First let me say thank you to the Faculty Senate and its president, Dr. Susan LeClair, for changing your meeting time and allowing me this opportunity to speak with the community. I appreciate your flexibility and your cooperation.

I want to thank everyone who is here for taking the time out of your busy schedules. I know it is not easy to step away from the demands of the day-to-day work to focus on a less immediate but important look to the future. Thank you for making this a priority.

And most importantly, thank you – to all faculty, staff, students, alumni, and friends – for all that you have done over the years to advance the noble and critical cause of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

When I talk today about what we have accomplished, please know that I deeply respect the power of “we” to accomplish great things.

To begin, let me state the two critical points I want to make today. First, by any measure, we have made tremendous progress since we entered the 21^st century together. We have had many obstacles, but by holding to our mission and embracing a vision that expanded our horizons, we have truly grown.

We have strong core values, improved quality, more students, more faculty, more programs, improved facilities, more funded research, and more engagement with our community. We should have a real sense of pride in what has been accomplished. We should celebrate our growth. My first points will be to highlight some of the key components of our growth.

My second point will be that we are not done growing.  Our growth must be more focused and be finely tuned around continuing to enhance quality. I am convinced that to truly meet our mission, we must become more accessible,  more innovative, more collaborative, and more willing to examine ourselves on all fundamental issues that define academic and service quality. We must also be more nimble in everything we do if we are to continue serving our students, the Commonwealth, our nation and our global community. I am going to urge the community to reengage in our strategic planning to help us refine our growth.

There are many positive things to say, but I am not forgetting our struggles.   We have been through a lot together. There has been the anxiety of a serious and long-term structural budget deficit.  There has been the added stress of severe budget cuts. The inevitable tensions of union negotiations.  The debacle of unfunded contracts.  The destabilizing UMASS system re-organization proposals.  Some uncomfortable disagreements about changes in our academic programs and how we assess ourselves. And the painful fight to establish our law school.

But obstacles are part of real life. In Dorchester where I grew up, people were constantly faced with adversity. They reacted in one of two ways. They would surrender or they would get stronger, smarter…more innovative…more stubborn about their goals.

I am proud of all of you for confronting and conquering the adversity we have faced over the years and for maintaining a sense of community.  We have emerged more stubborn than ever about our mission to create meaningful teaching and learning opportunities that allow people to reach their full human potential.

Today, a little over half way into our strategic plan – entitled Engaged, Embedded, Evolving -- we are stronger, smarter, and more innovative than we were when we entered the 21^st century.

In 2000, we put together a plan with six goals that have been guiding all our decision-making. It wasn’t a traditional planning process but it had broad participation and governance affirmation of mission, vision and goals. I am very grateful to all the people, well over 200, who shaped the plan and who were willing to take a risk that strategic planning could make a difference for our university.

Each participant surrendered their cynicism and dared to hope. Many people at all levels of the institution invested their skill, their wisdom, and their passion in making the plan a living, breathing guide to action.

We recently completed a document that summarizes the accomplishments of the plan to date as well as the continuing issues we must face in moving forward. This document is available at umassd.edu.

I am not going to walk you through it page by page here, but just consider some of the things that YOU have accomplished in recent years despite daunting obstacles:

