Remarks of University Senate President Peter Gilkey

My name is Peter Gilkey, I am a mathematician. I am also president of the UO Senate for this year. I would like to talk to you today about two things: Faculty Governance and Scholarship-Teaching. At the outset let me say I am using the words scholarship and teaching in a broad sense; in the school of music, for example, I would interpret the word scholarship to mean not only traditional scholarship but also creative performance.

The charter of the University (which can only be altered by State legislative action) states: ``The President and Professors constitute the faculty of the University, and, as such, shall have the immediate government and discipline of it and the students therein. The faculty shall also have power, subject to the supervision of the board of regents, to prescribe the course of study to be pursued in the University, and the text books to be used. University of Oregon Charter, Section 14, 1876.

The University of Oregon has a long tradition of shared governance. The University Senate together with the elected and appointed committees are an integral part of that tradition. As Senate President during this year, my primary role is to facilitate the smooth working of these structures.

The Senate deals with two sorts of issues. One is legislative. At our October meeting, we have motions from the Undergraduate Council which deal with residency requirements and with general education requirements. Later in the fall, we take up a motion from the Student Conduct Committee. There will be other items of this sort during the year. The other issues are more broadly focussed. This year I expect the Senate to deal with budgetary issues. We will also deal with diversity issues (to use a single word to describe very broad spectrum). As President of the Senate, I need to make the Senate a place where ideas can be debated in efficient fashion and in an atmosphere of respect. I am not a campus leader; as I said above, my primary role is that of a facilitator.

But now I come to my second point. The purpose of the University is not bureaucracy. Rather it is Scholarship and Teaching; these are central to our University. Scholarship and Teaching are not in conflict; without scholarship we have nothing to share with our students - without communicating our knowledge, scholarship is barren. At lunch yesterday, my friend Sergey asked: ``Peter, what are you doing''. I started to list my activities as Senate President so far this year - I have not been idle as recipients of large volume of emails that I have generated can attest. At the end of the list, my colleague looked puzzled and said again ``Peter, what have you been doing?" And of course the point of his question was clear. At the end of this year, the answer to Sergey's question should not be``I was President of the UO Senate''. Rather it should be ``I taught well and added to the mathematical knowledge''.

In closing, let me welcome the new faculty members; you are the future of our University and I hope that many of you will participate in the shared governance of our University at an appropriate point in your careers. I hope you find the University of Oregon as congenial and productive a place for your scholarly endeavors as I have found it for mine. Let me hope that your answer to Sergey's question at the end of this year can be: ``I taught well and added to knowledge''.

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State of the University Address -- University of Oregon President Dave Frohnmayer

My assertion, while technically correct, will, of course, in no way change the tens of thousands of celebrations already planned for this year. Too many people already are set to follow Yogi Berra's apocryphal advice, "When you get to a fork in the road, take it." But I think it is important for our University to hold to the most rigorous chronological standards possible, to know when the fork has been reached.

In some ways, however the future seems already here--if epistemologists, or careful linguistic analysts, will permit me that somewhat strange, and strained, observation. For instance, we all struggle with processing e-mail backlogs, checking new websites and listening to voice messages. It is increasingly difficult to talk about the state of our university without talking about technology, or attempting to cope both with its challenges and deficits. Technology--especially in the areas we care about, in information storage and retrieval, in communications and teaching--has advanced at a breathtaking pace during the past decade.

It was only a little over 15 years ago that the first really viable personal computers went on the commercial market. Just ten years ago, no one had heard of a website. Few on campus had looked at an e-mail. The internet was an obscure tool for computer experts, created partly for national defense, and powered by the driving intellects from America's research universities, ours a principal one among them. Creative work and visionary leadership have changed this picture. And in the past several years, much of the creative implementation of technology and national leadership has come from individuals here on the University of Oregon campus.

We are among the pioneering group of universities reshaping the way the internet is used in academia, through the creation of Internet 2. This coming weekend, a leading computer manufacturer will help our students raise awareness about world hunger by making our campus a world hub for NetAid, a United Nations-sponsored effort to use the Internet to promote development and alleviate poverty around the world. Technology, however, is not an unmixed blessing. We cannot embrace dazzling high-tech advances with such adoration that we forget the purpose of this machinery: helping us to do our work. Helping us to undertake and publish research more effectively, to organize our teaching more efficiently, and to serve others, both internal and external to our campus, in better ways. Technology cannot do this by itself.

