William Dickinson Hawley

Transcription

Hello, and welcome to the State of the University address. My name is Eric Larson and I'm the President of the Student Association here at Binghamton University. I'd like to start off though, by thanking President Stenger. You'll notice that this is the first time that the State of the University address has been given mid-semester which allows for a lot more people to attend. But that's not the only first. This is the first time a student has been welcomed to speak here at the State of the University address and I feel that this is a strong gesture by the University of their eagerness to include students in our shared growth. Considering there are so many students here, I would like to take a moment to address you all directly. Just this past semester, I've had the most humbling and eye-opening experience serving as your president. I've been able to see first hand exactly what a campus filled with dedicated and resourceful students is capable of accomplishing. It's certainly an incredible volume of things. The fundamental thing that we're looking at here is that we have a campus that is thriving and because of this fortunate title that I hold, I am able to have this privilege to come here and speak to you about all of the things that you have been able to accomplish. As just a quick example, we've got the bike share program. It just opened this semester. Now, it's not the first bike share program in University history, but it is a special bike share program in the sense that every single stage of development was done by students from conceiving the idea to planning it to pitching it to designing it, building it, maintaining it. Every single step along the way was done by eager students ready to fill the need that they saw on this campus. But perhaps the most visible service that we offer as students to this campus are the blue buses. These OCCT blue buses are, in fact, the largest student-run bus company in the country. Every single day, dozens of our students drive thousands of their peers across the greater Binghamton region. And everyday, we strive to make OCCT the best service it can be. Through conjoined efforts with the University, we've been able to expand our fleet and increase our service in addition to making our service smarter by allowing for a new app that will be coming out shortly for live tracking of where our buses are and how full they are in real time. We do more than just transport ourselves around campus and stuff like that. We also throw pretty good concerts as well. Just this past semester, SAPB (our programming board) threw the biggest concert this University has hosted in almost a decade. It is not an easy thing to sell out the Events Center and we were able to succeed there. In addition to that, the programming board won't stop there. We're going to press on and try to make Spring Fling once again another anticipated milestone for our entire community as well as a proper sendoff for our soon-to-be alumni. We want to keep Spring Fling a top nationally recognized university festival. But I think at the core of what I'm trying to get at here is that there's something special about how Binghamton treats its students. Binghamton entrusts its students with more responsibility and it is precisely because of that, that we have more opportunity. What drew me and a good portion of the students here to Binghamton was the the price. It's an affordable school, it's nationally recognized as a top-ranked value institution. But what kept me here were those very opportunities. I eagerly anticipate my future because I'm confident in the value of my degree and experience. And that's a good question for all of us to be asking ourselves with some regularity: what gives a university degree its value? Is it admissions statistics? Yes. Construction projects on campus? That too. And Binghamton has been able to grow both bigger and better at the same time. Normally, you get one or the other not both. So, we're going to keep on doing that but there's something more proactive that each of us can do in order to make sure that we add value to our degrees. Each year, the Binghamton student alumni base grows stronger and on a state, national, and global level, we are showing the world exactly how valuable a Binghamton degree can be. What I challenge you to do, because it is very easy for all of us in this room to share in that benefit. What we need to do is be actively involved and take pride in the things we accomplish here on this campus. When you take pride in your work, what you're really doing is helping yourself. Now, the challenges associated with change can be disorienting. But I urge you all to not lose sight of the resources that Binghamton boasts. The Student Association here strives everyday to create a more cohesive and collective environment on campus through our student groups, our services, as well as through communication with faculty and staff. Our faculty and staff are second to none, they are fantastic. They've helped thousands of students achieve their career goals and advance the reputation of this university through the research that they've provided. But perhaps one of the easiest resources that we have to overlook would be our administrators. Binghamton University students enjoy national unparalleled accessibility to our top administrators. Let's put it this way, you'd be hard pressed to find some other university president who you could have a casual conversation with during a morning jog or rub shoulders with while you're pulling fruits and vegetables out of the campus garden. You can be fairly certain here at Binghamton, the university administrators not only hear your concerns but they also act on them. To talk to you a little bit more about what our university administrators have been up to, I present to you Vice President of Student Affairs Brian Rose. Thank you Eric, and good afternoon. I need to start this morning with a little bit of sad news. The university learned this morning that our fourth president, Clifford D. Clark, passed away. President Clark served here between 1975 and 1990 and in something that's very well connected to what President Stenger will take about later afternoon, he was particularly noted for his dedication to the University's graduate programs. So I'd like to ask all of you to please join me. Bow your heads in a moment of silence to remember President Clifford D. Clark. Thank you. Now on to some of the formalities of the program and what I'm here to do today. First, you hear this a lot at the beginning of any program. Cell phones. You will have an opportunity to share with