"Shaping Our Future in the Age of Accountability"
Keynote Address for President Jo Ann M. Gora
Friday, August 19, 2011, 9:00 a.m.; Emens Auditorium
Thank you, Provost King. I welcome all of you to our annual fall faculty convocation.
I want to begin my remarks by reflecting on our tremendous accomplishments of the past year. Through your efforts, today's Ball State is recognized as a leader in higher education. The continued innovation, collaboration, and dedication of you, the Ball State faculty and staff, have made possible our current success and the position of strength from which we are able to shape our future. I thank you for your hard work.
As expected, our success comes with challenges. Many of you will recall that I spent much of last year's speech describing the increasing public scrutiny of education at all levels, from kindergarten to university graduate programs. I said that these pressures affected us here at Ball State and would continue to do so.
As you know, in the 12 months since I last addressed you, the pressures have not just continued but have actually increased. Many public colleges and universities in our state endured another round of budget cuts. Ball State's operating appropriations were reduced by 5.2 percent. This came after the $15.2 million reduction in last year's biennial budget.
More pressure came with the publication of Academically Adrift and the national media coverage that followed its release. I know that some have questioned the research methodology or the scope of the data, but I believe that misses the larger issue. As the provost has said, this book has raised serious questions about the academic rigor of university courses in general and the quality of learning outcomes in particular. Essentially, the book has questioned whether colleges and universities are properly preparing graduates for the global, knowledge-based economy of this century.
That discussion--a sometimes heated one--has been going on for many years, and it simply is not going away. It is a reflection of the increasing public scrutiny and emphasis on accountability that I described in last year's address. It is related to the continuing concerns of parents, politicians, and the public about the cost of college--and often the debt incurred by students and families. We are living in a time of declining resources and everyone--parents, donors, commissioners, journalists, legislators, and the public in general--wants to know what we in higher education are doing to become more productive, more efficient, and more affordable. If the last year has shown us anything, it has demonstrated that this age of accountability will continue, even when our economy begins to show signs of sustained improvement.
Simply put, this age of accountability is the new normal--and that's a good thing! What a great challenge and opportunity for all of us at Ball State. It prompts the question: How do we shape this university in coming years to clearly show the public how we differ from our competitors and how we bring value to the citizens of Indiana--and indeed, of the nation?
The answer comes, in part, through the continuing successes of our faculty and students. Those successes demonstrate the value of a Ball State degree.
So much of today's discussion about the value of a college degree focuses on only one aspect of that value--cost. At best, this concept of value includes another aspect--time to degree. Too often, the long-term value and quality of the college degree is ignored, and the importance of those aspects of value and quality is what we have emphasized with our current strategic plan. The strategic plan for 2012 to 2017, which is being developed this year, will focus on defining rigorous learning outcomes and assessing our students' abilities to meet them, since academic quality will remain front and center to everything we do here at Ball State.
While much of that work has already been done as a part of our current strategic plan, there is still more discussion that should take place. The best defense against those who claim colleges are "academically adrift" is a set of learning outcomes that demonstrate academic rigor. I challenge you to develop additional ways we can demonstrate the academic rigor of our programs.
Clearly, we must provide the critical thinking skills needed by graduates entering this global, knowledge-based economy. Knowledge acquisition, the ultimate goal at so many institutions, is not enough for students. They must be able to transform knowledge into judgment and judgment into action. Ball State can demonstrate that we provide our students with the tools needed for long-term success--the ability to innovate, to be creative and collaborative, to think critically, to solve problems, and to be entrepreneurial. Legislators and community leaders understand that this is the real value of the Ball State degree.
We arrive at the start of this academic year with strong evidence of our effectiveness in this age of accountability. Much of that evidence comes in the form of our current strategic plan and its successful implementation. As we enter its fifth and final year of implementation, we either already have met or are on schedule to meet 98 of its 104 outcome measurements. We can more clearly articulate and demonstrate our university's academic model, and the value it provides. Everyone from prospective students to business leaders understands that value--in all of its dimensions--and why it is worth the time, cost, and effort involved.