Witness the counter-intuitive but somehow deliciously perplexing recent Carnegie-Mellon study--financed by the NSF and private high-tech companies, peer-reviewed and published under the auspices of the American Psychological Association--that showed an increase in clinically observable depression among users of on-line chat groups compared to non-users. More recently, a UCLA study found that while 87 percent of faculty members agreed that "student use of computers enhances their learning," 67 percent said that "keeping up with information technology" is a source of stress--more stressful, in this study, than research and publishing demands, teaching loads, or even the promotion and tenure process.

Technology is not an unmixed blessing, and here it is never a substitute for the human touch in learning. Yet we are living in a technologically driven Age of Information--an accurate term only in superficial ways. We certainly have access to many more factoids, in more places, more quickly, powered by another of this decade's new terms, "search engines," than at any moment in history.

But knowledge, as you know, is substantially different than the process of speeding factoids from site to site. It is discovering and explaining the relations between and among facts that helps us compose the foundations of knowledge. With the forbearance of the physical scientists among us, I borrow an analogy from chemistry. Chemists know that it is not individual atoms alone that create a molecule, but the interaction, the bonding between and among atoms that determines the nature of a molecule. In the same vein, it is the interactions between organs in a living body that determines health. It is not too great a leap, I hope, to apply the same principle to information.

Many assert proudly, but with blithe naivete, that we live in the Age of Information. I submit that modern society is drowning in information--and it is our job as a university community to build lifeboats to save our common humanity from this cataclysmic flood of detritus. I think we're entering a different new age: The Age of the Editor. The age of analysis; of critical and informed selection; the age of informed choices; the rich and scary age of giving ethical value and analytical order to the promiscuous proliferation of unorganized facts, factoids, and growing electronic warehouses of info-bits.

If that imperative is true--and I think it is--what a truly wonderful age to be working at a university! For it is here, in our university, in every university, that selectivity, interpretation and discriminating (I did not say discriminatory) judgments must be carried to their highest degrees. This is the mission of our librarians, our teaching faculty, administrators, teachers at all levels: To give our students powerful tools for choice and understanding amidst the cascading chaos of the information explosion.

This year, as you know from my letter to you at the start of term, is auspicious for other reasons as well. I also will articulate some concerns for candid discussion before I conclude. To recap: This campus is moving on an upward trajectory:

• We have a new law school.
• We have a new recreation center, funded by our students.
• We have several more major building projects under consideration, which we will announce formally later in the fall.
• We have successfully negotiated fair and, I hope, lasting contracts with our hardworking classified staff and GTFs. I extend thanks here to everyone who participated in these negotiations.
• Our entering students, thanks to the focused and directed efforts of staff and faculty, this year have higher average GPAs and SAT scores than last year.
• We have an outstanding group of new faculty, first-rank researchers and scholars, all of them, of whom you will hear more after my remarks.

But an equally important change occurred this past year not here, but in Salem, where the Oregon Legislature did something brave, something smart, something right: it reversed Oregon's long policy of disinvestment in its public universities, and gave the Oregon University System the first significant increase in public funding in a decade. We all owe a debt of thanks to the legislature and the governor. Although the final funding fell several million dollars short of what the Oregon University System requested, the increase still marks an important change. Higher education was again a priority in Salem.

Where will the money go? Much of the increase--far too much, until you appreciate the risks we took to achieve systemic reform--is tagged for recapitalization--for long-term support of programs we have been funding through short-term means during the disinvestment years. Much will go toward implementing a new, student-centered funding model, one simpler and more realistic than we have had for years. This new model will allow Oregon public universities to retain tuition moneys generated on their campus, and will reward those institutions most innovative and successful in attracting and retaining students. As you know, this is a change I and others have advocated for some time.