us your great new ringtone at the reception after the program this afternoon. We'll have some cookies. And I'm addressing this primarily to the older folks in the audience. I know students, you don't actually use phones to call anybody, so I expect yours to already be on silent. Technology is our friend. A quick story that has absolutely nothing to do with what I'm here for today: I was communicating with our staff about our new Marketplace area and I wanted them to make sure that our televisions are set to some interesting programming this weekend. So I wanted to text them to tell them to made sure they had on the Superbowl. I put 'Superbowl' all as one word and it was spell-checked to be 'Superb owl.' So please go to the Union on Sunday night, it'll be interesting to see what's on television. Next, I want to ask your help in acknowledging my colleagues. As I'll explain in a few minutes, we used to do this program very differently than how we're doing it this afternoon. There'll be a presentation not only by the President but also the Vice President of the University. So I'd like to acknowledge and have your help in welcoming our senior staff. First, Executive Vice President and Provost, Donald Nieman. Our Vice President for Administration, James Van Voorst. Vice President for Research, Bahgat Sammakia. Our Interim Vice President for Advancement, Becky Benner. And our Director of Athletics, Patrick Elliot. Well, my real role this morning is to formally introduce the Binghamton State of the University presentation to explain the format and how it's different from what we've done here for several years and also to explain the rationale behind the change. Now, it's relatively common for universities to hold some type of event where the president in the history of governmental leaders of all levels delivers a State of the University address. Many schools have the event at the beginning of the academic year, some create an opportunity for the address during an alumni reunion or a homecoming weekend. And there are those, like us, who select this time of the year because it best aligns with political or budgetary cycles. What Binghamton's been doing is actually been a little different than a traditional State of the University address. For several years, the senior administration of the University had an event that we used to refer to as the University Forum. Here's what would happen: we gather in Lecture Hall 1, President would give some remarks about the overall direction of the University, then each and every one of the Vice Presidents would present about programs and initiatives that were happening in their areas. There are some advantages to that approach, a lot of information was shared. You know, we're all showing off - look how much we do. The Provost would tell us about the great new entering class of students, thousands of students, some not from Long Island. The SAT scores that the entire entering class had perfect SAT scores which somehow only ranks us 6th nationally. Vice President of Research would talk about the incubators and the pre-incubators, lots of incubators. Maybe we'll be the one that finally solves the chicken and egg question. And, of course, Vice President of Administration would tell us about the new way we found to charge our deer for parking. You get the idea. There were some downsides to that format, though. First it got off along. We were happy when we got it down from three hours to two and half. And while, in theory, we take questions, you can imagine what the rest of the audience would have done after all that time somebody actually asked a question. Speaking of the audience, the traditional time for the University Forum as Eric alluded to a few minutes ago was an early week in January before the university was back in academic session. So, it was actually President Stenger who has this wildly innovative idea. What if we discuss the State of the University at a time when our faculty and students are on campus to hear it. So that explains why the change in date. And we were hoping, glad to see that we received a larger attendance so we needed a new venue. Now, as you've likely already figured out by this point, the address will given only by President Stenger. That has the advantage of efficiency, certainly, and legitimately leaves time for your questions. The President will talk about our accomplishments over the past year or so and also talk about the road ahead. I assure you, he invites what he calls, "Respectful skepticism," through your questions. You will engage President Stenger and your questions about all the programs and initiatives he'll announce and discuss during the address. Beyond just efficiency, there's something symbolic in a more traditional model for this address. While it wouldn't be accurate or fair to depict the old Binghamton as a heavily siloed organization, it's long been a collegial community. Nonetheless, the notion of several vice presidents each describing their own vision and the work of their individual areas convinces something less than a complete unity of purpose. What President Stenger has done in his two years with us is to galvanize our work around a single, simple, and powerful vision to be the premier public university period. We work together with that single purpose in mind and we therefore speak with one voice. So guests, my colleagues and administration, faculty, staff, and students, please welcome the voice of Binghamton University, President Harvey Stenger. Thank you for coming. Can you hear me okay? Good. Welcome. Definitely a good turnout today. I appreciate people coming here. I want to welcome and thank our elected officials in the area who arrived on time and are sitting in the front row here. Assemblywoman Donna Lupardo. Town of Union advisor, Rose Sotak. The new mayor of the city of Binghamton, Richard David. Our new partner, the mayor of Johnson City, Greg Deemie. Today is the first day of the new year in China, the Lunar New Year and it is the year of the horse. The horse, as symbolized in this new year fashion, is to tell us that we are in a year of fast, competitive strength. Certainly, that means you can grow faster and that the wind is at your back when you're the horse. But if I had to sum up the whole situation at Binghamton University in just one word, if I had to pick just one word, I'd say it's amazing! What we can do here as a university, relatively small university, relatively young university, what we can do here we've shown people over the last 2 years that it is incredible and certainly, it's amazing. It takes a lot of people though. Thousands and thousands of people to