Karen Doudt's ** words ring in my ears: "You know, Jo, I'd really like to try this!" Words of an innovator, an entrepreneur, a risk-taker. Gutsy Karen. Even when she was looking right into the eyes of illness, she'd design a new project and say, "You know, Jo, I'd really like to try this."
Listen to what Elisabeth Kubler-Ross wrote: "It is the denial of death that is partially responsible for people living empty, purposeless lives; for when you live as if you'll live forever, it becomes too easy to postpone the things you know that you must do. You live your life in preparation for tomorrow or in remembrance of yesterday, and meanwhile, each today is lost."
Saddened by her death and inspired by her life, I would like to reflect with you today about how we can use our days fully. How we can become more courageous to risk? How we learn to act without a sure 100 percent guarantee of the results before we take the first step? How can we do this at the College?
What challenges face us?
• The need for more money – for financial aid to students, for salaries, for operations, for buildings and equipment, for endowment
• The need to maintain our strong faculty and staff and recruit more and better students
• The need to accomplish our mission through focus on students – one at a time
Many different challenges, yet it all seems to come back to that first one: the need for more money. How can we garner sufficient resources to be the Manchester College that we want to be? Whose job is it to get those resources?
The obvious answer, and one to which I am strongly attracted, is that it is Vice President for Enrollment Dave McFadden's and Vice President for College Advancement Tim McElwee's job to get that money. Dave needs to recruit more and better students who will not need or request financial aid and who will stay here to graduate. It doesn't sound that hard to me. After all, Indiana has more than four million residents. Tim needs to find more rich people who will give their money to the College. Call the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Ted Turner gave a billion dollars to the UN. In fact, some days it leads me to wonder whether Tim and Dave are really trying that hard.
Of course they and their departments are working very hard and very effectively. We have the best enrollment in 20 years and had the biggest fund-raising year in our history this past year. Yet the challenge remains. If they are so effective, why aren't our resources increasing?
Let's look at admissions and financial aid. Increase in numbers of students does not automatically mean more revenue. Students come to Manchester with high expectations for financial aid. Even families with six-figure incomes often use financial aid as the determinant for where their children go to school. As a result, two factors become very important. One is called the "discount rate" and refers to the average amount of financial aid received by students. Ours is slightly above 42 percent, which means that while our tuition this year is $15,230, the average student pays about $8,800. This second number is called our "net tuition revenue." Paying only $8,800 is good news if you are the parent of that student. It is bad news for the College which receives only about half of the tuition revenue that it looks like we do.
Well, why don't we reduce financial aid? The answer is simple. We would not be able to recruit enough students to maintain the program. For the past decade, the Midwest has been the area of the country most affected by financial aid discounting and the competition for students that results. Discounting is now spreading to the coasts; so it is a challenge for colleges everywhere. Now that discounting is happening on the East Coast, the media are even covering it! Many families do not plan to pay very much for their children's education, and they expect us to pick up the difference. Increasing the numbers of students is essential for our institutional health, but it will not provide sufficient resources given the net tuition that we receive from them.
So, we need to look to other sources for funds. I wish I had a dollar for each time someone suggested that we ask the Lilly Endowment for money. The Endowment has been extremely generous with higher education in Indiana, and we've been fortunate recipient of millions of dollars for help with retention, computing services, diversity, and the science center. The Endowment, however, decides when it invites proposals. It sets the guidelines for what can be proposed. So, Lilly Endowment, generous benefactor for the entire state, does not accept unsolicited proposals for need that we identify. They have the money, and they set the rules.
Well, if Lilly Endowment won't do it, we should at least hire a grant writer. I wish we had $30,000 to $40,000 to hire one, too; but we would not likely find this person to be the magic solution either. In fact, the name "grant writer" is a bit misleading. This summer, our science faculty members worked on proposals for the National Science Foundation curriculum lab grant program. A grant writer could not have written any of those proposals because it is the faculty expert who needs to make the arguments. Having said that, I wish I could take a year to be a grant writer for the College, working with you on proposals. But we can't, and it wouldn't be a magic cure anyway.
