State of the University Address 2006

Each year at this time, I report to you on the University’s achievements and focus on our hopes and challenges for the new academic year. We are beginning a special year—our 40th—and continue to make remarkable strides, building on the talents and dedication of our students, faculty, and staff. Let me begin by putting our progress—and our future—in broad perspective, by telling you about a book I recently read on the recommendation of one of our colleagues, David Yager. Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind has received rave reviews and focuses on society “moving from the information age to the conceptual age.” Pink has the following to say:

For nearly a century, Western society in general, and American society in particular, has been dominated by a form of thinking and an approach to life that are
narrowly reductive and deeply analytical. Ours has been the [information] age
of the “knowledge worker,”…but that is changing… We are entering a new
[conceptual] age…animated by a different form of thinking and a new
approach to life… Our brains are divided into two hemispheres.
The left hemisphere is sequential, logical, and analytical. The right hemisphere
is nonlinear, intuitive, and holistic… Today the defining skills of the previous
era—the “left-brain” capabilities that powered the Information Age—are
necessary but no longer sufficient. And the…”right-brain” qualities of
inventiveness, empathy, joyfulness, and meaning…increasingly will determine
who flourishes and who flounders. For individuals, families, and organizations, professional success and personal fulfillment now require a whole new mind.¹

For UMBC, this shift has profound implications, particularly involving our increasingly interdisciplinary work connecting arts, sciences, and engineering instruction and research, and, more broadly, our growing strengths across the disciplines. Pink gives us a framework for seeing ourselves today and, more important, for envisioning our future, particularly as we produce graduates who are both analytic and compassionate.

My talk today comes on the heels of our annual retreat, where campus leaders reflected on our first four decades and the campus’s future. Looking toward our 50th anniversary in 2016, we focused on several issues critical to our success: developing the next generation of campus leaders; creating an environment that supports students and nurtures faculty and staff; assessing student learning; fostering greater interdisciplinarity and creating new knowledge through research; serving more students, including adult learners; and strengthening relations with alumni.

The retreat set the stage for today’s event. To gauge our progress, I reviewed the Middle States evaluation team’s recent report to the campus. It cited

“a vibrant and healthy institution [where] learning is paramount,” “the
academic seriousness of the students, [who are] involved and outward-looking,”
“faculty [who are] energetic and accomplished researchers,” “a remarkable degree
of collegiality,” “sound decision-making processes,” and even “grounds [that]
are spotlessly clean.” The team cautioned, however, that we “are at a critical
stage in [our] development.” We face “structural challenges inherent in
simultaneous growth and development on several fronts…and in the years ahead
will need to ensure that [our] momentum is matched by concerted investment
in support, staffing, and infrastructure.”

The team also found that we need to focus more attention on assessing student learning and using the results to strengthen our programs, services, and planning and budgeting. In short, the team found UMBC to be vital and strong, but facing serious resource challenges. Therefore, as we approach our 50th anniversary, we’ll need to adhere to our Strategic Framework for 2016, the campuswide plan developed by our Planning Leadership Team under the Provost’s guidance, which is helping us make the case for needed funding, both public and private. In this context, let me now report to you on the state of the campus.

A year ago, we implemented a major academic reorganization. This year’s transition involving the College of Arts & Sciences’ separation into the College of Natural & Mathematical Sciences and the College of Arts, Humanities, & Social Sciences has gone well, and our senior leadership group is working together effectively. Warren DeVries, our new Dean of Engineering & Information Technology, arrived on August 1st, and please join me in welcoming him to campus. Warren chaired the Mechanical Engineering Department at Iowa State University from 1996-2002 and directed the National Science Foundation’s Design & Manufacturing Innovation Division the past four years. Again, let me thank former Dean Shlomo Carmi, who contributed substantially to the College’s development this past decade. I also want to welcome Michael Dillon, our new Director of Institutional Research, Ken Baron, overseeing Academic & Pre-Professional Advising, and Terri Werner, who leads our new Training & Organizational Development office. Terri’s arrival reflects a new emphasis on providing professional development opportunities for staff and faculty, and she, Michael, and Ken will be contributing to campus in significant ways. Also joining us this semester is Karen Burg, an American Council on Education Fellow and bioengineering professor from Clemson University, who will be working closely with me and senior colleagues. Vice Provost Lynn Zimmerman, also an ACE Fellow, is spending the semester at Princeton with President Shirley Tilghman. Let me also welcome all others new to the campus—we look forward to getting to know you.

