Remarks From President Walter Harrison
Faculty/Staff Kickoff
January 20, 2016
Good afternoon, and welcome to the euphemistically titled spring term faculty-staff kickoff meeting. Frankly, I congratulate all of you who braved the cold January weather to be here today. I hope the news I bring you will make it worth the adventure!
I always notice with some amusement that the Office of Marketing and Communication entitles these remarks as a “State of the University” speech. That always seems a little grandiose, but this year—on the heels of President Barack Obama’s State of the Union message, it seems a little foreboding. Since he is not eligible to run for re-election and I am retiring six months after he leaves office, I do not want any of you to feel that I am a “lame duck.” Indeed, the University is in one of the busiest and most active moments in its history. So I intend to outline as succinctly as I can the current initiatives and activities we are engaged in, and I hope you will see that all of the University—including me—is engaged and moving forward at full speed.
First, just a word of thanks to all of you who sent me warm messages about my retirement announcement in November. I was completely overwhelmed by the response to the announcement. I started to respond to the messages, but they became so voluminous that I could not keep up. I promise each of you that I will try to respond individually, but I want all of you to know how much I appreciate the supportive and congratulatory words.
I hope you have all seen the message in yesterday’s UNotes from Kathy Behrens, who is chairing the presidential search committee. I know that she, board chair Lucille Nickerson, and Sue Fitzgerald, who will staff the search, are engaged with planning the search. In the UNotes article, she suggests that anyone with comments or suggestions send them to the website address. I second her suggestion.
Along with serving as president of the University, for the next year and a half I am serving my second term as chair of the Connecticut Conference of Independent Colleges (my two terms have been a decade apart). I’m sure most of you know about the State’s budgetary problems, so you can understand that all of us who serve independent colleges are facing real challenges. So far, so good at the state level. But I sense there are real challenges ahead.
I suspect you also know that Hartford has a new mayor, Luke Bronin. I join most observers in saying he brings a breath of fresh air and new perspective to the office, and he and I have had two occasions to meet this fall. He knows that Hartford, too, has its challenges, and has asked for our help, especially in redoubling our efforts to be a partner in developing the Hartford neighborhoods surrounding the University. I have pledged our support.
But he is also very honest and direct. He also told me that he was going to try to attract Melissa McCaw, our excellent budget director, to become director of management and budget for the City. Alas, he succeeded. I ask that you all join me in congratulating Melissa.
He also told me that Hartford faces demanding budget challenges, and he may have to recommend that the city’s hospitals, Trinity College, and the University pay a Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILOT). He also told me that he would consult with me and others before recommending this. If he does, this will be a real budgetary challenge for us. No word yet, but fair warning.
Despite these challenges, and a declining stock market, the University’s finances remain stable. I am delighted to tell you that the Board of Regents have approved our recommendation of a 2.25 percent merit salary increase pool for FY 2017 (that is, beginning in July) for both faculty and staff. As you all know, individual salary increases result from individual performance reviews, but the salary pool next year will be a quarter percent higher than last year.
I am also pleased to remind you that we have provided $300,000 for the third year of faculty strategic compensation increases, and a matching $300,000 pool for staff strategic compensation increases in addition to the merit pools. It is our intention to recommend to the board that they provide similar pools for both faculty and staff strategic increases next year as well.
As you know, our budgetary success is a direct result of our achievement in enrolling a very large first-year undergraduate class and our continued success in increasing the revenue we receive from what we call “other tuition,” namely on-line tuition and winter and summer terms. Since we are what is known as a tuition-driven institution, we need every year to meet our enrollment targets. Last year’s success was certainly a result of great work by our admissions and financial aid offices, but I believe you all played a huge part in helping us attract our first year students. So I am asking you to do it again. Please join me in doing everything you possibly can to help us attract another good first-year class this coming fall. Talk to prospective students and families visiting campus, e-mail prospective students and families if asked, or if you come to know them while they’re here, and do whatever else you can to help. That personal touch is what really makes the difference.
We’re running slightly ahead of where we were at this time last year in students who have applied here, but the competition is becoming fiercer and fiercer. So everything you can do is extremely important. Please know how much I appreciate it.
I’m also delighted to report that our fundraising is going very well this year. To date, we have raised $6.2 million toward our goal for the year of $7.8 million. My thanks to our Institutional Advancement staff, the deans, our athletic department staff, and everyone else who has helped in this effort—most especially our very generous donors. And I am especially proud to report that we have raised $8.5 million toward our goal of raising $10 million in scholarship funds for our students. Continuing our tradition of making a University of Hartford education accessible to all of our students remains my top priority.
Now let me go quickly through some of our most important initiatives this semester.
Our strategic planning continues to move ahead at a rapid pace. I am convinced that our five goals can help make us leaders in higher education and improve the educational experience of all of our students. I am not going to run through each goal and our progress, but I invite all of you to check out the strategic planning website and our new dashboard of tracking progress at hartford.edu.
Earlier I spoke about the importance of attracting a new first-year class. It is also important to our success as a university to improve the number of students we help achieve their goals of graduating from the University. We trail some of our competitors in this important part of our mission, so—as most of you know—we have a Retention Task Force that is working hard as part of a national coalition of universities—known as the Student Success Collaborative—to improve what we do to advise and retain students.
