Thank you, you are all very kind. I consider it a great honor and privilege to be the Chancellor of UMass Dartmouth and the first woman to hold that role.

Commitment to be Engaged, Embedded and Evolving
I have always seen leadership as service-and I accept this medal today with a deep commitment to be fully engaged in enhancing the quality of what we all do-teaching, research, and public service; fully willing to become myself-and to draw all of us into being embedded in the cultural, economic, social, and educational life of our community-local and global; and not afraid to embrace change and help this institution evolve, becoming all it can and needs to be for the 21st Century.

In fact, what I want to talk to you about today is what I mean when I say UMass Dartmouth must be-an institution fully engaged in its work intellectually and effectively, deliberately embedded in the life of its community, and consciously evolving. But before I take up that theme in some more depth-first let me express some personal thank yous.

Let me first acknowledge those who have come before me in this role. There are five portraits hanging in the Chancellor's Boardroom-three Presidents and two previous Chancellors-counting only back to the SMU days. I have had the opportunity to come to know all of them-four in person and one by hearing and reading about him-I certainly owe them a debt of gratitude. They each shaped this institution and brought it to where it is today.

I want to acknowledge one of these fine gentlemen who is with us today-President William Wild. Please stand up, Bill, and let us say thank you for your years of dedicated service to UMD and its predecessor's institutions.

All of the Presidents and Chancellors stay connected to UMass Dartmouth-an indication of their commitment, affection, and continued hopes for the campus. I am blessed by their willingness to share their wisdom and insight and perspective with me. There are lessons in where we have been. I've told them at recent events when they were all there that they look very serious in their official portraits-in their robes and gray and navy suits. I've told them I plan to wear red for my portrait-just to make it stand out and to spice up the group a bit-they rolled their eyes and told me just having me on the wall was a big enough change for their group!

I do bring a different perspective -a woman's perspective-not better but different-and perhaps the inclusion and valuing of many perspectives, which I represent, is a symbol of the changing times!

Revering the Past
The SMU years are only a part of this institution's history. Through its predecessor institutions, Durfee Tech, New Bedford Tech, SMTI, SMU, and the Swain School has a 101-year history of providing quality education to the people of this region and the Commonwealth. I have deep respect for this institution's history, for its solid and excellent core teaching and learning process, for its adaptive and entrepreneurial spirit, and for its consistent responsiveness to the changing needs of its community.

But a university's real history is written on the hearts and minds of its trustees, faculty, staff, and graduates. I do get to see and feel that history so many times when they come up to me to tell me how UMD-or its predecessors changed their lives. That legacy must be valued.

A Sense of a Larger Community and Shared Leadership
I want to thank all of you for being here to share this occasion with our institution. These last days in our country have been incredibly difficult ones. We have no doubt been changed in our outlook, yet we are struggling to go on with our lives and our regular routine. We grapple with the rhythm of change and continuity.

It is not easy to put away sadness and worry about the future, so I want to thank you for coming together today around this celebration of leadership. Let us make it a celebration of the simple and profound leadership we have witnessed in this crisis-the personal heroism of so many.

Let's stop and appreciate the leadership that is emerging in a community that has grown from the shared sense of loss, and let's recognize the sense of power and deep patriotism that exists within but often does not rise to the surface. We have the opportunity right now to exercise wise world leadership and to foster a greater sense of global responsibility. In celebrating my new leadership here at the University, perhaps we can make it an occasion to remind ourselves of the challenge we all have-each of us in whatever we do-at every level-to learn, to lead, and to serve others, especially in times of need.

Expressions of Appreciation
I certainly must thank those here on the platform party who have presented me with gifts and greetings, as well as those who helped to plan all the details of this event. I am indebted to Professor Susan Leclair and Mr. Donald Ramsbottom and all the members of their working committee.

To all of you here I want to say Thank you. Let me assure you that I do know that without all of you-and those you represent-nothing truly great is possible here at UMass Dartmouth. There is power in shared purpose that opens the door to amazing accomplishments. What you have expressed today is not so much about me but about what you value and respect, and it reflects a strong sense of community and tremendous dedication to this institution.

