裸聊直播

• September 20, 2010

• By Mohammad H. Qayoumi, president, 裸聊直播, East Bay

Introduction

Good morning and welcome to the 2010-11 academic year. This year marks my fifth Faculty and Staff Convocation. I would like to take a few minutes to provide a brief “State of the University” report, recognize new members of the University, acknowledge significant achievements during the last 12 months, and share with you important strategic priorities and initiatives in the coming year.

A Brief “State of the University” Report

Before I begin, let me first thank and congratulate the University community for working through one of the most challenging years I can remember. Last year posed a great number of challenges and hardships we needed to overcome –– as difficult as any I can remember in my 32 years in higher education. That is why I foremost want to express my deepest appreciation for your hard work and dedication to our students and the University. Together, we remained focused on our primary commitment to provide access to high quality education for our students during a time of significant reduction of State funding, increased student fees, and increased student demand.

Your dedication and flexibility in accepting the financial hardship in the “furlough year” provided the means to deliver quality higher education for our students ––albeit at a seemingly ever increasing cost. The furloughs took a significant financial toll on nearly all of you. The layoff process with the subsequent rounds of reassignments was particularly painful and difficult, especially for those who are no longer at the University. Further, the 24 percent reduction in State appropriations over the last two years has clearly impacted both access to courses and the level of service for our students. Yet today, 裸聊直播 has emerged from these historic challenges poised for success. We have not strayed from our commitments, we have clearly defined our path and the University is now positioned to thrive in the coming years. So allow me to salute each and every one of you for your perseverance and loyalty. Collectively, you were a role model for collaboration, dialogue, and civility. I am honored to work with such a committed and resilient group of individuals.

Introduce New Members to the University

We have several new members to the administrative team that I would like to introduce and welcome:

• Dr. James Houpis, Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs
• Dr. Carolyn Nelson, Interim Dean, College of Education and Allied Studies
• Dr. Kathleen Rountree, Interim Dean, College of Letters, Arts and Social Science
• Dr. Sue Opp, Associate Vice President, Academic Programs and Graduate Studies
• Ms. Anne Harris, Associate Vice President, University Advancement
• Ms. Debbie Brothwell, Associate Vice President, Administration and Finance
• Ms. Carol Reese, Senior Director Academic Resources, Academic Affairs

How fast four years pass! In preparing for this year’s address, I reviewed remarks from my first convocation address. At that time we were an institution simply trying to survive. We were facing serious problems in a number of areas. In the address I indicated that to ensure the future of the University we needed to concentrate our efforts in four key areas: enrollment growth, increasing the number of tenured track faculty positions, enhancing the physical appearance of the University, and achieving financial stability. I acknowledged that addressing these areas would be both difficult and at times painful to resolve. Together, through commitment, dedication and hard work we have in four short years succeeded in transforming the University from just surviving to one on the threshold of thriving.

Since 2006 we have reversed the historical pattern of a lagging and at times a pervasive decline in enrollment to build the highest enrollment in our 53-year history; reaching 12,465 FTES and 14,749 head count last fall quarter. Last year we not only continued to meet our enrollment target but were able to maintain enrollment momentum consistent as a destination University. In fact during the past three years, we have seen tremendous growth in all of our application categories: freshman, graduate, and transfer applications. The pent up demand to attend our University clearly demonstrates that we are indeed an institution of first choice for students in the region. Maintaining enrollment momentum will be critical to our future, especially once funding to the CSU provides for enrollment growth.

From 2006 to 2009 we were able to hire approximately one-third of our current tenure track faculty. The budget crisis and reductions in workforce allowed for only two searches last year. In the coming years it will be essential for us to recommit to continuing to increase and develop our tenured and tenure track faculty. Last year we affirmed our commitment to tenured and tenured track faculty by not laying off any regular faculty member, but extremely painful workforce reductions affected lecturers and staff. In planning for future tenure track searches, Provost Houpis, in consultation with the College Deans, is developing a multiple year plan that will support our ongoing quest for academic quality and institutional distinction. As our budget improves it will not only be essential to increase faculty, but we will also need to replace staff in critical areas.

