State of the University Addresses

1996 State of the University Address

Chairman Arnelle, members of the Board of Trustees, faculty and staff colleagues, alumni, students, and friends joining us here at the University Park Campus and via satellite throughout Pennsylvania, "The great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving," said Oliver Wendell Holmes. Twelve months ago I stood before you as Penn State's new President to share my vision for the future of this magnificent University. I said at that time that I saw a great opportunity to build upon the mission, the foundation, the traditions, and success that have made Penn State one of the nation's leading universities.

Today I wish to report to you on the work we have done over the past year to seize that opportunity, to move our University forward, and to strengthen our role in this Commonwealth and beyond. More important, I also wish to take a look ahead.

The past year has been a time of crucial action for Penn State. Even as it continued to be a time of learning for me, it was a time of initiative and progress for us all. No university can afford to stand still in the present environment of challenge and change. We have not stood still, but have tackled the most pressing of problems and pursued our most promising opportunities, moving quickly, collaboratively, and with strong commitment to the best interests of higher education in Pennsylvania. I am grateful for the response of the faculty, staff, and students, so many of whom have contributed to these efforts. It is with such a spirit of cooperation and open communication that a bright future for our University will be forged.

And in the presence of this statewide audience, I wish to say how blessed I have been to be serving as President of a university with a supportive, enthusiastic, and forward-looking Board of Trustees. Penn State's governing board is admired throughout higher education, and for good reason. Thank you all for your leadership, vision, and stewardship.

Before I highlight the initiatives and accomplishments of the past year, I wish to make a few comments on the process of change at Penn State. Though change is inevitable for our University community, it builds on tradition. This is very important to me. Our mission of teaching, research, and service is timeless. Our land-grant heritage has proved time and again the tremendous value of excellence and access in all facets of higher learning. We have a profound responsibility to continue these traditions that promote the economic and human development that enables society to thrive. Every change at Penn State, every new priority and program direction, ultimately must carry on our commitment to progress and to people. However much the conditions, methods, and specific concerns of the University change, we remain what Penn State always has been: a community of scholars and learners dedicated to this end.

Higher Education Leadership

University leadership can be trying. MIT's Paul Gray used to say that the definition of a modern university president was someone who lived in a large house and begged for a living. But Michigan's recent president, Jim Duderstadt, says a better analogy today is the local sheriff in a frontier town who has to get up every morning and strap his guns on and go out in the main street and see what gunslingers have roamed into town to shoot the place up.

I say there are two things wrong with higher education leadership today: a peculiar and inappropriate sense of pessimism and a lack of passion. I ask you: Where is the optimism, and where is the passion? Meetings in the statewide and national higher education community can be depressing. If I believed everything I heard from other college and university presidents, I'd probably consider a very early retirement. And if we let some observers assign grades to the faculty and administration, we'd all be on academic probation. I'm not sure how our universities, indeed our entire society, became infected with this culture of pessimism, but I can tell you that I have been inoculated against it, and I'd like to give all of you the same shot. It's not about being Pollyanna, but rather about focusing on the possible. It's about building on strength and not being scared off by the naysayers.

I sometimes feel like one of the three men who had adjacent businesses. The businessman who ran the store at one end of the building put up a sign reading "Year-end Clearance." At the far end of the building, the other businessman followed with a sign reading "Closing-out Sale." The businessman in the middle knew his business was going to be hurting badly under this scenario, so he put up a sign that read "Main Entrance." I'm putting out the sign at Penn State. It says "Main Entrance."

I can tell you unequivocally that I believe in the value of American higher education. I believe in the value of a Penn State education. Without minimizing any of our challenges and problems, I can say I am genuinely enthusiastic about what is possible here. For the record, I do not buy the concept that because our challenges are unprecedented we must scale back our ambitions. The opposite is true. It is in this context that I reaffirm my goal for Penn State to be the top university in the United States in the integration of teaching, research, and service. To abandon or de-emphasize any of our missions would be an abrogation of our heritage and would undermine the strong foundation built year by year since 1855.

As for passion, it must be encouraged, nurtured, and rewarded. The greatest teachers have it; the most brilliant research discoveries stem from it; our best artists and musicians display it; it shines in the eyes of our most eager students; and it sweats from the pores of those we cheer on the courts and playing fields. Passion is also the missing ingredient in higher education leadership. I hope you never discover it lacking at Penn State.

