Chancellor’s State of the System Address
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Chancellor Erroll B. Davis, Jr.
“State of the System”
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Chancellor Davis gave his State of the System Address to the Board, which was as follows:
Let me preface my remarks today with the hope that each of you had an enjoyable holiday season with friends and family.
Standing here today to deliver my third annual state of the University System address, I am conscious of the shadows cast by two other such speeches. Tomorrow, Governor Perdue will make his state of the state and budget address. And, of course, one week from today, President-elect Obama will make his inaugural address, setting out the state of the union.
While my remarks will not be as important as the other two, they do point out that from the University System of Georgia, to the State of Georgia, to these United States, our fates are intertwined. The State of Georgia cannot be strong unless the nation itself is strong. The University System cannot be strong unless Georgia is strong. The University System has benefited from the support of Governor Perdue and the legislature in good times and bad. We look forward to working with the Governor and legislative leaders in the months ahead to preserve the legacy of support for public higher education for the next generation of this state’s citizens.
Three-quarters of a century after its founding, the University System remains strong, healthy, and more vital than ever to the future of Georgia. However, the University System is being tested and challenged in ways that we must acknowledge, and about which we must be concerned. This morning, I want to talk briefly about our strengths and then about the tests and challenges that we face in the weeks and months ahead.
Our strength is clearly our people. This includes our leadership at the System level, our leadership at the institutional level, the faculty and staff at our institutions themselves, and our students.
Let me begin with this board. As I look around this table, I see a wide variety of background and experience. We have lawyers; beverage, auto industry, and manufacturing executives; bankers and financial experts; educators, printers, newspaper publishers, and communication specialists. Your presence, collectively, totals an impressive111 years of experience on the Board of Regents. Transparency, however, compels me to recognize that our two longest serving regents comprise 45 percent of that total.
I know that each of you is committed to preserving the quality inherent in this System …that each of you understands the critical importance of strategically guided decision-making that helps us operate more effectively as a unified System, rather than as a confederation of independent institutions. And finally, I recognize that each of you has personal ties to one or more University System institutions.
When we talk about the role of the University System in leadership development, we are not speaking in the abstract. Twenty years from now, some of the students currently attending classes at our colleges and universities most probably will be your successors on this board, perhaps sitting at this table, in this room. And others will be in leadership roles in business, education, health care, and government. Just as the decisions your predecessors on this board made generations ago helped to shape the future of many of you here today, so too will the decisions that this board makes shape Georgia’s future.
And this points to another key strength – our data-driven decision-making that is given focus by a sound Strategic Plan. There are those who question the wisdom of strategic planning in tough economic times. But such an important tool is even more critical to us during tight budgets, as we must make strategically sound decisions that maximize the use of reduced resources.
At the institutional level, we have an extraordinary group of presidents. Our current presidents have a combined total of almost 171 years of institutional leadership just in the University System. We continue to attract top talent from outside Georgia, such as Mark Becker to Georgia State, Patrick Schloss to Valdosta State, and John Schwenn to Dalton State. But we are increasingly able to call on deep bench strength, with the appointment of Tim Mescon at Columbus State, Mike Stoy at Middle Georgia, and interim presidents Virginia Carson at South Georgia, Valerie Hepburn at Coastal Georgia, and Gary Schuster at Georgia Tech.
All 35 presidents have been tested in this difficult fiscal year and all have risen superbly to the challenge. We do owe them our appreciation! To date, our presidents have managed budget reductions of $182 million. At the same time, they are serving 23,000 additional students over the past two years who are not yet reflected in the funding formula. In summary, they have been asked to reduce their budgets by eight percent while simultaneously increasing their enrollment by upwards of ten percent. In short, our internal efficiencies are supporting these thousands of additional students – they are not supported through the funding formula. We do not have administrators leading our campuses. We have leaders who are actively and vigorously leading.
