 5, 2001. 2 Coffin, William Sloane. The Heart is a Little to the Left: Essays on Public Morality. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England [for] Dartmouth College, 1999, p. 3. 3 Egerton, John. Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1995, p. 130. 4 Graham, Edward Kidder, "The College and Human Need," an address before the student body at the opening of the University of North Carolina, September, 1915. Published in Education and Citizenship and Other Papers by Edward Kidder Graham. New York and London: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1919, pp. 137-47. 5 Gomes, Peter J. The Good Life: Truths That Last in Times of Need. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2002, p. 23. |
Delivered
by Chancellor James MoeserAbout Chancellor Moeser | Office of the Chancellor