Remarks at the Stated Meeting of the Faculty
16 September 2003
Welcome back. Have you noticed the change in the Bedford entrance?
In the depths of August, over two long weekends, the Bedford Overpass came down — throwing new light on the entrance to the campus and opening our next major construction project, the West Quad. Those of you who've been here more than 30 years now see the main gate as you remember it. The rest of us are experiencing culture shock.
The next step is a tunnel to carry utilities between Roosevelt and James and create the foundations for the new building. And then next summer, Plaza comes down. (Do I hear cheering?)
Our students still think we're beautiful. In the Princeton Review they ranked us among the top 10 for most beautiful campus. And they still consider us a Best Buy, ranking among the top 20 that deliver "the best academic bang for the buck."
We begin the semester with 29 new faculty members. New faculty who have joined us since fall 2000 now number over 100 — about a fifth of our entire full-time faculty. That figure will continue to grow: we have authorized 38 searches for the present academic year.
Our freshman class is 6% larger than last year's; transfer students have increased by 13%, for a total of 2,843 new undergraduates as of this morning. That, however, is offset by a drop in the number of students who came back — a drop we attribute chiefly to a large graduating class in June; a fairly busy summer session, when students completed coursework at the old tuition rate; and the College's enforcement of our probation policies.
The increase in new students runs counter to the expectation that the tuition increase, mandated by the University late in June, would lead to significant losses. We'll never know how many might have come if tuition had not gone up, though we will seek more information on why students who were eligible to return did not do so.
As you know, the Legislature responded to the strong lobbying campaign in which you participated and restored financial aid to its previous levels. That helps all eligible students to cope with higher tuition bills (some 67% of our students receive financial aid in some form). We have stretched our scholarship dollars as far as possible — and expect that donations from alumni and friends will improve as the market improves.
Tuition was adopted by the University to make up for a shortfall in State funding. Which brings me to a painful statistic: Brooklyn College must now raise 70% of its operating budget through tuition and fees, up from slightly below 50%, where it had been for years. We have joined the ranks of tuition-driven institutions with a whole new set of concerns. In budgetary terms that means that if we meet the goal of 70% — $55 million — this year, our operating budget, which pays our salaries, buys supplies, and pays for maintenance — will be little changed (barring a 2% reducation already announced and possible mid-year cutbacks).
We have arrived at the halfway point of the five-year strategic plan we implemented in spring 2001.
I will touch on a few major points to give you a sense of where we are and where we must go from here.
In the Strategic Plan we set three goals for ourselves.
The first: to maintain and enhance academic quality.
We set out to build a strong faculty. I've already mentioned new faculty. They come to us at a time when jobs in higher education are tight, and we benefit from the opportunities of the market.
We are pursuing a multi-year project to improve the setting in which we teach and learn — paint and refurnish classrooms and offices, upgrade lecture halls in Ingersoll, strengthen our technological capability — to provide for travel and research, and to recognize achievement through named professorships. We support research also by building a new Office of Research and Program Development, by sponsoring grantwriting workshops, and facilitating grant applications.
We want to do more. We want to raise the profile of research on campus: refine our information about available research grants, increase research awards, track research being conducted with grants, better prepare research laboratories for incoming faculty, and strengthen applications for institutional grants. This coming year we will bring together everyone teaching or doing research in science, mathematics, and technology to discuss and define our vision of science for the future. We need to think about where we want to go, what faculty and resources we will need to get there, and what science facilities we will require. Because the next big, state-funded construction project, after the West Quad, is going to be for the sciences.
Over the last few years, the quality of students applying for admission has improved steadily, according to the generally accepted measures of SAT scores and grade-point averages. We have become much better at retaining students: 86% of entering freshmen now return as sophomores. (The number a few years ago was 79%.)
Our Honors Academy — a group of 349 students — is as good as it gets. I take particular satisfaction in announcing that Carol Zicklin, '61, has endowed a professorship — our first ever — specifically for the Honors Academy. We will conduct a search for a senior scholar who will anchor the Honors Academy and serve as a magnet.
The College is getting national exposure by participating in a number of curricular projects. Two of these projects intend to develop a sense of civic responsibility in college students. "The Arts of Democracy," an initiative of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, seeks to build a bridge between college education and responsible citizenship. "The Democracy Project," co-sponsored by the American Association of State Colleges and Universities and the New York Times, seeks to develop curricular and co-curricular activities that work together to create engaged citizens committed to democratic practice.