As I continue to tour the system, visiting two to three campuses in depth each month, my understanding and appreciation for the faculty and staff continues to deepen. When we say that we have two institutions rated in the top twenty public colleges and universities in the nation, we mean that we have a faculty and staff at two institutions rated in the top twenty. When we say that we have other universities and programs recognized or highly rated by external authorities, it means that we have faculty and staff members whose work has been recognized or rated highly. The president of the United States did not award a medal to a college or university; rather, he awarded the medal of science to a Georgia Tech professor – Dr. Mostafa El-Sayed.
Most of us in this room do not teach students, create knowledge, or apply knowledge to solve local or state problems; faculty members do; staff members do. In conversations with hundreds of students over the past three years, I have heard complaints about advising, registration processes, tuition levels and, of course, parking. However, I have not yet heard one real complaint about the quality of instruction in this system. The core mission of our institutions — teaching, research, and public service — not only endures, but also thrives, thanks to our faculty and staff.
The presence of the three students introduced earlier, Cadet Porter, Ms. Taylor and Mr. Anderson, is fitting today. Our colleges and universities attract the best and the brightest students in Georgia. Each meeting you meet some of them. The best faculty members want to come to Georgia or stay here because of these students. I’m told that it now takes a 1400 SAT to get into the honors program at UGA. This makes me happy that I finished long ago!
North Georgia has the top-rated cadet in the nation – who you just met just moments ago. Atlanta Metropolitan College has the one student in the state of Georgia selected along with only 30 peers internationally from 200,000 students to receive the highest recognition of the Phi Theta Kappa honor society. And in the 2007-2008 academic year, UGA was the only public university in the country with winners of Rhodes, Truman, Goldwater and Udall scholarships. These are all students who could attend college anywhere in the nation. But they did not choose to go anywhere – they chose to go someplace special – the institutions of the University System of Georgia. These students remind us of our ultimate purpose here – educating and preparing Georgia’s next generation of leaders.
However, if we are to be honest, we have to note that our strengths are being tested and challenged today, perhaps as never before. I want to touch briefly on five of these challenges: the academic preparation of students, faculty salaries, institutional missions, access versus quality, and public support.
First, let me turn to students and their academic preparation. We have a record number of students in the System — 283,000 this past fall. This is good news. However, we still have too many students enrolling in our colleges and universities academically unprepared for work at the college level.
Overall in the System, the percentage of first-time freshmen with learning support requirements has gone from 30.5 percent in 1995 to a low of 20.9 percent in 2001 and has steadily increased every year since, to the current percentage rate of 25 percent. Staff will be researching this trend and will come back to the Academic Affairs committee with a fuller report.
While most of these students are, by board policy, served in our two-year and state colleges, this trend line is still headed in the wrong direction. What does this tell us? The learning support numbers signal the ongoing importance of our close alignment with the Department of Education and the K-12 schools, which, I should point out, is addressed in goal four of the Strategic Plan. Our P-16 Office has a critical role to play in coordinating our teacher education programs with the K-12 system. Our future, in many ways, depends upon the success of K-12 in preparing more students to a higher level and in graduating more students who are academically ready for postsecondary education This is a long-term process, and while all of us recognize that the current situation is very tough, hard times do not absolve us from our responsibility to continue to plan for the future.
Second, all studies indicate that the University System has slipped with respect to faculty salaries. Today, Georgia ranks 8th among the 16 Southern Regional Education Board states in average faculty salaries for four-year institutions, falling from 6th place in Fiscal Year 2007. The state ranks 10th in faculty salaries at two-year colleges. At the two-year level, this is the lowest we have ranked since the SREB began collecting comparative data on this sector back in FY1989. You now can make more as a high school teacher than at some of our access institutions!
While between FY2000 and FY2008, the average salary of Georgia’s public university faculty has increased 20.7 percent, compared to 30.8 percent across all SREB states, for our two-year college faculty, the gap is significant – a 5.2 percent increase over this same time period compared to an average 33 percent increase across all SREB states.