Organizational Changes

Penn State is a large and complex institution whose organizational structure needs to evolve with growth, opportunity, and the times. Several organizational changes are being implemented that I wish to summarize for you.

Our most profound change this year is the restructuring of the Commonwealth Educational System. In a year-long process that has been intensive, open, and consultative, we have redesigned Penn State for the future. Faculty, staff, students, campus advisory board members, and community and governmental leaders have come together to plan for expanded educational programs at Penn State Erie, Penn State Harrisburg, and our seventeen Commonwealth Campuses serving undergraduates.

The impetus for this reorganization is a combination of demographic changes and changing educational needs. We will spend the 1996-97 year implementing a new organizational structure that will eliminate the Commonwealth Educational System as we now know it. New four-year degree opportunities at the campuses will be developed to meet the demands of the communities served by our campuses. Penn State Harrisburg will merge with Penn State Schuylkill. Four new colleges will be designated: Penn State Abington, Penn State Altoona, and Penn State Berks/Lehigh Valley (a merger of the Berks and Allentown campuses); the fourth college is The Commonwealth College, an academic unit that will consist of our twelve other Commonwealth Campuses. Each of the new colleges will have budgetary, curricular, and programmatic responsibility characteristic of colleges at Penn State.

These changes are designed to allow for greater autonomy of our campuses, encourage greater responsiveness to community and regional needs, address the educational needs of our students better, enhance location-based continuing education, promote an appropriate balance of enrollments between University Park and the campuses, facilitate modest enrollment growth at the campuses, allow place-bound students to complete a degree closer to home, recognize the needs of adult students, and provide expanded professional development opportunities for our faculty and staff. I wish publicly to thank Senior Vice President Robert Dunham for his outstanding leadership in this effort.

Penn State Great Valley, our graduate campus in the Philadelphia region, has been moved under the purview of the dean of the Graduate School. And the dean of the Graduate School will now report to the provost. We acknowledge with reluctance the forthcoming retirement of David Shirley, senior vice president for research and graduate studies. Upon Dave's retirement, the position will be redefined to focus very specifically on the research function with the title of vice president for research.

We also face the daunting task this year of finding a new dean of the University Libraries. As Nancy Cline moves to Harvard to oversee the most prestigious academic library in the world, we shall aspire to find someone who can sustain the progress she has created for this University.

In another profound organizational change, we will strengthen outreach and the Penn State Cooperative Extension. The plan has several components. We will redefine the role of the University's senior officer for outreach from vice president for continuing and distance education to vice president for outreach and cooperative extension to provide stronger advocacy, coordination, and leadership for activities in these areas. This position will provide overall leadership and facilitate a shared vision for all outreach programs and activities University-wide. The vice president will administer the budget, personnel, and programs of continuing education, distance education, and public broadcasting and, with the dean of the College of Agricultural Sciences, will oversee Penn State Cooperative Extension. The vice president for outreach and cooperative extension will join the President's Council and report directly to me.

The director of extension also will serve as an associate dean in the College of Agricultural Sciences. A key part of the director's job will be to develop and implement a comprehensive, statewide extension program planning process in concert with stakeholders, extension agents, and faculty. This new administrative arrangement is intended to strengthen University-wide support for extension and to enhance collaboration between extension and other academic units within the University.

A Chronicle of Progress in Teaching

I turn now to a brief chronicle of our recent progress across our foci of teaching, research, and service. The fulfillment of Penn State's instructional mission is expressed through many forms of teaching and learning. Increasingly, they are integrated with our research and service missions to promote and support lifelong learning and accelerate the transfer of new knowledge and technology. Yet undergraduate education continues to occupy a special position at Penn State. Superb resident education should always be a priority, an intensive form of teaching and learning that sustains personal growth and intellectual development as no other approach can. Following our accreditation visit last fall by the Middle States Association, the review team praised the quality of a Penn State education, making special note of the high level of student satisfaction.

There are many measures of the quality of a Penn State education, but none speak to me more profoundly than the accomplishments of our alumni five, ten, twenty, or fifty years after graduation. The loyalty and enthusiasm of our alumni say a great deal about the Penn State experience. With its 138,000 members, the Penn State Alumni Association is the largest in the nation. Perhaps even more compelling is that we are second only to Harvard in the number of graduates who make a financial contribution to their alma mater--65,000 last year.

