Provost Susan V. Herbst
Fall Faculty Address
October 6, 2005
 

"Priorities for Academic Affairs"

Thanks very much for the introduction, President Hall, and to the Faculty Senate for the opportunity to discuss major academic issues we confront here in the fall of 2005.

This is a university that has experienced significant change and transition over several years, and I am grateful for the patience of the faculty as new administrators settle in and learn our way. The University at Albany is an incredibly warm, welcoming place and I know I speak for all the recent arrivals in the Provost's Office when I say that.

There were many ups and downs, but you stayed -- after weathering those storms -- to help build the future. I am grateful for this as well. These last few years have been very tough on public higher education in this country, so at least we are not alone in our budget cuts, depletion of faculty and deferred maintenance. We are, in fact, in better shape than many public research universities, and it is important to maintain a national perspective as we evaluate our local problems.

It is a wonderful moment for us; we have our challenges but we do have the resources to push forward and the will to cement our place among the strongest research universities in the nation. We have lost ground here and there, but it is ground that can be gained back very quickly if we work together.

In terms of priorities for our academic mission, I've only been here a month and I sound like a broken record already. There are, to my mind, four priority areas. These areas matter immensely at every research university, so you might hear this very same speech in Madison, Chapel Hill, or College Park. They have similar struggles, in many of the same areas we do. But let me focus on 4 domains today:

1. Undergraduate Education
2. Expansion, Support and Diversity of our Faculty
3. Graduate Education
4. Partnership

Before I start with undergraduate education, a few words of preface. First, on the national rankings, dashboards and other statistics documenting where we are. You've seen the data, you know our problems. We'll always have these data on hand, and we'll always look at them. But I believe we are all at the same point: Let's move on. Let's work on our problems and make progress in getting past them.

Second preface is about our collective self-esteem. I know that we are behind in some areas and that we have work to do. But I still have - something I will lose quickly no doubt - tremendous objectivity when I study the University at Albany. And I will tell you that this is already a great research institution. When I told scholarly colleagues around the country, across disciplines, that I was moving here - and I know a lot of elitists - they were impressed and in nearly all cases, named faculty here whom they respect tremendously. Setting aside our many nationally-ranked programs, we have a very strong faculty across many disciplines, a huge number of faculty and administrative leaders who are dedicated to the university, significant interdisciplinary collaboration, stellar teaching, extraordinary (if somewhat unusual!) architecture, buildings of historic importance and great beauty downtown, and a local community that recognizes our value to the region. We should always look to metrics and to universities that are ahead of us, but please know that this is seen as a place of high quality scholarship and education and we should be proud to be here. I know I am.

But to undergraduate education. I am not going to stand here and tell you it matters; you wouldn't have chosen the career you have if you didn't enjoy educating young people and enabling them to become thinking citizens. It's the most important thing we do. We hope our research and writing matters, and that we permanently change the course of our discipline. But those are, truthfully, rare instances. The impacts we have on the lives of our students, on the other hand, are very real, constant and lasting.

I believe our goal should be to turn our students into intellectuals. I don't expect that every UAlbany graduate will seek a doctorate or want to read Kierkegaard in their spare time. But I do believe we should teach our students that the world of ideas matters, that it is fun and important to think, and that argument is essential to citizenship. Students think and argue in class, but we need to underscore that classroom culture is fleeting. Let's implant in our students - no matter how well- or ill-prepared they are for college -- a life long desire to learn, no matter how elusive the project seems.

Along these lines, and coming back down to earth, there is so much we can do. In Academic Affairs, we have a renewed focus on the first year experience, on retention, on advising and all the other vital initiatives that make undergraduates stay put and stay focused. In the best cases, we help students find their intellectual passion, and they run off on their own without our constant surveillance. I believe that if we work more intensely with freshmen and sophomores - through advising , programming, and creating an intellectual environment for them - we will see even more demanding and impressive juniors and seniors. More details on these initiatives shall come soon, but we are fortunate to have leaders in the administration and on the senior faculty dedicated to these matters.

A word about honors: We must build a university honors college. Other universities like ours, with challenges like ours, have built successful honors colleges. In doing so, they transformed the entire nature of undergraduate education at their institutions because the colleges stretched across all disciplines and corners of their universities. Honors colleges attract top freshmen and serve the most ambitious students. And, although it sounds elite, it is not: provosts and faculty at universities with strong honors colleges have told me that their honors colleges serve as beacons for the entire undergraduate body, no matter how large. Honors colleges underscore excellence and lead the way. I hope we can establish an honors college that will be selective yet still large enough to leave a major footprint on the whole university.

Another reason for the establishment of an honors college: We want our students to have the sort of multi-year preparation that will enable them to compete for Rhodes, Marshall, Truman and other scholarships. It is our responsibility to help students become competitive for these grants, and it must start early in their college careers through systematic attention to their intellectual development, careful advising and development of a community of junior thinkers. I thank the CAS faculty who worked on early proposals, as well as the Senate working group on honors, and ask that we make an honors college a reality as soon as possible. We are behind other public universities in these matters, so let's get on board and do the right thing for our deserving students.

A word about faculty. As I noted, we already have a terrific faculty with high standards for teaching and scholarship. We do not have issues with faculty quality, far from it, I am impressed on a daily basis with the accomplishments of this faculty. Our problem is that we don't have enough faculty, not nearly enough, and our faculty have not been supported to the level they deserve. Improving the lot of faculty is the responsibility of faculty in some ways: Faculty must work with each other, with the resources they have, with their chairs. Faculty need to strive for excellence in their disciplines, bring in external money where they can, and dedicate themselves to our students. But the truth is that faculty can only do so much. It is the job of the administration to support the faculty and build the infrastructure faculty need to do their work well. I will tell you that the President, I and everyone else in central administration see this task as highest priority.

