The President's Inaugural Speech posted 4/1/06

To Chairman Gary Valade; honored members of the Board of Trustees; Search Committee Chairman David Hickman and members of the Presidential Search Committee; Faculty President Bill Bachman and members of our esteemed faculty; The Honorable Dr. Joe Schwarz; State Senator Cameron Brown and Representative Dudley Spade; Mayor Gary McDowell; Marlene Ross and my wonderful classmates in the ACE Fellows program; administrators; students; support staff; physical plant employees; dining service employees; trusted alumni; delegates from far and wide; cherished and dear friends from Pittsburgh; friends from Michigan and all corners of the United States; Marsha Fielder and the outstanding Inaugural Committee; Brian Mitchell, my good friend, mentor, and President of the prestigious Bucknell University; and more family members than have ever congregated in one place, I say…

…Thank you for honoring Adrian College with your presence here today.

Nine months ago today this College and this community opened their arms to our family with kindness and warmth beyond anything we have experienced thus far in our lives. You gave us a wonderful Homecoming after 21 years of being away from Michigan. Adrian is a special place and we are honored to live and serve here.

As I begin my remarks I want to say a word about Beth, my wife, and our new First Lady of Adrian College.

When we married in 1986 and started a journey that would take us to Chicago, Boston, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, and eventually home to Michigan, you endured small apartments, living in a college residence hall for six years with our children, moving to small towns in which we knew no one, and raising our children in less than ideal conditions. You did all this so I could pursue my passion for higher education. I can never express in words how much I appreciate your support and how much I love you for everything you have done to allow us to be here today.

And to our children I say that you are your mother’s and my most proud achievement. Each day we have with you is precious, each year goes by too fast, and we treasure each and every moment we have together with you. You and all children can be certain that no professional accomplishments can ever equal the joy that parents feel in holding and spending time with their children.

I would be remiss if I did not mention one more person who in recent years has been instrumental in this day, a person I invited to join me from Washington & Jefferson College. To many of you, Rick Creehan is the Executive Vice President of this great College, a man of boundless energy and ideas, who has already turned around our admissions process and increased our total applications by nearly 70 percent.

But to me, he is a friend who reminds me that loyalty is still a value to be treasured, commitment to one’s word is essential, and candor and honesty are still the best way to lead one’s life and lead others.

Rick, this College and I thank you for being here today.

Today we celebrate not the ascension of one person to an office, but the ascension of a College to new levels of excellence; not the arrival of a family, but the arrival of a campus community to a new era of stability and academic prosperity; not a transition of leadership, but a transition of institutional vision into an era of Renaissance that will forever change how we educate students at this College.

It should be clear that the excellence we seek, and the educational experience we intend to create, did not begin with my arrival on July 1st. It started with the great men and women that came before us. The men and women who founded this school in Leoni, Michigan, as Michigan Union College in 1845, on through the two great men sitting directly behind me, former President Don Stanton and President Stan Caine. These men gave much of their professional lives to Adrian College and we are honored to build on their accomplishments.

When I contemplate the work of these two men and, of course, President John Dawson, who is represented today by his wonderful wife, Virginia, I am reminded of Cicero’s adage, “That if on some days I can see farther than others, it is only because I stand on the shoulders of giants.”

Today the keys of the past and the great work of our forbearers symbolically and ceremonially get turned over to us. It is now our responsibility to build on their achievements. We welcome this challenge and we eagerly accept the awesome responsibility of leading this College into a bright future.

This future, it should be clear, will be rife with change. Just as these men evaluated and responded to the challenges in higher education when they took office, we too must change and adapt to the challenges before us in order to remain strong for the next 147 years.

The challenges facing colleges like ours are massive. We know, for example, that we are constantly under siege by enormous public institutions with marketing budgets and eye-popping sports revenues several times larger than our entire annual budget. If you add to that the fact that over four million college students now take at least one course online, and you can see why small colleges like Adrian must define their niche.

Our challenge is compounded when you realize that dozens of small colleges are approaching an annual price tag of $40,000 for tuition, room and board. This number is mind-numbing. We must find ways to control costs and redistribute resources or families who want a small private education for their children will be forced to educate them elsewhere.

And finally, an ominous dark cloud hovers over the horizon of all colleges and universities, a cloud that will burst in 2009 when forecasters predict a precipitous drop in high school graduates.

All of this will occur at precisely the same time we want to grow enrollment at Adrian College. But we will not let these threats stand in the way of progress. Daunting as these challenges may be, we will pull together as one campus community, contributing our collective best thinking, working together to create an undergraduate experience replicated by only the best small colleges in this country.

In this effort we seek nothing short of becoming a benchmark for how to build a successful small college in the 21st century.

Our quest to build a new and better Adrian must begin with two ground rules that will establish the parameters of what we create. First, we must absolutely reject mediocrity in all its forms at this College. If good is the enemy of great, as Jim Collins says in his recent bestseller, then mediocrity is the enemy of all that is good and we should not accept mediocrity on any level. We will set high standards for ourselves and our college and demand that we achieve these standards.