Another measure of our progress is our University Scholars Program. Our incoming class is the strongest ever, with average SAT scores of 1430 and near perfect high school grade-point averages. Our entering Scholars' class of 258 students includes 56 valedictorians and 17 salutatorians. These students have chosen Penn State over the most prestigious universities in the country. This past year we began to lay the groundwork for an expansion of the Scholars Program. This not only will enable more academically talented students to take the fullest advantage of the special resources of our University--more important, it will elevate the academic tone on campus for all of our students.

I have also encouraged the review of Penn State's General Education requirements currently under way by the Faculty Senate, with the goal of creating for this University a unique baccalaureate core curriculum that prepares graduates for the twenty-first century. I have watched with enthusiasm the burgeoning activities of the Schreyer Institute for Innovation in Learning. These activities join a number of other special efforts throughout the University to encourage active and collaborative learning among our students, and I applaud them all.

The out-of-classroom experience is an important component of a Penn State education. This year we implemented a new student activities fee to enrich the campus environment for students at all locations. These funds will be used to increase the number and quality of extracurricular activities, including clubs and organizations, fitness and recreational opportunities, and lectures, music, and cultural events. At the University Park Campus, approximately two-thirds of the funds will be used for the HUB/Robeson expansion.

Research and Faculty Scholarship

Support for Penn State research continues to be promising despite a restricted pool of federal research dollars. Our research expenditures totaled a record $344 million in fiscal year 1995, up from $317 million the previous year. The federal funding climate is having its impact on the flow of dollars to research universities. Yet, we are well positioned to weather the changing environment for federal funding, not only by virtue of the outstanding competitiveness of Penn State faculty, but because so many of our strengths lie in areas of continuing priority. And I am pleased to report that once again this year, the University ranked second in the nation, behind MIT, in the level of research supported by private industry.

Many of the greatest advances in research, scholarship, and creative activity are now found at the boundaries between disciplines, in areas of interdisciplinary cooperation, and in those spaces where faculty meet without regard to departmental confines. It is time to review our commitment to our Intercollege Research Programs, to renew our support of the very best programs, to invest more heavily where such investment is appropriate, to grant some programs their independence, and to begin new intercollege research programs appropriate to the twenty-first century.

The Life Sciences Consortium is moving forward to encourage greater coordination and interdisciplinary collaboration in this important field. The consortium is a multicollege organization working to promote interdisciplinary team research, develop new graduate programs, enhance life sciences faculty, and improve shared technology resources.

In addition, we must recognize that the majority of Penn State's distinguished research and creative work takes place within our traditional departmental structure, and we must support such scholarship appropriately as well.

Those of you who labor so successfully to attract grants and contracts to Penn State to support your research will be pleased to know that we are instituting a revised system of handling the distribution of funds returned to the University for indirect costs. We will institute a new incentive-based system that will provide enhanced rewards to colleges that are successful in their funded research programs.

Outreach and Service

Important recognition of Penn State's public service mission was received this year in the form of increased state funding for agricultural research and cooperative extension. These areas have a long and strong tradition of serving the Commonwealth, but have suffered from eroding state support in recent years. We requested--and received--an 11.4 percent increase in the state appropriation for these line items. This surely will reinvigorate these historic areas of our land-grant responsibility.

Last fall we dedicated Penn State's Philadelphia Center, which consolidates the educational and community services the University provides to the city's residents. This highly visible presence in Philadelphia marks a commitment to urban outreach. The center is home to programs of Penn State Cooperative Extension, including 4-H, which serves approximately 12,000 Philadelphia youths. It also includes a community recruitment center and offices for the College of Education's Urban Education Initiative, PENNTAP, development, and Penn State Continuing and Distance Education.

To acquaint new faculty with the various regions of Pennsylvania and to give them some insight into Penn State's role across the entire state, we launched a highly successful two-day bus tour of the Commonwealth. It is my intention to continue this "road scholars" trip in future years. It is a wonderful way to encourage the faculty to become involved in the life of this state.

Moreover, I am pleased to announce that Penn State's deans, vice presidents, and other senior University officials will participate in a new statewide tour. Building on my visits to communities and campuses throughout Pennsylvania this past year, University leaders will be involved in reaching out to Penn State's family of students, employees, alumni, and donors, and friends.

