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Chancellor Gearhart's Remarks to the Campus Faculty Senate

Campus Faculty Meeting
Giffels Auditorium
November 6, 2008
3:30 p.m.

Good afternoon.

I have had the chance to meet with many of you on various occasions, but I have not had a chance to address the faculty as a whole since I took this new position last July. I appreciate the chance to do so now.

Since July, I have spent much of my time touching base with alumni, donors, legislators, members of the media, and other stakeholders across the state. My purpose has been to get to know them and learn what is on their minds, to reassure them that we will continue the upward progress we have enjoyed under Dr. White's leadership, and to begin articulating some of the priorities I already have identified.

As I have listened to our deans, department heads, staff and faculty members like you, I have been refining and revising this list. I value your opinions and concerns, and hope you know I take them seriously. I thought I might restrict myself to a few main points that I hope will be of interest to you.

First, let me begin by acknowledging that a change of chancellor often signals a change of priorities. One of the things I have chosen to emphasize from my first day is putting students first - we even started with a video highlighting the prominence of this initiative. It is a message I have related with insistence, and I hope that everyone appreciates my determination on this matter.

But I think this has led to some concern that this may be attended by reduced emphasis on other things, such as research and scholarship - that in some way, putting students first must come at the expense of something else. I would like to assure you today that this is not the case - conducting research and engaging in scholarship remain tremendously important.

I believe passionately that research and teaching go together like soup and sandwich or peanut butter and jelly, and we cannot become a top 50 public university without a true synergy between them. But I also believe in the importance of integrated scholarship and that as important as research and scholarship are, teaching is the reason most of our students are here, at least on the undergraduate level. I want to encourage our faculty to strive for excellence in both, and to put students first in the classroom insofar as you are able.

Some of you also have wondered about our students' first initiative, as opposed to merely being 'student-centered.' Let me say that, in my opinion, the students' first initiative is simply a means of pushing students into the forefront of our consciousness, and being more mindful of their centrality to our mission. I want to look past the assumption that because we are a university we must be student-centered and determine what we can do to optimize our students' experience here: administratively, financially, and academically.

Right now, the state of Arkansas ranks 50th in the country in the percentage of adults over the age of 25 with a college degree. About 18.2 percent of adults have a degree in this state, which places us just above West Virginia. If you're wondering how West Virginia ended up at 51, it's because the District of Colombia is number one, at 50 percent - all those legislative aides, I suspect.

The basic fact is that no state with a low proportion of degrees has a high per capita income. This doesn't bode well for a state that is trying to adapt to a more knowledge-based economy. One way we can directly influence this number is by graduating students at a higher rate.

The state graduation rate currently is about 46 percent, with the University of Arkansas leading the way at 59 percent.

That's just not going to get it done.

So some of the impetus behind the students' first initiative is simply trying to improve students' experience, and see if we can find ways to keep them on the course to success. This means making sure the curriculum is up to date - the core curriculum has not been reviewed since 1955, by the way - and addressing the skills they need in today's society. This means we are providing them with challenging coursework, as well as research and study abroad opportunities. It means we are more actively reaching out to students, anticipating problems before they happen, rather than when it is too late.

None of this matters, though, if a student simply cannot afford to attend college, so we also must continue to create need-based scholarships, as with the Access Arkansas initiative. So yes, we need to put students first. There is a part of me that worries if we cannot find a way to put students first, Arkansas will remain last-or near it.

The problem, unfortunately, is more complicated than just graduating more students. Between 1989 and 2006, Arkansas produced 166,000 people with bachelor's degrees - that ranked us 35th in the nation, incidentally.

How then, did we end up at the bottom of the rankings?

Because during the same period, the state experienced a loss of 42,000 of those degree holders.  In other words, they migrated to another state. This represents not only an economic loss, in terms of a skilled and educated workforce contributing to the economy; it represents a cultural loss, too, in terms of educated people promoting education as a societal value.

Why is this happening? Well, lots of reasons. I'm sure the lure of bigger cities has an appeal, and many students, particularly here in Fayetteville, originated from out of state, so they merely returned to their homes. But certainly one of the most important facts cited was opportunity.

The main beneficiaries of these college graduates are states with human capital economies-and by this I simply mean economies that require people with college degrees.  Here we get into a 'chicken or egg' scenario. A high concentration of advanced level workers is essential to attracting high-tech businesses, which have a higher impact on the economy due to the added value these enterprises generate.

But if graduates are leaving to go to places where these businesses already are, then how do you attract these businesses to your region? I would say you start building a foundation for economic development, and that is research. Establishing research centers and leveraging that research to create businesses and jobs is one means of keeping our graduates in this state, and attracting others.

