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Address to the Campus at Fall 2008 Convocation 2008 Faculty and Staff Convocation Remarks by Chancellor David J. WardClick here to download a Word document of the address.Thank you, Cliff, for that generous introduction. Good morning everyone welcome. I hope the summer has treated you and your families well. It’s great to see so many old and new friends and new colleagues here this morning. My wife, Judy, joins me in thanking all of you for welcoming us back to UW-Green Bay and the Green Bay community. We are delighted to be here! I mentioned that Judy joins me in thanking you. I’d like to introduce her and publicly thank her for her patience, love and support through the years. Tomorrow we celebrate our 42nd wedding anniversary. Judy would you please stand. I’d also like to thank someone who has provided me with a steady hand, sound advice, wisdom and friendship. Along with the entire campus community, I owe a large debt of gratitude to interim Provost Bill Laatsch who has delayed his well-deserved retirement to serve as Provost. Bill would you please stand. Bill, thank you for your outstanding service and for once again answering the call of a grateful university. We also have with us today a number of elected officials and members of our Council of Trustees. I’d like to acknowledge and thank them for their support, friendship and leadership. With us this morning are Rick Beverstein, Kate Meeuwsen and Ginny Riopelle. I'd also like to thank another special guest, Marge Weidner, for everything she has done for UW-Green Bay. In my speech this morning, I want to talk about perspective, opportunity, and action. As we move forward in the coming academic year, it is helpful to have some context, or perspective about this great institution which is entering its 40th year of operation. That perspective provides a platform to think about the opportunities to move UW-Green Bay forward in service to students and our region. Finally, I want to discuss some action items that we will pursue this year as we maintain and then escalate the positive momentum of UW-Green Bay. PERSPECTIVE First, let me offer some perspective on UW-Green Bay. When I think of perspective, I am reminded of a true story told to us by our son John’s teacher as we attended a parent teacher conference. John was a first grader in the Neenah schools and one day the teacher had all of the children in the class tell the rest of the class about what their mom and dad did. When asked what his mom did, he said that she was a speech therapist. When asked what his dad did, John said that he was a college professor. The teacher pressed John as to what subject his father taught at the university. John never stumped for an answer, paused for some time and then responded, “I think he teaches homeroom”. Needless to say as a young professor of finance it was an interesting perspective. My sense of perspective was keenly developed in my early years at UW-Green Bay. In 1969, I came to UW-Green Bay as an assistant professor, my first real position in higher education. We were a new university and the development of this campus provided a once-in-a-lifetime case study in higher education. To be sure, there was considerable turbulence in those early years but the mission and purpose of UW-Green Bay were on the mark and, as I look back, were well ahead of the times. In that charter year of 1969, as I sat in the audience for the first convocation at UW-Green Bay, Chancellor Ed Weidner provided us with an important perspective when he said: “We are a different university from over 90 percent of the universities in the country because of the fact that we have an academic plan that is specific in orientation. We have an academic plan with a focus on ecology, on the man and environment relationship. We have a unique opportunity starting from this base.” About 32 years ago, I left UW-Green Bay to pursue other opportunities. When I left in 1976, the work of forming the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay was still on-going. That formation continued under the leadership of Chancellors Weidner, Interim Chancellors Harden and Kuepper, Chancellors Outcalt, Perkins, and – most recently – Chancellor Shepard. As I return to the campus in 2008, I see remarkable progress in building a regional comprehensive university that makes a difference. Here are just a few recent accomplishments that mark the development of UW-Green Bay into a university that makes a difference in our region and state.
OPPORTUNITY This campus has been fortunate to have many opportunities to serve our region and has an opportunity to further develop its mission in the region, state and nation. The mission of UW-Green Bay that Ed Weidner talked about in 1969 is even more relevant today. We can clearly see that the environmental focus of this campus now intersects with mainstream thinking in business and governmental policy. The opportunity curve for UW-Green Bay for the next five years is only limited by our time and budget resources. But let’s move from this academic talk of opportunity curve to some real examples of what UW-Green Bay can do for its students, faculty and regional community. In defining this opportunity curve, we must be careful to define real opportunities and offer real solutions. First, there’s UW-Green Bay’s Growth Agenda. This crucial initiative addresses the dominant problem for the New North region. And that problem is educational attainment. The New North region trails the state, which in turn trails the nation, in the percentage of college-educated people in the workforce. This has region-wide and state-wide effects on our economy and tax base. To compete in the global economy, we need to move the educational attainment numbers in the New North. I see no reason why this region cannot exceed state and national averages in the percentage of adult residents with four-year college degrees. Chancellor Shepard understood that need and formulated a way to go after funding to increase our capacity to educate more students in this region. The UW-Green Bay Growth Agenda, developed in collaboration with regional leaders, resulted in $1.7 million in additional funding for UW-Green Bay, and we are in fact slowly growing our instructional resources and student base. Northeastern Wisconsin’s Growth Agenda for UW-Green Bay is a six-year plan and we will be challenged by the current economic and budget environment. But this is an opportunity worth fighting for that can advance the quality of life and economic prosperity of the New North region. And I have great confidence that we will succeed in that fight! That’s because since the founding of UW-Green Bay, the people of our community and region – the people whose support we need – have been there for us at many critical junctures. And they are with us today! Next, we have many opportunities for building and strengthening regional partnerships. My work in the private sector as an economist has allowed me to study the strategies for regional development. I am proud of the work my colleagues and I have done in laying the foundation for the New North regional strategy. And one thing that has become clear to me is the importance of strong public universities to successful regions around the country. We also have the opportunity to further build out and expand the access to higher education by building on our educational partnerships with Nicolet College and NWTC, with other higher educational institutions and with K - 12 school districts in the region. Creating more access to higher