1999 Convocation Address
This address was given by Chancellor Richard R. Eakin at the 1999 Faculty Convocation. This and other speeches may be found in the records of the Chancellor's Office, Record Group CH1050, Series 2, Subseries 5 in the University Archives.
CONVOCATION REMARKS
August 16, 1999
Thank you, Professor Killingsworth. Before you relax too much, could I ask you to rejoin me here at the lectern? I just want to make sure that your colleagues know about all that you are doing for East Carolina. They obviously know about your role as chair of the faculty. They may have heard about your teaching awards and the impressive grants that you have received. But they may not know that you have agreed to lead the self-study for our upcoming SACS reaccreditation visit.
This is a critical, demanding and monumental task and I can think of no one better qualified to undertake it. On behalf of your fellow faculty members and the entire university, I thank you for your exceptional service to East Carolina.
It is a great pleasure for me to recognize the most recent winners of teaching awards at East Carolina. These awards were announced last spring, but in the rush of ending the spring semester, you may have missed them. Would the winners who are present please stand as I call your names, and please hold your applause until all have been recognized.Mel Markowski from child development and family relations was the ECU winner of the Board of Governors Award for Excellence in Teaching.
The recipients of the alumni awards for teaching excellence were Brian Love from chemistry; Carl Swanson from history; and Robin Webb-Corbett, from nursing.
Recipients of the Board of Governors Distinguished Professor for Teaching Awards were Boni Boswell from exercise and sport science; Robert Graham, from psychology; Thomas Huener from music; Brian Love; Michael McCammon, from exercise and sport science; and Karl Wuensch from psychology.
Congratulations to you all.
The winners of the research awards presented in the spring were Paul Gemperline of chemistry and Tibor Hortobagyi of exercise and sport science. Would you please stand.
We will have the opportunity to present advising awards to several faculty members later this morning.
It has become a happy tradition at these convocations to welcome new members of our faculty. This semester, nearly 140 faculty members are joining us for the first time. Would you please stand and let us see who you are.
Thank you. It is important that you get off on the right foot in your career here, so I want to help you in that endeavor. You will have a chance to hear from many officials today—the chancellor, the chair of the faculty, the vice chancellor for academic affairs, the vice chancellor for health sciences, the vice chancellor for research. But none of us can help you with that most important campus endeavor. Parking. That falls in the domain of Richard Brown, the vice chancellor for administration and finance, and I'm sure he would want me to tell you that his phone number is 6975.
I have several items to share with you this morning. Let me begin with the only discouraging note on the list. Many of you know that the General Assembly adjourned in July without reaching agreement on how to pay for the massive construction and renovation needs throughout the 16 campuses of the University of North Carolina.
We are, of course, disappointed. On our campus, this means that we do not have complete funding yet for the Science and Technology Building. But as President Molly Broad has said, a foundation has been laid in the legislature to move forward and find a workable solution to the funding needs of the University of North Carolina.
Even though we do not have the entire sixty-million-dollar cost of the Science and Technology Building in hand, we are going to begin construction this fall. The General Assembly has appropriated six million dollars for planning and initial work on this facility, so we will be closing off some roads, putting up fences and moving a lot of dirt. We will also be closing a parking lot, and as you probably remember, Richard Brown is in charge of parking.
There are two new administrative appointments that you should know about. Dr. Garrie Moore, who has served for the past year as director of equal opportunity programs, will become vice chancellor for student life on September first. He will succeed Dr. Al Matthews, who is retiring.
Garrie is a graduate of ECU and holds master's and doctoral degrees from North Carolina State. He is a former dean of students at Pitt Community College.
He will be succeeded in the equal opportunity office by Taffye Benson Clayton, who has done a splendid job as director of the African American Cultural Center.
A year ago I told you that we were laying the groundwork for a major fund-raising effort to increase our ability to offer merit -based scholarships to the best students in North Carolina and beyond.
That campaign, with a target of $15 million, will officially kick off next month, and I have no doubt that its success will be reflected in a larger number of truly top-notch students at East Carolina.
Professor Tom Durham from the Psychology Department and Willie Lee from University Printing and Graphics will be spearheading the faculty and staff component of the campaign when it gets under way later in the academic year, and I know you will want to assist them in every way that you can.
Within the next few weeks, the university will have the opportunity to announce formally that it is the recipient of a major National Science Foundation grant to increase the bandwidth of our connection to the Internet. This will have the effect of significantly increasing the speed limit of our connection to the information highway, and will make it possible for researchers across the campus to collaborate more effectively with their colleagues at other universities.
This award follows our acceptance for membership last spring in UCAID, the organization that is developing the so-called Internet 2.
Both these developments confirm our standing as a leader in information technology.
One final note of good news. When classes begin Wednesday, we are expecting a record number of first-time freshmen, and their test scores and grade-point averages are just as good as in past years. This is an important step in our plans to significantly increase our enrollment over the next decade, and I appreciate the work that you have done and will do to make sure that these students are not just accommodated but receive the same excellent instruction that is our hallmark.
If asked to summarize where East Carolina stands today, I would say that we are doing very well indeed. Our quality, our numbers, our resources and our ambition are unsurpassed in the 92 years since our creation by the General Assembly and in the 90 years since the first students actually enrolled. You, the faculty members of this university, are largely responsible for these successes.
