Below is part of the text of my remarks to the faculty from last Friday's meeting:
Today I want to share with you the latest news on budgets and relay what I know about strategic planning, enrollment planning, and plans for conversion to a new budget model. But before we do any of that, I want to talk to you, the faculty and staff of the College, about you and the work that you do here each day. I am continually amazed at how hopeful, how creative, how energetic, and how committed you are to the task that we face. Educating students and advancing the current state of knowledge in today's world is a challenge during the best of economic times. But to continue unabated, in the face of sharply declining resources and a very real sense of uncertainty about what the future holds is remarkable. I can never fully express to each one of you how grateful your university is for your service. And I personally thank you, each of you, for your hard work and dedication.
That having been said, we cannot put on a happy face and pretend that everything is okay. It is not okay; the changes that we face in the next few years will challenge the very core of our beliefs about higher education and about our responsibility to our students, our community, and our state. With budget cuts in the $20 million range looming--as well as recissions that we have already given back and more expected--we know that business as usual will not be possible any longer.......
......The university strategic plan exists now in a draft form. Now colleges and other mid-level units have been asked to flesh out our contributions to the plan. I've called a special "Breakfast with the Deans" session for Wednesday, October 28th and invite anyone interested in helping us develop our strategic plan to attend. From those initial discussions, we will create working groups to address specific parts of the plan and recommend college-level initiatives.
Related to this is the ongoing work of the Strategic Enrollment planning council, on which I serve. We have made significant progress already; enrollment has increased slightly more than we planned, and new details on the plans for growing graduate enrollment are nearly complete. Overall retention is up and we anticipate very small, but steady improvements to continue in that regard. Departments have already been engaged in these processes. To date, many of you have held new "retention fairs" or "pre-advisement" events for students, have participated in recruiting events or have helped phone recruits who were considering USM but not yet committed to us. Your efforts are working and are much appreciated.
We are working through details of clearer advising and scheduling systems that should make the work of advising both simpler for you AND more effective for students. We know that the best advising extends FAR beyond "scheduling classes" and really builds a relationship between faculty or staff advisor and the student. I encourage you to think of advising as an extension of your teaching--because it is! One final word on recruiting and retaining students: I hope that all of us now realize that these jobs belong to each person at USM. We should never say that "only admissions gives tours for prospective students" or that "first year experience is in charge of student engagement activities." We are the experts in our fields; we are best suited to engage both future and current students. They WANT to be directly involved with us, and they are much more likely to decide to come here, or to stay here, if they feel we care about them.....