The cornerstone of our strategic plan is immersive learning. This initiative demonstrates the learning outcomes the public expects because an interdisciplinary team of students can innovate and collaborate, applying their classroom knowledge to solve real-world problems and deliver a meaningful product or service to a business, community, or nonprofit. This is increasingly being recognized as a major differentiator for this university. Our Career Center reports that 300 employers used our campus recruiting program last year and that more than 15 percent of them were new. Those employers were seeking a wider range of majors and the abilities that immersive learning encourages, including collaborative problem-solving, an entrepreneurial outlook, strong communication skills, and a focus on results.
We continue the steady march toward our goal of making immersive learning opportunities available to each of our undergraduates. This past year brought another record number of students participating in immersive learning. In the four years of strategic plan implementation, almost 12,000 Ball State students have completed at least one of our more than 700 immersive learning projects. Those projects have involved 44 academic departments and all seven of our colleges. They have been conducted with partners based in 69 Indiana counties, but their results literally have affected citizens in every county in our state. Projects range from redesigning hospital gowns at IU Health Ball Memorial Hospital here in Muncie to perfecting toy-making in Hong Kong and from rethinking the design of a transportation hub in Venice to designing staff development programs and working with children on reading comprehension programs at an orphanage in Malawi.
In my travels around the state, I find increasing public recognition of the benefits of immersive learning. I am asked to speak to many community groups about particular projects and several community partners have become repeat customers, strengthening their bonds with the university. Even in this difficult budgetary environment, the General Assembly continued its financial support of immersive learning. These projects also have been supported by Provost Immersive Learning Grants and by private funds, including millions of dollars from the Ball State Bold campaign. Immersive learning projects enable our students to clearly demonstrate learning outcomes--after all, they are the ones driving the learning process. They also provide significant economic and community development for our state and spread the university's influence around the world.
There are many noteworthy examples from the past year, but allow me to describe just three of them. Ball State's Sports Link program was the only program in the country in which college undergraduates produced broadcast content for Fox College Sports, a national network. Our exclusive partnership with that network allowed viewers in the nation's top 25 television markets to watch work created and produced by Ball State students, including 10 30-minute sports magazine shows that featured profiles of Ball State student-athletes and coaches, as well as coverage of games. Under the guidance of Chris Taylor, instructor of telecommunications, 35 students from three majors worked on Sports Link. More than 100 other students have signed up to participate in future Sports Link endeavors.
One of Sports Link's magazine stories won both a regional Emmy Award and the College Sports Media Award for the nation's best collegiate feature story. Industry executives were so impressed by our students' work on a variety of platforms that the students were selected as online producers and social media analysts for March Madness on Demand, producing multimedia content during last spring's NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament for Turner Sports Interactive.
Another example of the benefits of immersive learning comes from our Virginia B. Ball Center for Creative Inquiry. Geri Strecker, assistant professor of English, mentored a team of 14 students, who traveled around the state interviewing Negro Leagues veterans as a part of the Black Baseball in Indiana project. This project had a long list of community partners, including the Indiana Historical Society, Conner Prairie, and the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
The students have produced a 30-minute documentary about the Indianapolis Clowns and other Indiana connections to the Negro Leagues, and an accompanying book will be published next spring. This project was prominently covered in The Indianapolis Star, and it also has drawn national coverage, including a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
The final example of immersive learning is the work that our students have done for the last three semesters with NPower Indianapolis. Under the mentorship of Catherine Chen, associate professor of information systems and operations management, the project this past semester featured a team of students from information systems, telecommunications, and marketing who conducted training in cloud computing applications. The students produced training videos and workshops that showed executives from nonprofits around Indiana the benefits of cloud computing for their organizations.
The model was so successful that other NPower chapters are considering using our students' videos and workshop outlines in their communities. Previously, our students worked with NPower to research free or low-cost software tools that can help nonprofits with such things as event registration, network management, donor tracking, and security.