education and increasing the number of college graduates in the New North region should be one of our primary missions. To do that we need to continue to build partnerships that serve the region. And then there’s our opportunity to continue to build academic excellence at UW-Green Bay. As you know, Chancellor Shepard earlier this year identified three academic excellence initiatives worthy of the University’s attention: The themes of these three initiatives are environment/sustainability, business and entrepreneurship, and internationalization. I strongly support these initiatives. In the coming year we have the opportunity to build on UW-Green Bay’s academic success and to further define the academic program for our community and region. I am greatly impressed by the commitment to these academic initiatives from our faculty and others on campus and in the community. ACTION That brings me to the third and most important part of my remarks today: action. As we look at the year ahead the key question in front of us is: What do we do with these and other opportunities? Without action opportunity is lost. When UW System President Kevin Reilly offered me the opportunity to serve as your interim chancellor, he said that my main responsibility would be to keep this university moving forward. He knew, as I do, that unless we move forward, other colleges and universities soon will be looking back at us the same way Michael Phelps looked back at his competition in the Olympics. And we will move forward. Working with community leaders like our Council of Trustees, we will continue to build Northeastern Wisconsin’s Growth Agenda. We will succeed because it is the right thing to do for the New North and for the state of Wisconsin. Just last week, the Board of Regents endorsed Phase Two of the UW-Green Bay Growth Agenda. Now we will work with the Legislature and Governor to gain their support for Phase Two — the same kind of support they gave to Phase One. In the area of academic excellence, we will build a more international campus. We are making great progress. This summer, we hosted a delegation from China seeking solutions to their daunting environmental challenges. During the visit of this delegation, our faculty made important professional contacts that bode well for future international cooperation. In addition, we have a memorandum of understanding with the University of Jordan, and Dean Fritz Erickson recently visited Jordan for discussions of further developments that could benefit faculty and staff on both sides. And our students are doing their part in promoting greater global perspectives among students. The UW-Green Bay Student Government Association created a blog known as SGA Global, the only blog of its type in the United States featuring international opportunities and resources for students. I also am impressed by the international dimensions of campuswide Common Theme program on Waging War and Waging Peace. I encourage all of you to get involved in this yearlong experience of open discussion and critical thinking. We also are working with community and business leaders to establish an interdisciplinary business center for entrepreneurship and innovation. The economic future of the New North region and the very tax base of our communities and the state are tied to the creation of innovative businesses that in turn create good paying jobs. The University is educating the entrepreneurs and innovators that will build that future economy. The University is a major source of innovation and ideas for the New Economy. We need to bring the many assets and network connections of the University together in an interdisciplinary setting that can lead and support innovation and entrepreneurship in the New North. With the help of faculty and the valuable assistance of our trustees and other community friends, the concepts and structure for the center are being developed. You will be hearing much more about this in the months ahead. And now to our initiative on the environment and sustainability. As I said earlier in my remarks, the founders of this University challenged the conventional approaches to higher education and built a university based on interdisciplinary thinking and a focus on the environment. As an example, even before the first Earth Day in 1970 UW-Green Bay was examining the relationship between man and the environment. A clever headline writer called us Eco U. Since those early days, we have lost some of the focus that led to the legacy of Eco U. Yes, we have stayed true to our original mission. But because we have worked hard to emphasize that we are much more than Eco U, we have not always done all we can to feature our environmental heritage. The constants have included our outstanding, internationally recognized faculty in the environmental sciences and policy and our innovative interdisciplinary approach that combines science and policy at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. Another constant has been the leadership and influence of graduates of our environmental programs — leadership not only in our local community but in communities from coast to coast. Leadership from people like David Bancroft, a 1977 graduate who is president of the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay in Baltimore, Maryland. Or Gordon Hempton, a 1976 graduate and Emmy-award winning acoustic ecologist from Port Angeles, Washington, whose work was recently featured on ABC’s Nightline. Closer to home, graduates like Paul Linzmeyer, Paul Wozniak and our own Prof. John Katers are making significant contributions to environmental awareness in our community. Times change — and institutions evolve. Today, you can’t pick up a popular periodical without seeing the words green and sustainability. Businesses are hungry for graduates who can show them the way to a greener, more prosperous future. Our New North region and state look for University leadership in solving our many environmental challenges. Our campus community gets it and we are reenergizing our focus on the environment and sustainability.
I get excited thinking about this institute’s great potential for teaching, research and community outreach.
CONCLUSION This is an exciting and challenging time to be at UW-Green Bay. I hope you are as excited as I am. And I know that I have no intention of backing down from the challenges facing us today. Together, we will meet those challenges. And, together, we will continue to build UW-Green Bay into the kind of institution that will make a positive difference for generations to come. I am proud to be part of the UW-Green Bay community and to be working with our outstanding faculty, staff and student body. It is a high honor to be appointed to lead this institution in the year ahead. As we prepare for another year, let me offer one last perspective to frame the coming year. John Wooden, the famous basketball coach at UCLA once said- “You can’t live a perfect day without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you." I think we can all attest to the wisdom of that statement. We sit here today because many people – our parents, our spouses, our teachers and others- did things for us that we can’t repay. Our work here in the university is all about doing things for our students and colleagues that they may never be able to repay. And in doing our work we can achieve John Wooden’s perfect day. As we start another academic year, I hope we will have many perfect days in the year ahead. Thank you, and may you all have a perfect year. |
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