Growing the Entrepreneurial University
 
As some of you may know, I grew up in New York City. My father was a contractor who decorated the great theaters on Broadway. The complimentary tickets we received meant I was exposed to an extraordinary amount of theater. As an impressionable child, I thought the theater was magical. In my naiveté, I didn't know that the success of a Broadway play depended less on magic and more on the review written by The New York Times long-standing drama critic Brooks Atkinson.
 
However, Brooks Atkinson did not limit his critiques to drama. He was also an observer of American society. He once wrote, "This nation was built by men who took risks -- pioneers who were not afraid of the wilderness, businessmen who were not afraid of failure, scientists who were not afraid of the truth, thinkers who were not afraid of progress, dreamers who were not afraid of action."
 
His words draw an interesting parallel to the growth of this university. Our past and our present have been shaped by a talented group of men and women -- businesspeople, scientists, thinkers, and dreamers who were also doers. That Ball State University is a very strong institution is a direct reflection of their hard work and your hard work and dedication.
 
There are two perceptions I have that remain unchanged from my address last year. The first is that higher education, in general, and our university, specifically, face challenges. The second is that despite the challenges, these remain exciting times at Ball State. However, the basis for that second perception has changed over the past year.
 
I had only been on the job nine days when I spoke to you last year. Based upon a handful of conversations, I had just a sense of the strength of your commitment to Ball State. Now I've met with every academic department. Some faculty members have told me what an impression this made on them because it was the first time a president had visited their department during their tenure at Ball State. But I can assure you these visits made far more of an impression on me. My early sense that there was something very positive about you and Ball State grew into a firm conviction. I came away deeply impressed by your intense dedication to students, your great love for the university, your commitment to experiential learning, and your eagerness to invest in the quality and to raise the visibility of Ball State University.
 
I am determined to continue these conversations with you and will look to your deans for suggestions on how to accomplish that. I also want to reach out to our students and be available to hear their thoughts and impressions. At the freshman convocation, I will offer to have lunch with any group of five students who invite me to dine with them, my treat -- a counter to the notion that there's no such thing as a free lunch. For students at Ball State, there's a free lunch with the president.
 
During my remarks last year, I outlined the priorities I think are important for any institution of higher learning, and our meetings confirmed that many of you share those ideals. We also share a desire to see more resources than have been available in recent years directed toward our core academic mission -- I'll say more about that in a moment.
 
The visits allowed me to hear your stories, and I have shared many of them with state leaders, alumni, friends, service clubs, and members of the media. And you continue to provide even more great stories, proof of Ball State's positive momentum.
 
Our peers and independent sources have validated your good work with significant national rankings and recognitions in the past year for 11 programs or initiatives: namely, landscape architecture, undergraduate and graduate entrepreneurship, sales education, counseling psychology, school psychology, freshman programs, Teachers College's global and international teacher education, University College's Learning Center, the master's program in student affairs and higher education administration, and telecommunications.
 
I spoke last year of building on our strengths. Telecommunications and the other departments in the College of Communication, Information, and Media accomplished that objective by churning out great work that seemed to be in the headlines all year. Students from the college took home a prestigious Student Academy Award, regional Emmy Awards, International Gold and Silver Reels, international awards for the student radio station WCRD, regional advertising competition honors, and national honors for The Daily News, the speech team, Expo magazine, and the independent online publication Ball Bearings. Our award-winning students cite the guidance and encouragement of faculty as a major contributor to their success.
 
A number of the projects I just mentioned received funding from the Center for Media Design, which has spawned a great deal of creative research. The center has also encouraged interdisciplinary endeavors such as "The Brain." Started in nursing, the project brought together faculty from criminal justice, journalism, telecommunications, social work, and speech pathology. The project won Best Use of Technology for Educational Programming at the inaugural Billboard Digital Entertainment Awards, beating out entries from mammoth entertainment companies including Walt Disney. That's an impressive accomplishment and proves our talented faculty and staff can compete with anyone given the time and resources to fully realize their creative potential.
 
While the Lilly grant that funded the CMD is expiring, we are exploring options and partnerships that will allow us to keep the work of the center going and to enhance opportunities for more creative interdisciplinary ventures.
 
This leads me back to my earlier mention of resources and the challenges faced by Ball State. We are grateful that the state's budget for the 2005-2007 biennium includes funding for the university's new heat plant, but we are disappointed our elected leaders could not be as supportive as we had hoped. Most concerning, the state failed to provide resources in recognition of Ball State's growth, the second highest among Indiana's colleges and universities.
 
