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2006 State of the University Address

University of Minnesota
Robert H. Bruininks, President
March 2, 2006

Good afternoon. It’s a pleasure to present the State of the University to you today.

The University of Minnesota is a statewide resource that cuts across geographic areas and regional economies, and does a remarkable job of changing to meet the evolving needs of Minnesota. In this, our 155th year, “The question before us,” as William Rainey Harper once said, “is how to become one in spirit, though not necessarily in opinions.”

The University of Minnesota, Morris, is generously hosting this year’s State of the University address. Morris is one of the finest public liberal arts colleges in the country, and it owes a great deal to the leadership of Chancellor Sam Schuman, who has led this institution since the year 1998. We’ve been fortunate to benefit from “Chancellor Sam’s” visionary leadership, which has improved the school’s academic foundation and the student experience so significantly. As he moves on to pursue other interests, I want to thank him and his wife Nancy for their many contributions to the Morris community. Please join me in applauding them for their very important work.

I’d also like to welcome some special guests: Regents Dallas Bohnsack and Steven Hunter; Senior Vice President Robert Jones; Vice President Linda Thrane; Carol Wilcox, mayor of Morris; and, last but not least, Susan Hagstrum, First Lady of the University of Minnesota. We are looking forward to attending the inauguration of Charles Casey as chancellor of the University of Minnesota, Crookston, tomorrow afternoon.

I’d also like to welcome those joining on our Duluth, Crookston, Rochester, and Twin Cities campuses, including Regent David Metzen and Regent Patricia Simmons, and members of the University Senate chaired by Professor Judith Martin.

The State of the University is strong, and we are making great strides in the quality of our programs and the impact of our public mission.

The academic profile of incoming freshmen systemwide has improved once again, with average ACT composite scores and high school ranks the highest ever.

The University of Minnesota continues to attract and enroll a freshman class that is increasingly diverse.

At nearly 32,000 applications systemwide, we have already surpassed last year’s total by more than 3,000 applications.

Freshman to sophomore retention and four-, five-, and six-year graduation rates continue to improve across our campuses.

Our scholars successfully competed for and secured $561 million in sponsored research this past year, 98 percent of all such funds awarded to researchers in Minnesota’s colleges and universities. We are fifth in royalties nationally, and New Scientist magazine named us fourth among all U.S. universities for success in commercializing intellectual property.

93,000 donors—a record number—made gifts and pledges to the University last year, including an unprecedented 51,000 alumni.

And we gained ground in renewing our partnership with the state. We were able to limit annual tuition increases to single digits this year and next, and fund more than $70 million in new strategic academic priorities over the same period. Through the 2005 bonding bill, we are modernizing classrooms and laboratories and preserving our capital assets. I want to extend my special thanks to the legislature, its leaders, the governor and the thousands of members of our Legislative Network who supported the University in the 2005 legislative session.

Legislative Request

We’ll need to continue to strengthen our partnership with the state this year. Our 2006 capital request puts students first, by making a fundamental investment in their educational experiences. It creates opportunities for groundbreaking research that will benefit the state and its communities and support the University’s land-grant mission.

The request would allow expansion of our business schools in the Twin Cities and Duluth, modernization of science classrooms and biomedical sciences research space, and improvement of three of the University’s statewide research centers and field stations, including the center here at Morris.

This session, we’re also putting forward a novel proposal for long-term funding of high-cost, but essential, biomedical science research facilities. Does that mean we’re decreasing our commitment to other vital areas of academic research? Absolutely not. But the biomedical sciences comprise more than $300 million annually—more than one-half of the University’s distinctive research portfolio. The University contributes to the creation of new knowledge and more effective treatments for medical disease and to the training and research foundation of Minnesota’s health care industry.

Minnesota is a world leader in the biomedical sciences. But as Will Rogers once said: “Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.” Twenty other states, including California, New Jersey, and Wisconsin, are making enormous research investments—“reaching,” to use Senior Vice President Frank Cerra’s words, “for the brass ring of biomedical science.” In order to be competitive, the University must add approximately five state-of-the-art buildings and the researchers to fill them over the next 10 years. We are bringing to the Board of Regents—and asking the legislature to consider—a proposal to create a new bonding authority dedicated to financing academic biomedical research facilities. These very expensive facilities are essential to the University’s aspirations and Minnesota’s future prosperity.