In four years we have made great strides in turning around the physical appearance of the University. We have completely renovated all lecture and library spaces including providing new furniture. Today, interior spaces are clean and well maintained. Our outdoor spaces continue to improve and many visitors comment on the aesthetic appearance of our campuses. We will continue to work diligently to provide an attractive environment for our students, faculty, and staff. The physical environment for living, learning, and working has been an important factor in helping us become a destination University.

Many of you will remember the financial status of the institution in 2006. We were burdened with over $11 million in operational debt and a $4.5 million structural deficit. 裸聊直播 was an institution in serious financial crisis. In that first year, we put together a four-year financial plan to balance our budget based upon enrollment growth. Due to the current financial crisis and the elimination of CSU funding for enrollment growth, we greatly modified our plan and took a more difficult and painful tack last year with budget and workforce reductions. Through our collective efforts in these intervening years we enter this academic year with no operational debt, and at close of last year we were a financially solvent institution for the first time in years.

As you can see we have made impressive gains, even in difficult times, through our collective efforts and hard work.
 
Recognition of Achievements from Last Year

As we reflect on last year’s accomplishments, time will not permit a comprehensive review; however, let me share with you some representative examples of our great work.

Let me start with two very important recognition awards that are presented to a faculty and a staff member each year, the Miriam and James Phillips Outstanding Professor and the Vivian Cunniffe Award recipient.

I would like to ask Dr. Jeffery Seitz, the Phillips Outstanding Professor, and Mr. Don Moreno, the Vivian Cunniffe Award recipient, to please stand and be recognized. Thank you both for your valued contributions, and congratulations!

• I would like to recognize the important contributions of the Academic Senate, its Executive Committee, the University Planning, Assessment and Budget Committee, the college deans, the department chairs, faculty and staff. Your contributions to advancing the University, especially in these difficult times, is a great part of the reason the Princeton Review identified us as a “Best in the West” institution for the seventh consecutive year and why our College of Business and Economics was recognized as a “Best Business School” for the fourth consecutive year.

• Last year we graduated 5,100 students in five commencement ceremonies –– 3,500 baccalaureates and 1,600 masters. In addition, 443 students received teaching credentials, 127 received special credentials and 196 administrative credentials were awarded. We continue to lead the CSU in the number of credentialed mathematics and science teachers produced each year. CSUEB clearly is an important contributor to the workforce of the region and our graduates are contributing to the region’s economic vibrancy.

• The Diversity Report is in the final stages of review. The Diversity Report developed through the expanded Faculty, Diversity and Equity Committee was accepted by the Academic Senate in the spring. I will talk more about the Diversity Plan as part of our upcoming year’s initiatives.

• The McNair and Upward Bound TRIO Programs’ scholarships and grants activity establish us as an important institution in providing pathways to degree and advanced degrees for underrepresented students.

• Last year our African American and Latino education summit brought over 1,500 participants to the University in support of our goal to increase college going rates among underrepresented communities we serve.

• We continued the tradition of success at the CSU Student Research Competitions, last year Mikel Delgado and Lorie Curtis, undergraduates in Psychology, received first place for their research presentation in the Behavioral and Social Sciences.

• Students in Music, Theatre and Dance Programs continue to provide quality cultural programming to the community. Last year’s productions of “Chicago” and “Iago Syndrome” received great reviews. Our East Bay Chamber Singers toured Europe performing to sellout crowds and our students just returned from performing Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” in Scotland this summer.

• Our athletic teams completed their first full year in Division II of the NCAA, competing as a member of the California Collegiate Athletic Conference with a number of significant accomplishments:

    o Women’s water polo ranked third in the Western Water Polo Association Conference.
    o Coach Lisa Cooper was selected National Coach of the Year.
    o Forty-two student athletes received academic All American recognition.
    o Water polo student-athletes Jenna Casady, Claire Pierce, and Liz Warren received All-American honors, and two baseball and two women’s basketball student athletes received all conference recognition.