make this happen. Certainly, it starts with our students - the 16,000 students we have on this campus and spread across the region as well. Commuting from downtown Binghamton and commuting from Johnson City. 16,000 students in this community make a big difference on our community as well. When we do the economic assessment, we realize that we have a $1.2 billion dollar per year economic impact on New York State. We're important, not just as a place to get an education but we're important place for the community. We're an important hirer and an important place to gather. In most typical state of whatever addresses, you have to tell them what happened, tell them what might prevent you from doing something in the future, and then tell them what you want to do in the future hoping that those challenges can be addressed. So I'll do the same thing but the way I'll do it is I will address it within the structure of the Road Map to Premier document that we prepared last year. I thought it would be best to keep reminding people that we wrote a strategic plan. We, the faculty, the students, the community. WE wrote a strategic plan last year and we called it the Road Map to Premier. It had five strategic priorities and we wanted to make sure that today, we reemphasize those 5 strategic priorities because under each one of them we made accomplishments. So categorizing the progress in 2013 underneath them certainly made sense and we've made incredible progress underneath these. Our first strategic priority is to have our graduate and research programs to be accelerated. We want to make sure these are path-breaking opportunities for research and creative activities. Before you start talking about the things you did in just the past year, you have to recognize that we're really good at this. We are already outstanding in this area. And so when you start to think about --- well tell me some things, some of the folks out there who are doing great things already. It comes to mind quickly, almost off the top of my head, dozens and dozens of faculty. Let me tell you of just four of them. Kanad Ghose, department chair of computer science, been here for quite a while. Kanad is a brilliant scientist, computer scientist, in electrical engineering who has developed ways to remove heat from data centers. Sounds kind of simple, put an air conditioner in there. It's very complicated and Kanad's work has developed some algorithms that companies across the world have come to Binghamton to learn about and is now the director of a Industry/University Cooperative Research Center with dozens of companies looking at this important problem for our world. Or I can think about Sarah Laszlo, assistant professor in psychology. Sarah is discovering what causes, in the brain, dyslexia. If she can determine these causes, she has a great chance at finding the solutions to these causes. Or Ricardo Laremont, professor of political science, an expert in Middle East politics and recently named a senior fellow of the Atlantic Council's Africa Center. Great guy. Or one of our favorite authors, Maria Gillan, who writes poetry and has recently won an American Book Award. It's great to have those kinds of people here. Some young, some older but they're here already. How do we take what we've already done so well and make it even better? So last year, under the guidance of Donald Nieman, we developed a concept of Transdisciplinary Areas of Excellence. The concept seems simple. If you're really good at something, do more of it. Well first you have to figure out what you're really good at and then you have to figure out who is contributing to that part of what you're really good at. That process can take you a really long time. It was very impressive last year when Don went to the faculty Senate and went to some of the faculty leaders and said, "Give me some people who might be able to help me do this." In a very short period of time, just a couple of months, they developed five transdisciplinary areas of excellence and in that process chose leaders to lead a group of faculty underneath each one of these. You know these folks: Wayne Jones, Terry Deak, Ami, Tom McDonough, Pam Mischen. Each one of them directing an area of the transdisciplinary areas of excellence. But including with them dozens and dozens of faculty. So each one of the transdisciplinary areas of excellence has a team. The first one, directed by Wayne Jones, Smart Energy has faculty I won't read their names but I'm sure that you can see people on here that you recognize. Leaders in their field as well as some of our younger faculty. Health Sciences, chaired by Terry Deak, and the group here, again, leaders in their field spread across the University. Very important to recognize that these faculty aren't all coming from one single department or even one single college or school. They're coming from all the schools and colleges and many departments. Citizenship, Rights, and Cultural Belonging, chaired by Ami, where we have a breadth of faculty who are doing research in this almost difficult to narrow it down to who should have been on this committee. Many people desired to be on this committee but moved forward in their planning. The Material and Visual Words, from art to physics. Chaired by Tom McDonough and a great group of faculty as well. And the last one, Sustainable Communities, chaired by Pam Mischen and again, a long list of faculty. The list of faculty isn't there to be read, but the list of faculty there is kind of to give me a scale. The number is close to 60 faculty involved in these committees. At the same time, all of those committee members are participating in searches. They're hoping searches that departments are running for faculty searches that might be associated with a transdisciplinary area of excellence. So traditionally in academics, a department says we want to hire a faculty member and that department starts that search and hires a faculty member that they would like to have. What we're doing is we're providing just a little bit of outside help, guidance, participation so that when they recruit that faculty member, that faculty member knows that there's a whole neighborhood here of people who do things like me. Who do research like me. Who teach classes similar to the classes I teach and I want to know who they are so when I'm on campus interviewing, I'm not just sitting around with my department colleague, I'm sitting in a group of faculty who are from other departments who are telling about the wonderful things that are happening there. It actually improves the recruiting process. So this year, we have 55 searches underway, 38 of them are associated with TAEs. If you take a typical search committee of 5 to 7 faculty, multiply that by 38, not gonna do that in my head for you but you add it to the 60 before, it comes to just about 50% of the faculty right now. In just one year, one year, since this concept started. 