chancellor@ku.edu
I want to give a very quick and brief report on our progress for some of the goals that we’ve set. Then, I want to move very quickly into something else. Perhaps the most important thing that I have to say to you today concerns KU and its national rankings; both the rankings that we’ve received and the rankings that we seek. I think those rankings are tied to our proximity to Kansas City. And the thesis for that part of my conversation today is very simply stated. I believe that KU’s goal should be to achieve a ranking in the top 25 of American public research and teaching universities. When someone thinks of KU, they should say unquestionably KU is an institution that is in the top 25 of American public universities.
To accomplish that goal, KU has to recognize its dual mission: it has to be a research and teaching university for the state of Kansas. That’s our responsibility and our mission and we need to carry it out. But to be successful in that responsibility to Kansas, we also need to be a research and teaching university for the greater Kansas City bi-state area. That’s our responsibility and our opportunity, and we need to think about achieving that also. To accomplish a top 25 ranking, KU has to do certain things. You’ll hear me today talking about investing in science and engineering generally, and in information technology and the life sciences specifically. You’ll also hear me talk about increasing the general level of resources at the University, and how that is directly tied to where we are ranked as a university.
But let me begin by bringing you up to date on some of the progress that we’ve been able to make at the University in the last year. People are always interested in enrollment. We are prohibited by the Board of Regents from talking about enrollment until after the 20th day of enrollment, but I can say that our enrollment is going in the right direction, as you see in this graph, and that direction will continue.
There’s always great interest in National Merit Scholars. That’s probably appropriate; that’s the way it should be. We enrolled this year 116 National Merit Scholars; we have more than 300 National Merit Scholars now studying at the University of Kansas. We know what a National Merit Scholar is: it’s someone who scored in the top 1% of the PSAT and the SAT. I’d like to put the pride that we have in those 116 National Merit Scholars, causing us to be ranked somewhere between 6th and 9th among public universities, in the context of our admissions management overall.
The National Merit Scholar enrollment is important, but it might not be the most important indicator of the success of our admissions programs. Perhaps more important are the 1,800 freshman who are receiving some kind of recognition for their academic achievement through some form of scholarship. And even more important may be the 15,135 students who are receiving either loans or grants in order to help them attend KU. That financial aid totals $85 million, too much of it in loans. It would be better for the nation if more of it were in grants. But the bottom line is still the same: KU’s policy is to recruit students who can meet KU’s academic challenge and then do everything we can to help needy students obtain loans, grants, and scholarships from state, federal, and private sources.
Evidence that we are on the right track in admissions: the entering freshman class at KU looks like it will have an average ACT score of 24.4. Compare that to 23.7 in 1995. About 30%of the freshman class has an ACT score above 27. You add that to the students who are already here and there will be somewhere around 5,000 KU undergraduates with high ACT scores in our student body. (As a reference point, the national average for the ACT is 21.7.)
We also spend a great deal of time recruiting minority freshmen. We work hard recruiting minority students because we believe in a diverse university, we believe in a university where not all of the students nor all of the people at the front of the class look like me. The numbers look very good for us this year with minority freshman and we’ve made some strides with minority faculty. Minority enrollment overall will be 9% of the student body; minority faculty now total 166, up from 124 five years ago. I don’t think we should be very satisfied with either of these numbers. I think we must do better. We will not be living up to our sense of a diverse university, our sense of a university that’s representative of all of the people of the state of Kansas, unless we do better.
Another area where we’ve had some conspicuous success is in the recruitment of women faculty. I remember the first convocation speech that I gave at KU, the number of women in the total faculty was about 24-25%. I think we should be proud that now a third of KU’s faculty are women. I think we can do better in recruiting women, particularly in disciplines where women have been underrepresented in the past, but I also think that we should take pride in the fact that we now have more women teaching at KU than ever before.
I also want to talk about the increase in our ability to secure external funds to support the research of the university. This year faculty secured $167.6 million, to support research, up from $100 million or so five years ago. I think it will be even more in the year 2000. We should be proud of that. It means we are achieving success in the national competition for research funds.