The most serious repercussions of the state budget will be felt next year, when we will experience a $2.5 million cut to our state appropriations for operations. We are and will continue assessing the shortfall, but it will be a painful year with the loss of funding necessitating reductions and reallocations. However, our priority must be to emerge from the year an even stronger university. With this in mind, I am determined that raises next year will exceed the 1.25 percent approved for this year, a most regrettable result of the state budget shortfalls as well as public pressure and our own desire to minimize tuition increases.
 
Successfully navigating the choppy waters ahead and emerging even stronger begins by charting a more entrepreneurial course. As an entrepreneurial university, more reflective of 21st-century values, I will encourage you and our students to take risks, be creative, and define new challenges, emphasizing the possibility of finding external partners or supporters to fund new endeavors. This is not to say that research funding and private gifts can replace state support, but they give us greater flexibility to pursue new opportunities of our choosing.
 
Extramural funds support activities that lead to new discoveries and intellectual property, provide stipends for graduate assistants, and enable us to create unique immersion experiences for our undergraduate students. And the pursuit of these funds encourages us to be more creative. We must develop new revenue streams both through bolstering externally funded research and by creating new intellectual property.
 
We are off to a good start on the first front, with research grants and sponsored programs bringing in a record $25.7 million last year. I applaud all of you who pursued grants or other funding opportunities. The provost's office believes $30 million of extramural funding is within our reach in the next year or two.
 
At Ball State, we have some centers with the potential to generate commercially viable products and techniques. One of these, the Human Performance Laboratory in our College of Applied Sciences and Technology, is celebrating 40 years of excellence. So is the more recently established Center for Computational Nanoscience in the College of Sciences and Humanities. The development of these enterprises demonstrates your willingness to take this university in new directions, especially where interested funding sources exist.
 
Across the disciplines, there are other opportunities to increase the commercialization of the university's intellectual property. For instance, Associate Professor of Architecture Kevin Klinger has developed a CMD-funded project called the Institute for Manufacturing and Digital Exchange, or I-MADE. This wide-ranging consortium will work with Indiana's manufacturers to generate digital design and fabrication ideas that can be turned into material products while also enhancing our educational programs in design.
 
Also, Educational Technology Professor Matt Stuve in Teachers College has developed a powerful assessment tool called rGrade and is working to make this software available to educators everywhere. If you think you may have something with commercial potential, Dr. James Pyle and his staff in the Office of Academic Research and Sponsored Programs are eager to help you develop your idea.
 
The university's approach to becoming more enterprising is borne out in several ways, including our charter schools initiative, the formulation of the program allowing students to earn a bachelor's degree in just three years in more than 30 majors, and the many market-responsive degrees and emphases that we offer. Examples include the newly created emphasis in animation within the bachelor's of fine arts, the geography major with an emphasis in geographic information processing and mapping, and the learning opportunities that information systems students are receiving in the Networking and Security Lab in the Miller College of Business.
 
Let me focus on those last two for a moment. The Networking and Security Lab is working with the computer science department on an application to have the entire university designated a National Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education. Receiving this designation would make Ball State eligible to compete for significant federal funding from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Homeland Security. Our expertise with GIS systems and mapping led to a partnership with a Lithuanian company that has developed sophisticated software for visualizing predictive penetration models for wireless broadband signals. We have signed a one-year contract to be the first in the United States to receive training and deploy this software. We will use it to model wireless penetration for our Digital Middletown initiative, which has received significant federal funding. We are also exploring potentially substantial business partnerships based upon our access to the mapping software. These examples clearly illustrate the potential for academic offerings to take new avenues in pursuit of resources and recognition.
 
New facilities also offer new possibilities. The Music Instruction Building opened last fall and lived up to its billing. The inaugural music series was outstanding, and the performers raved about Sursa Performance Hall. As you may have read in the The Star Press 11 days ago, national and international conferences have been booked in the building because of the hall and the state-of-the-art recording studios. Events like these provide a return on the investment the state made in this wonderful facility, and young musicians attending these conferences now see the College of Fine Arts in a different light and Ball State as an attractive college choice. It is our hope that the Communication and Media Building and the new activities it will inspire will have a similar impact after it opens in 2007.
 
Being an entrepreneurial university depends on seizing opportunities and responding nimbly to the challenges of the day. But it also depends on foresight and sustained effort toward common goals, which is why strategic planning is essential to our pursuit of excellence. Throughout the spring semester, the Strategic Planning Task Force met regularly to review extensive data about the university and its competitive environment and to conduct an assessment of the institution's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that is posted on the strategic planning Web site.
 
Just a couple of weeks ago, the group completed its work in creating the framework -- in draft form -- for the plan itself, including vision, mission, and values and culture statements and three broad goals covering learning, scholarship, and engagement. Now, to ensure that the plan is a collective document we can truly call "ours," it is time for you to get involved.
 