Second, Adrian College can not cut its way to financial security. We must invest our way to prosperity. Like any good business, we must know exactly what we are investing in, why, and what the return on our investments will be. And then, again, like a strong business, we must demand accountability up and down the administrative chain at Adrian College to ensure that people deliver on these investments.

Now I know that some in academia bristle at the idea of running a college like a business, but I do not apologize nor shy away from this comparison. Like a business, we must invest to reach such a high level of quality that our student numbers will flourish and we will secure our financial future well into the 21st century.

With these ground rules in mind, our goals are quite simple. First, we increasingly hear that students in large universities take five or even six years to graduate. Six year graduation rates are an indictment of the schools who brag of their “success” with this number. Adrian has always done better. Seventy percent of our graduates complete their work in four years. But that’s not good enough. I am challenging the faculty to write a curriculum that guarantees that students in any major, including teacher education, can graduate in four years.

Second, it certainly is no secret that we need more students. Enrollment is the single greatest challenge that we face and it will determine, more than any other variable, the quality and future stature of Adrian College. We are running at two-thirds capacity – and no college, non-profit corporation, or for-profit corporation can survive at two-thirds capacity. Colleges of less than 1000 students cannot be viable in the 21st century.

Many of you are aware of the changes made this year to attract and retain students: a new admissions house, more aggressive recruiting, a new fitness center, new campus apartments, and ground broken for a multi-sport complex. I am proud to announce today that these efforts have resulted in a 56 percent increase in the number of students who have paid their deposit to enroll at Adrian College next fall. This is in addition to a modern-day record for the number of applications received at Adrian College.

The plan is working and when we reach our goal – when we attract strong freshman classes of 400 and build our enrollment to 1400 – we will one day look back and this hour, at this day in April, and say that we identified our greatest threat to this college, we conquered it with quality investments, and we charted a renaissance that will last well beyond our lifetimes.

Third, we place before us the goal of not only attracting more students, but attracting students capable of high academic achievement. This is not to suggest that we don’t value and respect the students who currently attend Adrian College. Beth and I have hosted many of them for dinner at our home this year and we are impressed beyond measure. These students are wonderful, balanced, kind, hard-working, and outstanding future leaders. I believe they will one day be acknowledged as the Second Great Generation.

Nevertheless, those that seek the rigorous intellectual challenge that colleges like Adrian should provide, where classrooms are filled with vigorous debate from the left and the right, where knowledge production is valued as much as knowledge assimilation, and where learning is valued for its own sake, those students need to be surrounded by more of the same.

Fortunately, the investments we are already making in this renaissance have ignited an extraordinary turn of events in not only the quantity but also the quality of our freshman applications. Just yesterday I learned that this year’s application pool of students with a 3.5 GPA and over has increased by 60 percent. And perhaps most indicative of a school on the rise, at the opposite extreme, the number of students we have denied admission to for the fall class of 2006 has risen by 600 percent.

As we attract more students – and more students who are highly qualified – the faculty and administration will be challenged to re-imagine the academic experience at this College. I have spoken often of the need to identify and initiate new academic programs that are consistent with our institutional history, are appealing to today’s students, are important to our nation’s future, and will lead graduates to jobs that can support a family and reasonable lifestyle.

And how should we select the new academic programs we will offer? First, we should look to the students. For example, in recent months we have seen students, students that I referred to earlier as the Second Great Generation, heading by the carloads to Louisiana and Mississippi to help rebuild areas devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Before that we saw many students, including Adrian students, flock to New York City after 9-11 to bring comfort and relief and to help in any way possible.

We should consider developing programs that will enable these compassionate young people to find vocations rebuilding regions across the world torn apart by human strife, natural disaster, and economic failure. They might go as nurses with a specialty in terrorist injuries, as social workers with a specialty in natural disaster stress relief, or as philosophers, political scientists, or anthropologists with a specialty in reducing poverty and human suffering.

We must consider new academic programs that reflect our values and tradition, but programs that add a unique Adrian dimension that will distinguish our education from similar programs offered elsewhere. We are limited only by our imaginations.

The starting point for many of our new academic programs should be our response to the world that surrounds us. For example, we know that the outsourcing of jobs has created a terrible economic environment for our graduates to enter. In the manufacturing sector alone, America loses 34,000 job each month. Perhaps Adrian College could specialize in an academic program focused not on manufacturing and making things, but making things better.

I am suggesting that we open an institute at Adrian College solely devoted to innovation and creativity. I can envision an Institute for Entrepreneurism, Ingenuity, and Inventiveness whose sole purpose is to teach students how to think creatively about improving existing products and ideas. Creative entrepreneurs can never be outsourced, will always have a job, and can work in any field imaginable. Every human constructed reality can be made better; Adrian College graduates should be leaders and doers in innovation and creative improvement. We should be known as the school that teaches students how to build careers on all disciplines. Low-wage overseas workers may replace Americans based on price, but we should never let them surpass us in inventiveness.

