Good afternoon and welcome. It is my pleasure to stand before you today to deliver my second plenary address as Chancellor of UWM.

• The potential of our University in terms of its academic strengths, research portfolio and current and future contributions to economic development in Southeastern Wisconsin.
• The need for UWM to serve as a model for the diversity and academic excellence for the UW System, the State of Wisconsin and, indeed, the nation.

We have made excellent progress in these areas, both of which I will be discussing in detail this afternoon. But first, let me say thank you to this campus, because without your support, I would not be able to be reporting back to you about our progress.

During the first semester, I have been able to take advantage of more than 75 invitations to meet with faculty, staff and students.

You have welcomed me to your departments, centers, schools and colleges.

You have honestly shared your opinions about our past, present and future, and I am grateful for your hospitality and your guiding influence.

As I discuss what has transpired during the last semester, I hope many of you will see the influence of what you shared with me.

Over the past months:

We have launched the Biomedical Technology Alliance.

This alliance — which includes the Medical College of Wisconsin, Marquette University, UW-Parkside, the Milwaukee School of Engineering and UWM — has been endorsed by the leadership of the city and the business community.

The purpose of the BTA is to expand biomedical research in Southeastern Wisconsin and promote economic development, much in keeping with the Governor’s Grow Wisconsin initiative. I expect to report more on developments in this area in the upcoming months.

We have commenced a campus-wide Strategic Research Development Program with $1 million in seed funding from the UW System.

Proposals have been solicited from the schools and colleges, and I will continue to work with the Academic Planning and Budget Committee as the program is implemented. A selection committee consisting of distinguished professors and governance leadership will be involved in evaluating proposals for funding.

The purpose of the program is to develop world-class research teams that build programs across UWM’s schools and colleges, regional academic institutions and industrial partners. We expect that the program will be ongoing for the next four to five years. While funding priorities will be made, we anticipate a relatively small number of high quality proposals for which we will seek continuous external funding.

We have reinvigorated the Shaw Scientist Award program by bringing together former Shaw Scientists at UWM with new potential applicants to the program.

This program, which is supported by the James D. Shaw and Dorothy Shaw Fund within the Greater Milwaukee Foundation, is used to advance research in the fields of biochemistry, biological science and cancer research at UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee.

Although it has been in existence for more than 20 years, the Shaw Scientist Award program funding was reduced by the Foundation during this current round because investment income was less than expected. To insure continuity, UWM will support this program, for our faculty only, and designate it the Chancellor’s Scientist Program. We expect to fully participate in the Shaw Scientist Award program in its next competition round.

We have promoted discussions to make the Milwaukee Commitment to Plan 2008 an achievable and realistic plan in support of diversity across our campus.

Three open meetings are being held this month to provide input for a report to be submitted to the Board of Regents for its February meeting.

In support of the goals of this initiative we have already begun

(1) enhancing recruitment activities in the Greater Milwaukee schools and communities;

(2) establishing satellite recruitment offices at multiple locations in the community;

(3) strengthening outreach to parents and families;

(4) creating on-campus housing opportunities for MPS students;

And (5) launching a Future Leaders Program to increase the number of pre-college participants who will ultimately enroll at UWM; and increasing scholarship opportunities for students of color.

With respect to the latter it is important to note that our fund-raising efforts have raised $6.3 million in support of student scholarships, an all-time high. I appreciate the work of our scholarship campaign co-chairs, Mary Kellner and Art Smith, and the UWM Foundation in these efforts.

And the final item from the first semester that I would like to share with you is we have moved forward a review of our enrollment plans and academic support infrastructure to improve retention, graduation, and student selectivity.

In the next few months, I will receive recommendations that will lead to structural changes that will enhance academic support services across our campus.

I would also like to share with you that I have heard your concerns about physical space planning for this campus. It is time to take a comprehensive look at where our future space and facility growth will occur. There is no doubt that our current physical space is unable to sustain the kind of growth in research and scholarship that is required in the coming years. I envision that we will become even more of a multi-campus institution than we currently are.

With this in mind, I have asked School of Architecture and Urban Planning Dean Bob Greenstreet to take the lead in this initiative. I appreciate his willingness to make this further contribution to our university.

A number of organizational changes have accompanied these initiatives and I would like to recount them for you:

• Two key searches – the first for the Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and the second for Vice Chancellor for Research and Dean of the Graduate School -- are well under way. We expect campus visits for the finalists in the next month or so.

As you know, Provost John Wanat has stepped down to return to his research and faculty life. I appreciate John’s service during my brief time as Chancellor and gratefully acknowledge his exemplary service to this institution during very difficult budget times and during a transition from one Chancellor to another.

