Installation Address - April 2, 2008
Chancellor, regents, distinguished delegates and guests, and members of the Austin Peay family, I am awed and grateful for the opportunity to stand before you at this moment in the life of a great university.
I appreciate deeply the greetings and remarks made today, the musical performances and Malcolm Glass’s poetry reading, as well as the extraordinary planning that went into this inaugural celebration, led by co-chairs Dr. Timothy Winters, Roy Gregory, and Carol Clark.
The day is made all the more memorable by the presence of my family and some of my close friends from across the years. And, of course, I couldn’t imagine being here at all without the support and partnership of my wife, Lee.
In the eight months since Lee and Amy and I arrived permanently in Clarksville and joined our lives to this community, we’ve had the opportunity to get to know many members of the Austin Peay family, and are delighted to share this culminating moment with you today, when our futures are formally connected to the future of this great institution. Thank you all for being here.
Since moving to Clarksville in August, I’ve had the opportunity to talk personally with many of our faculty and staff and alumni and to visit with our students at lectures and concerts and sports events and even the “Tacky Prom.”
It seemed important to me that a president’s first activities incline more heavily toward listening than to speaking, and so I spent a large part of the last eight months talking with you, taking stock of where we are and paying close attention to each vision of what we might be in the future. Your voices are a part of the architecture of this address.
I want to talk with you this morning about the future of Austin Peay, but with a keen appreciation for its past. For more than 200 years, Clarksville has nurtured the spirit of learning on or near the site where we gather together today. As early as 1806, while Thomas Jefferson was still president of the United States, a rural academy rose up at the corner of Henry Street and present day College Street, followed by a string of academies and Masonic colleges, and later by Stewart College and Southwestern Presbyterian University.
The dizzying succession of educational institutions came to an end with the establishment of Austin Peay Normal School in 1927.
I don’t mean to tire you with a recitation of history, but merely to remind you how regularly the men and women committed to seeing higher education flourish in this place have summoned themselves to a new beginning. Confronted with the challenges of their times, our predecessors prevailed over a variety of circumstances to move forward. They are like the grandfathers in Stephen Crane’s poem. I’ve always enjoyed his poem about a little man who stood up against mountains:
Once I saw mountains angry,
And ranged in battle-front.
Against them stood a little man;
Aye, he was no bigger than my finger.
I laughed, and spoke to one near me,
“Will he prevail?”
“Surely,” replied this other;
“His grandfathers beat them many times.”
Then did I see much virtue in grandfathers --
At least, for the little man
Who stood against the mountains.
Austin Peay stands in the shadow of grandfathers –and grandmothers–who faced the mountains of their day: men and women such as Governor Austin Peay and Commissioner of Education Perry Harned, who fought to establish a state institution of higher learning in Clarksville; Mary Kathryn Tanner, the school’s first professor of Latin, Spanish and French; President Halbert Harvill, who presided over a 500 percent increase in Austin Peay’s enrollment during his 16-year tenure; the Rev. Wilbur N. Daniel, who in January 1956 became the first African American to enroll at Austin Peay, and who helped the university become a place where students and faculty and staff—from every race and culture—are welcomed and made full partners in our academic community; and President Joe Morgan, who guided the institution in its transition from college to university. I could expand the list of names to fill the morning, but only suggest a few to remind us, in Stephen Crane’s words, about the “virtue in grandfathers.” They help us understand that a great community does not move forward by chance, but as its members successfully confront the challenges of their day.
I want to suggest to you this morning three challenges we face as Austin Peay State University enters the future: the challenge of defining our academic identity; the challenge of defining the kind of excellence we will pursue; and the challenge of defining our distinctive place within Tennessee’s system of public universities.
In terms of our past and present academic identity, Austin Peay is a university that has combined a solid foundation in the liberal arts with strong professional programs. The liberal arts are literally “liberating arts,” those subjects such as literature, mathematics and science whose study is designed to liberate the mind from slavish devotion to the unexamined life, the life Socrates said “was not worth living.”