• I would also like to recognize the wonderful achievements of the Associated Students Inc., and the leadership of President Shahid Beig and his Executive Committee in expanding support and programming to meet the needs of our students. Further, the opening of the LEED Gold Certified Recreation and Wellness Facility will provide a great resource to the University community as an activity and social center.

• A number of our faculty have received recognition for their distinctive achievements:

    o Julia A. Norton, professor emerita in the Department of Statistics and Biostatistics was presented the 2010 Carver Medal from the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, its highest honor, at its annual meeting in Sweden this summer.

    o Dr. Nancy Mangold, Accounting, was a Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) Academic Fellow for the year. She worked in Washington in the Office of the Chief Accountant at the SEC on issues related to accounting standards.

    o Emeritus Professor Frank La Rocca, Music, was the Grand Prize winner of the 2010 Vanguard Premieres International Choral Composition Award, winner of Second Prize in the 2010 International Sacred Arts Composer Competition, and was the recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Composer Fellowship.

• Last March we held the first Research, Scholarship and Creative Activity Exhibit, hosted by the Office of Faculty Development in concert with the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs. The exhibit provided 60 faculty members, representing all four colleges and the library, the opportunity to present their research work to the University community.

• Our Nursing and Health Science Program has become a central player in training healthcare workers from nurses to hospital administrators for the region. The Nursing Program has doubled its enrollment in the last five years, with cohorts at the Hayward campus and Concord center. The Health Science Program has tripled its majors in the same period. These programs have received over $5 million of funding support from John Muir Healthcare Foundation, Kaiser Permanente, Song Brown Foundation and Betty Moore Foundation.

• The collaborative work between faculty from CEAS and Science has produced a number of impressive grant awards. Two examples are the pending $11.6 million grant from NSF to provide science content enhancement to middle school teachers and $450,000 from the S.D. Bechtel Jr. Foundation and Broadcom for a certificate program to strengthen science content knowledge for elementary school teachers. The College of Education and Allied Studies was awarded several U.S. Department of Education grants for workforce development totaling over $800,000 to recruit underrepresented populations in Oakland who have an interest in STEM teaching as a career, and to provide in-service professional development for ESL teachers.

• We have recently moved into our new Student Administration building.  The new building provides a much needed centralized location for the delivery of student services. I would particularly thank members from the Division of Administration and Finance and Information Technology Services for their leadership in making the move to the building so successful.

• The University was selected by PG&E as a demonstration site for a 1.4-megawatt fuel cell. This facility will provide a resource for instruction in sustainable energy, biological research, and reducing energy heating costs.

• The Bookstore’s Textbook Affordability Plan has saved over $1 million dollars for our students last year helping to reduce their educational costs.

• The CSU Board of Trustees approved the Hayward campus Master Plan which now provides us the mechanism to implement the next phase of development for the University.

• We have completed the first year of the leadership phase of our comprehensive fundraising campaign. We have established a $40 million to $50 million goal for the campaign, a seven-year to eight-year University-wide effort that will have significant long-term benefits. The campaign is on schedule to meet our fundraising objectives.

Let us collectively congratulate these individuals and units for their outstanding achievements.

University Priorities and Opportunities in the Year Ahead

One of the important factors that contributed to improving the positioning of the University from simply surviving to being on the threshold of thriving is our commitment to the University’s Strategic Plan, which includes our seven shared mandates.

As we begin this year, we must continue to clearly define our path. There are a number of realities in higher education today that we must collectively address. These realities include: legislators are calling for efficiencies to reduce cost; financing of higher education in California will not return to former levels in the foreseeable future; current research provides evidence in support of alternative methods of instruction; students are demanding project-based curriculum and increased technology in learning; and our public is calling for accountability for graduates who are prepared and career-ready.

This summer the Cabinet reviewed the University’s strategic initiatives and their alignment with our seven mandates. Following deliberation the Cabinet provided a proposal for 2010-11 initiatives. In addition, the Cabinet identified initiatives that merit broader discussion across the University, and proposed a process to do so.