First, the task force will hold open forums and post material to the strategic planning Web site to gather feedback. Then each unit of the university -- academic and administrative -- will be asked to submit prioritized, measurable objectives and resource strategies in support of the goals of the plan. The task force will provide a resource guide to units as they work.
 
Certainly not every objective submitted will appear in the final plan because of the constraints of time and resources. Some inevitably will be revised or reworded. But in its final iteration, the strategic plan must be a collective work that allows us to grow in many new ways. It is critically important that distance education fuel some of this growth because it permits us to continue to gradually increase our overall enrollment as we become more selective in on-campus admission. There is untapped market potential in the area of distance education, and we can benefit from extending ourselves further into that market while at the same time meeting genuine societal needs. A U.S. News & World Report survey found our online master's degree program in nursing is the second-largest in the country, helping address the shortage of nurses. Interestingly, it enrolled students as far away as rural Oregon and Iraq, where a soldier on active duty was able to continue her education through our program.
 
As I have often said, my top priority is to put students first, and the strategic plan must include ways to enhance the student experience. First, we must provide a challenging, distinctive academic experience. The new Core Curriculum should prepare students for the challenges of the 21st century while remaining true to our core academic mission of helping students develop the critical-thinking skills that will carry them through a lifetime of learning. In addition to establishing a core that is more interdisciplinary, more writing intensive, and more sensitive to issues of diversity, we must broaden opportunities for students to engage in intense, active learning outside the classroom.
 
We have so many successful examples of this kind of experiential learning at Ball State already -- Business Fellows, the chemistry summer research program, NewsLink Indiana, the Virginia B. Ball Center for Creative Inquiry, the College of Architecture Planning's Community-Based Projects, internships, and study abroad, among others. All of them have proven to be intellectually transformative for our students. We must make these kinds of opportunities a hallmark of the Ball State experience, allowing all interested and qualified students access to some kind of experiential learning opportunity in the future.
 
Moving in this direction requires strategic decisions about resources, but it also requires an engaged faculty that excels at encouraging and coaching students to success. I can enthusiastically say that in my experience, no faculty has better fit that description than you. Recent graduates such as Jaron Henrie-McCrea, the telecommunications major who won the Student Academy Award, and Kate Endress, an honors entrepreneurship major and women's basketball player who was named ESPN the Magazine Scholar–Athlete of the Year, have raved in public about the support, experiences, and preparation they had here.
 
I know many of you have students validate your work in less public ways, such as an e-mail 2005 theater and dance graduate Chris Petty recently sent to a half dozen of his professors. In thanking them, Chris said he didn't think he would make it in Hollywood, he knew he would because of the valuable lessons he learned and the relationships he formed at Ball State. The fact that last year we had two graduate students earn Fulbright fellowships, another receive a Fulbright-Hayes fellowship, and an undergraduate earn a Udall Scholarship also reflects positively on the quality of our students and the excellence of your mentoring. Let's also celebrate the extraordinary Academic Progress Rate of our athletes, making us one of the top five universities in the country according to the NCAA, along with Tulane, Notre Dame, Duke, and Rice -- great company to keep.
 
On the flip side of these successes is the recent slide in our retention rate. It is essential that we rededicate ourselves to attaining an 80 percent retention rate. This important issue must be addressed in a focused way, and I have asked Alan Hargrave and Deborah Balogh to co-chair a task force on the topic, with a goal of producing a report by June. Talking about retention brings me to the second dimension of the student experience that must command our time and attention -- fostering a vibrant and supportive campus environment. There are many factors that contribute to such an environment, facilities among them. Isn't McKinley Avenue more beautiful than you could have ever imagined? Congratulations to the Facilities Planning and Management staff and Jim Lowe for overseeing this extraordinary renovation. The new East Residence Hall is scheduled to open in two years and will certainly add an attractive new dimension to on-campus housing with its focus on living, learning, and meeting spaces. However, we should make it a priority this year to examine the positive effects that could be realized through enhanced recreational facilities or a new focal point for student activity. Students have a list of wants, and tempering their desires -- and ours -- with the ability to pay for them will be a challenge.

Technology is one area in which I believe we have been able to meet our students' desires. This is a technology-rich environment, and we are committed to producing graduates who will be technology leaders in the workplace. The university's wireless network now extends to all residence halls and common outdoor gathering spaces. We have been informed that the effort to install and upgrade this system will be recognized nationally next month. Stay tuned for more details in a President's Perspective.