We should also be proud of the fact that a year ago when we met for this convocation, we were in a situation where many of us were concerned about the way the state of Kansas was being perceived nationally and internationally. The State Board of Education had chosen to de-emphasize the teaching of evolution, which was a very controversial decision. I think it was made by people of good faith, but it was still a controversial decision and it is one that many of us felt that we had to object to. The evidence shows that we were not alone in objecting to the de-emphasizing of the teaching of evolution. In the face of some of these sentiments, we created last year a science education task force. I felt we needed to be able to show the nation that KU was taking a leadership role in science education generally. I did not want people to think that the University of Kansas was anywhere other than on the cutting edge of science education. The science education task force met, considered certain challenges, and came forth with recommendations. The first recommendation was the creation of a science education center. If you want to read all the recommendations of this task force, you can go to www.ku.edu/~scitask/. I am particularly pleased to be able to announce today that we have created a center for science education, directed by Professor Joe Heppert, a nationally recognized leader in science education. He will be contacting you this fall and asking many of you to participate in the efforts of that center.
Let me go on to talk about KU and national rankings. Rankings can be problematic. I think we should recognize that up front. You like to cite them when they’re high; you want to bury them when they’re low. The question we ask ourselves is do they measure anything accurately? How can they apply to a large, complex organization like an educational institution? Do they really mean anything?
I am the chair of the American Association of Universities Committee on Accreditation and Rankings. Three years ago we invited Jim Fallows to our AAU meeting to talk about U.S. News and the way they rank universities. Mr. Fallows was challenged by various presidents and chancellors over his magazine’s rankings. I understood the concern. If Harvard was first one year and then third the next, it was hard to believe that any real difference had occurred. What occurred was that U.S. News changed the weight of the items it ranked.
My own opinion is that rankings can be useful if you know what the methodology is and what is being ranked. I think the U.S. News rankings, for example, have been very informative for K.U. What they point out very clearly is that faculty salaries, low faculty salaries, are the primary reason that KU has not been ranked higher. I’ll talk about that in a minute. Secondly, I think rankings have the great virtue of being something the public understands. Universities are complex places; the public can understand rankings because they tend to be one dimensional and that’s the advantage from a public point of view. It can also be considered a disadvantage. As I thought about this issue, the conclusion that I’ve come to is that as a national research university, KU is always going to be included in rankings. The only way we could not be included would be to simply opt out, refuse to send information in. Many third and fourth tier institutions don’t have to worry about rankings. No one expects them to appear prominently in those rankings. That’s not going to be the case for KU. KU is always going to be expected to be in the rankings, and frankly, KU is going to be expected to be high in those rankings because of the academic reputation of the University of Kansas.
There’s another factor that enters into rankings. I think there’s such public interest in rankings, because the public understands that this robust economy, this new economy, is a knowledge-based economy. That’s what makes it go. The development of intellectual capital is as important as physical capital in the new economy. The public understands this, and that’s why there’s such focus these days upon universities. This was particularly illustrated this past week when Senator Roberts and I, along with Dr. Wefald from K-State and Dr. Beggs from Wichita State, held a press conference in Topeka to talk about the findings of a survey of Kansas citizens about research. Those research findings show that 94% of Kansans believe there should be more money for science and engineering research, that 59% of Kansans say university research is important to the economy of Kansas, and 68% of Kansans favor doubling our national spending on medical research over the next five years. I think the people of Kansas understand that in this "new economy," research universities are very important. The reason that they are important is because the new economy is a knowledge-based economy.
When you look at books like Lester Thurow’s Building Wealth: The New Rules for Individuals, Companies and Nations in a Knowledge-Based Economy, what you find him talking about is science, and science as an endless frontier. When you look at things that have been said about Kansas and the Midwest in the last ten years or so, you see a similar theme. Ten years ago, the Battelle Corporation did a study of the Kansas City area and concluded that Kansas City’s future economic success was tied to having a strong research university. Ten years later, just last year, the National Governor’s Association took a look at the 30 fastest growing, high-tech metro areas in the country (Kansas City was not among that group) and came to the conclusion that 29 of those 30 were home to or very near to research universities.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot recently and reading a lot, and one of the people who has influenced my thinking is Frank Rhodes, the Chancellor Emeritus of Cornell University, who has said, "Knowledge is the core business of the university." Rhodes is a very eloquent writer, and he focuses on the university’s contribution to a knowledge-based economy, particularly a research university like Cornell, or a research university like the University of Kansas. Interestingly, the National Governors Association has come to a similar conclusion that the public university system is the major site for public research and development. In other words, the university becomes the key to the economic success of states. This is the reason that when you hear Senator Roberts talk in Washington or in Kansas, he’s talking about the importance of research universities and how important universities are to conducting the nation’s basic research and why he advocates building a research infrastructure in Kansas.