• We stabilized our budget which was a looming problem in 2000 and I am pleased to say we have also almost completely eliminated the large accrued deficit. We did this while at the same time we invested in our future and our growth and we built an endowment of $20.5 million. This is a tribute to your patience and your ingenuity.
• Despite losing some of our most senior faculty leaders to early retirement, we have attracted more than 130 new and outstanding tenure/tenure-track faculty members. They come here because they have deemed this place worthy of their investment of time, energy and passion. They have done so because they value what we have built here and what we will build here.
• And based on your feedback we work hard to keep them here and support and recognize our faculty with the New Faculty Institute, faculty travel grants, a more expansive sabbatical program, the laptop program, CATLS, the Chancellor’s Colloquia and Departmental seminars  and forums. The faculty is the key intellectual asset of our campus and as you have heard me say on many occasions, “Education is not about filling a pale, but about lighting a fire”. I want to be sure to keep your intellectual fires burning brightly.
• We have expanded our enrollment to 8,800 students and have done so while maintaining and enhancing our academic standards and creating greater diversity. We became a residential campus by adding 2,000 residence hall beds. We upgraded almost 55 of our 65 general purpose classrooms and our atrium study areas.  We also opened the Fitness Center ( which we have already outgrown), improved our Dining Halls, upgraded the campus center, improved our athletic fields and built new tennis courts, as well as expanded our student activities programming. We created learning communities, but I believe we have more to do to ensure that every student feels that UMD is completely dedicated to his/her success.

 More students are choosing us because they value what we have built here and what, with their help, we will build here.

• We’ve added new departments in Portuguese and Policy studies, reorganized others in Business and Engineering.  We’ve added new undergraduate and Masters Programs.  We have grown from two doctoral programs to four and are about to have six with Nursing and Luso/Afro/Braziliam Studies to be approved over the spring for fall enrollment.
• We achieved AACSB accreditation for our Charlton College and opened the new Building and all of our professional programs have achieved the renewal of their national accreditation with commendation.
• Our research enterprise has grown from $7 million to more than $23 million dollars and is driven by opportunities and challenges embedded in our region. This expansion has occurred because public and private benefactors value what we have built here and what we will build here. They have believed in our mission and have invested in us. 
• And, most importantly, we have granted degrees to 7,200 undergraduate and graduate students. The value of those degrees to the individuals who received them flows from the efforts of everybody who is associated with this campus: the star researcher, the committed teacher, groundskeeper, the counselor, the friend, the annual fund giver.

This is the broad brush evidence of our success. There are countless specific examples of our success: some are big achievements; some are small steps for individuals and groups.

• The School of Marine Science and Technology strengthening New Bedford’s fishing industry.
• Technology-empowered teaching supported through CITS and CATLS
• Pathways and College Now students demonstrating excellence with some support and encouragement
• The Advanced Technology Center in Fall River creating new technology business locating in the region and expanded high skill jobs.
• The Hockey Team going to the NCAA tourney for the first time.
• The Star Store in downtown New Bedford stimulating the creative economy of the City
• Being able to offer the Clemente Course in New Bedford

There is a long list.  And there is more on the near horizon:

• The re-opening of the Cedar Dell South in the fall and eventually Cedar Dell North.
• The opening of the new 20,000 square foot research facility on April 5, launching a new era of inter-disciplinary innovation. 
• New undergraduate majors in crime and justice studies, and as I have already mentioned the doctoral programs in nursing, and Portuguese studies. 
• An exciting $10 million renovation of the Claire T Carney Library and the opening of the Ferreira Mendes Portuguese Archives and Library Special Collections. I am very pleased to tell you that we have had a wonderful response to our library capital campaign. We are close to $4 million raised toward our $6 million goal. We will have one of our donors with us right after this event to present us a check for $150,000 to establish the Edward Dinis Policy, Law and Public Service Collection in the Ferreira-Mendes Archive.

***

So what is the true state of our university? Simply put, it is strong. We decided to identify things that could be done and we did many of them. Our glass is half full.

But our campus remains in a state of evolution…as it should.

Because we know that in our fast-changing world, clinging to old ways is a strategy for stagnation, indeed failure.

Last week our new governor, Deval Patrick, focused on the necessity of forward thinking when he visited with SouthCoast business leaders.

“Yesterday’s greatness does not assure tomorrow’s,’’ he said. “It is a mistake to fuel the future on the fumes of the past.’’

Gov. Patrick could have been speaking about our university. There is simply no time for complacency, no time for parochialism, no time for blind defense of the status quo. No resting on our laurels.