Closely related to the strategic planning process is an effort under way to refine our current brand and enhance our marketing efforts to best support our aspirations for the future. The university has worked with Carnegie Communications to complete two significant marketing research projects. The first focused on image and awareness, and the second on brand positioning. This second study included an internal component, and many of you will remember receiving a survey via e-mail late in the spring. The faculty and staff response rates to the survey were very high, and I thank you for taking the time to participate in this important project.
 
From the research completed by Carnegie, a clear picture of our key challenge has emerged: while prospective students see us as better than competitors in having a comfortable, friendly campus environment, they are not yet persuaded that we offer a challenging academic experience.
 
We will move forward from the research phase into refining our brand and then rolling that out through all communication vehicles -- our television advertising, Web pages, recruitment publications, and the myriad other external communications that must align with and carry the university's branding messages. You will see the focus on communicating academic quality, challenge, and engagement come through very strongly as we move to close this gap in the market's perception of our university.

This complex effort will be overseen by our new vice president for marketing, communications, and enrollment management, Tom Taylor, who comes to us from University of Maryland Baltimore County. Tom played an integral part in transforming UMBC's reputation from a regional one to a campus of choice with enrollment growth increases coinciding with improved SAT scores and continued success in attracting a diverse student population. Tom, welcome to Ball State. With the appointment of Kay Bales as the new dean of the Division of Student Affairs and candidates for the provost position beginning their visits to campus in the next few weeks, the task of filling positions at the cabinet level is almost complete. I also want to thank Deb Balogh for providing her characteristic unflagging energy and attention to detail to the provost's duties during this interim period and to her leadership of the strategic planning process.
 
I'm pleased to note that this was another strong year for fund-raising. Of course, it's hard to top a year that included a $17 million estate gift. However, we received $18 million last year, the most in a year without a major estate gift. And not counting estate gifts, the amount of cash, bonds, properties, and securities received rose 28 percent from the year before. The number of gifts to the individual colleges rose 29 percent. Also up are the numbers of alumni donors, which increased 8 percent. And these numbers reflect only a very small portion of the pledges made toward the Drive to Distinction campaign.
 
We have received pledges for $11.1 million of the $12 million needed to renovate and expand the football stadium. This is also an incredibly encouraging story. Of the 594 donors to the campaign, 83 are new and 278 have given at higher levels than ever before. We believe many of the relationships established during the Drive to Distinction will be long lasting, with these benefactors continuing to provide gifts to initiatives that align with their interests. We expect to celebrate the successful completion of this campaign during Homecoming.
 
Certainly we tapped into a specific interest with the Inauguration Scholarships, providing benefactors with the opportunity to join the university in awarding 25 students educational packages that will exceed $32,000 over the course of four years. The scholarship initiative produced several other noteworthy results. In addition to the positive response and media attention garnered by the university, the initiative helped to heighten our reputation as a leader in public education in Indiana. Since that time, I have been asked to join the board of the Indiana Chamber of Commerce, and Governor Mitch Daniels has appointed me to the Indiana Education Roundtable and the Achieve Conference, which is trying to address issues surrounding secondary school achievement. He also invited me to represent Ball State and the higher education community on the recent trade mission to Taiwan and Japan. I am honored to represent this excellent university wherever I go.
 
Another way in which the state is looking for us to maintain a leadership position is with our Building Better Communities initiative, which comprises all of the ways in which Ball State reaches beyond the campus and outside the classroom to help communities improve quality of life and develop economic capacity. Building Better Communities sprang out of the Community-Based Projects program in the College of Architecture and Planning, which like the Human Performance Lab is celebrating its 40th anniversary. For a number of months, I have been talking about Building Better Communities -- and many of the other great things happening at Ball State -- to service clubs and economic development entities across Indiana, and I will continue this outreach in the fall.
 
As I stated earlier, this is a very strong university, but it can be so much more, and we can take a lesson from the past as to how we can achieve a better future.
 
Forty years ago, two maverick faculty members in physical education -- Bud Getchell and Dave Costill -- launched the Human Performance Lab in a trailer outside the Field Sports Building. They started with enthusiasm and determination and a vision of what might be possible, and today their successors are working with astronauts and cosmonauts on muscle research that one day will yield benefits for all mankind.
  
Likewise, 40 years ago, some kindred spirit visionaries were teaching architecture classes in World War II–era Quonset huts and dreaming of the day when they could channel their resources into a College of Architecture and Planning. Indiana's first and only, the college today consistently ranks among the best in the country.
  
As I look out at all of you, I know the visionaries of tomorrow are here. In whatever time we live, constraints of every sort exist, be they time, resources, or critics. But, our success results from getting back up and carrying on when we inevitably trip over an obstacle. Robert Kennedy once said, "Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly," and as your predecessors of 40 years ago so creatively showed us: when our imaginations are boundless, our possibilities and potential are truly infinite.