Under the leadership of you, the faculty, I know that we will continue to see growth in the number of immersive learning projects and the students participating in them. Even as the public asks more questions of us, it does so knowing that a college degree is more important than ever. This state will need to produce at least 10,000 more college graduates each year through 2025 just to respond to changes in Indiana's economy. The academic rigor these projects provide and the learning outcomes they demonstrate will be in even greater demand in the years to come.
Strategic plan implementation has brought many other accomplishments, including the creation of a more vibrant and supportive academic community. Last year, we opened five new buildings or centers on campus, including the Student Recreation and Wellness Center, the Marilyn K. Glick Center for Glass, Thomas J. Kinghorn Residence Hall, the A. Umit Taftali Center for Capital Markets and Investing, and the Ball State Welcome Center in Lucina Hall. We are committed to providing state-of-the-art facilities for you and for our students.
Another strategic plan objective that demonstrates our momentum is our list of nationally ranked and recognized programs. Last year was certainly a banner year for our faculty and students, highlighted by the Carnegie Foundation for Advancement of Teaching elevating Ball State’s classification to "research university, high research activity," putting us in the company of institutions such as Boston College, Clemson University, and the College of William and Mary.
Ball State's list of nationally ranked programs since the strategic plan was developed is impressive indeed. There are numerous recognitions of the university as a whole, including our ranking among the top 20 up-and-coming colleges and universities by U.S. News & World Report, our recognition by the same publication for one of the nation’s top programs for first-year students in each of the last seven years, our listing among the top 60 military-friendly universities, and our inclusion as one of the top universities in the Midwest by The Princeton Review for the last seven years, among others.
Even more importantly, that list includes dozens of national rankings of academic departments, including accounting, architecture, our online master of business administration program, educational leadership, our graduate program in education, elementary education, both the undergraduate and graduate programs in entrepreneurship, finance, information and communication sciences, journalism, landscape architecture, music, nursing, risk management and insurance, telecommunications, theatre and dance, urban planning, and, of course, Burris Laboratory School and the Indiana Academy for Science, Mathematics, and Humanities.
The list again is led by our undergraduate entrepreneurship program, which has been ranked in the top 10 in U.S. News & World Report's America's Best Colleges edition every year since 1999. This past year was particularly exciting for our entrepreneurship students, as they worked with U.S. Navy researchers to develop commercial applications for military patents, including products such as simulated skin, which medical and nursing students can use to practice their surgical and suturing techniques. U.S. News & World Report listed this initiative, called Military 2 Market, first among 10 of the nation's top college classes that influence the outside world.
But there is a broader context to our increased academic reputation--more and more of our students or recent alumni earn nationally recognized fellowships or scholarships every year. Last year, we celebrated only the second Truman Scholar in Ball State history and the first time in university history that two of our students earned Goldwater Scholarships in the same year. We also boasted two Rhodes Scholarship finalists and an Olmstead Scholarship finalist, all unprecedented in our history. These are all outstanding students who have enjoyed close mentoring relationships with their faculty. My congratulations to faculty in the colleges of Architecture and Planning and Sciences and Humanities for mentoring these students and assisting them with their successful applications.
In fact, last year was our most successful year ever in this regard, as 16 of our students and recent alumni received national scholarships. I am proud to say that since 2005, 41 Ball State students or recent alumni have earned 43 national scholarships and fellowships.
Many other student groups brought visibility to Ball State through their success in national competitions. Our debate team won its fourth straight national title this spring, and two of the three students named All-American were Ball State seniors. For the seventh year in a row, Ball State theatre and dance students were honored at the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival; this time, it was twin brothers who earned the Barbizon Award for Theatrical Design Excellence. And The Ball State Daily News staff earned 34 Gold Circle Awards from the Columbia Scholastic Press Association, the second highest total in the country. Eleven of those were first-place awards for online coverage, reflecting our emphasis on emerging media journalism.
As we enter the final year of strategic plan implementation, we celebrate our successes and make plans to build on them, both this year and in the years to come. Another key objective in our strategic plan is increasing our population of high-ability students. This is absolutely critical for the significant intellectual challenge of immersive learning. We have been increasingly successful over the last four years, and I am proud to report that another outstanding class joins us Monday.