Many of you are familiar with the quality of Morris’s education and its regional outreach center. It also has another distinction—it is building the only university sports stadium approved by the legislature in years!

This is the third year we’re bringing forward our plan to build a 50,000-seat football stadium on the Twin Cities campus, a facility designed to be a focal point for University life and state pride. Stadium advocates: It is time to act now. Approval this session will avoid increased costs of $30 Million and loss of more than $50 million in private contributions. The Metrodome is simply not a financially viable long-term option for the Minnesota Gophers. We’ve assembled a plan in which the University funds 60 percent of the $248 million cost with non state funds—mostly private contributions—with state funds providing the remaining 40%. The plan has strong bipartisan support at the Capitol, including from the governor, senate majority leader, and speaker of the house.

In this venue and many others, I have proudly made the case for the University’s unique role in Minnesota’s system of higher education, and the essential part a research university plays in any region’s success. We must continue to share the U’s story and its importance to Minnesota’s elected officials.

Strategic Positioning

In last year’s State of the University address, I highlighted the case for transforming the University of Minnesota, for fundamentally repositioning the University’s academic and service commitments for the 21st century. I outlined a values-driven process to guide us toward achieving the bold, aspirational goal our community adopted—namely, to become one of the top three public research universities in the world within a decade, with an equivalent standard of excellence applied statewide to our coordinate campuses, research centers, and extension offices, each according to its signature role and mission.

From establishing values and aspirations, we moved quickly to wide-reaching recommendations for change and consideration of our long-term academic priorities. These recommendations were overwhelmingly affirmed by the Board of Regents and the University Senate.

Today, the transformation of the University is very much a work in progress. More than 500 community members have been working since September on nearly 40 task forces and in hundreds of meetings. They’ve gathered input from the University of Minnesota and its extended communities and created ideas to shape the University’s future. Eleven of our task forces have submitted their reports, including those integrating the proud cultures of six existing Twin Cities colleges into three new colleges. I want to thank the members of these task forces, the college leaders, and the University community for their diligent and creative work.

University leaders are now reviewing task force recommendations to translate them into the priorities, long-term directions, and daily work of the University of Minnesota. We’ll begin to report our recommendations to the University community and Board of Regents this month, including names for two of our new colleges: The College of Design and the College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences. We expect that the name of the College of Education and Human Development on the Twin Cities Campus will remain the same.

Teaching and Learning—Undergraduate and Graduate

A central pillar of Strategic Positioning is our commitment to the education and support of a diverse undergraduate, graduate, and professional student population: We will maintain our current high levels of enrollment and increase diversity. We must also continue to improve access to the University of Minnesota, the educational experiences available to our students, and, most importantly from my perspective, student outcomes.

For undergraduate students, we will leverage our unique role as Minnesota’s research university by strengthening students’ connections with faculty on the cutting edge of their fields. We will substantially increase support for programs like our Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program and service learning in the community.

We will leverage the University’s distinction as a provider of high quality graduate and professional programs, by strengthening existing priority admission and what we call fast-track programs for our most accomplished students, such as Pre-Med Scholars and VetFast, and we will look closely at extending this option to other professional and graduate programs.

We will build on successful improvements we’ve made to the student experience. Our undergraduate-related task forces have formulated promising recommendations to enhance student learning, strengthen writing experiences for all baccalaureate students, create a Twin Citieswide honors program, and develop more consistent academic and career advising and faculty-student mentoring.

To ensure that the access we provide our students is access to success, we will continue to strengthen programs that support transitioning students, such as freshman seminars and first-year experiential programs. We will expand bridge programs for the summer between high school and college. And we will establish a new office on the Twin Cities campus to offer comparable support to transfer students.

We must further improve student graduation rates. There has been significant progress, but Provost Tom Sullivan and Senior Vice President Robert Jones will soon announce new systemwide expectations for strengthened advisement and career services for students and new systemwide goals for graduation rates.