50% of the faculty now are involved in hiring our faculty in a completely new and different way. The second thing that I want to talk about underneath strategic priority number 1 is the concept and the desire for us to grow our graduate programs. Last year, almost a year and a half ago, we initiated a request for proposals called a graduate growth initiative. We got some great ideas from several departments across campus. We ended up with 6 that we funded and a 7th one that is being launched soon. The areas of Informations Systems Security, Health Systems Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering just expanding their current program. Tax Accounting, Biomedical Anthropology, and a new one that's being approved is in Sustainable Communities. This is important because, as we look into the future, we know when we compare ourselves to other schools (and I'll get into that much more detailed later), that we are small as a graduate institution. We need new ideas and new programs and to expand our existing programs to become the premier public university period. New big idea: when I got here I said, "We need a pharmacy school." Somebody said, "Don't we need a law school?" I said, "No, we need a pharmacy school." We need a school that takes advantage of the great research that's occurring on this campus in the area of pharmaceutical sciences. Whether it's in biomedical engineering or biology or chemistry or psychology or neuroscience, we are doing research around the edge of pharmaceutical sciences which is probably one of the hottest fields of research right now. We needed to add that. At the same time, we know that many of our undergraduate students go onto get a Doctor of Pharmacy. That Doctor of Pharmacy is still a very valuable degree with great job opportunities across the country. So, we made a proposal and sent it to SUNY. It's now on its way to the State Education department and just recently, the governor said we might need some money. Here's $10 million to get started. It's a nice way to get started and a promise that he'll help us finish this building in a location in Johnson City which is inside the town of Union. Always wondered why a city was a village inside of a town. It's Broome, works for me. And we're gonna be there, so we're going to have a university inside of that borough, municipality, city, town. And that's exciting. This is exciting, this has been the buzz the last couple of weeks and we know that we're going to do a great job over there. We hope that can be an anchor tenant there like we are an anchor tenant in downtown Binghamton. We also want to make sure that we're great educators. We want our students, remember there's 16,000 students --- they're not just here to go to the library for our faculty members to do their research. They're here to learn. What we want our faculty members to be as smart as possible so we're encouraging them to be great researchers so that when they come to the classroom, they're not just reading the textbook. They're telling them what they just discovered. So we want to transform our learning community so that our students can learn faster and better and that our teachers and professors can teach better and better. We're good at it. How do we know we're good at it? Well, when some guy says, "Hey I want to come to your campus to tell you that you're doing something really good," you must be doing it really well when it's this guy. President Obama calls up, or somebody from the White House calls up, and says that we'd like to come to Binghamton University and talk about the president's new education program. We said, of course you can come. When, where, how, whatever you'd like. It was a lot of work, we spent a lot of time preparing for the president to come. It was an outstanding event. He spoke for an hour and fifteen minutes, almost all just questions and answers, engaging our students and our faculty in a conversation. Because he knew that he was at a place that was doing exactly what he was trying to tell the rest of the country to do. Be accountable. Deliver education at an affordable cost. When you look at our statistics, we know our students graduate on time and we know that they're successful. Every one of these rankings out there, no matter which one you pick, there's probably a hundred of them out there now, will show us as great graduation rate, outstanding freshmen, great successful rate after, and very low debt at the time they graduate. Less than $5,500 than the national average in student debt. And the governor comes here a lot. In fact, I had someone do a little research and he has come to Binghamton University in 2013 more than any other campus, private or public in the state of New York. Not sure why, maybe he just enjoys the Southern Tier. Not sure if he's a spiedie fan, but he loves to come here. He knows that associating with Broome County and Binghamton University is a good thing and when he comes here, he gives us things usually. Either a task, or something in return. So, if we're going to this, if we're going to make this a transformative learning environment like the president of the United States and the governor thinks we are, we need some help. We need great leadership and we had it right on our campus. James Pitaressi, professor of mechanical engineering, a distinguished teaching professor in mechanical engineering is now the new director of the Center of Learning and Teaching. James, if you know James, is a little enthusiastic about teaching. If you don't get the bug from James about teaching and teaching in new ways and experimenting in your classroom, you're not here. But James has taken on this challenge and has accelerated it. Teaching faculty how to flip their classes, showing them how to use different technologies. We've moved staff into James' areas from Ed-Comm and from the Center for Training. James will be working his way across the entire campus to improve our learning environments. Certainly, our laboratories - we're always trying to make our laboratories whether they're digital or web or physics or chemistry or biology the best they can. Things like this in the Fine Arts building are the kinds of classroom that we want to have across the entire campus. We got other great things that are happening on campus for our students. I'll just talk about a few of them. Undergraduate