Finally, new academic programs should recognize the explosion of technology that captivates this generation of young adults. They communicate in ways few people in my generation imagined at their age. They talk continually with their friends through the world through email, instant messenger, and cell phones, entertain and educate themselves through the Internet, and carry the world with them on iPods. They buy and sell on eBay, and find jobs and apartments on craigslist.

The College must recognize these wired and wireless students to help them become not only consumers but producers of communication, so that they can see how technology can create cross-cultural understanding, meaningful dialog between nations, and the oneness of humanity.

They will require us to think creatively about technology and to build a highly interdisciplinary program that combines English and communication and art and business with computer information systems, to prepare students to use these new communication tools in ways that benefit humanity. During this renaissance, we need a strong and expanded communications program.

These are just a few ideas, to get us started, to get us thinking. The best ideas for our academic renaissance won’t come from me. They’ll come from you, and I look forward in the months ahead to hearing them.

But education, we know, involves far more than progressive curriculum. It requires master teachers who can help students learn while doing. Modern students are willing to sit in classrooms. But they also want to “do.” We should give them the opportunity to experience their major beyond the boundaries of the campus.

I am proposing that the college greatly increase its support of faculty members who can provide experiential education opportunities to our students. Adrian should lead the way in field experience, internships, hands-on workshops, shadowing opportunities, and service learning.

Political science students should spend time learning in Washington, D.C. Art students should visit the Sistine Chapel and the Louvre. Athletic training students should have an opportunity to observe a professional training camp. History students should work at Gettysburg for a summer. And all freshmen should have the opportunity to shadow someone in their professional field for three days to see if they like what they have selected for a major before they graduate.

I propose that the renaissance of Adrian College be inextricably linked to a new emphasis on experiential education, and I encourage the faculty to plan a future grounded in it. Create classes where students are forced to leave the classroom, get their hands dirty, invest emotional, physical, spiritual, and intellectual energy into the learning process. We should be known as the College in Michigan where you learn reading, studying, and doing.

The possibilities are endless. Every faculty member on campus could weave threads of experiential learning into their curriculum knowing that their efforts are supported by the College and will be funded by the President’s Office.

As we work together to shape our renaissance during the coming years, you will have a president and an administration that is collegial, dialogical, open, accessible, and, yes, one of my favorite words, transparent. I will be fully engaged with our outstanding new mayor and eager to leverage the college to improve our entire region.

But you will also have an administration that is resolute, determined, demanding of excellence, and ready to show leadership when progress bogs down. We will succeed and we will move forward. Failure will not be an option.

Finally, you will also have an administration that believes students should synthesize all that happens on this campus. From the lessons of the classrooms, to the insights gained from friends in the dining hall, to the social experiences gained in the student center, it all comes together in one building on campus: the chapel. The essential truths that give direction and meaning to our lives are heard when we open ourselves to the voice of our Creator, when we combine His wisdom with our experiences at this college. It is in these quiet moments of prayer and reflection that the great insights of the heavens reveal themselves and transform young lives into purposeful and meaningful journeys.

I will end with a short story of an experience I had a few weeks ago as I was preparing this speech one late night in the College archives. I was reading through old speeches, speeches by giants at the College. There was Asa Mahan, our first president, who saw us through the Civil War and President Lincoln’s administration; President David Jones, who lead the College as the 19th century turned over to the 20th century; Harlan Feeman, who somehow kept the College alive during the Great Depression; Samuel Harrison, who steadfastly led this institution as Hitler’s troops marched across Europe; and President John Dawson, who undoubtedly watched anxiously during his presidency as the world nearly perished during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a man who later certainly saw part of his world perish as his only son died only a few short weeks after being stationed in Viet Nam.

As I read through these speeches I found an old photograph that someone must have slipped within the pages of one of the texts. It was a photograph that on the back was penciled 1870-1871. As I looked at the photo in the dim light of the archive room, it appeared that it was taken in front of old North Hall. Students and a few professors posed beautifully amidst the trees, the women standing elegantly in their tightly-buttoned dresses, the men nearby in the background, dressed in their Sunday-best, shined boots, pressed ties. Scattered among the group were young children, undoubtedly sitting obediently for the brief second that the photographer needed until they could return to their toys waiting on the frayed edges of the photo.

As I looked into the eyes of these young adults I could see that they were proud. Proud of the College that would claim them as alumni, proud of what they were accomplishing as students, hopeful and excited about the life that awaited them after graduation.

And as I sat and thought about these people, I reflected on how important their lives were to the continuation of the College. Without them we would not be here. And I thought about how important our work is to future generations of students. Without us, and our thoughtful and strong stewardship of this institution, they will not be here. We owe a debt to the people in this picture. We owe our best efforts to the future generations of people who may one day find our photograph scattered amidst the pages of inaugural speeches.

The weight of history is upon us at this hour to lead Adrian College into a bright and glorious future. May we never forget how important this work is, may we be here for each other, and may God be here for all of us as we seek His guidance as we craft this wonderful new Renaissance at Adrian College.

Thank you.