This year, more than 14,000 students applied to Ball State. One result is that we are projecting a freshman class of 3,839, an increase of more than 200 students from last year. This increase comes even as we continue to attract strong students and be highly selective with our admission standards. For instance, 62.6 percent of these freshmen hold the Indiana Academic Honors Diploma or its equivalent. That is higher than last year's class, and it is an increase of almost 16 percentage points from the 2006 freshman class. It is especially impressive when you remember that less than 31 percent of 2010 Indiana high school graduates earned the Indiana Academic Honors Diploma.
The average high school grade point average for our incoming freshmen again tops 3.3. Nearly 9 percent of these incoming students are enrolled in Honors College, and we have made major strides toward our diversity goals this fall. Some 13.3 percent of this class comes from outside Indiana, an increase of nearly two percentage points from 2006, and 13.6 percent are underrepresented minorities, up significantly from 8.6 percent in 2006.
At the same time that we report such excellent news in student recruitment, we have equally exciting news in student retention. We project that we will reach one of our strategic plan goals by welcoming close to 80 percent of last year's freshmen back to campus as sophomores. Among many other positive outcomes, this led to a recent study that ranked Ball State sixth for the largest percentage increase in six-year graduation rates among public research universities in the nation.
Many of you tell me that the increased academic quality of our student body over the past few years has made a noticeable difference in your classrooms. We should also remember that those students' abilities enable us to increase our academic rigor, something our students, in fact, expect.
In the area of new initiatives, this freshman class will be the first to enjoy a more structured relationship with the Career Center. All freshmen will take a career inventory, designed to help them make more informed decisions about possible majors and professions to pursue after graduation. With this new program, the guidance they receive from the Career Center will start in the freshman--not the senior--year, enabling our students to make better choices as they progress through their academic curricula.
This fall also follows the successful conclusion of the Ball State Bold capital campaign, which we will recognize at the Evening of the Fellows Society dinner on September 23. The campaign has exceeded its ambitious $200 million goal by more than $10 million. In fact, by July 1, we had raised $210,750,032! Most importantly, because it was structured to support our strategic plan objectives, these dollars will contribute to the strategic plan's continuing implementation. It is reassuring to know that even as our state support has decreased by 11 percent in the last five years--and our state operating appropriation for this year is equivalent to the amount of state support received in 2002--support for Ball State from private donors is stronger than ever. We should take pride in the fact that there were nearly 66,000 donors to the campaign and that more than 30,000 donors were new.
The lasting impact of Ball State Bold cannot be overstated. One hundred and thirty-three new endowed scholarships were established during the campaign. Having additional scholarship funds that enable us to invest in bright, talented students is critical to meeting our strategic goals as the competition for high-ability students continues to increase. More important, bringing more of these students to Ball State raises the level of learning both inside and outside the classroom. Their presence here benefits our entire university.
There is no greater example of this than the fact that we offered 55 Bold Celebration Scholarships to members of this incoming freshman class. These merit-based scholarships are worth $10,000 annually and are renewable for four years, for a total of $40,000. It is worth noting that our original goal for this program was to name 25 scholars, the same number as the Inauguration Scholars we introduced in 2005. We should all be heartened by the enthusiastic support of Ball State alumni and friends, which allowed us to more than double our goal.
These Celebration Scholars share a dedication to outstanding academic achievement. In March, they averaged 2116 of a possible 2400 on the SAT and boasted an average high school GPA of 3.96 on a 4.0 scale. But they also displayed a wide variety of backgrounds and interests, as their planned areas of study covered more than 40 academic majors. I am convinced that they will be among our student leaders in the next four years and that their studies at Ball State will greatly enrich our campus.
As you return to Ball State this fall, you see that the physical transformation of campus continues. Through the support of federal funds, we have completed the final stage of the McKinley Avenue renovations, stretching from Riverside to University, further beautifying our campus and improving traffic flow.
Renovation continues at North Quad, the first of three academic buildings in the two-phase Central Campus Academic Project. The North Quad work will be complete by January, increasing usable space while improving circulation in the building. The subsequent renovations of Teachers College should be complete by December 2013; work on the Applied Technology Building should begin next year and be complete in early 2014.