Regarding our facilities, it’s easy to appreciate our physical transformation over the past 15 years simply by looking around campus. New buildings in engineering and information technology, physics, and public policy, and major renovations of our biology and chemistry facilities have significantly advanced our core mission in instruction and research. Also adding more than three-quarters of a million square feet of new space for student apartments, the Commons, an addition to the Retriever Athletics Center, and new athletic field and stadium facilities has helped to transform the campus, not just physically, but also in terms of campus environment, which is now far more residential with substantially more student activities and campus life than was the case just a few years ago. And this year’s capital budget includes nearly $5 million in State funding to begin designing our new, $140-million Performing Arts & Humanities Facility. As we all know, this facility is our number-one capital priority for the next several years. We will continue working with the Chancellor, Regents, Governor’s staff, legislators, and others who can be supportive. This facility will house seven departments and promises to create a regional and national appreciation of UMBC as a cultural destination. Also, we recently broke ground in our research park on a major new facility to house the U.S. Geological Survey’s Water Science Center, and later this year we will break ground on a multi-tenant building to house new IT and life-science firms. You’ll also notice that the campus quad has been undergoing a facelift this summer.

Regarding the student body, our 12,000 students are among the most academically talented and diverse we’ve ever enrolled. We have students from every state and over 120 countries, and we’re sending others abroad to study on every continent. Our enrollment includes approximately 1,450 new freshmen, up slightly over a year ago and many with extraordinary academic records, roughly 1,000 transfers, up about 50, and approximately 2,300 graduate students, reflecting an increase of 100 and growing numbers of domestic students, women, and minorities.

Recruiting more new students and retaining more of our continuing students are top campuswide priorities this year—and for the foreseeable future. Bottom line, our annual budgets are tied to our enrollment-growth projections—and our ability to meet those projections. Therefore, we are giving even greater attention and support to recruitment and retention, including aggressive marketing with support from Institutional Advancement. We also are developing more revenue-generating training and research initiatives and enrolling more students in post-baccalaureate certificate programs. The Continuing & Professional Studies division is playing an important role in these efforts. This year’s budget is tied closely to our priorities and reflects a more formal, transparent process. It also is based on reasonable assumptions about revenues and expenditures tied to our enrollment projections. Successful recruitment and retention efforts mean greater revenues for the campus—revenues to fund our complementary academic and administrative plans and provide even stronger support to students, faculty, and staff.

Despite the challenges we face, our success this year has been university-wide. Our students continue to excel in national competitions—from placing high in the Society of Automotive Engineers’ Mini-Baja competition (ahead of such universities as Cornell, Virginia Tech, Purdue, and College Park) and winning a record-setting seventh “world series” of college chess, to finishing first in the National Society of Black Engineers’ Academic Tech Bowl for the second straight year, and winning the Best Digital Map competition sponsored by the American Congress on Surveying & Mapping. Also, the class of 2006 included recipients of major awards and students going on to top graduate schools and promising professional careers. The Ancient Studies Department had a particularly stellar year, sending five graduates to classics programs at UNC-Chapel Hill, the University of Chicago, Tufts, the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and King’s College in London. Other graduates received Fulbright Awards, Goldwater and National Security Education Program Scholarships, and NSF Graduate Research Fellowships. Still others are going on to programs at other top schools across the nation—from Harvard in biology, and Stanford in mathematics, to the University of Arizona in philosophy. Other graduates are launching careers with major companies and agencies—from IBM, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Mercantile, and T. Rowe Price to the National Security Agency, Social Security Administration, Peace Corps, and Maryland public school systems. Our graduate students this year include Fulbright, Lucent Technologies, Wyeth, and NSF GEM and Graduate Fellows, as well as fellows supported by the National Physical Sciences Consortium and the Southern Regional Education Board. One graduate student’s success warrants special mention—Victoria D’Souza, who received her UMBC Ph.D. in biochemistry in 2002 and did her post-doctoral work in our Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) lab, just joined the faculty at Harvard, where she received a multi-million-dollar start-up package.

Our student-athletes excelled again this year in the America East Conference. Highlights include tournament championships won by our men’s teams in lacrosse, swimming and diving, and cross country, as well as regular-season titles captured by the women’s and men’s lacrosse teams. Most important, our student-athletes are academically strong, with more than half earning gpas of 3.0 or higher. Also, our men’s and women’s basketball teams had the highest gpas in the conference, and student Adam Grossman (track and field) earned Academic All-America and America East Scholar-Athlete honors this year.