We have begun to, as they say, train the trainers: that is, train an early cohort of advisors who can incorporate what we are learning through this effort to improve how we advise students. We hope to have every advisor involved in this effort by the next spring semester. We are also learning how to detect early signs that new students are struggling and to intervene as early as possible. Improving what we do to advise students is an important part of how we support students and improve the University’s service. I am very grateful to everyone involved in this important effort.
A number of us have been involved in putting the final touches on the planning for the renovation of the University Libraries—namely the Mortensen and Allen Libraries. We are on schedule to begin the construction when the ground thaws this spring, aiming for a completion date in spring of 2017. Here are two conceptual designs of what we will see when we are finished: an expansion of the libraries northward toward the Hog River, here seen from the footbridge over the river, and an artist’s conception of what the new study space on the second and third floors will look like. I am extremely excited about how these changes will affect all of our students’ learning experiences.
And a construction committee has begun the planning stage of a renovation of Gengras Student Union. Currently they are in the program planning stage, so I don’t have any pretty pictures to show you. But I can say we are on a very tight schedule that would have this major renovation project completed in approximately two years. Stay tuned for some pretty pictures next fall.
While I am talking about the future, let me move to one of the most important projects we have in determining how the University moves ahead: finding a new dean for the Hartt School. You may have seen a report of this in UNotes, but just to repeat briefly. We have retained the firm of Isaacson Miller to help us in the search, also staffed by Sue Fitzgerald. The chair of the search committee is Katherine Black, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. Here is a list of those people serving on the committee. Our consultants were on campus last week to begin the process by interviewing University administrators, the Hartt School faculty, and members of the Julius Hartt Musical Foundation about what they would like to see in a new dean. We hope to conclude the search this semester.
I want to mention a few of the major initiatives I discussed this fall, and give you a progress update on each.
One of our long-term initiatives that received a great deal of emphasis this year is our attention to ensuring sexual assault awareness among all of our population—students, faculty, and staff. This was one of the areas that received a great deal of comment in the survey conducted by the President’s Commission on the Status of Women. Many comments involved the climate for a safe campus for female students. Many of you know this already, but I think it is important to point out that under the direction of Susan Fitzgerald and Patricia McKenna Grant the University has adopted what is known as a green dot program to promote bystander awareness and intervention. We have trained an early cohort of people to train others, and are now broadening our reach to include more students, staff, and faculty. Under the direction of Lisa Belanger-Buoniconti and her staff in Human Resources Development, we have also undertaken a series of seminars on sexual assault prevention. I have taken one of them, and I would urge each of you to consider signing up. I learned a great deal in that seminar, and it increased my awareness of the issues involved with this important topic.
We have also begun two important initiatives to improve our technology on campus. The first is broadly strategic. In March the University formed a group of 18 staff, faculty and administrators in an intensive IT Governance Planning Workshop guided by Ellucian consultant Dr. Chrissy Coley. The workshop resulted in an IT governance structure, identified areas for improved alignment of IT planning with institutional priorities, and articulated the need for an IT Strategic Plan to reflect the directions outlined in our University Strategic Plan.
The University’s Information Technology Executive Council [ITEC] in collaboration with the other standing IT governance committees began the IT Strategic Planning process in November . Next month ITEC will hold a series of focus group sessions and open forums to solicit broad participation from students, faculty and staff. We will announce the dates and times in U Notes over the next few weeks.
A second, more focused approach that I discussed this fall was our effort to make our website more responsive to what technology folks call the “lean back” devices—smartphones and tablets. We have measured the increase of smartphone traffic on our Hartford.edu website between August 2015 and January 2016—as you can see on this slide, an astounding 120 percent increase. You can also see that in traffic across all platforms—lean back and lean forward—we have seen a 77 percent increase. Why is that important? Because 61 percent of people who have a good mobile experience have a better opinion of the brands they are looking at. All of this is helping us to reach more people and raising the awareness of the range of activities and opportunities at the University of Hartford. Bravo!
Let me mention briefly what has become personally one of my most important focuses this year: adopting a smoking policy for our University that recognizes and respects the rights of non-smokers and smokers alike by creating smoke-free and smoking zones on the part of our campus that lies south of the Hog River—what most people call the academic side of campus—and the Handel Performing Arts Center. With Professor Jane Horvath, who serves as a senior advisor to me—and who has done most of the work on this project—I have visited with several groups—the Faculty Senate, the Council of Deans, the Student Government Association, and a group of international students—to discuss this proposal. Here is a quick look at what we are proposing for the academic side of campus. I mention this now not to give a full presentation but to alert you to this effort and to ask you to invite us to visit a group of your choice this term. While we are constantly revising this plan, it is my intention to have this in place by the start of next fall semester.
Finally, I want to discuss a topic that is in the national spotlight—balancing the imperative to respect people of all races, religions, genders, and political beliefs with the long and important academic tradition of allowing the free exchange of ideas and viewpoints. Since the national news stories on campuses across the country—the University of Missouri, Yale, and Ithaca, just to name a few--I have spent a considerable amount of time asking a number of you and a number of students on this campus if they feel safe, respected, and welcomed here. We are an extremely diverse campus—by race, by nationality, by gender, by religion—and I am extremely proud of that. I believe we celebrate what we have in common and respect what makes us different. I want to assure that this spirit remains a hallmark of the University of Hartford. It is part of what has made it such a pleasure for me to live and work here. I ask you all to join me in embracing and enhancing that spirit.