Now more than ever, our students need the capacity to discover the truth for themselves, rather than be captive to the voices of the moment, whether spoken by Fox or CNN, Matt Drudge or Ariana Huffington.
The need for our students to find jobs–a need we take quite seriously–does nothing to diminish the necessity for giving them a strong background in the liberal arts. This is so partially because life is more than having and holding a job, and a university education ought to prepare our students for life, not just for jobs. W. E. B. DuBois famously observed that “the true college will ever have one goal,–not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life which meat nourishes.” But the liberal arts are also intensely practical. In an age where facts and information have an increasingly short shelf-life, a general education focused on critical thinking and learning how to discover new information is the most practical education of all. We are preparing our students not simply for their first jobs, but for their second and third, in a world whose changes we can scarcely imagine. I propose that our future will grow out of this past and present mingling of liberal arts and professional programs.
To strengthen the education our students receive in the liberal arts, I first will encourage us to transform our honors program into an honors college, where we can challenge our most academically gifted students to reach their potential. Second, we must strengthen international education opportunities available to our students through increased study-abroad options and increased focus on global topics here at home, to better fit them for a world whose borders and boundaries are increasingly permeable.
Third, I will challenge us to continue the work of re-imagining the gatekeeper courses through which most of our students flow and where many of them flounder. Nationwide, our peer institutions are engaged in a similar re-imagination, and we have every reason to seek to play a leading role in this academic evolution.
To strengthen the opportunities for professional education, I will encourage us to see our business program accredited and to move forward with plans now underway to offer our first doctoral program, an Ed.D., designed for practicing education professionals. And I expect the coming years to see us develop other professional programs, as we seek to respond to the economic needs of this region and this state.
A second challenge we face is that of understanding the kind of excellence to which we ought to aspire. I know first hand how hard our faculty and staff are working to serve our students. Across virtually every category of employees, we serve more students per faculty, staff or administrator than any other institution in the TBR system. And this service is not just a matter of taking care of the day-to-day business of educating our students, but of stretching to improve the things we do. In my eight months here, I’ve seen how regularly our faculty and staff go above and beyond. I think about the Halloween percussion concert and the lengths to which Dr. David Steinquest and his students went to provide not just a musical performance, but a sold-out extravaganza. I remember a chemistry club meeting I attended, where Dr. Carrie Brennan, instead of being at home, spent an evening looking on while students discussed the chemical properties of solar panels. I saw the attention Tammy Bryant in Student Life focused on planning our reinvigorated Unity Dinner this spring, when the poet Nikki Giovanni gave a lecture our students will never forget. “Above and beyond” is our normal state of affairs.
I’ll just mention briefly three principles that ought to guide our continued efforts to improve. The excellence to which we aspire should be organic, it should be connected, and it should be conspicuous.
First, I think the most important of our efforts to improve the education we offer students will be organic–that is, those efforts will not be the result of the creativity and energy of any president, least of all me, but will be the expression of the creativity and energy of our faculty and staff and students. I expect to be engaged actively in focusing our attention on particular priorities over the coming years—our present focus on student success is an example of this kind of engagement. But I believe firmly that the best things to happen here over the next decade will be things born in the imagination and nurtured by the dedicated toil of our faculty and staff and students. The job of a president is not to author excellence, but to encourage and support and call attention to the members of this community who refuse to settle for the ordinary and the routine, but who find new ways to make this an extraordinary place and the education we provide to our students an extraordinary experience. This is a job I enthusiastically undertake.
Second, I will regularly encourage our striving after excellence to be connected. We are part of a larger academic community and our peers in other colleges and universities struggle, as we do, to improve what they do for their students. I will challenge us to be part of larger conversations in this state and in our nation about how to better serve our students. I hope that the things we do at Austin Peay will become exemplars for other universities seeking to chart their own course forward. Austin Peay’s excellence should also be connected to this region and this state—not simply evolving in isolation from the needs around us, but full partners in the economic life of this region.