Many of our faculty also have distinguished themselves this year. This past spring, we recognized our Presidential Teaching and Research Professors, Phil Sokolove in biology, and Joel Liebman in chemistry. They reflect the faculty’s commitment to students—in the classroom, through research, and through mentoring and advising, both one-on-one and in group settings. Other examples include Darwinian scholar Sandra Herbert, in history, who was named a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Cambridge, where she is helping plan the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth and Cambridge’s 800th anniversary this year; Rachel Brewster, in biology, was one of only 20 scientists nationally to receive the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, which the White House calls “the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on scientists and engineers beginning independent careers;” Eric Dyer, in visual arts, won the Gus Van Sant Best Experimental Film Award; Rebecca Boehling, in history, received the David Baumgardt Memorial Fellowship; Katherine Seley-Radke, in chemistry and biochemistry, was named a Jefferson Science Fellow at the U.S. State Department; Suzanne Rosenberg, in biology, was appointed by the Governor to Maryland’s new Stem Cell Research Commission; Anne Rubin, in history, received the Avery O. Craven Prize for her Civil War work; Tiffany Baffour, in social work, received the Maryland Higher Education Commission’s Henry C. Welcome Fellowship; and Julia Ross and Taryn Bayles, in chemical and biochemical engineering, received the Regents’ Faculty Award for Excellence for Collaboration in Public Service. Scores of other faculty across our full spectrum of disciplines have won major awards, fellowships, and grants, published books, received patents, and had other creative achievements. Also recognized by the Regents was Emma Sellers, in political science, who received this year’s Regents’ Staff Award for Outstanding Service to Students. And our Presidential Staff Award winners this year include Joe Hill and James Peach, both in physical plant. Kudos to all of our award-winning faculty and staff this year.

Another top priority this year, and in the future, is to continue building our research portfolio and increasing our sponsored programs, which totaled $85 million this past fiscal year. Faculty and staff have been instrumental in building strong partnerships with Federal and State agencies, companies, and foundations not only producing major research-and-training opportunities and funding, but also contributing to our rising national reputation among research universities. Particularly noteworthy this year are UMBC’s leadership role in collaborations with Princeton, Rice, Hopkins, Texas A&M, and City College of New York on a $15-million NSF grant creating a major new Engineering Research Center; a $2.2-million grant from HHMI’s Undergraduate Education Science Program; the fifth million-dollar grant from the U.S. Department of Education supporting our Center for History Education; a $2.9-million NSF grant to our Center for Environmental Research & Education (CUERE) for graduate research and training focused on water in the urban environment; and most recently, a $1.5-million NIH grant for AIDS research instrumentation and an invitation from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (on whose board I serve) to participate in its prestigious Institutional Leadership Program, collaborating with the University of Illinois, Notre Dame, and others on initiatives involving undergraduate research.

As we continue to expand our Federal research portfolio, NASA is our largest funding source, and NSF and NIH are our next two heaviest Federal supporters. Our success is due largely to the work of our centers, including the Center for Advanced Studies in Photonics Research, our Goddard Earth Systems Technology Center, CUERE, our HHMI lab, the Joint Center for Astrophysics, and our Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology, among others. Other significant funding and partnering opportunities come from a variety of sources for activities ranging from K-16 math-science initiatives to the arts, involving our Imaging Research Center, Center for Art & Visual Culture, Center for Health Program Development & Management, Maryland Institute for Policy Analysis & Research, and the Choice Program and other activities in the Shriver Center.

We should all be encouraged by the commitment of faculty and staff to special initiatives focused on women and minorities in science and engineering—from WISE (our Women In Science & Engineering program), ADVANCE (our program for recruiting and advancing women faculty), and CWIT (our Center for Women & Information Technology), to the McNair and undergraduate and graduate Meyerhoff Scholars programs for preparing minority researchers, and our Promise and Alliance-for-Graduate-Education-and-the-Professoriate programs to increase the numbers of minority graduate students in STEM fields. A year ago, I reported that women held the majority of tenure-track positions in our Chemical & Biochemical Engineering Department, and just recently, Dr. Julie Ross was named chair of that department. More generally, since 1999, when WISE was launched, the number of women faculty in STEM departments has doubled—from 20 to 40—with advances in all ranks. Recently, Science magazine featured an article by Mike Summers and me on UMBC’s sustained success producing minority science-and-engineering graduates, and Mike and I have been traveling the country together speaking at special symposia sponsored by HHMI and the National Institutes of Health. What’s particularly significant about UMBC’s work in these areas is that the lessons we’ve learned are benefiting all of our students and are being replicated nationwide.