research. We've always had undergraduate research, but recently we made an emphasis to make sure our undergraduate researchers are recognized and that they're put forward for scholarships and fellowships and that we have a concept called Research Days now every year. Some examples: Sarah Davis, who is a researcher in Lyme disease, looking at the demographic connections of Lyme disease patients. Chris Bassen, who's looking at how to improve the success rate of transplants, an undergraduate and a Goldwater Scholar in biomedical engineering. Our students are really smart. In fact, there's a group of them called the University Scholars who are so smart that it's kind of scary. Their leader, their boss, their chairperson is Bill Ziegler. Bill has made the University Scholars Program a premier scholars program, entering 100 freshmen each year. It's his 3rd year being the director and it's an outstanding program. Also, our entering freshmen class. Even though it continues to grow, continues to improve in quality. The 3 point SAT average score being over 400 points above national average now is an outstanding figure that we have. We know that we'll maintain it, I'm certain with our new admissions director, Randall Edouard, we'll probably exceed it this year. Graduate applications are up. We're strong at the undergraduate level but people are starting to hear more about us at the graduate level. Graduate applications are up 23%, last year to this year as well as enrollment. Fall enrollment in 2013 was 10% higher than the fall enrollment in 2012 and that's going to be very important as we move forward. We also have to find some resources for our faculty and graduate student researchers. They're the ones doing a lot of the hard work, so how can we help them? Certainly as we're adding more faculty, we have to bring them on board with the tools that they need. We've invested $7.5 million per year now in investments to get them here, plant them in their laboratories, and make sure they're going to be successful in that very early period whether they're a senior faculty member or whether it's a junior professor. We also know that we have to recruit the best PhD students that we possibly can. They come from great undergraduate institutions and they're being recruited by many other places. In order to do that, Provost Nieman last year created the Doctoral Research Fellowship Program, a significant increase in the stipend to the best graduate student applications that we have in many of our departments. We've seen it be successful in its first year and we're going to continue to do it. We'll be investing almost $4 million per year when it's fully built out. Strategic priority number 3: make sure that our campus is diverse and inclusive. We know we're diverse - we can measure that. And we have diversity numbers that are comparable to our peers, but are we inclusive? Are we, perhaps, even better inclusive than our peers? Well, what is inclusive? How do I measure inclusivity? How do I enhance it? How do I manage it? That was certainly one of the priorities that came out of the Road Map process. So the first thing we said was, "We need someone to take the leadership role in this." And again, it's great when people are already there. So asking Valerie Hampton to be the chief diversity officer was the logical step in making sure that inclusion and diversity had its table, its top table, at the University. She needed a team. We added the diversity officers from each of the divisions as well as moving the Multicultural Resource Center into the Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and directed by Nicole Sirju-Johnson. They are now launching the campus climate survey which will be coming out in a month or so. Sean Massey has been helping to develop it and we encourage people to take it when it comes out. When you think about diversity and inclusion on campus, you always think about Randall Edouard and his Educational Opportunities Program. Shown here with his small group of students, probably at the end of a semester or the beginning of a semester walking them to campus or sending them off, Randall is an outstanding contributor to making sure that this campus is diverse and inclusive. Impact. That was strategic priority number 4. We have an impact on a lot of ways. We have an impact on our communities, like I said before we have a large economic impact. But what have we been doing recently in terms of that impact while we're in downtown Binghamton and we're growing our student population? And when we grow our student population, we grow our faculty as well. Faculty and staff. In the last two years, two admitted classes, 24 months, 1300 more students and 100 more faculty and staff into the community. If you took that as a business model (and I don't want to say that as a business model but those of you from the community and elected officials do worry about the business aspects and the regional economics of what we're contributing), that's like bringing a $30 million company into the region. $30 million a year impact from students living here, taking classes, living in the community, so we're having that local regional impact. But we're also a great place to have fun. We have a lot of great things to do on this campus, whether it's in this venue or in the events center or one of the smaller theaters. We really want people to come on this campus. I think we're as inviting as we possibly can but we probably need more parking, I know. But we will be as inviting as we possibly can even within the constraints of parking. The governor, on one of his trips here, signed the StartUp NY legislation. StartUp NY, people have heard about it. It's an opportunity for new companies to come from outside New York State and to land inside of New York State, bringing their employees, their products, their revenue into New York State and they will be tax-free if they're put somewhere near, close by, or on State University property. Like the Broome Community College or at Binghamton University. A great opportunity. We're still inching up on it, we got our plan in. It's been improved, we haven't signed on with any companies yet but we are investigating especially around some of the opportunities that we have in the region such as in Endicott and in downtown Binghamton. As the governor usually brings something and then takes something away, he asks me to be the co-chair of the Regional Economic Development Council, which gives away across the state about $750 million a year. In the last two years, we've been called the top performer in this process and so the 8 counties in the Southern Tier win significantly