The benefits of a research university can be easily explained. If you put knowledge in economic terms, what you have is intellectual capital formation. In the new economy, intellectual capital formation is the key to economic development, the creation of wealth and prosperity, to cultural development, an enhanced quality of life, and to human development -- each individual living up to their potential as a human being. If we put these terms into our regional context, I think they mean a better Kansas, a better Kansas City, and a better world.
All of this suggests that we should be thinking about the University of Kansas as one university serving as the research university for both Kansas and the Kansas City bi-state area. The logic of this plan can be stated very simply. A nationally ranked research university is central to the economic and cultural life of a state. If you don’t believe that, go to North Carolina and see the influence of the University of North Carolina. Go to Michigan and see the influence of the University of Michigan. Secondly, a nationally ranked research university is central to the economic and cultural life of a city. If you don’t believe that go to Seattle and see the influence of the University of Washington. If you don’t believe that, go to Los Angeles and see the influence of UCLA.
KU is a research university, and a pretty darn good one. It’s close enough to the top 25 of public research universities that you can see how to get there from here. KU is also uniquely positioned by its history, its accomplishments and its geography to serve an essential dual mission for our regional society. We must serve the state of Kansas as a research and teaching university, and we must serve Kansas City as a research and teaching university as well. Given that dual mission, we have to remember that mediocrity serves no one. Given this tremendous responsibility, we cannot settle for a mediocre effort.
In order to serve Kansas and Kansas City well–the greater Kansas City, of which Lawrence is a part–KU must achieve rank among the top 25 U.S. public research universities in the next 5-10 years. I believe we can achieve that goal, because we’re pretty close now. With that momentum established, I would suggest that we should see ourselves among the top 25 research universities, public and private, in the next 10 to 20 years. That’s a lot tougher challenge, but I think we can meet it. For KU to accomplish those tasks, we have to combine Kansas resources, greater Kansas City bi-state resources, federal resources and private resources.
Why do I think Kansas City is of such importance to this goal? It’s because geography is destiny. We are geographically in the greater Kansas City area. Three of our four campuses are in this area; 99.7% of our students are in this area. We have around 28,000 students at KU; 32% of them come from greater Kansas City. We have 8,000 graduate students, approximately 37% of them come from greater Kansas City. We have over 300 degree programs, we have 2,000 faculty, and 10,000 staff including student employees. We are a $1 billion asset for this region, for this area that we call greater Kansas City. We brought in $168 million in research dollars this year. Our goal should be somewhere in the range of $200 to $250 million in the next 5 years. We have 57,000 alumni living in greater Kansas City. We have supporters in the greater Kansas City area.
That’s why I think a plan to secure a place among the top 25 U.S. public universities in 5 to 10 years, is very much within our grasp. We are not exactly chopped liver now. We rank very well on a number of scales. Before the Carnegie Corporation changed its rankings for universities, we were listed as a Carnegie 1 ranking. We’re still listed in the top ranking of the Carnegie rankings, they just got tired of trying to adjudicate between those who were in Category 1 and those who wanted to be in Category 1. We’re one of the 32 public members of the American Association of Universities, the most prestigious consortium of American universities. We have 17 programs that are ranked among the top 30 in the nation. We have two programs that are ranked number one in the nation: special education and our city manager program in public administration. When we look at books that are written about American research universities like Graham and Diamond’s book, The Rise of the American Research University, we see KU described as "one of 21 rising stars."
We have other assets that can be applied to this effort. Last year we were 9th in the enrollment of National Merit Scholars among public universities. This year I hope we are slightly higher than that, at least among public universities. We have the 16th largest endowment, right at a billion dollars, among national public universities, and as you know our endowment is the oldest endowment at a pubic university. We have high rankings for a number of our individual programs. I’m not going to call these out specifically. You are the people who are part of these programs. You know the significance of those rankings and why they’re important and what kind of challenges and sacrifices people have had to make to achieve those rankings. We have high rankings at the KU medical center as well.
