chancellor@ku.edu
This is the 11th time I have had the privilege to convene the annual KU Faculty and Staff Fall Convocation.
In 2001, we met the same week as the attack on the World Trade Center. In 2005, we meet a week after Hurricane Katrina and the evacuation of the city of New Orleans.
Once again, we are convening a school year amidst chaos and uncertainty, with the future cloudy, subject to revision and repair.
Even though we have been opening the University of Kansas in this ceremony for 140 years, the present suffering we have watched in New Orleans reminds us that nothing is ever permanent or certain, or as settled and as safe as we think it is. We should not be so arrogant as to assume that we know what lies ahead.
On the other hand, I am very confident about the future of this university. Reference the success cited by Provost and Dr. Carothers. It is as strong as it has ever been, and it will be strong enough to weather future storms.
As we prepare for the uncertainty and anxiety that looms ahead - a nation at war, one of our major cities bankrupt and bereft, terrorism threatening our sense of personal and national security - I still believe KU will not merely survive but triumph.
It will do so because of the extraordinary educational community that has been created here. KU is as strong as it has ever been, and it will need this strength for what lies ahead. We should not be smug, but neither should we allow our self-confidence to be undermined.
You have created a remarkable success story these past few years.
Students
Faculty
Rankings
Research
Stewardship
This is a record of success we should all be proud of.
It is fair and accurate to say that KU has never been stronger. But I also have to say that I don't believe KU has ever been more challenged than it is today. And our success occurs at a moment in history when there is great anxiety and uneasiness.
For example: Our excellence is well recognized nationally, and yet not understood locally, as the recent U.S. News controversy revealed. It is almost as though there is a deliberate unwillingness to recognize the validity of our achievement.
We have the ability, because of your accomplishments and the private donations of our alumni, to build major new buildings, and add those buildings to the assets of the state. But just as there was a failure to maintain the infrastructure of New Orleans, we are denied funding to maintain KU's buildings, leading to a huge deferred maintenance problem.
We have entered into a compact with our students and our Regents to raise tuition to a more competitive level (even though it is still below the average of our peers) and yet the legislature will not even permit us to receive the interest on the tuition we collect.
At a time when the university has leveraged the state's investment four-fold, so that we return $4 for every $1 invested in KU, politicians trumpet a "no new taxes pledge" and threaten the entire educational system of Kansas with spurious schemes like the "Tax Payer's Bill of Rights" - a bankrupt idea already proven in other states to be a recipe for destruction of public education.
Finally, our science is of national stature, but our state school board challenges the scientific principles that are essential to our teaching, and makes the state the butt of jokes for the rest of the country. Six politicians on the board claim that evolution is just a "theory."
Evolution is a theory in the same way that gravity is a theory - it has been proven by years of scientific observation and experimentation. If we were to fail to teach such basic scientific principles, we would place Kansas students at a disadvantage in the global, intellectual marketplace, and we would limit their ability to contribute to scientific leadership in the world. KU and the State of Kansas must be part of the scientific discovery process that drives innovation and keeps us competitive in a global economy.
We must prepare students for this global competition. One of the reasons that we feel so challenged is that at the very time that Americans retreat from their commitment to fund higher education, universities assume even greater importance to our survival as a nation in the global marketplace.
Tom Friedman, New York Times columnist has documented this phenomenon in his new book which many of you have read, The World Is Flat, A Brief History of The 21st Century. His book says many things, but one thing it says very clearly is that we are on the brink of a huge mistake as a nation, because we are neglecting higher education.
Friedman's book results from his careful analysis of how well the country is doing in global competition. The answer is not too well. He cites the jobs that have gone to India and China. He cites three basic facts about that world marketplace.
Friedman says we have only two choices for facing this global challenge: "try to put up walls of protection, or to keep marching forward with the confidence that America has the right stuff, even in a flatter world."
He believes the American system is ideally suited for competition because of our research universities.
Friedman argues that America's research universities "spin off a steady stream of competitive experiments, innovations and scientific breakthroughs - from mathematics to biology to physics to chemistry." They prove, "The more educated you are, the more options you will have in a flat world."
He quotes Bill Gates: "Our university system is the best. We fund our universities to do a lot of research and that is an amazing thing…We reward risk taking. Our university system is competitive and experimental."
It [American's university system] "is a great engine of innovation in the world."
Tom Friedman: "The web browser, MRI, super fast computers, global position technology, space exploration devices and fiber optics are just a few of the many inventions that got started through basic university research projects."
But Friedman warns, "While we were admiring the flat world we had created, a lot of people in India, China, and East Europe were busy figuring out how to take advantage of it."
America's "quiet crisis" is the erosion of America's science and engineering base." In 15-20 years will discover we have a critical shortage of scientists and engineers.
