Sept. 14, 2009
Fall Conference Remarks
from Cal Poly President Warren J. Baker
SAN LUIS OBISPO -- Cal Poly President Warren J. Baker gave the following address Monday, Sept. 14, 2009 at the opening of Fall Conference 2009. Below is the full text of his remarks:
Given this past year of national economic duress – and this summer of extreme budgetary distress in Sacramento – it’s tempting for all of us to focus on things that aren’t going right.
Indeed, Cal Poly faces significant financial challenges, and I know that each of you is personally and painfully familiar with this because of the furlough program.
I’m truly sorry that pay cuts were necessary, and I know that for many of you this is no small sacrifice.
I’m grateful that, despite this disruption to you and your families, you’re doing everything possible to minimize the impact on our students.
Our students are the reason we are here.
Helping them become successful in their lives and careers is our mission and is the cause to which many of us have devoted our entire professional lives.
I appreciate your commitment to this noble mission.
And while the state’s fiscal crisis is of grave concern, let’s pause for a moment to reflect on things that are going right at Cal Poly:
First and foremost, another outstanding class of freshmen is entering Cal Poly this week.
And Cal Poly has you, a very talented, engaged faculty and staff, ready to serve our students in Cal Poly’s unique “learn by doing” experiences.
Now let me savor this thought for a moment: Cal Poly has an outstanding group of students, and a determined and talented faculty. That is why I am so proud of Cal Poly and why you should be so excited about the coming academic year.
In addition, let me mention several other things that are going right at Cal Poly:
One:
This week, Phase II of Poly Canyon Village opens, meaning an additional 1100 students will be living on campus. With the addition of these 1100 beds, our total residence hall capacity is now nearly 6,500, and research shows that freshmen and sophomores who live on campus are more likely to complete their degree than students who don’t have access to on-campus living.
Two:
As you have no doubt noticed, the University Union Plaza is in the midst of renovation. While the construction process is an undeniable inconvenience right now, the end result will be a more welcoming hub of student activity.
Three:
Renovation of the Rec Center will begin this fall – doubling the Rec Center’s size and providing our students with a first-class fitness facility.
As these projects attest, Cal Poly is not standing still in the face of a challenging economy; Cal Poly is moving forward, as it should, without relying only on state support.
And yet there’s no denying that Cal Poly is at a critical crossroads regarding the way we do our work, how we continue to improve the intellectual capacity of the University and how we garner the support and resources we need to fully achieve our potential.
We always have the responsibility of finding better, more efficient ways to do our jobs, but the current budget crisis adds urgency to that responsibility because it reminds us that this is not a temporary perturbation. For more than two decades support for education has increasingly fallen short of need. In California and the Nation the rate of educational attainment has slowed at a time when a college education is increasingly necessary to achieve a technologically skilled workforce as well as to offer a life of opportunity and informed civic responsibility to the young people of our State and Nation.
What are our responses to this challenge?
Beginning with today’s Academic Senate retreat, we are embarking upon a review of the curriculum. I note with delight that Senate chair Rachel Fernflores is calling this initiative the “Year of the Curriculum.’’
The Senate is identifying the number of courses we can effectively teach and the priority we should assign to courses, to best serve our students.
Our Academic Affairs staff is diligently analyzing the factors that affect students’ progress to degree. Among the conclusions that we have already determined:
- In many of our programs, there is not a clear path to degree -- that is, the programs have not clearly laid out the courses students must take to complete a degree;
- Students in need of remediation are likelier to succeed academically if they enter the regular curriculum and receive additional support than if they enroll in “remedial” classes;
- We know that what we call “intrusive advising’’ works, with advisors functioning as coaches for students.
- We impose unnecessary barriers to changing majors and students are not given prompt guidance and answers to their requests for change of major.
It’s tempting to excuse ourselves from addressing these issues because of state funding cuts.
But we must address the needs of our students. We know what must be done.
Your help is crucial. Specifically, we need your continued help in identifying what the qualities of a Cal Poly graduate should be.
We need your help in reviewing university and program curricula to ensure we are preserving the fundamental character and quality of a Cal Poly education, while achieving efficiencies. This means we may have to give up some things we love teaching in order to provide what students must have to graduate.
And, of course, we need you to do all that you can to provide a welcoming and supportive environment for our students. In a letter that I will send to you shortly, I will have more to say on some specific plans and lessons learned that will help improve the learning environment for our students and create an even more open and supportive environment to foster the success of our students.
All these efforts – the construction projects, the curricula review, the focus on improving graduation rates and reducing the time to complete a degree – are consistent with the recently drafted Strategic Plan, which, you will be relieved to hear, is in its final drafting stage and is now available for review on the Academic Affairs web site.
The plan, in its current iteration, has as its cornerstone, these three key strategic choices:
One:
That as part of your collective efforts to continue to develop Cal Poly’s unique polytechnic identity, the University will increase integration and interlinking of disciplines, faculty, staff and students. We will do this so that we can build on our core learn-by-doing teaching experience to ensure that all students have a comprehensive polytechnic, cross-disciplinary education. That we will give students what they need to be well rounded, whole systems thinkers for the future.
Two:
Cal Poly must ensure its economic viability by strategically managing revenue, costs and allocation of resources so that we improve our effectiveness and efficiency. This means that collectively we will have to make some difficult choices about priorities. Some difficult choices have already been made – and there is no doubt that even more are necessary.
Implicit in ensuring our economic viability is the need to develop alternative sources of funding, which I will speak more about in a minute.