International Programs

The United States is becoming more cosmopolitan than almost any other nation of the world. Our cities--New York, Washington, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh, to name just a few--are more international in their trade than London, Paris, and Prague. I have visited with dozens of employers around the state, and over and over, the CEOs of these companies tell me that their growth markets are in the international arena. They are eager to hire graduates who speak a foreign language, and who understand world geography, international politics, global economics, and have an appreciation for cultural understanding. My belief that we need to do even more to internationalize our curriculum has been reinforced. If Penn State is to prepare students adequately for the future, we must give enhanced focus on our international programs.

I am pleased to report that we have elevated the position of deputy vice provost for international programs to a deanship to help us infuse international perspectives into Penn State's academic programs. As we bid farewell to LaMarr Kopp, who has served as Penn State's international affairs ambassador for many years, we are pleased to welcome Beverly Lindsay, a former Penn State professor in our College of Education who has since served in a number of international capacities with the United States government, as a faculty member and administrator at the University of Georgia, and as dean of international programs at Hampton University. Dean Lindsay will join the Council of Academic Deans.

It is our goal to increase substantially the number of undergraduate students who have study abroad opportunities. In addition, I will ask our deans to encourage increased opportunities for our faculty to engage in collaborative research across international borders, to support conference and travel opportunities that will enable our faculty to internationalize their curricula and thus translate their international expertise into meaningful undergraduate experiences.

Admission and Enrollment

Penn State continues to be the most popular university in the United States. For the second year in a row, more high schools students--53,238 last year--sent their SAT score reports to Penn State than to any other university. We received 700 more applications for admission this year, breaking last year's phenomenal record, although we admitted more than 800 fewer students at the University Park Campus than the year before in an effort to curtail our enrollment growth.

Nevertheless, more than 12,000 new students began a Penn State degree this year. It is of some interest to know that the typical student offered admission to the University Park Campus for fall semester had a class rank at the 93rd percentile, with an SAT score of 1270 and a high school grade-point average of 3.89.

It is noteworthy that in this environment of increasing competitiveness, Penn State was able to achieve its goal of increasing the racial and ethnic diversity of our entering students. Minority baccalaureate applications for summer/fall l996 were up 10.3 percent compared to 1995. Paid accepts for all minority groups in this year's entering class were up 5.9 percent compared with last year.

Despite Penn State's popularity and the growing competence of our prospective students, it is incumbent on us, as a flagship university, to raise the sights of the next generation of students, not just for our university but for all of society at large. Penn State must assume some responsibility for setting standards that will elevate the intellectual preparation of Pennsylvania's high school graduates.

In light of my earlier comments about internationalization, I am pleased to announce that I have consulted with the Faculty Advisory Committee and the Senate Committee on Admissions and Records and have asked that the University Faculty Senate adopt a new admission protocol that requires a modest level of proficiency in a foreign language for entrance to Penn State. Effective with the entering class of students who are now freshmen in high school, future Penn State students entering the University directly from high school would be required to have a minimum of two years of a foreign language, with three years recommended.

On a related note, while not changing the current mathematics requirements of the various colleges within the University, we will wish henceforth to recommend explicitly that students take four years of mathematics in high school in order to prepare themselves better for university-level work. I am hopeful that Penn State's leadership in these initiatives will benefit primary and secondary education in the state as well as strengthen the educational foundation of our next generation of students.

In other developments relating to admission, we are introducing a new publications program to present better the diversity of opportunities available at Penn State throughout our twenty-three locations. We plan to adjust the balance of summer and fall admits to accommodate the great interest in a Penn State education and to yield a highly talented pool of students for the fall semester. We will expand our analysis of prospective students' applications to ensure that students from exceptionally competitive high schools or students with special talents do not escape our attention.

Investing in Penn State

Now, may I tell you a story? I have been so concerned about the uncertainties of our state appropriation, I sent our senior vice president for finance and business, Gary Schultz, to a fortune-teller for a reading. The fortune-teller looked into the crystal ball and said, "Your university will suffer inadequate funding until the year 2000."

"Then what will happen?" our emissary asked.

Replied the fortune-teller, "Then you'll get used to it."

Well, I intend to continue to make the strongest case possible that Penn State is worthy of increased support from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. We are the state's principal engine of research and technology transfer. We are the institution of choice for the plurality of the most talented students seeking admission to college, and we are Pennsylvania's source of services and educational activities from more than one hundred different major program thrusts whose mission is outreach. I will promise our legislators that a dollar invested in Penn State will return far more value than that in human, cultural, and economic development. I will promise that because it is true.