Perhaps the most notable construction milestone occurs this fall, when we flip the switch on Phase One of our geothermal energy project, the largest of its kind in the country. We will close down two aging, coal-fired boilers and demonstrate our fiscal and environmental commitment, saving more than $1 million annually. When we are able to complete Phase Two, we will double our savings and reduce our carbon footprint by nearly half. This project continues a long line of sustainability efforts at Ball State, which are supported and aided by our students and faculty, in particular, the Council on the Environment. Our sustainability work has brought us national recognition from Kiwi magazine, The Princeton Review, the Sierra Club, the Second Nature Climate Leadership Awards, the National Wildlife Federation, the Hoosier Environmental Council, and several others.
Finally, the most important development during the upcoming academic year will be the writing of Ball State's new strategic plan, which will guide our university through 2017 and shape our future as we approach our centennial in 2018! Many of you were hard at work last year on one of our task forces, reviewing everything from online education to the future of the Honors College. Those groups were all examining what a Ball State undergraduate education should look like in the future.
Our strategic planning task force has been hard at work for months, fully engaged in synthesizing these ideas. The deliberations began with a roundtable in February in which nearly 50 faculty and staff from across campus participated. There are 22 members of the task force, which is chaired by Provost King. Would the members of the strategic planning task force stand and be recognized?
The task force will issue its final recommendations in spring 2012. Those recommendations are critical to Ball State’s 10-year reaccreditation by the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association. As most of you know, North Central is increasingly focused on learning outcomes; our current and new strategic plans address that focus.
Many of you have led the way in teaching through a hybrid model, one that combines aspects of the face-to-face classroom experience with online resources. In years to come, more and more teaching and learning throughout higher education will use this approach, in part because academic quality and rigor can be enhanced through technology. As many other institutions are doing, we will be increasing the use of technology and integrating it into most of our courses, no matter where they are taught. This responds to our students' requests, enriches the overall learning experience for all students, and builds on our faculty and students' expertise in emerging media. After all, as the authors of A New Culture of Learning argue, our students live in a world characterized by continual change, ubiquitous connectivity, and almost unlimited access to knowledge resources.
As we adapt to this new culture of learning, we are making many new resources available to faculty. The completion of the Unified Technology Support facilities on the first floor of Bracken Library aids these efforts, as does the creation of the Faculty Apps Café. The latter program will provide individualized faculty support with applications, seminars on emerging media, and question-and-answer workshops on popular campus applications.
A new faculty support unit, which we are calling the Learning Technologies Resource Center, is located in the Ball Communication Building. Here, Information Technology and Academic Affairs have partnered to provide faculty training and support for using technology in teaching and learning. The center will work with academic departments to develop annual plans for online course production and to develop a framework for measuring the use of technology-mediated learning on and off campus.
Ball State is expanding its rich media technology portfolio with two new Blackboard modules. Connect gives faculty the ability to send announcements as text messages to students who have opted into the system. Mobile Learn allows students and faculty to interact with course content from any smart phone or tablet.
All of these technologies have been upgraded or created to support your instructional efforts. In addition, Dr. Jennifer Bott is serving as our assistant provost for learning initiatives. She will spend this semester evaluating our current assets in online education, assessing our future capabilities, and making recommendations to accommodate online offerings for classes both on and off campus. To that end, she is working with faculty experts across our campus to build a robust, multidimensional approach to faculty development in online pedagogy and design. Faculty experts are taking the lead in instructional design and technology and are working with their colleagues to prepare rigorous and quality online courses and programs.
In other important developments at Ball State, I want to take this opportunity to thank Kay Bales, vice president for student affairs, and all the members of our NCAA certification committee for their hard work on our self-study to meet the standard 10-year review of athletics. We are pleased that the NCAA was so satisfied with our self-study that we will not be required to have the standard peer review visit that was scheduled for this fall. While reaccreditations are fairly commonplace for academic departments, the NCAA reaccreditation is critical and will add to the recent reaccreditations earned by our University Police Department and our Museum of Art. They, too, should be congratulated.