But when you analyze faculty salaries in constant 2000 dollars, the picture is even less rosy. Viewed this way, the average faculty salary in the University System’s four-year institutions has decreased 3.7 percent since 2000, compared to a 4.4 percent increase in the SREB. At Georgia’s two-year colleges, the decrease in constant 2000 dollars for faculty salaries since 2000 is even more marked, falling 16 percent, compared to a 6.1 percent increase in the other SREB states.
We simply cannot maintain our competitiveness and our core academic quality indefinitely unless we can address some of these salary challenges.
The third challenge is institutional mission. We are not a cookie-cutter system; all our institutions do not look alike. They are not homogenous. We have an institution with a military and leadership mission – North Georgia. We have an institution with a public liberal arts mission – Georgia College. We have an institution with an aviation mission – Middle Georgia College. We have institutions with agricultural missions – UGA, Fort Valley, and ABAC. We have institutions with technology missions – Georgia Tech and Southern Poly. We have institutions with residential missions, commuter missions, four-year missions, two-year missions, research missions, and medical missions. And, yes, we have institutions with an HBCU mission.
There have been suggestions that we consider merging some of our institutions. We are always open to considering suggestions made in good faith. We understand the need to be as efficient as possible in the current budget climate. With our shared services project, we are combining back-office functions and capturing those administrative efficiencies. I believe this is preferable to blurring the missions of distinct institutions. We will continue the dialogue with some of our legislative colleagues on this topic. Our focus will always remain on the student. Students do not choose to attend a generic college or university; rather, they choose a USG brand name, which offers the programs they need and the environment in which they can excel.
Fourth, unlike some other systems, we have not put forward an enrollment cap or an enrollment reduction as a means to respond to current budget pressures. We have not taken this step – to sacrifice access in order to preserve academic quality. We have kept our doors open and have told all the new students that they can still expect high-quality instruction. Our excellent presidents have made this work – so far. However, reason would indicate that a continuing trend of increasing enrollment and decreasing resources is not a formula for success over the long run. In fact, some of our presidents have already indicated that their institutions are at or near a tipping point. Without sufficient resources, academic quality at our institutions will degrade. We will not allow this to happen – we will recommend to you that we restrict access first before we degrade quality.
And finally, we are challenged by national voices questioning whether higher education is a public good, worthy of public support. On the one end is the belief that public higher education is, despite public support, totally a private gain for the individual. On the other end is the belief that public higher education serves a good that is greater than the individual benefits of a college degree. My personal belief is firmly in the public good camp. This is why I have consistently talked about the value the University System adds to the state. This is why I will continue to look for ways to demonstrate this added value at every opportunity. This is also why we will keep pushing for more need-based aid in this state.
Clearly, the current economic situation and the tremendous pressures being placed on state budgets are giving this discussion an added dimension. It would be very easy to allow the current budget situation to create a sense that the public good cannot be sustained – and that college should be more of a private gain. This, to my mind, is a classic – and potentially dangerous – example of sacrificing the important for the urgent. We must solve our budget crisis. But we must not sacrifice the important – the historic legacy in this state of public higher education as a clear public good that adds value to the lives of all residents across Georgia.
In summary, the System is strong, but the storm clouds are definitely gathering. The System is strong, but the challenges are very real. Our combined voices must be clear, forceful, and consistent: We are NOT a cost. We are NOT a cost to the people of Georgia. We are an investment in the future – an investment that benefits students …an investment that benefits Georgia …an investment that benefits this nation. We are an answer, not a question; a solution, not a problem. We are a part of state government where the decisions made today have the capacity to demonstrably improve the future that we, our children, and our children’s children, will all live.
This will be a difficult and challenging period for this system. I am convinced however, that if we make our case – if we stick to our plans – if we speak as one about the great value that we provide to society, then, we have the capacity to emerge more strongly, more focused, and more important than we are today. Based on the quality of this Board and on the quality of our leadership at the institutional level, I am convinced that we will prevail.
Mr. Chairman, thank you and the rest of the Board for your continued dedication, commitment, and leadership. I expect all to be tested in the coming months.