The American Association of State Colleges and Universities and the Policy Center for the First Year of College chose Brooklyn College as a founding institution — one of a dozen colleges — of a project to develop national benchmarks for first-year programs: the Foundations of Excellence in the First College Year. We were chosen because of the work we do for our freshman students — which, as you know, has been exemplary and a model others have come to emulate.
Our second major goal under the Strategic Plan is to become a student-centered campus. We have focused on creating a service-oriented ethos that lets students see the campus as hospitable to their needs and helps them to benefit from the education we offer.
The On-Course Advantage — TOCA for short — allows students to graduate within four years. It works like a contract: students make college a full-time commitment, maintain satisfactory progress toward a degree, and keep up their grades, while the College, for its part, provides sufficient access to required courses to enable steady progress. TOCA has grown from 241 in its first year to over 800. Meanwhile, the University has discovered the importance of helping students proceed expeditiously toward a degree and looks now to the College to see how it is done.
Our new YESS Center provides evening students (and anyone who's around after 5 o'clock) with one-stop services for registration, financial aid, scholarship information, and the like. This has ameliorated — though not solved — a problem that our students continue to mention — most recently in the Princeton Review — the famous run-around: a tangle of red tape, a jungle of rules and regulations, the absence of adequate help. It is a problem that does not make us look good, and it depresses enrollment. We have worked on it through student orientations, streamlined processes, expanded uses of technology, and customer-service workshops for office staff. We still have a way to go.
To help students, especially seniors, find opportunities after graduation, we have brought in a first-rate professional adviser who gives guidance on professional schools. Marjorie Magner, '69, has made a generous gift to help us furnish a new Center for Career Development and Internships with staff, equipment, and recruitment opportunities, all to help our students find their way into the world of work.
The third goal of the Strategic Plan — close to my heart but also elusive — is to make the College a Model Citizen. The Plan describes that goal as seeking to contribute to the community and to be a presence in the community.
Two campus projects have led to the founding of two new high schools. The STAR High School is a school that focuses on science, technology, and research (hence the acronym). It opened two weeks ago, with over 60 students, in a dedicated space in Erasmus High School, as the first step toward rebuilding that once prestigious school. The High School for Social Justice, located at the former Bushwick High School, is part of a larger vision that seeks to transform traditional approaches to high-school education.
Our involvement in the community has grown, through volunteer work by students, including our annual volunteer day, and by steady efforts to draw the community into our life. The community has come to value College resources — a community newsletter, access to the new library, better information, new campus maps, an open house — and has reciprocated. When we called on the community to help make our case in Albany last spring, it responded.
To be a model citizen is also to model citizenship at home. Our students still complain about the way they are treated. This takes me back to something I said here three years ago — we must create a setting for ourselves, all of us, that is welcoming and hospitable, respectful of each other and civil. I have set up a small task force to examine the problem and come up with practical recommendations.
We are committed to a citizenship of diversity: diversity strengthens our offering and enriches us internally. Our diversity efforts have focused on recruitment, hiring, and retention of minority and women faculty members. We have established a number of standing coordinating bodies — the Diversity Council and the Task Force on Faculty Diversity — to lead these efforts. Diversity as a mission, however, is entrusted to all of us. It is an ideal and an obligation binding on each and every one.
I have talked about three of the goals we set ourselves in the current Strategic Plan. We will soon distribute a mid-course report, which is comprehensive for these last two-and-a-half years. Even as we take stock of the first Strategic Plan of my administration, it becomes time to think about the second. That plan will take effect in 2005, the year we celebrate the 75th anniversary of the founding of the College and the 70th anniversary of our campus. I expect to establish the necessary committees within the year.
Finally, fundraising. You don't see much of it, because much of it takes place off campus: in Manhattan, California, Florida. I give it about half my time, engaging and re-engaging our alumni for the College, telling our story, making the case that we are worthy of their support, bringing them here to show them how beautiful we are and how smart. It's working.
Next spring, we will announce publicly The Campaign for Brooklyn College, a fundraising campaign begun shortly after I took office, with a goal of raising $50 million.
We have already raised $40 million toward that goal.
Some of that $40 million is visible on campus.
The new library, built for us by the State, owes its technology to Morton Topfer, '59, of Dell Corporation — you've seen its trademark on your computers.
Morton Topfer and his late wife Angela gave us the Library Café, which, with funds from City Council, we will soon double.
The Tow and Koppelman Professorships support the faculty, and Tow travel grants sponsor both faculty and students. Students see the world on Furman travel stipends and serve paid internships such as the Buchwald internships.