You know better than anyone that academic reputation is a critical part of rankings. We also know for undergraduate rankings, people look at retention rates. We know that institutional financial resources are a part of rankings. We know that admission standards count. Next fall’s freshmen class will be the first to be admitted under the Kansas Regents qualified admissions standards. And we know that faculty support–meaning basically not only the general support for the faculty, but also faculty salaries–is a part of what’s calculated. The reason that’s important is that we, over the last two years, have had an interesting relationship with U.S. News and World Report. Two years ago we were ranked 30th by U.S. News and World Report, tied with Indiana. Then last year, we suddenly went from 30th to 38th. And then this year, which just came out in the last day or two, KU was ranked 42nd. We took a look at it and it became very simple to figure out why we went from 30th to 38th last year. When we were ranked 30th in 1999, we had a faculty reputation or an academic reputation rank of 27 among public universities. We had a faculty support rank, which is tied to faculty salaries, of 85. The next year, last year, we still had basically the same academic reputation (28), but our faculty support had dropped to 101st. This year we see almost exactly the same pattern.
Thus, one thing we have learned is that if faculty salaries don’t keep pace, then it won’t make that much difference how well your faculty are thought of. An academic reputation of 27 or 28 or 29, among all of the top public universities that are in the U.S. News category, is pretty good. This year, our academic ranking was exactly the same as Wake Forest, which was ranked 28 among the top 50 universities in this country. KU’s ranking for faculty resources for the last two years, this year and last year, has been 101; it hasn’t changed a bit and it dropped 16 places two years ago. Our overall financial resources rank 97th. So if you want to get into the U.S. News rankings and understand what’s going on there, you can report that data in a couple of ways. If our faculty support is at 101 (faculty salaries and resources that go into supporting faculty) and our financial resources are at 97, how did we get ranked 42nd? The answer is because of the success and reputation of KU’s faculty which caused us to be ranked 28th last year and 29th this year in academic reputation among public universities. In other words, our KU faculty salaries are ranked 101st, our KU budget is ranked 97th, our KU faculty are ranked 29th. I’ll let you decide what conclusions to draw.
Let me talk about another way that we rank universities. We rank universities by the amount of external funding that their faculty are able to secure in the course of a particular year. These are the numbers for 1999 for KU. Our federal expenditures for research are $72 million. Our overall expenditures for research are $168 million, which I cited earlier. It’s worth looking at where that $72 million and that $168 million got us ranked. Among 361 public universities, KU is ranked 54th in total research funding ($168 million), and 60th in federal research funding ($72 million). When you add all the public and private universities together, KU is ranked 77th in total research funding and 93rd in federal research funding. Those are all in the top 20%. I cited these figures to someone six months or so ago and they said, "What’s your complaint? You’re in the top 20%." I don’t think being in the top 20% is good enough. I’m interested in being in the top 25 of American public universities.
One of the primary ways that we can improve is by securing additional external funds, particularly from the federal government, which has an NIH budget that this year is going to be $21 billion, and which has an NSF budget that has been increasing considerably over the last few years. If we can do that, it can be part of our plan to move into the top 25 public universities.
How are we going to accomplish this? I’ll lay out in broad, general terms the way I think we can do that. Clearly, we have to maintain our strengths. We have that academic reputation 27, 28, 29, because we’re pretty good. We have a lot of things that are going well at this university. We know that we have strengths in humanities, social sciences, and the arts. We know that we have a very good reputation as a teaching institution at both the graduate and the undergraduate level. We know that we have a number of programs and a number of individual faculty who are ranked very high in their particular discipline. We obviously need to maintain those strengths if we are going to rise in these various rankings. We also need to recognize that we have to increase federally funded research in the sciences and engineering at KU if we really want to be thought of as a top 25 research university in this country. In the areas of information technology and the life sciences, we have particular opportunities to be able to do that.
Finally, if we are to achieve a significantly higher ranking, and be identified as a top 25 public university, we have to increase the general level of KU resources. We have a strategic plan that I think is a good strategic plan. You helped create it. There were over 100 faculty involved in producing it. It basically said that we need to act as one university because there is combined power that comes from such unity, as well as efficiencies. We have to serve Kansas clearly. That’s our responsibility. But we have to serve both Kansas and Kansas City as a major research university. We have to build premiere learning communities with every decision we make.
If we’re going to increase federally funded research, our university has to be ranked somewhere in the range of 35 to 45 among American universities in funded research. We were 60th this last year in federal funds. If we had only secured $15 million more on an annual basis we could have been 43rd. So we need to set a target of increasing federal funding by about $25 million a year and particularly increasing federal funding for information technology and life sciences by $15 million a year.
If we’re going to invest in information technology and the life sciences, how are we going to do that? We need to hire about 60 new faculty who will be great teachers, who will perform service to the state of Kansas and the region of Kansas City, and who will be successfully seeking extramural funds. Interestingly enough, when you focus on life sciences and information technology, 21 of the 25 departments that are the highest per capita of federal research expenditures for KU are in those two areas.