For graduate and professional students who comprise 40 percent of the student population on the Twin Cities campus and 31 percent system-wide, we raised the minimum stipend for research and teaching assistants this past year by 10 percent.

We are investing more than $8 million over the current biennium in new fellowship funds and other forms of graduate support.

Graduate School dean Gail Dubrow is setting ambitious goals to increase diversity, foster interdisciplinary study, and introduce innovation into doctoral education. She is helping to develop a plan to ensure that, in the future, every admitted graduate student is provided financial support.

Affordability: We continue to work aggressively to ensure the University of Minnesota is affordable to students from low- and moderate-income homes. For Minnesota residents who are eligible for Pell grants, we have expanded the Founders Opportunity Award to include not only all new full-time freshmen, but also all new full-time transfer students. Ultimately, this award, which guarantees grant or scholarship aid equal to or exceeding the cost of tuition and required fees, is likely to benefit more than 4,500 students across our campuses each year.

Scholarships and graduate-professional fellowships remain the University’s top private fund-raising priority. After two years of fund-raising through the Promise of Tomorrow Scholarship Drive, we have raised more than $110 million toward our initial $150 million goal. A thousand more undergraduate and graduate students are already benefiting from this program each year.

Research and Discovery

Above all, it is our research enterprise that makes our educational programs different from every other college and university in Minnesota, and that makes our success so important to our state and our region.

A partial restoration of state support last year has allowed us to commit nearly $20 million to make important research-related investments. Areas of academic investment include the arts, humanities, and social sciences through a new Institute for Advanced Study; health sciences and innovative biomedical technology; the neurosciences; environment and energy—including a possible new center for biofuels; nanotechnology; and food science and human health.

Significant infrastructure investments included funding for our libraries and capital equipment for research. And to maintain our strongest academic units, the administration allocated $6 million this year for competitive market compensation for faculty and other employees who perform research and teach, and another $6 million will be invested next year, over and above regular compensation increases.

Community partnerships are another area of significant research-related investment. Under Vice President Tim Mulcahy’s leadership, the University is working to aggressively develop and license its technology; to make our research enterprise more transparent, accessible and welcoming; and to ensure that our research strengths—where appropriate—are connected and aligned with Minnesota’s needs and assets, not just in the Twin Cities but throughout Minnesota. With the state’s help, we’re developing exciting collaborations such as the Minnesota Partnership for Biotechnology and Medical Genomics, a historic agreement with the Mayo Clinic that this week awarded $15 million to nine Mayo-University research teams.

Public engagement

As a public research university, it is essential that our education and research improve the quality of life of the people and communities of Minnesota and beyond. Here are just a few examples of how we’re doing that.

In Rochester, we are working with the community to meet growing needs in higher education, with plans to accommodate more students and increase research and technology transfer. One of the proposals is an expanded Center for Allied Health Programs, which would address critical workforce shortages throughout the state in medical technology, occupational therapy, and other areas. The University wants to play a leading role in meeting these expectations, provided that funding from the state, local community resources, and other sources enables us to do so.

At Morris, researchers at the West Central Regional Outreach Center use the country’s only large-scale wind-to-hydrogen research turbine to study how to store wind energy for times when the wind isn’t blowing (and I’m not speaking). And they’re sharing what they’re learning through conferences, curricula with the K-12 system, and other innovative partnerships.

Researchers at our Natural Resources Research Institute in Duluth are providing assistance to people affected by the greatest natural and engineering disaster in U.S. history, Hurricane Katrina. The institute’s Brian Brashaw was recently able to share knowledge with officials in New Orleans on evaluating wood for water damage without actually destroying the wood.

University of Minnesota, Crookston, has one of the strongest service-learning components of any campus in the nation, and more than half of the faculty there have incorporated serious and substantial service learning into their courses.

Our new Consortium for Postsecondary Success is a statewide initiative that will address an array of preK-12 issues. Its initial focus is the achievement gap that exists for economically disadvantaged students and students of color. The consortium will help define the University’s role throughout Minnesota in improving preK-12 education for all students and preparing many more Minnesota students for success in higher education. The University has an extensive history of engagement with our schools. But, as our task force found, we have an opportunity—and I believe an obligation—to move from essential, but often fragmented, initiatives to a better-coordinated University-wide engagement.