more money than the other 5 or 9 regions in the area that don't get classified as a top performer. One of the projects this year was pretty important to us and the picture depicts undergraduate research opportunities on campus can be expanded if we think about product development as part of undergraduate research. So the grant that came through the Economic Development Council process is $750,000 which will allow us to equip undergraduate research laboratories for freshmen and sophomores. It could get them to think like an entrepreneur or an inventor in the future. Certainly, the $7 million given last year in the REDC process and the 6 million additional dollars that we've raised to build the incubator downtown at Hawley, Carol, and Lyle Streets is another example of how we can have an economic impact on the region. But impacts are broader than that. Impacts also mean that we are a destination for people - not just coming to performances, but coming for education. More than 2500 of our students are international students and it adds vibrancy to the campus, diversity to the campus. It really makes the campus an exciting place to be. That's a 13.6% increase in just one year. Again, we are becoming a destination because of our high quality. Because as you get bigger, more people know about you. We also have abut 16% of our students who study abroad. I thought, this is pretty good. 16%, 1 out of 6. That's pretty strong. In fact, the national average of students in higher education is just 1%. That's across a very large denominator but it shows that we're a significant performer in this. We know we can do better because we can create relationships that perhaps other places don't have. For example, this new program that we launched last summer with Samsung in South Korea where we send 9 students from Binghamton University (undergraduates) to Seoul, South Korea for a 10-week experience working for Samsung all expenses-paid. Travel, living, as well as a salary so that they can be employed for Samsung for that summer period. And we've got great alumni. 110,000 of them. Hard to keep track of all of them, but we known 1 of them is now a U.S. Congressman, Hakeem Jeffries. On top of Hakeem's great success, we've got 20,000 engaged alumni. That means they either came to an event, they volunteered for an event, they made a donation, something within that 20,000 they've done something in the past year for us. Specifically, they've given us some money. $13.5 million in donations in 2013, that's a nice number. But the number I like better is that more than 12,000 of our alumni last year made out a check and processed a gift to Binghamton University. That's important. 12,000 fans out there that we hardly communicate with other than probably an e-mail everyday and a brochure in their mailbox every other day. But we love them and we want to keep engaged with them. I get exhausted at this point. You start to think, "How'd you get all that done?" I don't know how I got all that done, but I know that I have great people who make sure that a lot of it gets done. And when you step back and think about it, well, how do you manage all these things at the same time? You have to have a great group of people who can manage projects, manage resources, and so the fifth strategic priority is about resources. How do we allocate resources and how do we acquire them and how do we manage them. I'll just talk about this briefly. Probably the most important one is during the legislative process for SUNY2020, you have the SUNY Predictable Tuition Plan. Modest increases in tuition to catch up to our peers so we can hire the faculty that we have to have to meet the growing student population. So the Predictable Tuition Plan was certainly important, managed skillfully by the Office of Administration, and each year $14 million more tuition allocation comes to Binghamton University through the state government process. That allocation is important for us to hire our new faculty. As part of that, we've also made the agreement that any undergraduate student (as we raise our tuition) that is not able to pay for the standard assessment procedures, we do not charge that and that's a $2.4 million allocation in helping to support access for those students who are economically disadvantaged. And we're hiring faculty, a lot of faculty. 93 tenure track faculty hired in just 2 years. 55 searches underway and 38 are associated with the transdisciplinary areas of excellence. But 55 in total, summer growth and summer replacement. That is helping us reach our goal of growing our faculty net by 150 over the period of the 5 years in SUNY2020 which is 30 new net faculty per year. And we're ahead of that target already. We're 67 after two years and we'll probably be close to a 100 after our third year. We're building new things. Beautiful things. Outstanding new things, LEED certified, platinum certified. We have the new Marketplace, we have the Chenango Room, we have the Center of Excellence, and we have the East Campus Housing. We're almost done building, but perhaps the next set of buildings will be elsewhere — downtown Binghamton as well as in Johnson City. But the construction on this campus, I think, has been an example of how we do things well, on time, and on budget. We got a new front sign. I love it. Great process that we went through to design the sign, build the sign. It's a metaphor, as well. The old sign we had there, I'm not going to criticize, but it looked like you were coming into a campground. Binghamton KOA. We got a real sign now. People know that they're at a premier university when they come past that sign. But if you think about it, it's next to a road and we've got a Road Map and you don't really drive in, you drive out. If you think about it: where does that road lead, what direction are we going to go? When you come out, are you going to turn right or turn left? So we have to make that decision. This is what we've done in the last 2 years and this is what our plan is to do in the next 3. I'm going to talk about enrollment because I think it is a simple thing to talk about. Areas of excellence and transdisciplinary gets kind of complicated, but just talk about enrollment for a little bit because it has such a big impact on everything that we do. As I said, from 2011, 2012, 2013, we've exceeded our targets for growth in enrollment. As we look forward, it looks like we're going to continue to grow at that same pace, it's a slightly decreased pace because we did so well in the first couple of years. Why do we grow? What happens when we get bigger? Some of the alums that I meet say, "Oh, don't get any bigger