We need to identify what we are good at and how we can get better, and then find ways to support, promote, grow, and commercialize it.

This leads me to an initiative that I am excited about.

Some of you may be familiar with Accelerate Arkansas. This is a legislative initiative that is trying to foster economic growth by developing knowledge-based companies and creating an environment supportive of entrepreneurship and continuous innovation.

Accelerate Arkansas has five core strategies:

Support job-creating research;
Develop risk capital for all stages of the business cycle;
Encourage entrepreneurship and new enterprise development;
Increase education level in the STEM fields;
And sustain successful existing industry via technology and competitiveness.

The pursuit of this last core strategy led to creation of the Arkansas Research Alliance with a half-million dollars in funding from the state legislature. This initiative is modeled after the Georgia Research Alliance, a business, educational, and government alliance tasked with growing technology-based industries in the state of Georgia.

This alliance has primarily focused on three things:
Bringing products to market and creating jobs of the future through commercialization and industry partnerships;
Driving world-class discovery and invention through eminent scholars and labs;
And partnering with federal sponsors to build research infrastructure.

Since its formation in 1990, the Georgia Research Alliance has:

Created more than 70 start-ups with $350 million in capital investment;
Recruited 60 eminent scholars, who did $200 million dollars in sponsored research in 2007 alone;
And built 24 centers of Research Excellence with $1 billion in federal and private investment.

We are attempting to develop this model here in Arkansas.  Governor Beebe released funds last January, an office was opened in Conway, and 90 percent of the Board of Trustees has been selected, including the five chancellors of the research universities and nearly 10 CEOs.

Let me move to some other issues facing our university. As you know, we are currently underfunded by the state by approximately $35 million. This has impacted our ability to institute appropriate salary increases for faculty and staff, as well as add tenured faculty positions to the colleges that most need them. Making matters worse, the gloomy economic prognosis led the governor to reduce our budget still further.

I would like to say here and now that I am absolutely committed to getting more tenure-track faculty positions created in the colleges that have seen the most drastic enrollment growth, and providing salary increases for both faculty and staff. More than 400 of our lowest paid classified staff are below the poverty line.

That's not the kind of reputation we want, or the kind of employer we want to be. But these salaries are set by the state, so we are somewhat hamstrung in how we can address them. We will be working with members of the general assembly to try to make some headway in paying our staff a decent and appropriate wage, and funding the formula so we can pay our faculty more competitive wages.

As some of you may know, we had money in the Commonfund managed as a Trust by Wachovia along with nearly 1,000 other colleges and universities. We managed to get about 52 percent of our $63 million investment out to date, but this is money that had been allocated with very little of it discretionary. Our funds were entirely the net of revenue from all sources and the expenditures from all sources.

We are being told that we will not lose assets but will not have access to the final 15 percent until 2011 creating some liquidity problems that we have solved to date. The reality is that these are tough times. Almost two dozen states are facing budget deficits this year, and some of our fellow SEC schools are cutting their budgets by anywhere from $25 to $75 million.

So far, we have not had to do any recycling or reallocation of funds. I'm proud to say we are holding our own. Meanwhile, we have recently provided Fulbright College with around a million dollars of additional permanent funds to help them manage their growth, and we will explore more temporary hires as needed to compensate for increased enrollment elsewhere.

I also would like to add that we are planning on rolling out a capital refurbishment, renewal, and renovation plan in the near future. As many of you know, we have very critical building, classroom, and physical facilities needs on campus. Numerous buildings on campus need renovation, including Peabody, Davis, Ozark, Kimpel, Vol Walker Halls, and Mullins Library, only to mention a few.  Since we are no longer planning to buy the Fayetteville High School property, we are hoping to use the funds earmarked for this to pay for the physical plant work.

I would like to end by emphasizing that we are in extraordinarily tumultuous times. We are in the midst of world economic crisis triggered by a meltdown on Wall Street. We are in the middle of a war, and we just elected a new president two days ago. While I remain optimistic about the upcoming year, I really have no idea what to expect-nor, I think, does anybody else.

I do know that we'll get through it, just as we got through the Great Depression, the oil shocks of the seventies, and the smaller recessions we endured in the eighties, nineties, and just a few years ago. There will be some temporary pain, unfortunately, but we are better positioned to weather it than a lot of other universities. Meanwhile, our work continues, as it must.

We have a dedicated staff, a fantastic faculty, and Arkansas' best students. Every morning on my way to work I see our faculty and staff going to work, too, to teach, to conduct research, to advocate for this university, and to keep it heading in the right direction. I am extremely proud of the work you are doing and your ability to stay focused on what is important: serving our students.

That is our core work.

That is our real work.

Thank you for doing it so admirably.

Students first, yes, but faculty always.