Yet, if the fortune-teller is right, we must not rest our hopes solely on public funds. We must be entrepreneurial, ambitious, efficient, productive, and creative. We will continue our quest to expand our support through research grants and contracts. We will study our tuition structure this year to assess whether a university that receives a declining proportion of its support from legislative appropriation needs a different approach to financing the cost of education, such as differential tuition that recognizes the higher costs of education in certain disciplines, at certain locations, or at certain points in one's degree program. We must also look increasingly to philanthropy.

Philanthropy

Surely the most astounding aspect of my job as president is reviewing the daily summary of private gifts that have arrived in support of the quest for excellence and in support of our eminent faculty, our gifted students, our museums and galleries, and our exceptional athletic programs. I don't believe I will ever cease to be amazed, gratified, and humbled by this generosity.

And I have exceedingly good news to share about fund-raising. This past year Penn State received an all-time record $83.2 million from 158,000 gifts involving 107,000 donors. This came during a year when no new fund-raising initiatives were launched. I applaud this marvelous support and thank all donors--alumni, parents, friends, corporations, foundations, and our own faculty and staff--for the resources that daily make qualitative differences on each Penn State campus. And what about our students? With two-thirds of our students receiving some kind of financial assistance, and with the majority of our seniors facing significant debt upon graduation, I find it astounding but heartwarming that these students manage each year to contribute more than $100,000 for a senior class gift. And as if that weren't enough, our students, in the nation's largest student-run philanthropy, raise more than $1 million each year through the IFC/Panhellenic Dance Marathon, supporting children who are victims of cancer. May we all celebrate this achievement by emulating this generosity and sacrifice.

Tremendous strides have been made in establishing a philanthropic tradition at Penn State. Our endowment, a key indicator of the University's economic health, has increased threefold this past decade. Yet, our philanthropic tradition is young. The potential for further growth in this area, and the need to do more, is great indeed.

Consequently, this fall we enter the first phase of a new comprehensive University-wide campaign that will emphasize increasing our endowment to support Penn State's people--faculty, staff, and students. Scores of individuals at the University will be involved with this initiative, including trustees, alumni, deans, and our development staff. I am pleased to report that our early efforts to recruit volunteer leadership for this initiative are being met with characteristically high Penn State success and enthusiasm. Early leadership gift solicitation and volunteer recruitment for the campaign will be among my highest priorities this year.

Priorities for Enhanced Support

Today we begin another cycle leading to our state appropriation in support of Penn State. I wish to share with you those priorities we believe to be most worthy of support from The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

Our highest priority for 1997-98 will be for new faculty positions to improve the quality of our educational programs, to bring down class size, and to respond to the growing demands for Penn State expertise. We will ask for ongoing funding for fifty new positions. In addition, I am announcing today that Penn State has initiated a program of internal reallocation that places the highest priority on reallocation of institutional funds to support new faculty positions. As part of the long-range planning process overseen by the University Planning Council, and under the leadership of Provost John Brighton, we have launched a multiyear initiative to shift funds from all levels of administration and from all parts of the operating budget to faculty positions.

We will ask for a special allocation for our libraries and for information technology. Penn State is a national leader in these domains and we desire to maintain this leadership. Nowhere are the funding challenges greater, yet nowhere are the potential rewards as great for those universities who are able to embrace and promote the new opportunities emerging in our information age.

We shall request a special allocation for deferred maintenance, a critically important item for a university that is 141 years old and that has several hundred buildings in dozens of locations around the state. Our successors will judge us in part on our stewardship of the facilities entrusted to us.

We will once again ask for an increase in our agricultural research and Cooperative Extension budgets that exceeds what we are requesting for basic operating cost increases for the rest of the University. This is to take a second important step, following this year's increase in funding, toward remedying the debilitating and unfortunate erosion we experienced between 1990 and 1996 in the support of these programs.