Put another way: We need money! We must increase the size of the pie. I am not particularly interested in moving resources from one starved unit to another, although some of this may be justified and it is something deans - more than any provost - must do every day. The reason President Hall pushes us on compact planning is that he is anxious to start a major capital campaign, get on the road, and tell donors and legislators, with confidence, what our shared, university priorities are. The compact planning effort feels like a rush and it is one: But we simply cannot raise significant money until we complete the process. I wish it were done tomorrow so we could start to raise the endowment and build new infrastructure. It's hard for us to wait, but we have opted for an inclusive, faculty-oriented process. So let's do the planning as quickly as we can, no matter how painful, so we explain to donors and the world who we are, showing them that we are capable of campus-wide planning. There is not one successful comprehensive campaign in this nation that did not begin with a major planning process. It feels rushed at the places that are hungry, and we are one of them.

The campaign will bring us resources and we are of course making daily arguments to SUNY administrators for increased funding. This goes well, but they are hardly wealthy, and need to make hard choices as well. We can do better in our competition for state funds if we have a plan, priorities and evidence that we mean business. We need to present a united front and soon.

When the funds start coming in, and they will, much of them will go toward faculty support. We need endowed chairs, endowed lecture series, more discretionary money for faculty, internal seed grants, research assistance funds, funds for equipment, for labs, for post-docs, for travel. These are the obvious ways to support faculty and we are focused on them.

But first things first: lets do our planning well, start this campaign, and get moving as a university that knows its values, its priorities, and acts on them. I ask for your patience: None of this will happen immediately. But I will tell you that we are moving as quickly as we can, without sacrificing the discussion, study and argument we need.

And please give it some time: This is a faculty that has suffered, but we simply cannot turn an institution this complex around - in a resource-poor environment - over night. There is history here and we shall do our best to preserve what is good and work on areas of concern as quickly as humanly possible. Universities are big, sluggish organizations by their nature, and I ask your help in prodding and pushing so we can overcome some of the inherent inertia of an organization of this size.

On diversity: So many universities give lip service to this but I'd like diversity to be a real priority for us. We need to work at it, and in very strategic, thoughtful ways. We will fail as a university if we do not increase the number of minority scholars as best we can and in as many fields as we can. I have learned a lot about this in the past, and I want to help you to succeed, hence our upcoming workshop with chairs and deans. Research shows that our diverse student bodies learn best from a diverse faculty. And it's more fulfilling, more engaging and more fun to serve on a truly multi-cultural faculty. Let us go to the mat and try our hardest to make this a place of real and not just rhetorical diversity.

A third priority for us is graduate education. Graduate students are critical to any research university and are our junior colleagues. We need renewed focus on graduate programs. We have many fine ones, but I ask you to start asking hard questions about your program and how you train your students. What is the goal of graduate education in your discipline at this time? In terms of our doctoral students, how can we help them to be as competitive on the academic job market as possible? It's very tough out there, and in some fields there are few faculty positions open. But let us think strategically about how we can compete for those slots and place our students in the great universities and liberal arts colleges.

So much of this is about resources as well: We do not have enough money to support as many graduate students as we'd like to the level we would like. I assure you that this is true even at the very wealthiest universities. Graduate education is low on the list in campaigns and donors do not always find it the most attractive point of investment even though we know graduate education is vital to the academy.

How do we fight this? We try to increase the pie here, and as you know, graduate education is on the list of the President's university goals. But I ask you to think hard about your programs as well:

• Should we be admitting fewer students, but each with more funding and investment of faculty?
• Is there a way to channel more department funds toward graduate professional development?
• How can we give them more opportunities to co-author where appropriate?
• Can we do better in terms of writing graduate support into our grants?
• Are we monitoring their teaching, to make sure they do not have overly arduous assignments?
• Hardest of all: Should your department narrow its focus in graduate education, and train a critical mass of students with interests in the same areas, instead of accepting students from across your discipline? Even if it means that not all faculty will teach graduate students every year?

Very difficult questions. I struggled with them as a faculty member, as a chair, as a dean. It is likely you have all of these questions top of mind. But let's keep them at the fore in the interests of training our graduate students to have the best possible opportunities. We as faculty have plum jobs, at one of just over 100 research-extensive universities in the nation. I want our graduate students to have what we have.

Fourth and final item I want to discuss is partnership. In this administration we will be as clear, straightforward and collaborative as we possibly can and we will respect faculty governance and participation immensely. The university goes nowhere without it.

Putting aside, as we must, issues that demand sensitive balance among legitimate yet conflicting parties, managerial issues or confidential matters, we will do the best we can to partner with faculty and students across domains. The President and I both have track records that demonstrate the value we place on straightforward dialogue and faculty involvement. Neither of us have forgotten what it is like to be on the faculty. I can say that I miss being on the faculty, in a department, every single day. I was a noisy advocate for faculty governance, on the record, for my entire career and I don't intend to stop now.

We need to pull together. I feel as though this is a university with many first-rate pieces, but they are not always joined to make this the strong institution it can be. We have scores of islands of excellence here, but none will reach the highest order of excellence unless they are coordinated, supported and put in dialogue with each other. We academics tend to be independent agents and we are rewarded for being focused on ourselves and on our sub-disciplines. But we sink or swim together at a university, and so must find ways to advocate for our interests, and simultaneously, realize the need for compromise and focus on the collective interest. I am not saying it's easy. But it is the only way we will become a gem in the SUNY system and in the world of higher education far beyond it.

Thanks again to Steve and the Senate Executive Committee for giving me this chance to speak. I am grateful to be at this remarkable institution, and will do my best to serve it well.