***

But we do have traditions here at UMD. We are not talking about abandoning our core values.  Our tradition of being embedded in our community -- focusing our teaching, research and service on the needs and aspirations of our community – remains a core value.

Our commitment to the individual student is another tradition of UMass Dartmouth. As we have grown, this commitment has required creativity and realignment. But it remains a core value.

Our strong belief in balancing scholarship and teaching and making them twin achievements. This remains a core value.

In the fall, we will celebrate our traditions with the release of a stunning pictorial history of the university written by Fred Gifun with the able design assistance of three wonderful graduate assistants and support from many people on and off campus.

Fred’s work will honor those who have built UMass Dartmouth and remind us how our core values were forged from mergers and transitions over the years as we became a strong entrepreneurial institution

The test for us now is how to express these traditional core values in a world that is much different than it was in 2000 when we embarked on our growth strategy.

Over the next several years we will continue to grow. We remain on a path to 10,000 students, a larger research enterprise, and a greater impact on our community.

But as we move forward, we will need to focus more on the shape and depth of growth to assure that we remain true to our core values.

We need to reconsider the mix of our 10,000 students: graduate and undergraduate… international and domestic…transfer and first-time freshmen…traditional and non-traditional…regional and statewide or out-of-state…honors and academically disadvantaged…Who is the UMass Dartmouth student of the future and how are we ensuring a personal, challenging, transforming experience?.

We need to closely examine our commitment to diversity, not just in access for students but in faculty recruitment, in curriculum, in welcoming climate, and in successful achievement of learning goals.

In a very short time, the majority population of our state and nation will shift, have we truly embraced the notion that diversity is an enhancement of the educational experience at UMD? We need to achieve strong synergy between our goals of access and excellence.

We need to expose students to international perspectives and experiences. Is studying abroad something we embrace and encourage?  How can we make it accessible and affordable?  How do we bring more international students to the campus? Do we need to encourage our students to become bilingual?

We need to deepen our civic engagement. What should we be doing to integrate service learning into our curriculum?

We need to identify emerging academic areas for greater investment in response to new interdisciplinary opportunities and needs.

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We will be making these decisions in an atmosphere of increasing accountability and higher expectations. More than ever, there is an expectation that a 4-year degree is the ticket to a viable vocation, yet we know that there is so much more to it than that.

We want our students to be critical thinkers to have innovative imaginations, to be able to create the new ideas and inventions which will power a knowledge economy.  We also want them to be kind, to be caring to be committed to democracy and the social contract.  We need to be clearer about how these integrative learning goals are achieved and demonstrated.

Ethnic and religious conflict, climate change, technological progress and other world-flattening issues are forcing us to re-think what we do within the confines of Ring Road. Technology makes a broader world accessible so much more quickly. 

Closer to home, our region and Commonwealth continue to struggle with dropout rates that are devastating to individuals, families and communities. What should we do to better focus our commitment to K-12 schools? We have a dramatic challenge here and our current programs and approaches are widely perceived to be inadequate.

Our region is trying to emerge as a serious player in the bio-technology, advanced materials, and marine science industries. These are all boundary crossing fields that demand we do business differently.

Meanwhile, young, smart, innovative people who do graduate from college are leaving our state at an alarming rate, weakening our long-term economic and social fabric.

What will be our response as students, teachers, researchers and citizens to these urgent and fundamental challenges?

I am confident that we have the intellectual and creative ability to lead on these issues. I am confident that the new strategic planning groups will help us address them.  But I also want to urge all of us to choose to exercise three collective powers: the power to participate and collaborate, the power to innovate, and the power to serve.

1. Power to participate and collaborate.  – Every member of our community needs to participate in our collective mission. Broad-based, diverse participation generates real energy that creates real change. It is no longer acceptable in this world to just do your own thing.