The Milton S. Hershey Medical Center

We will make a special appeal to the Commonwealth this year for support for programs at The Milton S. Hershey Medical Center and for the College of Medicine. One of the remarkable success stories in modern American higher education, our Medical Center has become one of the leading facilities of its kind. Senior Vice President Mac Evarts and his colleagues perform miracles every day. But in the context of a rapidly evolving landscape in the financing of medicine, as managed care increasingly influences the practice of American medicine, as we accept responsibility for the growing importance of training primary care physicians, and as we balance the concepts of access, excellence, and responsibility, we are

challenged to make ends meet. Let me give you a statistic that may shock you: Among 75 public colleges of medicine in the United States, Penn State ranks dead last in terms of how much support we receive from the state--dead last.

We had more than 7,400 applicants for 110 spots in this fall's medical school class; in fact, one out of every seven applicants to medical school in the United States applied to our College of Medicine. We served nearly 20,000 in-patients and more than 356,000 out-patients at our hospitals last year. Our Life Lion helicopter flew 1,048 transport and rescue missions last year--an average of almost three every day--to become one of the four busiest air medical aircraft in the United States. Can anyone doubt that we are worthy of increased support? The issues facing academic medicine are sufficiently important to us that I have recently accepted an appointment to a national study commission of the Association for Academic Health Centers, supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University Health System Consortium.

Penn State's World Campus

Let me turn now to one of the most exciting areas of future development for Penn State: using information technology to facilitate distance education. I am reminded that when Senator Chauncy Depew's nephew wanted to invest $5,000 in the Ford Motor Company, the senator advised, "Nothing has come along to beat the horse. Keep your money. Or if you must spend, buy a horse and you'll have enough left over to furnish it with feed for the rest of its life."

For more than a century, since we developed our first correspondence courses in agriculture and engineering, distance education has been an important part of Penn State's outreach efforts and a reflection of our values as a land-grant university. In 1892, distance education was part of a national effort to improve life in rural areas and protect our agricultural and industrial base. Today, advances in technology are allowing us to expand distance education as a way of dealing with a set of emerging social and economic issues.

We are living in a world in which lifelong learning is a necessity. Distance education gives the adult learner more flexibility over the time and place of study. It is a way to enhance access to our extraordinary faculty expertise to school children and to adults who need more education to keep pace with their changing work environment.

In order to respond to citizens' needs in the information age, I have convened a group with the purpose of exploring the potential for a "world campus" of Penn State. This "virtual campus" will not be built with brick and mortar but with the creative use of technology led by our faculty to extend selected undergraduate and graduate programs nationally and internationally. Through this approach, we anticipate propelling Penn State's expertise not only to every citizen of Pennsylvania but potentially to new students globally. I wish to commend Vice President James Ryan and the Distance Education Advisory Committee for the excellent report produced last month that helps set the stage for our initiatives.

Responsibility, Character, and Civility

In addition to the multitude of good news and a healthy dose of optimism I wish to share with you today, I also want to talk to you about something that has been troubling me deeply. The anguish is difficult to capture succinctly since it relates to the confluence where the University's educational mission meets character, citizenship, maturity, civility, tolerance, and social responsibility.

I have admired and many times pondered something Evan Pugh penned in a young woman's autograph book in 1853. You may find it hard to believe that Dr. Pugh was only 25 years old at the time. He wrote:

"There is no treasure within the reach of human effort so great as that of a clear conscience. Misfortune may beset thee, friends may despise thee and thou be left forsaken, a wanderer on the earth; but if thou art true to thy inward sense of right then shalt thou, in the midst of thy adversity, experience joy of thy soul which they who heed not this inward voice know not …"

To put all of this in more concrete terms, I want to give you an answer to one of the questions I am most often asked. I am asked repeatedly: "What is the most pressing problem facing higher education in America today?" My inquisitors expect me to speak about budgets, information technology, federal research policy, or public opinion. My answer may surprise you. The most fundamental problem facing colleges and universities throughout America today is the challenge of developing character, conscience, citizenship, tolerance, and social responsibility in a society that sometimes gives the impression that such virtues are optional.

And no aspect of this challenge is greater for our young adults today than the excessive consumption of alcohol and the behaviors that surround it. This is not a problem unique to Penn State, but it is my responsibility to raise our awareness here, just as I have raised this issue in my work with the national Kellogg Commission on the Future of State and Land-Grant Universities.

Surveys have adequately demonstrated that excessive alcohol consumption has become normative among university students. There are unmistakable consequences of such behavior for our communities, for our learning environment, and of course, for our students. A majority of the crimes reported in State College, for example, fall into the categories of assault, criminal mischief, and disorderly conduct. It's estimated that more than 90 percent of these crimes are alcohol related. Our University's judicial affairs caseload also reflects this phenomenon.