This past spring, Leonard and Claire Tow, '50 and '52, respectively, pledged $10 million towards a new performing arts center, the largest gift the College has ever received.
And just last month, Carol Zicklin, '61, gave us an endowed professorship for the Honors Academy, and Marjorie Magner, '69, gave us funds for the Center for Career Development and Internships.
And there are more.
I am immensely grateful to each of these donors, proud of the institution to which they have given, and proud of their loyalty to their alma mater.
Once the campaign goes public, with an announcement this spring, it will broaden. I will call upon the deans, the chairs, and certain members of the faculty to help in this, a major effort to raise money for the College.
Kudos. Among our students we can name Nicholas Pitsirikos, chosen as a Beinecke Scholar last year, one of 20 selected nationally and the third from Brooklyn College over the last four years. We have among our student body, winners of the Women's Forum Educational Award, a Salk Scholarship, a Mellon Humanities Fellowship, and admissions with full scholarship support to top-ranked graduate and professional schools.
Among the faculty:
Michael Cunningham, of the MFA Program in Creative Writing, is to be inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences next month.
Tania Leon and Amnon Wolman, of the Conservatory of Music, have both won ASCAP awards, and Tania Leon was honored also by the National Women's History Project celebrating women pioneers.
Mac Wellman, English, received the Lifetime Achievement Award, the highest honor bestowed by the Village Voice Obie Awards, which recognize excellence in Off-Broadway and Off-Off Broadway theater.
Edwin Burrows and Virginia Sanchez-Korrol, of History and of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies, respectively, have been named Distinguished Lecturers by the Organization of American Historians.
And Gerald Friedman, Department of Geology, whose research institute celebrated its silver anniversary this summer, appears in the Facts on File Science Library's listing of the world's most notable geologists of the 20th century — and with the additional title of honorary Kentucky Colonel, bestowed upon him this summer by Governor Patton of Kentucky.
I am proud to recognize members of the faculty who have been appointed to distinguished or named professorships. Let me call their names and ask them to stand — and ask you to hold your applause until we can applaud them all:
Distinguished Professor Edwin Burrows (History)
Koppelman Professors, Rochelle Cherry (Speech Communication Arts and Sciences) and Hector Carrasquillo (Puerto Rican and Latino Studies)
Jacques Edward Levy Professor in Analytical Chemistry: Maggie Ciszkowska (Chemistry)
Levy-Kosminsky Professor of Physical Chemistry: Ira Levine (Chemistry)
Bernard H. Stern Professor in Humor, Daniel Gurskis (Film)
Claire and Leonard Tow Professor: Sophia Perdikaris (Anthropology & Archaeology)
and six Broeklundian Professors:
David Berger, History
Leslie Davenport, Chemistry
Frederick Gardner, Mathematics
Clement Mbom, Modern Languages
Arthur Reber, Psychology
Sharon Zukin, Sociology
They merit our applause.
I recognize the members of the staff who were chosen last year as employees of the month for their dedication to their work, their helpfulness, and their courtesy. Please rise as your name is called, and may I ask again that we hold our applause until all names have been called.
For September 2002, Walter Garvey, Accounts Payable
For October 2002, Monica Rivera, Registrar's Office
For November 2002, Ireen Quercia, Human Resource Services
For December 2002, Evelyn Capitelli, Office of the Vice President of Finance and Administration
For January 2003, members of the Office of Facilities who brought us and who maintain the beautiful campus:
Steven Alliano
James Bryant
Julio Estrada
Heriberto Ferrer
George Forstner
Johnnie Green
Thomas Spoto
For February 2003, Tafari Sherry, Office of Safety and Security
For March 2003, Dolores Bashinsky, Central Depository
For April 2003, Barbara Ryan, Office of the Dean of Graduate Studies
For May 2003, Bettina Faga-Macry, Office of the Bursar
For June 2003, Mitzu Handy, The Student Center
Our congratulations and our thanks to all of you. You deserve our applause.
For the Best of Brooklyn, a charity dinner that raises funds for presidential scholarships, our most prestigious awards for undergraduates, and which honored Mike Kandel, '52, this spring, the Television Center made a three-minute film to give the assembled dinner guests, many of them journalists and financiers who do not know us well, a glimpse of the campus and of the College today. They loved it. Let me show it to you.
[Film]
If there are no questions or comments, I adjourn the Stated Meeting of the Faculty and invite you to join my wife, Flora, and me on the stage for refreshments.
