Remarks at the Stated Meeting of the Faculty
February 16, 2000
I have looked forward to this moment. I have been eager to return and tell you about where I have been and where I hope we can go together.
I've been away from Brooklyn College for just over two years, and I thank you for your support while I was away. You wrote me your thoughts, sent cards and good wishes, shared your wisdom, and encouraged me in the more trying moments. You were like family, always there, even from afar. I was all alone in that exposed position and yet I stood some 16,000 strong. Thank you for helping me then and thank you for this welcome home.
It is a rare experience to return to an institution one knows intimately, from close to thirty years' acquaintance, and see it with new eyes.
The nearly two years I spent as interim chancellor taught me things I didn't even know were out there to be learned-and which prudence commands that I not recount in any detail here.
And being chancellor gave me many advantages. It enabled me to find out how this University really works. It let me discover new approaches and learn about programs and services of high quality at the other CUNY colleges.
It gave me a chance to acquire a solid reputation and to establish good working relations with the Governor's Office and with City Hall, with the State Education Department, the State Division of Budget, and heads of other universities and university systems. It gave me a much broader understanding of higher education today, a view that encompasses institutions local and national, large and small, innovative and retrograde.
All that allowed me to compare our college with the other senior colleges-that is, to locate Brooklyn College quite precisely within the CUNY firmament-and to see it in the context of comparable institutions across the country.
While I was in office, my wife, Flora, and I visited each of the University's campuses, some more than once. These visits were voyages of discovery, full of pleasant surprises, and punctuated by contrasts I observed with Brooklyn in mind. To see Brooklyn College from this rare and privileged angle was a gift.
Over time, my skin grew a bit thicker, my hair a bit grayer, and my mind, I believe, a bit broader and wiser.
This unusual preparation gives me an unparalleled sense of where the College stands now and where we can go from here.
Brooklyn's strengths are formidable-and not always appreciated. We are admired for our core curriculum. We are respected for our enduring liberal arts tradition and our ability to balance that tradition with the growing importance of professional and preprofessional education. Our applicant pool achieves the highest SAT scores in the University. We have more graduate students than any other college in the University, and our total enrollments rank in the top ten of public institutions statewide. We have distinguished ourselves by the quality and the number of new full-time faculty we have hired of late.
We are a community varied in every possible way and yet bound together by our commitment to our students and to their academic success. We understand that our students and their fortunes are the heart of the academic enterprise. That principle, with us from the start, has never been questioned-in different times, with different faculties, under different boards, and among different politicians. We have invested our resources, meager and otherwise, accordingly: in academic programs, a core curriculum, new faculty. And we shall continue to make similar investments.
I believe we are at one in wanting Brooklyn College to be the best. To be the best for our students-and to enable them in turn to achieve the best for themselves. In order to do that we must evolve and grow. Our past achievements, which are a source of pride and inspiration, are not enough, and they do not represent our limits.
I've given considerable thought to what might make Brooklyn College a model institution in public higher education. Let me propose some characteristics of a model urban public liberal arts college in this new century. Some we already command, some are in their infancy, some we only dream about.
I propose these not as a prescription but as a stimulus for campuswide discussion, where ideas can take shape, achieve definition, and emerge as institutional goals.
We did exactly this when we put the Core in place twenty years ago. I challenge us to do it again.
A model public liberal arts college is committed first and foremost to academic quality. Quality must distinguish everything we do. We insist on strong, intellectually vigorous academic programs; we retain and nurture a top-flight faculty with superior credentials and accomplishments; we recruit and support a well-prepared student body able to benefit from the strong programs that we offer.
The enterprise of a model public liberal arts college centers on its students. We enable our students to attain their educational goals. We provide sufficient sections of required coursework to let students advance at their desired pace and graduate in as short a time as they can manage. We furnish the necessary academic support to enable them to work steadily and well. We help our students in their applications to professional and graduate schools and to positions in the workforce.
A model public liberal arts college resides on a twenty-first century campus, both physical and virtual. It lives in a physical plant that is well maintained and conducive to teaching, learning, and research; it uses state-of-the-art technological delivery systems that are in good working order, and it gives these systems the necessary support; it enjoys a state-of-the-art library with a collection and services consistent with its research agenda and academic offerings.