Diversity; International; Management and Stewardship; Interdisciplinary

Cutting across our mission of teaching, research, and outreach are four issues I’d like to briefly discuss with you today: diversity, international aspects of the U, better service and stewardship of our resources, and opportunities to work across the disciplines.

Diversity. The systemwide task force on diversity found that we cannot achieve our strategic positioning goal unless we sustain a genuinely diverse community. With that reality in mind, we are conducting a nationwide search for a new vice president to create and shape effective initiatives and programs in access, educational equity, and diversity. We continue our efforts to recruit a diverse student population, including a new commitment of half a million dollars annually to recruit students of color. And, based on historical trends, we anticipate that 30 percent of the recipients of our newly expanded Founders Opportunity Award will be students of color.

International. The Twin Cities deans have noted that “the future diversity of the state is likely to be international, linking diversity and international efforts in important ways” and that “future leadership to advance diversity and international education needs to be firmly connected with the academic affairs agenda.” We do a good job of connecting our students and the people of our state with the world, but we also have real potential to become a leading global university. Retiring associate vice president Gene Allen has led our efforts to expand study abroad opportunities, increase undergraduate participation in them, broaden international emphasis in our curriculum, and facilitate international students on campus. We are seeking a worthy successor in a systemwide director of international programs, who will help us build on the University’s strategic international ties and connections.

Management and service. All of our efforts to improve our academic programs will be severely undercut unless we pay close attention to our service culture, our use of resources, our financial position, and our accountability. This work is critical to our efforts, as a University, “to become one in spirit,” and it remains a focus of the strategic positioning process. As the Task Force on Administration and Productivity led by Vice President Kathleen O’Brien reported, our administrative operations must be the best among our peers—focused on service to faculty, staff, students, University units, and the general public, and driven by performance objectives and defined results.

Interdisciplinary. Throughout our strategic positioning process, the importance of interdisciplinary work has emerged as an important theme. The big questions that confront society in the 21st century require interdisciplinary teams of researchers who are strong in their disciplines but able to cross boundaries.

I have asked our senior academic officers to develop a systemwide strategy to assess, develop, and nurture interdisciplinary programs and to remove barriers to interdisciplinary research and education. They will help establish the University of Minnesota as a national leader in the conversation on interdisciplinarity and its best practices—most likely culminating in a national conference hosted by the University in 2007.

One exciting area of interdisciplinary work where the University is poised for leadership is the environment, an area where we have many strengths but where fragmentation keeps us from reaching our full potential. Provost Sullivan is beginning the early planning for a systemwide Institute on the Environment to better coordinate efforts throughout the University system. The Institute would allow us to become more than the sum of our parts in this critical area. It would improve recruitment and retention of talent at the U and the presentation of coherent priorities to funding agencies, enabling us to better respond to research opportunities—and donors.

I said last year that “the pursuit of excellence at the University is in the best interest and service of the state.” We’ve shown we’re willing to look hard at our current profile and direction. We’ve set a bold, aspirational goal for the University of Minnesota that is already yielding results. We’re working toward real benefits for students, toward a culture dedicated to our land-grant mission that supports the highest levels of excellence in academic achievement and in service and productivity.

Benjamin Disraeli once stated, “The secret of success is constancy to purpose.” It is time to begin to move this process from one centered around dozens of task forces with hundreds of members to one that pervades the entire culture of the University of Minnesota.

We are in a competitive global environment. Just as we are doing on an institutional level, our programs and departments and our colleges and our campuses must set higher aspirations and expectations and find ways to free up administrative resources for academic investment and programs. Each of us must rededicate ourselves to making the University one of the world’s top public research university systems. We must each work to increase public recognition and support of the University by communicating to our neighbors and elected officials the new excitement at the U and the long-term importance of a leading research university to our region’s future.

This is our opportunity to be a part of greatness. It is up to us to ensure a strong future for the State of Minnesota, while remaining connected to the noble values of our 155-year heritage.

Thank you. I’m glad to take your questions.

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