And third, I plan to devote myself to seeing that the excellence of Austin Peay’s students, faculty, and staff is conspicuous. It’s time for Austin Peay to move beyond being a well-kept academic secret. By my professional background, I know what it means to be an advocate for a cause, and I promise to be a vigorous advocate in the cause of making the great things happening at Austin Peay more widely known in this state and this region.
The third challenge we face is that of defining what makes Austin Peay distinctive among Tennessee’s universities. I believe this distinction will not turn precisely on the subjects we teach but on how we teach them. Our past and present are a superb foundation on which to build our future. One of the questions I’ve asked of our students and faculty and alumni was, “Tell me what makes Austin Peay a special place.” I have been overwhelmed with an essentially unanimous response, and it is this: What makes Austin Peay special is the close relationship existing between students and their faculty, the opportunities for individual contact and individual mentoring. And this emphasis on personal connections with our students extends to our staff as well—such as a cashier who talked with me about trying to help a student who needed more than a financial transaction, or my secretary Joanne Shepard, who hears there is a long line in Browning stretching from the cashiers’ windows and thinks “cookies.”
This central feature of what we are is more important than any particular program we offer. In fact, some of our stronger programs–physics or nursing, for example–draw their strength partially from the close interactions between the faculty and the students.
In his book, Killing the Spirit, historian Page Smith argued that “there is no decent, adequate, respectable education, in the proper sense of that much-abused word, without personal involvement by a teacher with the needs and concerns, academic and personal, of his/her students. All the rest is ‘instruction’ or ‘information transferal,’ ‘communication technique,’ or some other impersonal and antiseptic phrase, but it is not teaching and the student is not truly learning.” I agree with Professor Smith because I have benefitted from the kind of teaching he describes–an 11th grade English teacher who worked with me individually and introduced me to the study of poetry, another who loaned me her copy of Paradise Lost to read, a college professor who volunteered to supervise a honors thesis I wrote on science and religion.
Twenty years ago the author John Naisbit suggested that the contemporary world was growing at the same time more high tech and more high touch—high touch in that people are increasingly hungry for personal interaction. I propose that we understand Austin Peay’s future as an extension of its present and its past: a university offering its students a high touch education.
We practice the reality John Henry Newman described more than a century ago when he defined a university as “as an alma mater, knowing her children one by one, not a foundry or a mint or a treadmill.”
We should think of a high-touch university experience as having two sides: the personal attention we devote to our students, on the one hand, and the personal attention and engagement we encourage them to devote to their own education, on the other. The first side of high-touch education is already well-anchored in Austin Peay’s tradition and needs only to be systematically expanded. The second side of high-touch education—the promotion of student engagement—has its exemplars among us, but needs to be multiplied across our courses and programs. Both kinds of high-touch experience—student engagement with faculty and with their subjects—will assist us in meeting the core challenge we already are tackling—helping more of our students continue at Austin Peay from year to year and graduate within a reasonable period.
Already, a dedicated committee of faculty led by Dr. Jaime Taylor has taken the lead in encouraging faculty to think about how we might prioritize and devote resources to encouraging more engagement between our students and our faculty and between students and their subjects. Over the next few years, I expect to increase the number of high-touch experiences for our students. For example, we will seek the support of departments and programs in developing learning communities–groups of students allied in their interest in particular subjects who can develop residential or other out-of-class connections. In addition, we will look for more ways to encourage undergraduate research. The close relationship between students and faculty envisioned by such research is an example of the kind of high-touch relationship anchored firmly to Austin Peay’s past and to which its future must be bound. I received just last week a marvelous letter from three of our psychology undergraduates filled with a passionate description of the research projects in which they are engaged. Theirs is the kind of passion that multiplies student success.