The Cabinet identified the following University Strategic Initiatives for 2010-11 aligned to our seven mandates:

In striving for academic quality:

The academic plan for the University was completed in 2008. The next step in the planning process will be the development of strategic plans, led by Provost Houpis, for the Division of Academic Affairs, each college and each department. The strategic planning process will set into motion goals, objectives and action items for the next five years, consistent with the University’s strategic plan. Assessment will become a common focus as we demonstrate, not just to WASC, but to our students, their parents, our alumni and the community, that we are delivering on our promise of high quality learning, outstanding scholarship, and services to our community. As part of this assessment process, we will be setting baseline and benchmark measures on critical areas of achievement, for example, enrollment growth, scholarly activity and community engagement.

In the coming years, we will begin to interweave global engagement, diversity, writing skills, and quantitative reasoning across the curriculum. We will search for best practices in pedagogy in delivering general education, such that we are not delivering G.E. courses as isolated fragments but as a holistic and integrated approach that will lead to a well-rounded citizen. We will also seek ways to incorporate civic engagement and service learning as a requirement of general education. This service learning can take many forms. If 1,000 students commit 100 hours to the community each year that will put 100,000 hours of service into a community that desperately needs it. Our students will receive an invaluable lesson on the difficulties many community members face in everyday life, and in very short order this University will define the concept of a public university in service for the public good.

These past couple of years have taught us that the University needs to improve alternate sources of funding, not just for basic support but for those areas we wish to be distinctive in. We will need to double our research efforts, increase our advancement activities, and support new innovative ideas being developed by both faculty and staff.

And if we are to be distinctive and attract the best faculty as a destination University, then we need to invest in our faculty. This will include programs for professional development, rewarding our faculty who excel, developing programs to refresh equipment, and address scholarly and creative needs. We need to develop new centers and institutes and value faculty who wish to demonstrate teamwork to our students. We need to provide more out-of-classroom learning and graduates who “not only know more but can also do more.”

In support of Student Access and Success and Enrollment Management:

裸聊直播 has been focusing for some time on improving student retention and graduation rates, particularly as noted in our WASC report in Fall 2007. Our primary advisory group is the Student Success Assessment Committee (SSAC) which has faculty, student and staff representatives. Thus, when the CSU initiated an effort to close the achievement gap for students from underrepresented groups, we asked SSAC to take leadership along with the AVP for APGS. In spring 2010, the Board of Trustees also established a requirement that all campuses provide early start programs for students needing English and math remediation. Then, in summer 2010 the state legislature passed SB 1440 to facilitate the community college transfer process. In the coming academic year, the Provost’s Office through the AVP for APGS and SSAC will be working on these initiatives in consultation with the colleges and the Academic Senate.

Further, consistent with the University’s academic plan and the strategic planning underway in the Division of Academic Affairs, 裸聊直播 will continue to refine our enrollment management efforts regarding the mix of students by level and by discipline.

In support of an Inclusive University:

In May 2010 the Academic Senate accepted the Diversity Report prepared by the FDEC with additional liaison members from each division. I want to thank Dr. Terry Jones, Dr. Arthurlene Towner, and Associate Provost Linda Dobb for their leadership in moving this report forward. The Cabinet reviewed this report during the summer and is preparing recommendations for implementation. These recommendations will take the form of a “diversity action plan” to be integrated into the University’s strategic plan and will contribute toward the University’s inclusive climate. Each division will also be implementing its specific diversity initiatives.


In support of Vibrant University Villages:

The CSU Board of Trustees approved the Hayward campus master plan last September. While the ASI Recreation and Wellness Center was started prior to approval of the master plan, its opening this fall represents an exciting new component of student life. The University can now begin specific planning for the next new projects to implement the master plan. Priorities for the comprehensive campaign include a STEM Education building to provide state-of-the-art laboratories and teaching facilities to support our initiatives in math and science education.

In Support of an Efficient and Well-Run University and a Culture of Accountability:

Financial stability is imperative to sustain a well-run University. Our University of Possibilities comprehensive campaign will increase funding available for current programs and build our endowment, which will provide a permanent, long-term source of support. We have completed the first year of the leadership phase of our campaign. The campaign is on schedule to meet our fundraising objectives.