I am delighted to report that Associate Vice Chancellor and Interim Dean Rita Cheng has kindly accepted my offer to serve as Interim Provost, effective immediately. She will be consulting with faculty of the School of Continuing Education to select a leader for that School as soon as practical while the search for permanent dean proceeds.

• We will also be launching, this month, the searches for Vice Chancellor for Administrative Affairs and Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs.

The portfolios of these divisions will be slightly realigned by moving the Athletics Department and the Klotsche Center back to the Division of Student Affairs, where this important component of student life can be best integrated into programming for a well-rounded campus experience for our students.

We expect a successful completion to these searches and the current search for the Dean of the School of Information Studies by the end of the spring semester.

With these interim positions on the senior administrative team filled, we will be able to move ahead expeditiously with our vision for the future. I deeply appreciate all the hard work of the members of the search committees in recruiting for these important positions.

Let me now take a few minutes today to share my thoughts with you about a need I mentioned earlier: The need for UWM to serve as a model for the diversity and academic excellence for the UW System, the State of Wisconsin and, indeed, the nation.

I believe there is a need for UWM to serve as a model community that takes leadership in discussions that are central to what we do and what we are. In particular, UWM must forthrightly discuss the diversity of our campus and the multiplicity of voices that are necessary if we are to achieve our goal of higher academic excellence.

The reality is that if we do not become a more diverse community that welcomes all members of our society, we will never become a truly premier research university. Academic excellence and diversity are the pillars upon which this institution will thrive and achieve the prominence that was envisioned by its founders. Our diversity complements academic excellence and the growth in research that is our goal.

“Diversity” is an issue that is of paramount importance both to our University and to our larger society.

At our plenary session last September, I stated my belief that we must continue to diversify the racial and ethnic composition of our student body and our faculty and staff even as we slow and stabilize our recent high rate of enrollment growth.

I also expressed my belief that, in pursuing this commitment, we should do so only at the highest level of educational quality.

In the ensuing months, many of us have engaged in an intense assessment of our plans for and commitment to diversity. The UW Board of Regents has asked all UW institutions to report at the February Regents’ meeting on their progress toward and plans for meeting the goals of the 1999 UW System document, “Plan 2008.”

We currently are reviewing our campus diversity plan, “The Milwaukee Commitment,” and have conducted two of the three on-campus open forums to hear from campus and community constituents about the design of “The Milwaukee Commitment, Phase II.” I appreciate the efforts of all of those who have participated in these important hearings.

The third forum will be held at 1 p.m. Thursday, January 27th, in the Wisconsin Room Lounge in the UWM Union. I invite anyone who wishes to offer or hear testimony to attend this remaining session.

At the same time, the Enrollment Management Steering Committee and a number of its subgroups have been examining student admissions, retention, graduation rates, support activities, and campus climate

The goal is to identify those policies and practices that will maximize student success.

As they proceed, these groups are paying close attention to the needs of students of color.

Concurrent with these initiatives, the UWM Task Force on Race and Ethnicity, chaired by Professor Larry Martin, has completed much of its research and is preparing a final report this winter.

I would like us, as part of this campus-wide discussion, to be especially mindful of three concepts that are at the core of UWM’s identity and that should inform our thinking:

1. UWM’s historical commitment to educational access and opportunity
2. The relation of human diversity to academic excellence
3. Our commitment to UWM as a safe haven for the diversity of ideas.

First, as UWM approaches its 50th anniversary, we need to remember that our current efforts to create a fully representative university community are part of our core institutional mission. These efforts and the commitment to access and a diversity of people that they embody have deep antecedents.

Our predecessor institutions—the Wisconsin State College, Milwaukee, and the Milwaukee Extension Center, University of Wisconsin —-had as a central part of their missions to make higher education affordable and accessible to the people of Milwaukee and southeastern Wisconsin.

The Wisconsin State College and its predecessor, the Wisconsin State Teachers College, excelled in training teachers. Like the teachers educated by UWM today, the graduates from our predecessors formed the backbone of public elementary and secondary education in the Milwaukee area.

The Milwaukee Extension Center, located in the heart of downtown, gave the opportunity for geographically accessible and affordable UW-quality education to families and working men and women of all economic classes. Those missions were preserved and expanded with the formation of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1956.

As part of the social upheavals of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, this focus was expanded to explicitly include parts of our citizenry that traditionally had experienced financial, social, and educational barriers to participation in university life.