In addition, implementation of Ball State's new Enterprise Resource Planning system, critical to providing consistency, efficiency, and speed in institution-wide transactions for our students and other constituents, has begun. Finance, the first of five components of this system, went live last month. This is a significant milestone for our university, not only because it provides better customer service, but also because the better, more responsive data the system provides enhances departmental reporting capabilities and facilitates better decision-making. Thanks to all who have worked so hard to make sure that we have made the right decisions and have met an aggressive timeline, especially the members of the ERP Executive Committee, the ERP Executive Management Support Team, and the ERP Implementation Leadership Team. Would the members of all three groups please stand and be recognized? While we celebrate this achievement, we have a long implementation road ahead of us and you, as faculty members, will play an integral role in the coming year as more components go live.
Together, through the successes of our recent past, we have taken Ball State to new levels of excellence. The fact that we have done so despite significant fiscal challenges is a credit to everyone at this university who has worked so hard to continue to provide our students with a quality education. I am confident--and I trust that you are, too--that we will complete our final year of strategic plan implementation and develop a new strategic plan that will continue our university's tremendous momentum, responding and adapting to future challenges and allowing us to shape our future in this age of accountability.
There are many who deserve recognition for all that we have achieved--students, administrators, trustees, staff. But the bulk of the praise goes to you, the faculty. It is through your commitment and creativity that Ball State University continues to adapt and improve, meeting every challenge as we move forward.
I know that Ball State's increasing distinctiveness and national recognition help you do even more in your teaching, research, and service. I remain committed to bringing us more high-ability students, better campus facilities and technology, increased funding for more rigorous learning experiences, more rewards for your research, and more recognition for our academic programs.
What is amazing about this stellar faculty is that even as you continue to respond to societal pressures and challenges, you do so as the considerate, thoughtful, and involved mentors of students. I receive several e-mails, letters, and phone calls every year attesting to that fact.
So to conclude today, I could share with you the story of Ryan Shrack, who graduated with his master's degree in historic preservation in May and was immediately hired by the Indiana Office of Community and Rural Affairs as its northeast community liaison, based in Fort Wayne. Ryan was selected over 138 other applicants, many with much more experience, because the OCRA staff was impressed with his leadership in an immersive learning project to assist the Levi Coffin House, the state historic site near Richmond known as "the Grand Central Station of the Underground Railroad."
Or I could share with you the e-mail I received from the mother of Michael Konopasek, who earned his bachelor's degree in telecommunications in May. Michael, you may recall, was one of two of our students who won the 2010 Fox News College Challenge for researching, writing, filming, and producing a report on efforts to revitalize the city of Gary. His mother was awed by the fact that, at a time when television news positions are hard to find, Michael received seven job offers before deciding to work as a reporter at an Oklahoma City TV station.
But instead, I want to read a little from an e-mail sent by Ayriole Frost, a 2010 graduate. This e-mail was sent to several faculty members in our School of Music as she reflected on her first year of graduate school. She wrote, "I wanted to take this opportunity, as my first year as a master's degree student in music composition at Carnegie Mellon University is wrapping up, to let you all know how much I enjoyed taking your classes and how much I missed them this year. I had heard from other students that taking graduate music history and theory classes was a breeze after being in some of your upper-level courses at Ball State, but I didn’t understand how truly wonderful, challenging, and informative your classes were until I experienced studying at another institution for myself.
"Rest assured, there are many things about Carnegie Mellon that I like, but I have to say that in comparison to the courses I took from all of you, the music history and theory courses here are just not on the same level. I have truly been more than well prepared for graduate study by taking your classes, and I could not have asked for better course work (including the work I did with many of you independently). I thought you all should know that, though I appreciated your classes while I was at Ball State, I have an even deeper appreciation for them now, and I hope that all of you will continue to teach inspiring and challenging courses in the future." Now that's what I call a great learning outcome.
It is with pride that I call you my colleagues and look forward to the great things that we can accomplish together in this year to come. Thank you for all that you do at Ball State University, and my personal best wishes for the coming year.