and change your name back to Harpur College. Call it the Men's Gym and the Women's Gym again." We can't do that. Probably universities can do that, they can stay small. But public universities need to meet the demands of the population and have to help society. I'm going to give you 7 reasons, at least 7, you can probably think of more, of what positive things can happen when we grow. First, it becomes a catalyst for research, education, and outreach. More faculty members are doing research. It allows us to teach more classes. Every faculty member we add on top of the rest of the faculty teaches 4, 5, sometimes 6 classes in an academic year. So adding more classes and more fields is a good thing for our students who are selecting from sometimes a limited number of electives. It allows us to increase our visibility and recognition. Our faculty, through their research, travel, and publications, build an international reputation based on that research and those publications. That visibility and recognition is critical to recruiting the next set of faculty and the next set of great students. It allows us to hire more faculty and actually at the same time lower the student-to-faculty ratio thanks to the Rational Tuition Plan. We can actually now hire faculty at a faster rate than admitting more students. That, again, improves the ability to better balance in the way that they see optimum teaching and research. As we talked about the transdisciplinary areas of excellence, that's also important because now as we add faculty to those areas that excellence allows us to grow to the critical mass we would need to do things we might not have been able to do before. I think the best one is that our alumni get more and more proud. They like Binghamton to be big and to be powerful and to be recognized and to be seen. So I think just those reasons alone say yes, if you can get bigger and better, do it. If you can only get bigger by sacrificing quality, don't do it. But I think we've proven to ourselves in the last two years that we can get bigger and get better. But then we have to make a decision: where do we grow? Two different things, two different topics here. Where do we grow in terms of enrollment? So we have to choose whether we're going to grow our students at the freshmen level, transfer level, graduate student level, master's level, PhD level? We can grow our undergraduates - we have lots of applications. 29,000, 30,000 applications for undergraduate students. We could admit more of them and grow at the undergraduate level. But we know that might certainly lower the quality of the freshmen class. And we're a landlocked university. There's not many more places that undergraduates can stay on campus, especially when they're freshmen and sophomores and they want to stay on campus. We could grow at the doctoral level. That's really important because doctoral students publish, go on to go to great academic positions, and build your reputation internationally. PhD students, really good ones, are expensive. You pay them their salary, you pay them their tuition. And in return, they do some teaching for you but they're expensive. But we know that they're critical and we need to grow there. What about master's degrees? Master's degrees don't bring you a lot of reputation, however it is a service to our undergraduates who, when they graduate, they're going to say, "Now what do I do? Do I have to find another degree? How am I going to find my career? I'm an English major, I love to write. How can I find the right next step in my career? Should I get a Master's degree?" Should we grow at the Master's level? That's where enrollment-wise, but where do we grow physically? Now we have 4 options. First option is right here on the Vestal campus. Probably not. We're getting pretty crowded here. There's not a lot of extra room, especially after we finish the East Campus Housing. Maybe we can fit 3 or 4 more classrooms over by the Lecture Hall. What about downtown? How about adding new buildings downtown? Well, we certainly have already said we're going to do that. We're building the Downtown High Tech Incubator at the corner of Hawley, Carol, Lyle. We can expand even further down there, I'm sure that there's opportunities that the mayor would like us to consider. We could grow on the other side of Murray Hill at our ITC Complex and in fact, we have a plan right now to build another building there called the Smart Energy Building. But at the conclusion of that construction project, we're probably done there as well. The newest opportunity and my new favorite restaurant, the Red Robin Diner, in Johnson City. Johnson City has a lot of opportunities for growth if we want to do it there as well. If you look at the map, it's actually a shorter drive to Johnson City than it is to downtown Binghamton. So where do we grow? How do we make a decision about these balance points? How do we figure out where we're going to balance the enrollment growth and the location growth? We have to have some kind of a method when you're going to make these decisions. So we grabbed the top 10 public universities in the country. They're there, I think you recognize them. Berkeley, UCLA, Wisconsin, William & Mary, Virginia. If we just look at them as a group to compare ourselves to, take their average numbers and we look at their enrollment. They're a lot bigger than us. Average enrollment 32,000. Our enrollment right now is 16,000. Twice as big as us. But notice the difference in the size of the green part of the bar. They have 30% graduate students, we have less than 19% of graduate students. We are not doing what they're doing. Now I've told people that I don't want to chase the premier publics out there, I want to define what premier is and get there. This difference is something we need to address. So let's say we didn't grow our undergraduate population or we just grew it slightly through improved retention and we stayed in that 13,000 or 14,000 enrollment category but we try to get to the percentage of graduate students that our peers are at. That would mean that we would have to have 30%of our students be graduate students which would mean we would have to have 20,000 total: 6,000 graduate students and 14,000 undergraduates. That's where we should be. That's the right balance point for us. Getting bigger is better and getting bigger at the graduate level is even better because they have a much more meaningful experience leading to their careers. So 20,000. That's a round number. It's the year of the horse. Might as well pick an aggressive target. 