One "dirty little secret. . . is that the generation of scientists and engineers who were motivated to go into science by the threat of Sputnik in 1957 and the inspiration of JFK are reaching their retirement years and are not being replaced in the numbers that they must be if an advanced economy like that of the United States is to remain at the head of the pack. According to the National Science Foundation, half of American's scientists and engineers are forty years or older, and the average age is steadily rising.
"Nearly 40 percent of the 18,146 people at NASA are age fifty or older. Twenty-two percent of NASA workers are fifty-five or older. The National Commission on Mathematics and Science Teaching for the Twenty-first Century, chaired by the former astronaut and senator John Glenn, found that two-thirds of the nation's mathematics and science teaching force will retire by 2010."
"So the number of jobs in the U.S. economy that require science and engineering training will grow; that is what the global economy will demand. But the number of U.S. citizens prepared for those jobs will, at best, be level; and the availability of people from other countries who have science and engineering training will decline, either because of limits to entry imposed by U.S. national security restrictions or because of intense global competition for people with these skills."
"The NSB report found that the number of American eighteen-to-twenty-four year-olds who receive science degrees has fallen to seventeenth in the world, whereas we ranked third three decades ago. It said that of the 2.8 million first university degrees (what we call bachelor's degrees) in science and engineering granted worldwide in 2003, 1.2 million were earned by Asian students in Asian universities, 830,000 were granted in Europe, and 400,000 in the United States. In engineering specifically, universities in Asian countries now produce eight times as many bachelor's degrees as the United States."
What is the effect of all of this? Where does it leave us? We know that global competition will be more intense than ever before in history.
As Friedman puts it, "We Americans will have to work harder, run faster, and become smarter to make sure we get our share."
That is the world that our students will be entering. And that is the world that they expect us to prepare them for.
What can we do to change KU so that these kinds of goals can be achieved? The Provost just gave you two answers: Prepare people to graduate in four years and selective admissions.
Let me address selective admissions and add three other initiatives that can help us achieve greater competitiveness.
Selective Admissions - We need to determine whether KU should adopt a selective admissions policy for undergraduates, as was suggested by the North Central accreditation team. At the same time we need to determine if our admission policies for graduate and professional schools are sufficient to match the quality of our faculty with the quality of our students.
General Education - At the undergraduate level, we have maintained the same general education program, with modest amendments, for over 15 years. Last year, a committee looked at General Education at KU and made suggestions for change. I would challenge us to create a much more vigorous General Education program, one that prepares students for globalization and guarantees to teach our students to write, do science, and do mathematics equally well.
One University - Let's realize the potential in the idea of "one university." We know that the combined efforts of our four campuses - Lawrence, Med Center, Edwards Campus, and the KU School of Medicine in Wichita - is the way for us to achieve the synergy of a major research and teaching university. We must find ways to eliminate barriers to cooperation and joint discovery, and realize the full magnitude of our potential as "one university."
As part of this effort, I think it is important for us to identify and consider the role athletics play in KU's identity. We, more than most universities, should be able t capitalize on our success as a leader in athletics, and demonstrate how academic ambition and athletic ambition can be joined together to create social capital for the university as a whole.
NCI Cancer Center Designation - One project that has seen both the Med Center and Lawrence join together on, is the effort to seek National Cancer Institute designation as a regional cancer center. Cancer is a devastating disease which dedicated medical scientists have had increasing success in treating and defeating. Today there are about 10 million cancer survivors. The NCI has set a goal of eradicating the disease and its suffering by 2015.
KU should be in the forefront of the fight against cancer. Curing cancer will not be the only priority of the university, but it can be our first priority, because we have dedicated scientists like Gunda Georg and Roy Jensen, and hundreds of their colleagues on both campuses dedicated to the goal of eliminating cancer in Kansas. Too many families have experienced the pain that accompanies a diagnosis of cancer. In Kansas, 5,300 people die of cancer each year.
We have the opportunity, created by the joint efforts of scientists at the Med Center and the Lawrence Campus to capitalize on the proven expertise of KU's School of Pharmacy, Department of Chemistry, Division of Biological Sciences and many other units on both campuses to create a drug development pipeline whose benefits will include the development of new and improved oncology drugs, and a cancer treatment network that will deliver state of the art care through the University of Kansas to every Kansan.
These are five ways that KU can begin to prepare students for the global marketplace and contribute our intellectual talent to the challenge facing our university, our state, and our nation. I believe we are ready for this competitive future that Friedman envisions. If the goal is, as he states, to work harder, run faster and become smarter, I believe KU can measure up very well. I do not believe the uncertainty and uneasiness of our moment in history will take away from us this achievement.