This is a tremendous and heartening sea-change in the way higher education is viewed in this state. While I am strongly optimistic about the coming year, I believe it is appropriate to temper false expectations when it comes to the immediate benefits of the new university funding model. I wish I could say that it is going to translate into a flood of money for all of us. But with so much spoken for, with so many deserving programs to bring back to vibrant health after a decade of disinvestment, we will not see money for costly programmatic increases.

Let me speak directly also to faculty salaries. Remember that just five months ago, we implemented an average and permanent 2 1/2 percent increase for faculty salaries. I wish I could announce precise, predictable numbers for the coming two years, but that is not possible today for three reasons:

1. First, the Chancellor's Office this last Monday told all seven Oregon University System institutions to be extremely conservative, especially in the first year of this biennium, in announcing or awarding salary increases;
2. Second, normally reliable enrollment indicators through many years unaccountably have overestimated our actual enrollment this autumn by several hundred students. Enrollment is good, and for freshmen has increased. But overall it has not risen as much as we had hoped. Several million dollars of tuition revenue, which for the first time we might have retained and wisely expended, simply has not materialized; and
3. Third, the faculty--you--have not yet been consulted as fully as our community decision processes should respect.

1. First, we must await the traditional "Fourth Week of October" student head count and credit hour census to determine our revenue numbers;
2. Second, we need an honest and searching analysis of salary issues. These involve not only absolute levels respecting comparators, but important questions of "compression," disadvantages in areas of particular national and international strength, promotion award shortfalls and competitive disadvantages generally and specifically across disciplines. I already have shared our fiscal challenges with the deans, department heads, the Faculty Advisory Council and University Senate leadership.
3. Third, we need to develop a concerted long term plan--over a six- to eight-year period--with appropriate variables, to achieve a far higher percentage of parity with our competitors than we now enjoy. In this regard, please understand three important sub-points:

All is not grim--remember three positive things:

• We inhabit a community, and a teaching environment which many universities envy.
• In six years we have tripled, through the Oregon Campaign, the number of endowed faculty fellowships, professorships and chairs. Even though the pay-out is four percent of principal for these endowments, they are permanent legacies, growing each year, for our finest teachers and scholars, larger each year in number.
• We are exploring ways to improve teaching and office facilities for all across the campus, with knowledge of the need for significant improvements in many places.

In all the enthusiasm about a better budget this year, it's easy to overlook those who made it happen. There were a number, too many to list. But I believe we owe a debt of thanks to one person in particular. This part of my remarks has not been circulated in advance for comment or caution. These words are mine, they are true, and they are important to say now that the struggles of the past seem capable of bearing fruit.

Years ago, before I became president, and before he became Provost, John Moseley was already crunching the budget numbers, preparing reports, showing how the higher education system generally, and the University of Oregon particularly, was disadvantaged by the old budgeting system. He brought these concerns to the attention of those who made the budget. He refused to have his concerns discounted. And he would not stop. Year after year, he made his case for equity, for rationality, for a fair deal for the UO, knowing, or at least hoping, that others would join him in asking for a fair deal on the budget. The new funding model I believe represents a watershed in our institutional history. And for that we owe John Moseley our gratitude.

I said I would return to the Process for Change. All of you other than the very new faculty know about this two-year grassroots planning process to gather in every idea we could for educational improvement--and to implement the best of those ideas. Our work is bearing fruit. This year--to the extent that stewardship of still-scarce resources permits--will also see the implementation of the first Process for Change initiatives, including the introduction of Pathways, an innovative curriculum of integrated courses and activities for undergraduates.

The Process for Change on this campus generated hundreds of ideas during the past year. Dozens of the most effective are in the process of being implemented. When I shared just a sampling of your innovations with the Chancellor and the State Board, their reaction was one of respect and admiration for your work.

Besides Pathways, more are coming, or have already been put in place:

• This year saw an increased focus on academic rigor during our Week of Welcome for incoming students.
• There will be an increased emphasis on Participatory Learning Experience opportunities for upper division undergraduates. PLEs are designed to allow more of our students to participate in the acquisition and application of knowledge through internships, laboratory research opportunities, or community service projects.
• The introduction of Dean's Scholarships has helped stabilize and hopefully will increase our student numbers.