Our efforts in the nineties won us approvals and capital funding that will give us a magnificent campus. I ask two questions: (1) Will we be ready academically for the instructional and research opportunities the new infrastructure will offer us? and (2) As we progress through the new millennium, will one have to come to Brooklyn to go to Brooklyn?
A model public liberal arts college is in good financial health and manages its resources effectively. It has sufficient funding and flexibility to keep tuition affordable, provide scholarships, launch new programs, recruit and retain good faculty, support appropriate levels of administration, and maintain its campus. It increases its tax-levy investment, expands sponsored research, and attracts significant private funding.
A model public liberal arts college works with integrated information systems. It maintains a comprehensive, integrated institutional database that informs decision making and enables the campus to function intelligently and efficiently.
A model public liberal arts college touts its accomplishments. It holds itself accountable for how it spends public funds and for what it produces. It finds ways to measure and report its effectiveness and outcomes.
A model public liberal arts college is a model citizen in the broader community. It engages the local community, businesses, families, and individuals in ways appropriate to its core academic mission. It serves the community and becomes a force for reform and renewal in the local school system. Above all, it fosters a climate of civility and celebrates the richness of a diverse community-a richness (and I speak as one who knows Europe well) that is a unique American strength.
A model public liberal arts college reaches all intended audiences with a clear and unequivocal message. That message is accurate and informative, welcoming and helpful. It is conveyed in any number of ways, including a lively and information-rich Web site designed to inform our various publics.
I pose these questions to all of you and in particular to those engaged in the strategic planning process that is poised to begin its work and mobilize the creativity and ingenuity of the entire college community:
1. Do these characteristics cover what we believe to be essential?
2. How do we shape them into a vision commensurate with our tradition, our obligations as a public institution, our sense of our students-and of their future and our own?
3. Presuming we are not able to accomplish all at once, what are our priorities?
For the planning process to be informed by excellence, it must be informed by the best thinking possible. I eagerly await your ideas on what we must do to achieve our goals. My hope is to arrive at a new five-year plan by the fall semester.
As we move toward that more ambitious target, however, I propose that we explore some very practical things right now.
For our students, I want us to create a coordinated support system that responds to student aspirations, even as these change over time, and to align our offerings with what our students want to achieve. Our regular students look for scholarship incentives, block programming, and distributed learning. Our transfer students, who come to us mainly from Kingsborough Community College, look for early evaluations as prospective students and easy integration into the college. Students on the fast track look to earn their degrees in the traditional four-year time frame.
We need to introduce workable strategies for each of these clusters of desiderata, to give our students what I would call the on-course advantage. In speaking with students before I assumed office and since, I heard near-unanimous appeal for such an approach. In the next week or so, I shall appoint a task force to recommend effective remedies that we can introduce in the coming academic year.
For the faculty, I will ask the Brooklyn College Foundation, in its generosity, for additional funds to recognize and honor those of exceptional achievement and to give new faculty members more time to pursue their scholarly interests and build their scholarly reputations. I will also seek additional resources for academic support from the Foundation. A college that strives to improve quality and raise its standing must be prepared to acknowledge the efforts and ambitions of its faculty.
For the college community, I shall work to preserve and enhance on campus an atmosphere of civility that respects our differences. I also wish to ensure that the campus itself is clean, secure, and hospitable. The quality of our discourse and of our surroundings intimately affects the value we attach to ourselves and to each other. We must set an example for ourselves and for one another, and I will attend to this matter closely.
No institution, and certainly no college, succeeds without shared effort. We need to stay in touch. We can do so by traditional means (and I look forward to conversations and letters) and by new electronic means (and I look forward to your e-mail messages). I shall take advantage of the College's Web site to post messages at regular intervals and keep you informed on such matters as enrollment and budget, Board of Trustees and University policies, searches and new appointments. And to keep you informed on the progress of our common undertakings. I am delighted to have this new possibility of contact and exchange, and I look forward to hearing from you.
And now I invite you to join Flora and me for a reception on the stage. But before we conclude the formal meeting, are there any questions?