The Experimental Program in Higher Education, the Spanish Speaking Outreach Institute, the Indian Studies Program, the Center for Afro-American Culture, and the Office of Women’s Studies were pioneering organizations at UWM that were devoted to dramatically increasing the participation of women and racial and ethnic minorities in university life, both as students and as employees.

Today’s descendents of these early organizations and many others that have been developed in the ensuing three decades have provided recruitment, academic advising, and counseling support to literally thousands of students of color and others from disadvantaged backgrounds.

We are all aware that our enrollments have recently grown. But, interestingly enough, our overall official student enrollment today is approximately what it was two decades ago.

Over that same time period, however, our enrollment of students of color has increased by more than 50%. In 1983, students of color made up 10% of the UWM enrollment. Today, students of color make up 16% of our student population.

We also have recruited hundreds of highly qualified faculty and staff from “under-represented” groups.

Just ten years ago, 17% of our faculty members were persons of color. Today, that has grown to more than 22%.

But ours is not a record of unqualified success.

Quite frankly, we have struggled in some respects.

Let’s look at just one part of the larger diversity issue in order to illustrate some of the complexities we face. Let’s examine information presented this past November by the Enrollment Management Steering Committee. This information compares the six-year graduation rates of full-time, first-time freshmen at UWM and the other “Urban 13” institutions—universities that are quite similar to UWM.

The study of the 1996 freshman cohort shows that the six-year graduation rate for all UW-Milwaukee freshmen is 40%. That is exactly the average of all Urban 13 institutions.

But the six-year graduation rate for UW-Milwaukee freshman who are Black, American Indian, or Hispanic is 15%. That compares to the Urban 13 average of 33%.

I think we can all agree that this is a disturbing fact.

It is also unacceptable.

Somehow—for all our efforts to increase the preparedness of college-bound high school students and to provide financial aid, counseling, advising, and tutoring—we have collectively fallen short at some important part of our reason for existence.

So, we need to examine why we have this problem and how we can correct it.

We must ask “Why did students who constituted 85% of our 1996 minority student freshmen not graduate six years after beginning UWM?”

The Enrollment Management group has produced some interesting data to address this question.

My own preliminary conclusion from the data is that these minority students failed to achieve primarily for the same reason that non-minority students failed to achieve: Academically, they were severely under-prepared to do college-level work when they were admitted to the university.

Let’s look for just a moment at the student that I think we can agree is severely under-prepared: a student with an ACT score below 16 and who must be placed in both remedial Mathematics and remedial English.

Fewer than 50% of these students survive the first year.

Even more sobering is the graduation rate of students entering with ACT scores below 17 and requiring remedial work. Less than 8% of these students graduate.

Inadequate preparation for an intense college curriculum is the main obstacle to student success at UWM, and it is underscored by our inability to date to enable all of the students to succeed.

Here’s another fact worth considering. Over 75% of new freshmen without remedial requirements return the next fall, and—this is critical—the return rate of students of color without remedial requirements is actually higher than for comparable white students.

But having better understood these particular risk indicators for potential student success, the question remains: “What do we do about it?”

What is our part of our society’s responsibility to serve severely academically unprepared students?

Do we continue our efforts with Milwaukee area schools to better prepare pre-college students?

Do we build better partnerships with the Milwaukee Area Technical College and other post-secondary educational institutions to assure the best coordinated remedial education to college-age students?

Do we continue to review all our current student support programs to assure the most efficient use of our resources?

Do we modify our admissions standards so that we only admit people who have a reasonable chance to succeed here?

These are some of the questions with which we are wrestling. And the complexity of issues shown by this example is reflected in our efforts to recruit and retain a high-quality, diverse faculty and staff.

So, while we have had significant success in fulfilling our historical mission, our challenge for the future also is significant. I look to the groups that currently are studying these issues to give us the guidance to make reasoned, practical and ethical decisions in the coming months.

Let’s turn now for a few minutes from examining our historical commitment to access and opportunity and from assessing our current diversity activities to talk about what we mean by the term “diversity” and why, especially at UWM, it is an essential companion concept to our idea of academic excellence.

As an institution, UW-Milwaukee is an interdependent system, one that is both intellectual and human. As such, it is inextricably part of the universe of human knowledge, creation, and exploration ― the measure of success in which is excellence. It is also inextricably part of the universe of diverse societies, cultures, and individual lives ― the measure of success in which is opportunity.

We in the university cannot thrive by diminishing either our intellectual or our human components.

We are part of the universal intellectual world and part of the particular human community in which we live and whose people we serve.