In Support of the University’s Regional Stewardship:

In support of the University’s mandate for regional stewardship, we are providing leadership as a convener of Gateways, a regional P-20 cradle-to-career partnership with business, K-12 school districts, community colleges, philanthropic corporations and community groups with a common goal to improve student success in education and workforce preparation, particularly STEM areas. The partnership is working in three key areas for impacting student outcomes along the P-20 roadmap: school readiness in early childhood; problem-based, real-work experiences and career awareness in STEM; and strengthening teacher conceptual and content knowledge in mathematics. Gateways’ vision is a region of Successful Students, Productive Citizens, and Thriving Cities and Communities. Gateways is one example of the University becoming imbedded in the community we serve.

In the University’s Quest for Distinction:

We are focusing on STEM education. STEM education or “STEM -centeredness” means that we recognize the importance of quantitative thinking and analytical reasoning, along with reading and writing as recognized in our academic plan. Every discipline in the University has a purpose in shaping the intellectual capacity, creativity, ethics, and energy of every student. Every discipline plays a role in shaping our students for the future, with the hope that they will make the world a better place to live.

So why do we need to emphasize a University that has a STEM Education “centeredness”? This emphasis is needed to accentuate the woeful inadequacies in the U.S. population in the areas of science and math. These inadequacies are reaching critical, if not irreversible levels. According to the Programme for International Student Assessment, test results underscore concerns that too few U.S. students are prepared to become engineers, scientists and physicians and that the country might lose ground to competitors.

    • Out of 41 countries assessed, the US ranks: 12th in reading; 20th in Science; and 25th in Math

In the last 20 years, more and more of our science, technological, engineering, and mathematics related jobs requiring a bachelor’s, master’s or doctorate degree are increasingly going to foreign nationals, while more and more of our youth are being left behind. Shouldn’t these figures alone be a call to action, no matter what our discipline?

The U.S. was in a similar situation in the 1960s when President Kennedy called on the country to improve our education with a focus in math and science to become the science and technological leaders of the world. As a nation, we answered the call and led the world for decades, with marvelous discoveries and economic expansion; and with that economic expansion, came funding for the arts and protection of the environment.

It is now 2010, a half century later and we need to deliver the same call to action. If we do not respond, we may forfeit the future for the next generation.

To accept the call, we need to address three components that comprise a STEM-centered University. First, we need to improve science and math education from kindergarten through college. Employers indicate that for most jobs they are less interested in the college major of a potential employee and more interested in a skill set that is adaptable to an ever-changing environment. This skill set includes written and oral communications skills, the ability to work in teams, leadership skills, multicultural awareness, and competency in math and science. Second, we need to improve adult math and science literacy to produce a more informed public and electorate. As a nation we can ill afford political decisions that go against good science and the best interest of humanity. And finally, we need to increase the number of STEM professionals to meet societal demand in engineering, natural sciences, social sciences, education and the health sciences. For if we do not meet these needs, our country will give way to those countries that have invested in their futures.

Dashboard development
 
In order to monitor progress toward the achievement of our seven mandates, I have asked the Cabinet to update the 2008 Strategic Priorities statement and to concentrate this year on adopting operational measures for each mandate that we can display on the University’s strategic planning Web site.

Conclusion

Together, we have succeeded at transforming our University from merely surviving to the threshold of thriving. These changes will now allow us the opportunity to align academic programs with emerging opportunities and markets. We have demonstrated the agility, innovation and creativity to meet the needs and opportunities presented to us –– so that today we emerge from the financial crisis of the last several years poised for success.

Our ability to move to thriving as a CSU institution in the coming years will greatly depend on our continuing commitment to work collaboratively and collegially. One of the great strengths of our university is our people. Let us continue to be united and committed to working together to ensure the University’s successful future.

It has been both an honor and privilege to work with such a dedicated and talented group of students, faculty, staff and administrators.

Let me close with a quote from Charles Darwin that would appear to be appropriate for those of us in higher education today: “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”

Let this time of change in higher education be our time!

Thank you and Go Pioneers!