Nonetheless, we are at a critical juncture in our history. We face immense challenges and equally great opportunities.
Therefore, I come before you today to ask you to join me in no less an endeavor than renewing the spirit and strength of East Carolina University.
We have today, right now, an unparalleled opportunity to define the future of this institution.
Even if the academic year that we are beginning this morning did not fall near the end of the millennium, even if we were not drawing toward the end of East Carolina's first century, this would still be the right time for a hard look and forward-looking decisions.
Consider what is before us this fall:
We are beginning the strategic planning cycle. We are beginning the SACS self-study.
We are at work on a new facilities master plan.
We must prepare for a tidal wave of new students in the coming decade.
It would be predictable, perhaps even expected, that we approach these activities as chores, as typical examples of bureaucracy at work, as more meetings crammed into our already overflowing schedules. It would be possible, perhaps even tempting, to dust off the plans from the last cycle, apply a tweak here and there, print up some shiny new covers for the report and go on about our business. We would get reaccredited, we would have obeyed the letter of the law as laid out in the planning process, we would get along. That's not going to happen.
The challenges of the information age will not allow it. The needs of the region that we call home will not allow it. The future itself will not allow it.
Working together, we will not allow it.
Instead, we should renew and rededicate East Carolina University. We should imagine the university that will best serve—that is our motto, after all—the students, the citizens, the state and the nation in the coming century. Then we should become that university.
We should determine how to best use and best nourish the incredible talents that are in this auditorium today.
We should determine how to align and ally ourselves with the information technology revolution.
We should bring to this university the same powers of intellect, analysis and invention that we apply to our discipline-specific research.
We should, in short, renew, revitalize, rethink East Carolina University and move into the future unbound by, but learning from, the past and the present.
This is a truly exciting and memorable period for the institution. There should be no limitations to our vision. The only rule is that this should be a collegial enterprise.
Together we should make such decisions as:
How should this academy be organized in terms of departments, colleges and schools? What buildings and facilities do we need and how should they be used?
What are the expectations of university students in terms of what they should know and how they will learn that?
How can shared governance best function to the benefit of the institution?
These are obviously not easy questions to answer. We have no choice but to tackle them. I have never been as excited about the future of East Carolina as I am today. I hope it is obvious to you that neither I nor this administration—indeed, no university administration—could accomplish such a monumental undertaking without the faculty. By the same token, no faculty could effect such a change without the administration. This truly will be a joint effort, cutting across all lines.
In the end, we have no choice but to do this. If we do not, if we simply continue doing what has worked, and often worked well, then we will inevitably be inviting a decline more likely to be quick than slow.The evidence of the perils of complacency are all around us.
Imagine, if you will, if Bill Gates joined forces with the Disney empire and the Nike marketers and the Citibank lenders to offer a college education at home. And this new University, Inc. guaranteed a degree in 30 months. Money-back guarantee.
Or imagine that one of our sister institutions in the University of North Carolina opts to reinvent itself and thereby captures the fancy and twice the funding levels from the General Assembly.
Let me offer some assurances here. In no way am I suggesting that we abandon our heritage as a public university or try to turn ourselves into an imitation corporation. While I strongly believe that there is much we can to do make ourselves more agile, I would not tolerate the idea of six vice chancellors or a handful of deans— or faculty members for that matter—gathering in a computer-filled room and designing the future of East Carolina University.
Society is well-served by universities that trace their lineage to the Middle Ages, by universities that do not rush pell-mell into modernity, by universities that stand apart from and even look askance at the money-lenders in the temple and the dot-coms of the NASDAQ.
I cannot conceive, and I hope you would not, a university that tried to rein in free inquiry and expression, that did not hew to the tripartite mission of teaching, research and service, or that did not value, celebrate and affirm diversity throughout the institution.
On the other hand, if an institution with the size, complexity, history and global reach of AT&T can reinvent and refocus itself in 12 months, perhaps we could be doing some things differently in Greenville, North Carolina.
For those of you who, like me, have only a few years left on the campus and might wonder why should we go to this kind of effort, I would say this: what better legacy could we leave for future East Carolinians? For those of you who will be here for a decade or two or three, I would envy your ability to work and study and explore in such an institution.
Make no mistake: This will not be easy. In the best academic tradition we will no doubt disagree on more than a few things, perhaps noisily so. But make no mistake about this also: We will persevere and we will succeed. This is the right thing to do.
Working with Professor Killingsworth, the chair of the faculty, and Phil Dixon, the chair of the Board of Trustees, I have already taken the following steps:
I have appointed a steering committee to establish the guidelines for such a complex procedure. (Nowhere at Amazon.com could I find a book called "Reinventing Universities for Dummies.") I have asked Bob Thompson, the director of planning, to ensure that our current strategic planning efforts can accommodate significant input from the steering committee.
I have notified the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools that we are proceeding under the alternate self-study model and I am confident that our renewal and reinvigorating process will figure prominently in the focus of that study.
I have asked Brenda Killingsworth to work with the Faculty Senate to examine the senate's committee structure to make it more compatible with this university-wide process.
Within the next month I will report to you on the next steps. Thank you for your attention, and thank you in advance for your contributions to the future of East Carolina.