We thrive only by the maximum inclusion and integration of ideas and peoples.

In short, we thrive only through our diversity.

Let us also consider a few misconceptions of diversity, a few things that I believe “diversity” is not:

First, diversity is not a code word for lowering academic standards. While we have made and will continue to make significant allowances for students who are not fully prepared for university work at the beginning of their UWM experience, we require equality of performance to progress and matriculate.

Second, diversity is not a code word for a system of preferential treatment that advantages some groups at the expense of others. We only seek to assure full equality of opportunity – financial, pre-college preparation, and personal and academic counseling – to all of our citizens.

And third, diversity is not a code word for quotas. We set goals as a way to challenge ourselves and to measure our progress. It would be unconscionable to accept students or to hire faculty and staff whom we think will have little chance of success in order to show statistics that, in fact, mask our failure.

Opportunity is meaningful only if it means the opportunity to succeed.

So, being mindful of UWM’s historical commitment to access and to quality, and having stated my belief that the synthesis of opportunity and achievement is essential for our university to thrive,

I would like to talk finally about the third element that is at the core of our institutional identity:

the preservation of our campus community as a safe space for civil discourse about diverse ideas and beliefs.

I stated at our September plenary session that we must be a voice of reason in examining and creating public policy and that we must be unafraid to take up issues no matter how large or controversial.

I reiterate that sentiment now.

“Diversity” is a large and a controversial issue, about which intelligent and well-intentioned people hold differing views and objectives.

We must maintain UWM as a community of respect for these differences because those differences also constitute our diversity.

We seek to create and nurture a diversity of people and a diversity of ideas.

Let me mention some tangible initiatives that will further our discussions regarding the nature of the diverse intellectual community that we must become.

First, I am creating an Advisory Council to the Chancellor on Issues of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender that will serve as the key planning group around diversity concerns on our campus. This group, made up of faculty, staff, students, and our governance leadership will be charged with

1. developing a strategic diversity plan with a broad-based support similar to that found in our Black and Gold Committee;
2. monitoring our progress toward achieving our Plan 2008 and ensuring that there is accountability along the way;
3. providing recommendations for attracting and retaining faculty and staff of color; and
4. developing a diversity training program for the entire UWM campus.

The campus will look forward to reviewing and acting on the council's regular reports, the first of which I would hope to see by June 1st. The composition of this committee will be made known shortly.

Second, the Office of Equity/Diversity Services will fully enforce affirmative action guidelines and have the authority to close down faculty and staff searches if it can be shown that good faith efforts have not been made to diversify the applicant pool.

As you can see, I strongly believe there are compelling reasons to renew our commitment to a more diverse university, both culturally and intellectually. The impediments to advancing opportunity, excellence, and respect are deep and they are not unique to UWM or to higher education.

Our Milwaukee community, like our nation and the world, is often riven by differences of race and ethnicity, economic class, and social and religious ideology. These divisions, however, are not reasons to believe that positive change is unachievable.

The many problems we face are simply challenges to be overcome.

And that is what universities do best.

That is what scholars and teachers are trained to do: we bring our intelligence, our knowledge, our experience, and our ideals together to work on problems in an atmosphere of tolerance and civility.

So I return to my initial questions:

• What kind of model community do we aspire to be?
• How can we demonstrate that academic excellence is not separate from our objective to be an open institution that provides broad-based opportunities?
• How can we insure that every student who enrolls at UWM does so with the belief that they will succeed at our institution, and that they will be productive and informed citizens?

We answer these questions by showing that every single individual counts, despite the size and complexity of our great university.

I am asking every administrator on this campus, beginning with me and my management team, to voluntarily adopt an academically disadvantaged undergraduate student on our campus and to serve as a mentor to that student during their university career.

While this may be a small step in support of linking academic excellence to opportunity, it is important that we signal that every student on this campus is important and that student success, in our challenging learning environment, is our primary goal.

Our ultimate success in these efforts will be measured not solely by the numbers of students, faculty, and staff from underrepresented groups who are members of the university community.

Our success will be measured equally by the numbers of our university community who embrace human and intellectual diversity as core values of this institution; by the numbers who see opportunity and excellence as fully compatible ideals; and by the numbers who believe that their responsibility as academicians is to learn from the distinctness of ideas and peoples and to join in creating from these many parts a greater and more enlightened whole.

In this effort, I ask for your openness and ideas as we “sift and winnow” in the best tradition of Wisconsin education.

And when we have completed our research and have fabricated our new designs, I will ask for your commitment and for your hard work to help build our more just, more diverse university community.

Thank you.