20,000 students. So we have some ideas. How do we get there? We have our Graduate Growth Initiative. I said we have 6 of them onboard and we're adding another one. That will help us grow in certain areas that we already have and perhaps some areas that we're just adding around the edges. We have our new pharmacy program and doctorate pharmacy program. That'll add about 300 students over the next several years well before 2020 hits. We'll also have increased funding for graduate research assistants as we hire more faculty in areas that have grants and contracts that support research assistants in laboratories. We're going to have a growing base of teaching assistants because we're going to be expanding our enrollment, we'll have more money available to hire teaching assistants. But those 4 ideas, while they're good ideas, they're just incremental. We need a big idea. Alright, I got one. These guys know me, that's how long it takes sometimes. I've been talking about this for 2 years and every time I say it to someone, they say, "That's a good idea. Somebody should do that." And then I tell somebody else and they say, "That's a good idea. Somebody should do that." Nobody has said to me, "That's a good idea. I'll do that for you, Harvey." So I'm going to have to do it. Get it started, at least. Get it rolling down the hill. I'm going to call it something that will not be the final name, but I'm going to call it the 411 program. It's going to be obvious when you hear what we're going to try do it here. What we know from our surveys, our exiting surveys, our seniors when they graduate are still looking for jobs. Almost half of them, at the time of graduation, are still looking for a job. I don't care if it's in liberal arts, humanities, social sciences, engineering, or School of Management. Many, many of our students have not found jobs. And what do they do after that? They go home. What do they do when they get home? They think. "What should I do next?" The first thing that they need is experience. The second thing that they need is probably more education. What if we were to think about that time period after an undergraduate finishes their degree? As a time where we can blend, at a higher level, advanced academic work and experiential opportunities. It really is being done when you look at most of the professional schools. If you look at Social Work, Public Administration, Public Health, rotations into experiential opportunities is part of the degree requirement. But it is not part of the degree requirement for many other fields. It's not a degree requirement for engineering or computer science. Or the sciences. It's not a degree requirement for social sciences or humanities. Why not? Why not create a graduate program or add a feature to all of our graduate programs, not changing the curriculum or the course work, but add to those programs experiential learning opportunities. They're educated 21 or 22 year old folks. They know how to write, they know how to speak. These would be paid internships certainly and they could be spread across a 2-year master's program. They could be 3 months a time or a summer or a semester like the undergraduate co-op program in many universities. Although we won't use that term, it allows students to build their resume and their experiences and at the same time adding a credential to the traditional master's degree. Master's of English, Master's of Political Science, but then it will have an added value because of those experiential opportunities. I think this is a good idea and everybody that I've told so far has told me, "Hey, that's a good idea. Somebody ought to do that." And now you're going to tell me it's not a good idea, I want to see you afterwards. It's not up to me. I don't think I can design this or more than just explain this to you that simply. There's probably a lot more details and I've got some great people who can help me with details. We need some help. Certainly we can go around and talk to the firms we already have relationships with that hire our students. They might be willing to help us with interns. We can talk to our local support, some of the agencies, municipalities. They can help us with some of these internships. But the big call is on our alumni. We have 110,000 alumni, very successful alumni, spread across the globe. 20,000 of them are engaged with us every year. We're going to offer them assistance with their careers. We're going to offer them one of our interns to help their careers, their companies, their agencies get even better. And pay them. Certainly, we want those students to be paid interns. Our alumni, if we can reach out to them, how many students do you think we can place? 500? 1000? I don't think that will be very hard. We got 110,000 alumni. So the possibilities of using our alumni to make this program work are real. But again, I need some experts in this field and so I've asked several people to pull together some ideas and to come out with a pilot project this fall in 2014. Everybody knows the Graduate School dean and professor of English, Susan Strehle will be chairing this group. I've also asked Dean Laura Bronstein to be on this committee. Laura is the Dean of the College of Community and Public Affairs. She is a social worker by training and certainly understands experiential learning. Brian Rose, who's our Vice President for Student Affairs, Randy McGuire who's a Professor of Anthropology and Dean Anne McCall from Harpur College. This team is going to be the core team that will put the details behind this concept. They'll be bringing in students, staff, alumni, a lot of people into the process. From these 5 people, I'm going to be asking them to develop a program and a report as soon as possible. If we're going to grow though, let's put some numbers out there so we can see the faculty and staff growth plan. To grow by 3,000 graduate students, to grow to 20,000 students total, we're going to need to add about 180 faculty. We'll need to add about 100 staff members. We'll have to add about 180 teaching assistants. We have time to do it and as I've said before, as we do this we'll be improving the student-to-faculty ratio through this process. We've already proved that we can hire at a fairly fast rate and I think we can do that. In the end, and I'm not going to repeat those 7 reasons, we will get bigger and we will get better and we'll have greater global impact. So 20 by 2020, that's the slogan. Can we do it? Are we going to try at least? Do we want to think about it? Do we want to grow to 20,000 by 2020. Well, I think anything's possible. I really do. The last 2 years I've been amazed by what we've been able to do so I really believe that it's possible.