• From the faces of new buildings to the faces of a burgeoning class of incoming freshmen;
• From student government registering voters to the scores on our athletic fields;
• From voices raised in a spirited and energetic discussion of campus diversity to the hum of activity in our outstanding library.

• They produced a diversity video that has already been seen by department heads and campus leaders.
• They have initiated planning for a web page that will summarize our campus's efforts and guide users to other resources.
• They set up new lines of communication and gave an impetus to decision-making on a topic that has been a priority here for decades.

Ours is certainly not a campus marked by overt racism. But there is a level of interaction in which casual remarks and assumptions, more thoughtless than overt, can and do cause searing pain. I also learned yet another lesson about new technology. Last spring's sit-in was triggered by a "flame war," an exchange of e-mail in which participants were, to say the least, intemperate in their remarks. It is certainly true that the technology of e-mail--with its immediacy, its sometimes conversational tone, its instant amplification through copying to scores, hundreds of recipients with the stroke of a key--can make reasoned dialogue more difficult. It is wise to remember that e-mail is not a private conversation. It is a written document that can be made immediately public.

We will continue our work to build and expand campus diversity. We will continue to focus the energy that is already here in new efforts to make our campus a model of diversity. I do not want us to lose sight of the fact that we've accomplished a good deal already. We have attracted a high-quality student body with a higher percentage of students of color than the state around us.

We will do more. This year, close to $1 million will be devoted to scholarships targeted toward building diversity. The fund for Diversity Building Scholarships alone is scheduled to double from $280,000 in 1998-99 to more than $500,000 in 1999-2000. During the four academic years between 1995-96 and 1998-99, more than one in five of the new tenured and tenure-track faculty hires made at the UO were faculty of color--26 new faculty of color out of 121 total hires.

The most important point is this: The students, the faculty and staff, all of us are headed in the same direction, toward the same goal: A campus that is welcoming and safe for every student, every staff member, every professor, every person. This is not an objective easy to reach and nurture. It might not ever be totally achievable in a place this vibrant, this spirited, this devoted to the principles of free and unfettered speech. Not to speak of the fact that during the school year, 17,000 members of our community are young, with everything that youth implies: Deeply felt emotions, admirably idealistic goals, a wonderful feeling of freedom, a sense of the immediacy of issues. I fully expect that, like every large public campus in our nation, we will see continued activism in this area. And I give this assembly my own pledge that we will continue to make progress in this vital area.

I speak here of the spirit of our university. Let me take a moment to tell you a story that says something about the way others see us. I traveled to Taiwan late this past summer. Among the many benefits of this trip was a growing understanding of the importance of our being a founding member of an incipient "Pacific Rim" AAU--called APRU. I met the presidents of many other universities around the Pacific Rim during this trip, and am enthusiastic about the multitude of possibilities here for collaborative research, for technological sharing, for faculty and student exchanges. As the single most "international" public university in the nation, measured by the proportion of international students in our student body, the University of Oregon stands to take an important position in this fast-growing area.

While in Taiwan, I also met with many UO graduates. One of our alumni, a doctoral student at our university who also did work at Berkeley, graduated here and went on to help found a new university in Taiwan. He told me a story. He said that as he was thinking of how to set the tone of his institution. Would it be what he saw as the Berkeley model, or the model of the UO? The difference, he said, was illustrated by a mentor he had here, a chemistry professor who he saw often in the morning, getting coffee before going to his office.

This professor one month was in a foot cast, the result of a cross-country ski mishap. Despite the injury, this professor, every morning, still got his cup of hot coffee and limped over to his office door. And the Taiwanese graduate student, every morning, offered to help. To his surprise, the professor always refused. He sometimes ended up with a half-cup of coffee in his office, but he did it himself. This was quite different than Berkeley, our alum said, where apparently students fetching and carrying for professors is more the norm. To this student, that was the UO way: Collegial rather than hierarchical. Human rather than bureaucratic. Self-reliant. A little tough.