Our new research facility, which we will open in April, is designed to encourage inter-disciplinary participation. But we need to stretch the concept even further and accelerate the destruction of programmatic silos. We need to see our scientists engaging with our poets, historians, artists, and policy experts to help us all better understand the impact of their work on humanity.

WE need to give up adversarial approaches to meeting challenges. They create winners and losers and often fail to create real solutions – and they often take too long. We need to break down the barriers that separate people -- roles, seniority, race, discipline, college, management/union, campus/community -- and begin to embrace diverse perspectives. I want to ask you to participate in campus life fully and to embrace collaborative thinking and acting.

2. Power to Innovate – There are amazing, groundbreaking ideas being born throughout this campus – in our laboratories and classrooms, in our conference rooms and offices, and over coffee at the Underground Café and soup in the faculty lounge.

They are ideas about how we can all better serve our students and ideas about how our university can better save the world.

We need expand this power by opening the channels of communication both on campus and from campus to community. We have the technology to do this. We just need to exercise the will to be transparent and civil in our dialogues. We need to encourage the risk takers among us.

And we need to streamline our processes so good ideas can be put into action. I am calling on all of us to help innovative ideas flourish and grow.

3. Power of Service – When I came here seven years ago I was immediately impressed by the community service ethic that existed here.

Many individual students, faculty members and staff are engaged in inspirational service. Just this week I received a report that more than 100 of our students contributed 3,500 hours of reading tutoring to New Bedford children through the America Reads program. That is real power…two-way power. Both the UMass student and the child are transformed by the experience.

There are countless examples of such service. It is part of our history, rooted in our genesis as community-based textile schools in New Bedford and Fall River.

Today, we need to marshal and focus our power to serve by strategically matching our intellectual resources with the aspirations of our students and the needs of our region and Commonwealth and our global community. I Challenge everyone to provide significant service to each other and to your community.

***

Today, I am not prescribing the tactics for using these three powers. I am only asking for you to recognize that we have the power and responsibility to lead.

In fact, we have everything we need to lead:

• A new outlook from Beacon Hill to Capitol Hill that values public higher education.
• A fiercely supportive legislative delegation and civic community that recognizes our impact on the region
• A maturing alumni base that is becoming more engaged in the life of our campus and bringing tangible support.
• A fast growing regional population, from the SouthCoast to Interstate 495 to Cape Cod, which provides us with a dynamic base of students. 
• And a stellar faculty.

That leadership must be exercised in a new context that offers both opportunity and challenge.

As part of this dialogue we need to understand that with new investment there will be new accountability.

We need to understand that we are not entitled to anything.

Support for our mission comes in many forms:

• A parent’s faith that their son or daughter is receiving high value for their tuition payment;
• A scarce tax dollar that is directed here rather than a myriad of other worthy causes;
• A federal grant for which we competed with dozens of other institutions around the country;
• A private philanthropist’s belief that a portion of her wealth is best spent on a university initiative;
• The choice of an alumnus to volunteer to serve on a college advisory board.

All of the above are choices that other people make about us, and we need to prove every day that we are a good choice.

The strategic planning process that I have asked Provost Anthony Garro to lead over the next few months is designed to update our strategic plan to address our emerging challenges and opportunities. It is meant to call us to this deeper dialogue about our growth.

Lots of people have already signed up. Don’t stand on the sidelines. Share your ideas. Lead.  Exercise your powers.

I pledge that you will be heard. I especially look forward to dialogue with the faculty and student leadership.

As stewards of our “place” -- our campus, our region, our Commonwealth, our nation and our Global community--let us use our powers to participate and collaborate, innovate, and serve with a real sense of urgency.

The pace of change these days is remarkably fast. If we intend to lead, we can’t hesitate about embracing the challenge. We can be thoughtful and reflective but we must move forward with the same kind of boldness that so long ago changed New Bedford Tech and Durfee TECH into SMTI, and then SMU and then UMD.  WE gave up something each time for the promise of more.  WE have to do that same thing again now—for the promise of more. We have to be bold.