If we’re going to increase the general level of resources, we also need to look very carefully at how our budget is put together. Sometimes people forget, sometimes the public forgets, and says how much money did you get from the legislature? The money that comes from the legislature is very important to KU, but it is only 37% of KU’s budget. 39% of our budget comes from tuition and fees, 24% comes from gifts, grants and contracts. That’s what goes together to make up the KU budget.
If we are to increase the general level of KU resources, as a general strategy we have to invest in people. My experience is that quality people attract resources. There are many of you who are the living illustrations of this maxim. Good people attract resources. Resources find quality people. That’s been true at every university I’ve ever been at; anytime I’ve ever talked to anybody about university faculty, that’s the point that they made. We have to invest in people. We have to invest in new faculty to increase research funding. In this capital campaign, now in its quiet phase, we can double the number of endowed professors. Currently, you define an endowed professor as a person with a million-dollar endowment behind their chair or their professorship. We have about 60 endowed professors. I think we can double that to 120. We need to find ways to increase salaries for our most productive professors. We need to increase scholarship opportunities for our talented graduate and undergraduate students. And we need to increase fellowship opportunities both for our graduate students and our faculty.
If we’re going to increase the general level of KU resources, we have to recognize that there are physical facility needs that are a part of that effort. The Kansas University Medical Center has been planning for the last year its physical needs. Clearly, one area that is very important is an institute of genetic medicine because that builds on the human genome project. Another important area is in neurosciences. Still another important area is in brain imaging. Such efforts are part of an over-all effort to invest in the life sciences both on this campus and at the Medical Center. The Medical Center has done an extensive job of looking at its physical plant. Many of its buildings are over 70 years old. Their plan over the next 25 years is to spend $350 million at 39th and Rainbow reshaping the entire campus.
Increasing the general level of KU resources means we have to find ways to invest in Kansas City at the KU Edwards campus. In the last few years the Edwards campus has really taken off. We now have 17 degree programs there. The growth in student credit hours has been quite remarkable. The people of Kansas City see the Edwards Campus as a very important part of KU. There is also a capital facilities plan for the Edwards campus that calls for construction of three buildings and a total investment of $71 million dollars.
You sum it all up, what do you have? You have a plan to move into the top 25 public universities. We have 60 new faculty and 60 new endowed professorships. We need to improve salaries for productive faculty, provide scholarship opportunities, fund master plans. Those are the things we need to do.
Where do the resources come from? Well, they come from many areas. We have to recognize that we have an obligation within our own budget, as strapped as it is–and it clearly is–to identify funds for reallocation. We also are going to have to increase both private and federal research funds. We need to be sure that the Board of Regents for the state of Kansas is willing to commit to increased appropriations for the Regents system generally. We have to hope that the Regents will be successful in their desire to deregulate higher education because there are many costs built into the way that we operate now that don’t necessarily have to be there. We have tobacco settlement funds in Kansas that could particularly apply to life sciences research. We have to hope that the public support that Senator Roberts spoke about is going to translate into public support for higher education. And, finally, we have a federal election that’s going on right now in which both Vice President Gore and Governor Bush clearly have education at all levels as a priority. They both are absolutely committed to improving education, both K-12 level and higher education. I hope that bodes well for us as an institution.
I cannot stress enough how important to this set of plans is to the KU Endowment Association. As you know–it’s one of the worst kept secrets in Lawrence–we’re in the quiet phase of a capital campaign. It’s a campaign that I think will be able to provide a significant amount of money to the goal of being a top 25 public university. In the contacts I’ve made in the course of the quiet phase of that campaign, I find great support for the kind of goals we have talked about today. The University also can enter into partnerships with business, governmental organizations, cultural institutions, and foundations in both Kansas and Kansas City. Finally, we have to be careful about how we do it, but faculty at KU have been very adept at discovering ideas that have commercial value, and these ideas have value in the marketplace. That is another source for funding as we move into the future.
That’s what I would leave you with today. Let’s think, over the next 5 to 10 years, of KU securing its place among the top 25 U.S. public universities. In the next 10 to 20 years, having achieved that momentum, let’s place KU among the top 25 of all U.S. public and private universities. If we can do that, as a faculty, as an institution, we can all gracefully retire to Pioneer Cemetery and feel that we have contributed to a noble destiny for our university.