I also will seek to inaugurate a faculty-student dining program, which will encourage more of the informal mentoring already embedded in Austin Peay’s tradition.
These kinds of high-touch interactions between faculty and students can’t simply be added to work loads already at capacity. We will move forward by re-arranging and re-imaging our work to create time for more personal interactions with students and time to foster more engagement between our students and their subjects. Part of this will occur on the administrative side: I will lead us to become much more suspicious of creating administrative work for our faculty and staff that steals time from more important high-touch interactions with students. But part also will occur on the academic side as we seek to infuse our courses with more opportunities for student engagement with faculty and with the subject matter of their courses. It was to this end that I encouraged our provost’s office this year to inaugurate a series of faculty colloquia in which we might talk about ways of promoting student engagement. And it will be with the same end in mind that I encourage us to establish a center for teaching excellence at Austin Peay to encourage and support the work of faculty in promoting engaged learning among our students.
I know I’ve spent a good deal of time talking about the role of our faculty in promoting high-touch educational opportunities for students, but our staff is and will continue to be crucial partners in the work of creating a high-touch educational environment. One of our admissions counselors, Makeba Webb, talks to high school students about what they can expect from a university, and routinely encourages them to walk into the main administrative building and look lost. If no one helps you, she says to them, that’s what you can expect for your whole four years at that particular university. I believe we are not that kind of institution, but must continually resist the drift towards treating students as objects or numbers rather than as persons, whom we serve one by one. Our staff plays an indispensable role in cultivating and sustaining this kind of institutional culture.
Those are some of the challenges we face— challenges of defining our academic identity, the kind of excellence we will pursue and our distinctive place among Tennessee’s public universities.
Early last fall I spoke with the faculty and staff and confessed to having made an exploratory venture on the first evening after Lee and Amy and I moved into the president’s house. I set out to climb to the top of the bell tower in Browning. I encountered a room filled with darkness and couldn’t locate a light. Fear of having to call our physical plant and confess that I had fallen through a ceiling in the administration building eventually turned us back that first night. But I subsequently made the attempt again on a November day filled with sunshine. Although I nearly ruined a good suit in the process, I climbed with Bill Persinger, our director of graphic design, up into the bell tower and then scrambled out a panel onto the ledge that runs around the tower, taking in a fine view of the campus, from 8th Street to Castle Heights, and from College Street to the football stadium.
I invite you to climb the bell tower with me in your mind and imagine what Austin Peay will look like a decade from now.
It will be larger, I think, partially because we stand in the path of demographic changes that will bring more people to the Clarksville area. But Austin Peay also will be larger because we will be more successful in retaining more students from year to year and helping them to succeed. By conscious choice, though, Austin Peay will have maintained a high-touch atmosphere, where students are known “one by one.” Though still an institution dedicated primarily to undergraduate education, new graduate programs responsive to the needs of this region will have been added, and research opportunities for faculty and for students will have been strengthened.
It will be an increasingly diverse institution, in terms of the racial, cultural, and geographic backgrounds of students, faculty and staff, as we take pains to educate our students for the world of the 21st century. And because we have refused to settle for the commonplace, our educational peers in Tennessee will regularly ask one another, “Have you seen what Austin Peay is doing in this area?”
How will we make our way to this future? I will conclude by repeating an anecdote I’ve relayed to some of our local community groups over the past eight months. Ninette De Valois was the founder and early director of the Royal Ballet in England. At one point in the early 20th century, the ballet had returned to England from a triumphant international tour and performed at Covent Garden. Following the performance, the audience clamored for De Valois to come out on stage and be recognized. She came to the front of the stage and said simply to the enthusiastic crowd, “It takes more than one to make a ballet,” and then left the stage.
This is the thought we should take with us into the future: “It takes more than one to make a great university.” It takes faculty and staff and students and administrators—none capable of accomplishing the work alone, all worthy of mutual respect. This is the kind of community I am grateful to join officially today.
Thank you all.