Our legislative leaders-Senator Montigny and Representative Quinn-and all the members of the delegation. I am so grateful to each of you. You believe so strongly in this public University. You see its potential and respect its quality and invite us to work with you on important regional and statewide projects. You support us in every way you can, and I welcome your partnership.

Our Trustees give so generously of their time and wisdom and direction. You believe in the full power of UMass as a five-campus University System, and yet you also cherish the diversity and distinction of each of the campus missions. I value your service to us.

Our faculty and staff, their leaders, and our administrators are the heart and soul of our commitment to excellence and our ability to innovate. You are the intellectual core of who we are and our ultimate strength. I appreciate your colleagueship and your myriad contributions.

And our students, our alumni, and our community are the energy that sends us back again and again with renewed dedication to the classroom, the lab, the library, the project, the collaboration, the community. Thank you for choosing us to share in your aspirations.

All of the people you have heard -and all they represent-believe that what we do here makes a difference. I am grateful to all of you and happy to be part of your team. I also want to thank President Bulger and Trustee Fey for their gracious words about me. They are much too generous in their praise. I am very grateful for your sense of confidence in me and for entrusting me with this leadership responsibility. You both model the kind of leadership that I admire, and I look forward to continuing to learn from you and to work with you over the next years as partners, mentors, and friends.

I also want to express my appreciation to my friends Bob Karam and Hubie Jones who addressed you earlier. I wanted to have two individuals speak who I knew would speak from their experience and from their hearts about public service and the realistic challenges of leadership in the 21st century -and who would also not hesitate to challenge us about leading and serving. They certainly did that. Both of you practice what you preach. And as President Bulger often says in quoting Samuel Johnson-Example is far more efficacious than precept. Thank you both for being that example for us.

Being Shaped by Values
And I want to especially acknowledge my parents who are here. Truly none of this would be possible without them. Not just because they got married 56 years ago, and had me-the oldest and "super responsible" daughter-as well as my brother Richard who is here -the favorite and only son-who tells me that he gave me my start in moving to the top-because when he arrived it gave me the opportunity to learn how to play to win-he says I gave him the opportunity to be traumatized and clever at dealing with conflict -and my sister Marilyn-the multitalented but "baby" of the group-who can run circles around us both-but doesn't have to-because she's the baby-Isn't it amazing that we always stay in the same roles?

But seriously, it was my parents who set me on this pathway that led here-who taught me that learning was important, that effort would lead to achievement, that helping others was a value that would make you happy, and that doing things because they were right was more important than being right.

They did not have the opportunity to attend college themselves-they both worked all their lives so we could have those opportunities. But in so many ways outside of the classroom-they taught us to value learning-to think critically, to love to read, to debate, to question.

They held so many aspirations for us. They believed in us. They did tell us we could do anything that we worked hard at, that it was ok to make a mistake and to admit it. Telling the truth was not a choice but a necessity. That it was important to try-sometimes more important than succeeding, and they taught us to care about others, to respect people who were different from us, to always be fair, to be willing to take risks for what was important, to welcome people to our homes and hearts, to be loyal to our friends and our values, and to treasure family and friends not things.

I am a product of those values -their values-and I do believe that anything that I might have achieved and the reason I am standing here today is because of the path they laid out in front of me-this value path which I internalized, and which my education and experienced refined -I'm glad that I have the opportunity in front of so many people to tell them how much I love them and appreciate who they are and what they taught us.

And of course I have here so many of you who have been my friends and colleagues over the years. You have shaped me as well-You opened up so many divergent paths to explore. You have been there through the ups and downs, we have had a lot of laughs together, a few tears as well, the ideas and arguments, the projects and the plans, the hopes and the dreams. In all of you, I have a multiplicity of blessings, and from all of you I have learned to be my better self and to understand how much more can be accomplished in partnership with others. I am grateful for your friendship and your fellowship.

Embracing partnership here at UMass Dartmouth has also brought me many new friends. When President Bulger enticed me to consider coming here-he said you're young-you have one or two more lives in you after 20 years at UMass Boston-try another path.

It wasn't easy getting off the familiar road-especially leaving so many valued colleagues at UMASS Boston-many here today-but I have truly been embraced by this community.