My objective is not to eradicate alcohol but rather to reduce those mechanisms that institutionalize excessive alcohol consumption and socialize our new students to give such behavior a high priority and peer recognition. In this regard, Vice President William Asbury, the Faculty Advisory Committee, student leaders, and I are looking at a broad range of initiatives, including enhancement of our drug and alcohol education programs, increasing alternative social programming, meetings with community groups that wish to assist us in this effort, encouragement to business establishments to cease promotions that encourage excessive consumption, support of our many student leaders and student organizations who are mobilizing to tackle this complex challenge, support of the recommendations of the Substance-Free Housing Task Force of the National Panhellenic Conference and the National Interfraternity Conference, and specifically here at Penn State, support of Penn State's Interfraternity Council in its efforts to establish a new "Package for the Future" for its member organizations.

One specific goal of mine is to see the elimination of student organization-sponsored events occurring on Wednesday and Thursday nights that involve alcohol. There is little doubt that such social events affect the academic climate in our classrooms. Is this too much to ask?

Humanizing the University

We have taken important strides to make Penn State a more humane place for our students, faculty, and staff. I have just appointed an implementation committee to help put in place changes in our student judicial affairs system recommended by a special study group chaired last year by Vice Provost Robert Secor. While Penn State has had a history of providing excellent services through judicial affairs that support the ethical development and personal integrity of students, we need to handle cases more expeditiously, to recognize the important role of Residence Life in handling student problems within their jurisdiction, to promote positive behavioral change in problem areas, and to shift our focus as much as possible toward education, intervention, and counseling.

I recently approved a new child care action plan, and we will soon be breaking ground for the first of two new day care centers at University Park Campus. In the interim, improvements have been made to the CEDAR Day Care Center to accommodate a larger number of children.

We will contract soon with a developer for a Penn State retirement community. It will provide an attractive alternative for faculty and staff, members of the local community, alumni, and others. It also will support many of our academic programs through opportunities for research and student practicum experiences.

The Faculty/Staff Values and Practices Survey we conducted this past year was enlightening to me. On the one hand, I acknowledge with pride the substantial majority of our employees who care so deeply about this University and who enjoy virtually every aspect of their association with Penn State. Yet, I am deeply troubled that some of our faculty and staff have come to be alienated, are more excited by the prospect of the workday ending than by the workday beginning, and believe that the University does not care about them.

It is not sufficient for me as President to know that most of our employees are pleased to be associated with Penn State. My goals are for virtually all employees to feel about this University as I do. Many of the respondents indicated concerns related to departmental communications, supervision and cooperation, compensation and the reward system, and professional development. Unit survey results have been distributed to each administrative area. It is my observation that they are being carefully studied and taken to heart. I pledge that the University will give continued attention to issues of employee morale and we will be sure to follow up on the valuable input we received through this survey.

I was captivated recently by an initiative emanating from employees in the Shields Building, that sometimes infamous place that students describe as "the place where you go with problems." As an offshoot of their hard work at continuous quality improvement, the employees in the building decided they were going to try to change that concept; they now wear buttons that read "Shields--The Solution Place." I like it. Bravo to Vice Provost John Romano and all of his colleagues there.

Humanizing the University continues to be among my top priorities. I want to reemphasize that everyone at Penn State has a role to play in creating an open, sensitive, understanding, and responsive campus environment. To me, people come first. We put people first by opening the doors widely to all, by creating an environment in which everyone feels welcome, by eliminating intolerance and harassment, and by working toward the goal of civility and acceptance of everyone connected with Penn State.

A Concluding Thought

I wish to share one final thought. Universities are notoriously slow to change and respond. Yes, we tend to be territorial and protective of our own turf. Yet, I am proud to say that Penn State has become the Commonwealth's "Rapid Deployment Force," a concept I intend to promote. We need to anticipate and take on the challenges of Pennsylvania and beyond at every turn. This means an institution-wide commitment to our mission. It means that entrepreneurial activity and creative thinking must be rewarded. It means synergy created through cooperation and mutual support. It means that we here must believe in Penn State. It means that our benefactors must believe in Penn State. It means the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania must believe in Penn State.

This is the road we must travel in our journey of accomplishment for Penn State. I am pleased to do so with all of you.