To increase resources beyond what is possible with enrollment increases, we need to stay the course, support our Mission, but widen the road by making what we do best available to more people. This will accomplish two important goals: a) we will serve more learners, and b) increase our revenue. To keep our programs mission-based and viable, we have to do both. If we serve more learners without increasing revenue, we cannot survive. If we increase revenue without staying true to our mission, we will not sustain the quality of our program. We know what direction we're going. We like that direction. We believe in our mission.
As much as I relish the sight of Tim and Dave and President Marden, – shirts off, sweaty, tanned shoveling hard, did I say sweaty – we need to help expand the Mission and identify ways to build resources to support it. The challenge belongs to all of us. Certainly, the administration is where the buck stops on matters financial. But it is the College community – faculty and staff – that can design tools to address the challenges.
We all need to take up the shovels to widen the road. In fact, we've already begun to do this. A group of faculty worked hard last year to design the Master of Arts in Contemporary Leadership program that was approved by faculty and submitted to North Central in July. When implemented, that program will open educational opportunities to an entire group of young employees and others for whom graduate school was inaccessible before now.
The Small Business Institute Initiative has, for the first time in many years, asked area businesses about what educational needs they have. If their needs match expertise that we have on campus, we will be able to serve new learners. Or we may facilitate linking area needs to persons who can meet those needs, even if they're not with the College. Contrary to stereotypes, adult learners do not all want to sign up for distance education programs through for-profit university: some of them are standing beside you in the grocery line at Lance's. Others are interns on campus who will leave us next year to attend graduate school elsewhere unless they can enroll here.
In January we hope to activate the Mark Johnston Entrepreneurial Professorship for preliminary program-building. That program will help us learn about ways to work more entrepreneurially. Meanwhile, we can all, in our own departments, think of ways to manage resources carefully, scheduling courses when they have sufficient enrollments, using adjuncts judiciously, watching spending, designing new pedagogies – all things that most people do already. How do faculty specifically help widen the road?
But most important, you need to continue to teach well, one student at a time. That is the magic of this place. Michael Schrage of M.I.T. wrote: "When graduate students talk about the quality of their experiences at the university, they tend to describe the quality of the relationships they've had." (Schrage) Not a surprise at Manchester College. Myles Brand, president of Indiana University, shared a story, however, that reminds us that our focus needs to remain on the students. He told me meeting a senior faculty member at the end of the semester. The professor told Brand that his teaching had really excelled that semester. He had planned his lectures well, chosen relevant readings, and even told his jokes effectively. "But then, he lamented, 'They didn't get it.' The final exams made it clear that the students had not mastered the material." Brand goes on to say, "The fact of the matter is that the faculty member did not get it. If learning did not occur, then his teaching could not have excelled. Learning – not teaching – is the goal; teaching is instrumental to learning." (Brand) Keep teaching well by focusing on student learning. Learners are not all 18-22 year olds.
Second, we need to be more nimble. Greg Shea of the Institute for Research on Higher Education reminds us that "we are all temps." Given the economy and changes in the culture, everyone is a temporary worker. Our students, our technologies, our disciplines, the economy – all are changing constantly. We need to change, too. This rate of change causes stress, and we've all felt it. Perhaps even today. I'm learning to use Microsoft Word. Not a huge change, but it's stressful. Science faculty are planning ways to pack equipment and books that may become inaccessible for a year or more. Stressful change. Good change. Those who seem to handle it best are those whose first response is "we can work this out" rather than "that's not how we've always done it." The Lila Hammer, our Registrar, who works on some of the knottiest problems on campus with her goal to have students leave her office with some options. The Karen Doudt who sees needs at the Manchester Child Care Center and in our early childhood education curriculum and puts the two together. The Accounting and Business faculty who design a core curriculum for all the majors in their department so that we have less redundancy in offerings. And the list can go on and on.
This summer, a speaker described higher education as a place of permanent whitewater. Most of us who have white water rafted know the sense of anticipating a calm portion of the river. We work hard to get through the whitewater, knowing that around the bend, we will be able to catch our breath. Higher education is in permanent whitewater: there is no calm around the bend. Most of us thought if Manchester College got big enough, we would finally have the resources we need. But we've grown steadily and stably, and when we turn the bend, there is more whitewater.