The Mayors of Fall River and New Bedford - Lambert and Kalisz, and selectman from Dartmouth I see Bob Carney, Enid Silva, Len Gonsalves, Ken Vincent and Town Administrator Michael Gagne and so many members of the business and school community as well as donors and long-time UMD supporters -have invited me into the dialogue and shared with me their hopes and aspirations for UMass Dartmouth and this region. I have been truly taken into the SouthCoast family, and I am so grateful. That's why taking up this challenge of leadership is a possibility for me. I don't believe that I am in it alone.

The Meaning of Engagement, Being Embedded, Choosing to Evolve
Which brings me back to my theme-being engaged, embedded and being willing to evolve. In the wonderful investiture medal Professor Howard Windham has designed, those interactive ideas are visualized and engraved around the central symbol of wisdom. On the back are listed all the predecessor institutions and all the current academic schools and colleges-linking past with present and future. The design in its simplicity and complexity tries to capture my hopes and aspirations for this institution and myself.

By being engaged, I mean being fully alive to the things we do-intellectually excited and involved, emotionally connected and caring with our work and our students and colleagues, committed-and in fact driven to-excellence and quality because of our full engagement. If you have ever been in a place where everyone is actively engaged in what they do -doesn't matter what they do-where they love what they do- you know it is a vibrant and enlivening environment to do one's work and it produces excellence and quality.

Which raises the question of what the University's does-what is our work? It is the subject of much debate and conversation currently-more so in the larger public arena than in many previous years.

My nephews tell my sister- I don't know what Auntie Jean really does-I think she just goes to meetings. She doesn't really "do stuff" An interesting question -What is the "stuff" of higher education-what do we really do? And what should a leader in higher education do?

The simple answer is, of course, we do teaching, research and service-these are the fundamental core missions of a university. We don't produce students, we don't create jobs, and we don't make products. Those things do happen as a result of what we do-but they are not our core activity. We teach, we discover, we share with others.

And therefore, the most simple leadership answer would be that the leader helps create the institutional conditions that ensure that those things are done with quality; that they make a meaningful difference for the people they are meant to serve; and in a public institution, that they create the links that make it possible for this teaching and research work to have a broader benefit to the public.

These are true answers-but they are simple answers that often need more explanation. There is, for example, a huge debate about what is effective teaching and what content should be taught? Perhaps because we have all been to school and experienced what we identified a good and bad teaching, we think we must weigh in on what we need today from our teachers at both K-12 and higher education.

We are asked does our teaching foster real learning, encourage exploring, open the chance for discovering, and nurture creating and reward inventing. Does it induce thinking, questioning, counting, analyzing, synthesizing, and valuing? Can our students exercise judgment, make decisions, work in teams, communicate effectively, write coherently, solve problems effectively, relate effectively, and understand different cultural perspectives? Do they know content-geography, history, grammar, and literature? Do they appreciate beauty in its many forms? Can they make a compelling case for an idea or an argument? Can they use a computer as a learning tool? Do they function ethically? Are they well-prepared engineers, artists, nurses, and accountants?

These are not new questions -they go back to the earliest days of universities-but perhaps they are questions with new meaning and important in an information economy that gives greater cache to higher order thinking skills. And certainly in a democratic society like ours, they are the fabric of sustaining real freedom.

People also debate the value of pure vs. applied research. They wonder about the value of all the scholarship we do, and they look to the University more and more for active engagement in every dimension of public life and in social, cultural, and economic activity. There is a lot of discussion about the usefulness of what we do and our freedom to direct our own research agenda. The questions of intellectual property and the impact of technology on all dimensions of our work present a very challenging context. Just thinking about how technology will change they way we do our work, it s full topic in itself. And of course there are always the questions of the cost of what we do and the public financing of it-are more and more entering the definitional debate?

In the past, higher education was left to define its own "stuff" and respond selectively to identify public needs if and when it thought it could. In the present environment, there is a far more interactive dynamic influencing what and how we do our teaching, research, and public service mission. And there is the clear expectation that higher education leaders and their institutions will once again stake out important principles to frame the debate and step to the front in shaping the more complex answers.