Let us also be a little kind. Each of us here at the University of Oregon is intensely involved in our work, our teaching, our research, our daily duties. But let us from time to time--in our dealings with each other, with students, with other members of the community--remember the need we each have for a smile, an understanding ear, a word of kindness from the heart. It does not mean we do not insist on the highest of standards. It does not mean we accept excuses for less than our best. It does not mean we substitute sentiment for wisdom. But it does mean that we remain thoughtfully humane in the midst of our incredibly human efforts to teach and learn.

The new funding model asks us all to become more "student centered." In practical terms, that means that each of us must become, in effect, an officer of admissions. Each of us becomes a student advisor. Each of us--faculty, staff and administration alike--takes on a share of responsibility for making sure that students are getting the best education possible.

There might be someone here thinking, "But that's not what I signed on to do." In the unfortunate possibility that there is a hardened cynic in the audience, I wonder if going through his or her mind is the question: Is this where the President begins to tell everyone to work even harder? Absolutely not. Everyone I know on this campus works very hard already. I do encourage you instead to stay focused on the reasons you came here and stayed. Encouraging you to remember why you came to work in this university. Encouraging you to recall the emotion, the sense of duty that your decision entailed.

Let me put the issue autobiographically without, I hope, self-indulgence. Many years ago, I used to ask the questions, "What do I want to do?" or "What do I want to be?" Those are vocational and existential questions. Then some years ago, I realized (though not in a blinding flash on some Road to Damascus) that the questions were incomplete, because the focus was the ego. I now believe the proper question is "What is worth doing?" That question overtly leaves out the "I" and reintroduces the questions of value and ethical choice.

I believe we all are here because we have chosen what is "worth doing:" the transformation of lives through knowledge. This means ongoing self-criticism and self-improvement, on every level from the quality of our scholarship to the excellence of our teaching and advising. It means creating an atmosphere on our campus in which ideas are promoted with enthusiasm, critiqued with collegiality, and transmitted with passion.

The great German poet Goethe put it this way: "Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it, Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it." Let us continue to dream; and let us continue to be bold. Let me welcome you again to an auspicious time in a wonderful place.

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New Tenured and Tenure-related Faculty Members -- 1999-2000

MARY ANNE BEECHER Interior Architecture 1988 M.A. Iowa State

BRIAN F. DAVIES Interior Architecture 1999 M.A. Cornell

SARAH THOMPSON Art History Ph.D in process .Columbia

BARBARA S. ANDREW Philosophy 1997 Ph.D. SUNY-Stony Brook

SHANKHA CHAKRABORTY Economics 1999 Ph.D. UCLA

RONALD B. DAVIES Economics 1999 Ph.D. The Penn. State Univ.

SUSAN G. GUION Linguistics 1996 Ph.D. University of Texas

EHUD HAVAZALET Creative Writing 1984 M.F.A. University of Iowa

PATRICIA J. PENN HILDEN Director, Ethnic Studies

History 1981 Ph.D. University of Cambridge

ANTHONY J. HORNOF Computer & Info. Science 1999 Ph.D. University of Michigan

JOANNA E. LAMBERT Anthropology 1997 Ph.D. University of Illinois

DAVID LEIWEI LI English 1991 Ph.D. University of Texas

GRANT A. MEYER Geography 1993 Ph.D. University of New Mexico

TIMOTHY J. REISS Comparative Literature 1968 Ph.D. University of Illinois

JOHN B. SCHMOR Theater Arts 1991 Ph.D. University of Oregon

JONATHAN SKOLINK Germanic Languages

ANGELA GORE Accounting 1999 Ph.D. SUNYóBuffalo

MICHAEL STEIN Accounting 1988 Ph.D. Univ. of British Columbia

PHILIP J. ROMERO LCB Dean 1988 Ph.D. RAND Graduate School

KENNETH J. PETERSEN Decision Sciences 1999 Ph.D. Michigan State University

ALAN G. KAMHI Communication Disorders

and Sciences 1979 Ph.D. Indiana University

MARY F. ROE Educational Studies 1990 Ph.D. University of Illinois

KATHLEEN JACOBI-KARNA Music 1996 Ph.D. University of Arizona

KATHRYN OLSON Music D.M.A in process University of Colorado

RONALD ZIMBELMAN Music 1999 M.Ed. University of Oregon