This is certainly true in our own lives. When Sarah and Matt, our oldest two children, chose colleges, they chose on the basis of their intended majors. We all agonized over how to be able to afford their attendance at these two colleges, one so strong in elementary education and the other so strong in international relations. Imagine Dave's and my malaise when, within eight hours, we got phone calls from them. Matt first: "Dad, I really don't think I like kids enough to be a teacher. We did an observation requirement, and they drove me nuts." Sarah eight hours later: "Why did I ever think I wanted to study international relations? What will I ever do with that degree? I don't know what I want to do." Matt switched majors and is now a pastor, considering other career opportunities for 10 years from now. Sarah finished her master's in history and then got an M.B.A. She works at American Airlines but says she'll never fit into corporate culture. Permanent whitewater.
As we address one challenge, another will arise. Lest you find this description discouraging, think of the options we have. We need to train differently. We need to prepare for the marathon, not for the sprint. We need to practice handing the baton to other runners when it's their turn. We need to be agile. Flexible. In for the long haul. Creative in our problem-solving. Think nimble.
Third, we all need to work on how we allocate our time. Widening the road is not the same as doing more and more and more. One of the ways we all contribute to our own fatigue and sense of overwork is by talking about it all the time. We are busy, but this is full time work. We need to work more intentionally. Junk mail can be lessened by asking to be removed from mailing lists. We can do some academic advising in groups. We can lighten our load of possessions by donating books that we don't use to people who need them. We can delete or file emails after we read them. We can actually do our work instead of talking at length about how we don't have time to do our work. When we're tired, we can stop to refresh and then return to the work, much more productively. Gandhi said "there is more to life than increasing its speed," and he is right. We have the power to make good choices in how we use our time.
Fourth, we all need to accept change. When I taught here from 1982 to 1987, one of the troubling ways that we related to one another as faculty colleagues was to be quite quick to criticize one another's failures. If someone suggested a new course, we were too often quick to criticize its name, its content, its methods. We almost seemed to enjoy some failures, especially by faculty who thought they knew more than we wise experienced faculty. I don't sense that spirit of critique nearly as much today, and I am glad. I hope I've had some part in that change. When we began the new general education program in 1996, we made some rooky mistakes. We learned from them and corrected them. Life goes on. When someone takes a chance on something – something perhaps like the crazy idea of hanging a Christmas tree from a cherry picker – we laugh, share our concerns, and life goes on.
In the next several months and years, faculty and others will need to design creative ways to widen the road of services that are included in the ways we live out our mission. They will need help in that work. I hope they will invite constructive criticism, and I hope we will share it. But underneath that constructive criticism, we must have a shared hope that these entrepreneurial ventures will succeed. We are all stronger when they do. It is discouraging to develop a solid proposal and have it attacked in ways that are not rooted in a desire to make it better. Of the many good characteristics of working at Manchester College, this spirit of shared ownership for the mission, for the wider road, is what makes us distinctive. I've taught in four other schools, and none had the spirit of mission nor the spirit of cooperation that we enjoy every single day. Let's take good care of that spirit.
Finally, let's remember why we're here and celebrate it more. This summer, one of your colleagues got a call from a prospective student with whom he'd been in contact during the spring. "Coach Jarman!! I just got my letter this morning! I got admitted to Manchester! I already went to my mom's and dad's jobs and told them, and they're going to invite my grandpa and grandma over for a cookout tonight to celebrate, and how will I find out who my roommate is and where do you get books and will I know which day I'm supposed to come to campus?" We're here for these students. For them and for their older, younger, smarter, lazier, more motivated, sensitive friends, we need to stay the course, widen the road, and support one another in the changes that we must make.
Let's adopt Karen's courage: "Jo, I just really want to try this!"
** Karen D. Doudt, Professor of Education and graduate of Manchester College, died of cancer Aug. 14, 2001
Michael Schrage, A Tangled Web(s): The Rise of the Absent-Networked Professor and the > Translucent University, = in Kay Kohl and Jules LaPidus (eds). Postbaccalaurate Futures: New Markets, Resources, Credentials. Phoenix: American Council on Education Series on Higher Education, 2000, p. 77.
Myles Brand, A Research Universities in Transition, @ in Kay Kohl and Jules LaPidus (eds). Postbaccalaurate Futures: New Markets, Resources, Credentials. Phoenix: American Council on Education Series on Higher Education, 2000, p. 193.
|