While the environment is challenging today, and we may have been very comfortable when we did all this defining on our own, I think it presents a marvelous opportunity for us to be reinvigorated and renewed in what we do.

My call to be engaged fully -intellectually and with the heart-in our daily work includes full participation in this debate and dialogue and extends from the most senior faculty member to the janitor working in housing. The quality of the learning experience at UMass Dartmouth can only be improved by the commitment and full involvement of all the people who have a role in creating the learning environment for students. Being engaged means not waiting for all the conditions to be right, but being willing to make all the conditions right and to seize opportunities and master challenges. I think it also means inviting many perspectives into the dialogue and being enriched by the diverse perspectives. My message is simple-choosing to be engaged is the impetus to being excellent.

I do not want to imply that excellence does not already exist. It does-there is passionate teaching going on-there is innovative research-there is effective public service-and there is constant searching for ways to make it more effective. But being deliberately engaged ensures continuous improvement and no resting on our laurels. If we make engagement a conscious choice, we embrace the best in who we can be as individuals and as an institution.

As a second challenge, I am also calling us to be fully embedded in our community-moving beyond outreach and responding to needs-but taking clearly the point of view of those we serve and being with them in partnership with what we do. Our growth as an institution gets great impetus from the needs of our Community. The addition of the Center for Marine Science and Technology, the Portuguese Center and the new Department, the Center for Rehabilitation Engineering, our growing Center for Teaching and learning-the wonderful new Star Store facility for our College of Visual and Performing Arts, the new Advanced Technology and Manufacturing Center risen from the ashes of the old Kerr Mill in Fall River, the new Charlton College of Business building for which we had the groundbreaking this morning, and the possibility of a public law school all emerge from our being in and a part of the development of our community, of understanding its aspirations and its real needs, of being partners in making things possible, of thinking creatively together with the private and public sectors, with supporters and donors, and embracing the notion of mutual benefit and mutual reasonability.

I believe UMass Dartmouth is already a wonderful model of an embedded University, but to avoid the temptation of in any way retreating from our open door policy, we have to in fact, as someone recently suggested, permanently remove the hinges from the doors so they can never go back up -and embrace being part of a more messy but certainly more efficacious way of doing or core missions.

And our final challenge is being willing to evolve. Something again we are good at-as just the predecessor intuition listing shows you. UMass Dartmouth is not yet done becoming what it needs to be-it is the smallest of the UMass campuses, and it needs to grow-not just in size, although it will do that with two new dorms-but carefully, with focus and responsiveness to real needs. It must grow in its research activity, it will lead from its pedagogical strength, and it will innovate in its partnerships.

We already have centers of excellence in the sciences and math and in marine science and technology, we are developing a national and international reputation in Portuguese Studies, our design program is highly acclaimed, and our engineering instructional program is a national model. These are the foundations of future potential.

President Bulger told me I should come to UMD because it was a rising star in the constellation of UMass campuses, and I have found that to be true. I believe that passionate engagement, deliberating being in and off the community, and not being afraid to change-yet holding to the core-will allow us to polish that star to its full brightness.

I recently read a wonderful Book by Robert Young from Ohio University called No Neutral Ground: Standing by the Values we Prize in Higher Education. He argues that values are the summaries of our beliefs-catchphrases that explain who we are. They are the backbone of our behaviors-the great simplicities that spring from the deepest wells of our existence. Values emerge from our histories, they represent us in our present, and they guide us toward the future. He says the core values of higher education are service and truth.

I have told you about some of the values I was taught. I have told you some of the values that UMD has held over 101 years. I am suggesting a set of values or behaviors that I think will ensure our best future. John Dewey has said about educational institutions, "Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying, and expanding the heritage of values we have received that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible, and more generously shared than we received it."

My message today is not a list of promises of what I will do-Although I have the list. My message is not a set of problems to be solved-but I also have the list too. And my message is not a financial request for anyone-although I always have that at the ready. My message is to be fully engaged, embrace and be part of the community, be willing to change where that makes sense-You can really celebrate my investiture with me by joining me as I try to those things myself-bolding and with imagination, and with quiet determination.

 Last Updated On: 2/18/06