In such positive light, and coinciding with our 40th anniversary, we are publicly launching UMBC’s major capital campaign next month, with its ambitious $100-million goal by 2010. We have been in the campaign’s quiet phase and have already raised $60 million, including multi-million gifts for the Erickson School (the first undergraduates are enrolled in our new Management of Aging Services program), the Sondheim Public Affairs Scholars Program, and most recently a $5-million gift from George and Betsy Sherman for the Sherman Teacher Training Program in science and technology. Across all of our disciplines, we are building endowment support that reflects our campaign priorities, including student scholarships, fellowships, and internships, faculty development and research, and endowed chairs and professorships. To put the campaign’s success thus far in perspective, we raised $14 million in FY 2006—double the amount raised a decade ago when we celebrated our 30th anniversary. Even more impressive, our endowment today stands at $40 million compared to just $3.5 million in 1996. In other words, over just the past decade, we’ve raised ten times as much money for the endowment as we raised the previous 30 years! Of course, “giving begins at home,” and I want to acknowledge faculty, staff, and alumni who have been giving to the Annual Fund. Thank you for your generous spirit. With most campaign gifts thus far coming from corporations and a handful of individual donors, our challenge is to encourage even greater support from those who know UMBC best.

Our success also continues to produce heightened visibility. State and national press coverage of the University is now commonplace. Colleagues across the country have been congratulating us on the recent New York Times editorial crediting UMBC with “rocking the house when it comes to the increasingly critical mission of turning American college students into scientists.” It just doesn’t get much better than that! We’re also attracting many more people to campus who want to learn about us. Over the past year, we’ve hosted visits by leaders of national agencies, corporations, other major universities, school systems, and other organizations. Faculty, staff, and students have traveled extensively, talking not only about their own interests and experiences, but also about the UMBC experience.

Heightened attention and increased investment also require greater accountability to ensure that our image is substantive. As most of you know, State auditors this year completed an intensive review of our operations over the past three years, and their examination was quite positive, as were System audits, the Middle States and ABET accreditation visits, and our annual budget hearings in Annapolis. Such regular scrutiny requires us to stay focused on quality, responsiveness, and accountability.

PeopleSoft implementation continues to be a top administrative priority. While the process has been challenging for all of us in recent years, we continue to make progress, and our new systems are giving us greater internal control in fiscal and personnel management. This year, we have developed 20 training classes and put all documentation online; created a governance structure to prioritize IT projects, relying on advisory committees seeking user input; advanced two major PeopleSoft functions—the electronic payroll interface and financial system upgrades—both on schedule and in the final testing stages; and built a strong foundation for implementing the new student administration system. Regarding SA, the iStrategy data warehouse will be released this fall, providing new capabilities for reviewing student data under the current system, and allowing us to move seamlessly into PeopleSoft with the same reporting capabilities. Again, I want to thank all of you who have been working hard to implement these new systems in your units. Your commitment and positive approach are deeply appreciated.

The spirit of our founders 40 years ago has become a part of the culture and fabric of our campus today. We succeed by putting people first—supporting and guiding students as they learn and grow; supporting faculty in their research and teaching; supporting staff in their work with students and colleagues; and responding to the needs of our growing external constituents.

When I ask people how long they’ve been here, I’m always struck by their responses, particularly because so many of you have given your careers to this university. Whether you’ve been here for decades or just arrived, you make a difference through your contributions. We can all mark our time here in relation to the campus’s development—we are growing together. As UMBC celebrates its 40th anniversary, I’m celebrating my 20th year on campus this fall and my 15th as President—and I want you to know how much I appreciate the support you have given me throughout the years. We have become a distinctive model in American higher education, combining the traditions of the liberal arts academy, the creative intensity of the research university, and the social responsibility of the public university—exceptional by example.

As I say every year at this time, it is an honor each day to serve as President. Thank you.

1. Pink, Daniel H., A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age, Riverhead Press, New York, 2005, pp. 2-3.

STATE OF THE UNIVERSITY ADDRESS