Three:
We will be committed to excellence in all that we do – as we always have. But we also will seek continuous improvement and renewal. I’m very proud of what Cal Poly has accomplished over the years, but I also believe we haven’t come close to realizing our full potential. If we are relentless in seeking better ways to conduct our business – and we do that in a collaborative and open way – we can steadily drive toward a fuller realization of our potential. For example, we will continue to be diligent in implementing comprehensive enrollment management to ensure students’ rates of success and timeliness to degree.
As a strategic plan, none of this should surprise you. Much of this is entirely consistent with the Cal Poly Plan, which was conceived in the mid-1990s as a multi-pronged approach to preserve and enhance Cal Poly’s learn-by-doing philosophy and polytechnic mission.
The Cal Poly Plan established multiple goals aimed at improving curriculum, graduation rates and financial support necessary to meet the university’s educational commitment to students and to address California’s growing need for university educated professionals in applied, polytechnic disciplines.
Forgive me for taking a minute to call attention to what we already have accomplished together since the Cal Poly Plan was implemented 13 years ago:
- Today, Cal Poly has the largest undergraduate enrollments in architecture, engineering and agriculture in the CSU, programs that are among the largest and top rated in Nation, producing a significant portion of the technological and scientific workforce critical for California’s economy.
- Over the last 13 years, our six-year graduation rate has increased from less than 60 percent to nearly 70 percent.
- Cal Poly’s graduation rate today is the highest in the CSU System, and our five-year rate is higher than the six-year rate of the other CSU campuses.
A cornerstone of the Cal Poly Plan has been the campus-based fee, begun in 1996, with an initial campus academic fee, after students accompanied me to the Board of Trustees to help make the case for the plan. It continued to be recognized as important by our students who voted for additional academic fees in each of the colleges in 2002 and again last winter by our students, who voted to increase those fees. To put this all in perspective, the campus-based academic fees our students have paid over the years amount to what would have been generated by an endowment totaling several hundred million dollars. As you know, the Chancellor has asked us to delay implementation of the increase in the fee endorsed overwhelmingly by our students last March.
It is critical that Cal Poly move forward with the Cal Poly Plan to continue progress on the goals established 13 years ago. We need to attain graduation rates of 85% and guarantee all students the opportunity to graduate in the specified time set out in their degree programs. For most students that will be four years. We need to invest in professional development for our faculty. We need to work together to remove barriers to student success and progress. To achieve this we must invest in being more efficient and we must close the funding gap to achieve the Plan goals from multiple sources I am confident Cal Poly will continue to make progress in preserving and enhancing the essential nature of a Cal Poly education.
The question you might rightly ask: Are these approaches adequate given the state’s current retreat from funding higher education?
First, let’s acknowledge reality: California lacks a credible near-term plan to support education. California’s recent record on funding K-12 is well known – and no one is proud of it. Further, the state also has backed away in recent years from its commitment to fund community colleges and public universities. The state is disinvesting in education precisely when we should be doing the opposite.
Unfortunately, the state’s recent cuts for the CSU were merely prologue. That is, California’s budget difficulties are not going away anytime soon. I know that all of you will join in efforts to communicate with gubernatorial candidates in the upcoming election to ensure education is high on their policy agenda, and continue efforts to persuade the Legislature to increase its commitment to education, but the reality is that regardless of diminished state funding, Cal Poly’s mission remains critical to California’s social and economic health.
Cal Poly cannot simply give up.
To fulfill our mission, we must develop a more reliable funding model, which means we must be more self-reliant.
Thanks to your success over the years in implementing The Cal Poly Plan and guided by our success in the 2001 Centennial Campaign, the University has developed blueprints pointing the way toward a more self-reliant future.
The Deans, our Advancement team, faculty and countless advisory boards are busy preparing for an ambitious new philanthropic campaign for the university.
Many of you have been very successful in obtaining grants and contracts – and these are critically important to maintaining and growing the intellectual capacity of the institution. Thanks to so many of you, we have made significant gains in recent years and now we must redouble our efforts to secure even more funding from these sources.
Student fees, combined with generous programs of financial aid, are also a piece of the solution. As the success of the Cal Poly Plan has demonstrated, charging higher fees in the colleges to expand access to classes and shorten time to degree saves students money in the long run while expanding opportunity for prospective students.
The approaches above – striving for continuous improvement, diligently seeking incremental efficiencies, developing alternative sources of funding – are moving Cal Poly in the right direction to be less dependent on the vagaries of State and CSU support.
In other words: With your help, with your hard work, Cal Poly can meet the resource challenges with local initiatives and solutions to avoid the mindless retrenchment of our intellectual capacity that diminishes our service to students. I know Cal Poly will succeed.
There are many more topics I’d like to review with you this morning.
But our time is short.
As we celebrate – and that’s what our time this morning is all about – celebrating the beginning of a new year, a year of inspiring bright young people and preparing them to be future leaders and problem solvers.
As we celebrate today, let me close by calling your attention to what I believe is truly remarkable about Cal Poly – and here I want to focus on our students, the reason we are here.
You’ll recall that I mentioned the renovations of the University Union Plaza and the Rec Center.
But here’s what I find remarkable:
Our students chose to use their funds to renovate the UU plaza.
They voted to increase their fees to renovate and expand the Recreation
Center and increase opportunities for health and fitness on campus.
Last spring they voted overwhelmingly to increase their academic fees.
All of these were choices, to pay for quality.
The students whom we have the privilege to serve, they believe in quality, they believe in Cal Poly, and their judgment should be respected.
In return, they deserve nothing but our best.
I know that everyone here is committed to helping Cal Poly students realize their full potential.
I am in awe of your commitment to them and to this noble mission of ours.
And I thank you for all you do.