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The Post-Recession Imperative

State of the Campus Address
February 19, 2013
Grand Foyer, IU Auditorium
Provost Lauren Robel

Thank you, President Calloway-Thomas and members of the Bloomington Faculty Council, for the invitation to address you today. Welcome to all members of our faculty, our students, our staff, and to friends of our Bloomington community.

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to hear Senator Lugar speak to a full house in Whittenberger auditorium about his decades of foreign-policy experience. His richly textured, nuanced observations bore witness to the pragmatic necessity of deep knowledge of the cultures, histories, complexities, and languages of other countries. A few weeks earlier, I had the pleasure of listening to Congressman Lee Hamilton describe with clarity and humble grace the careful and difficult process of consensus building that is required in the foreign policy arena – a process that many of our current students have rarely seen in their lifetimes, and certainly never had explicated so accessibly.

Hearing these two giants describe at such an intimate level the wisdom gained through such long and substantial experience, I felt enormous pride that both were addressing us as faculty members in the new School of Global and International Studies. I also felt gratitude for the foresight and courage of the faculty in the College and other schools on the campus, who set aside their own disciplinary agendas to build a place where our students could learn from such men, and where the promise of decades of work building area and language expertise could be reimagined towards an ambitious vision of service to the globe.

Indiana University's Bloomington campus is a rare treasure. Of the many hundreds of colleges and universities in our country, of the thousands on other shores, we are blessed to be one of a handful of truly outstanding public universities in the world. There is much evidence to support IU Bloomington's assertion of fidelity to the highest academic standards. As one example among many, of the nearly 7,000 accredited postsecondary institutions in the United States, Bloomington is one of only 34 public universities that have earned a place among the Association of American Universities, an association distinguished by the research and teaching quality of its members. Our campus has a specific history and distinctive strengths – in the jewel that is our Jacobs School of Music, in the arts and the humanities, the sciences and technology, and in the highly-ranked professional schools.

I start with the specificity of this place to emphasize the depth, seriousness, and importance of our collective responsibility as a faculty. It is the commitment of universities like ours to serving humanity through the integrity of our ideas, and to our belief in a set of liberal values, that has made great public research universities paths to opportunity and hope in our democracy.

That democracy has been challenged since 2008 by a Great Recession. Like all U.S. institutions, and indeed public institutions around the world, this campus has felt deeply the effects of this economic turmoil. Our campus is among the most beautiful in the nation, and yet we are challenged to keep these gorgeous limestone buildings roofed, much less up to global twenty-first century standards for classrooms and laboratories. Our students have faced the increased cost of attending college as they and their families have struggled with a stagnant economy. Our graduates have entered the workforce in the most difficult of times. Many on this campus, particularly among our staff and teaching faculty, have carried significant burdens and shared additional work to make real our community's commitment to each of its members.

As a result of your human generosity, our President's and Trustees' careful stewardship, and the support of our state and our graduates, we have been able largely to avoid the disheartening human cost of layoffs and furloughs that have dealt blows to many of our colleagues at other public universities. During this period of financial stress, we have also focused increasing amounts of financial support on our students.

The Great Recession has required the faculty and leaders of this institution, those who are the stewards of our academic traditions, to think with creativity and care about first things. In the most difficult economic period of most of our lifetimes, they have done so guided by a set of values and commitments that are core to the meaning of a university:

• the centrality of excellent ideas, of truth, and of artistic beauty;
• the moral imperative of seeking those ideas, that truth, and that beauty, with unflinching integrity;
• the profound privilege of transmitting them with fierce clarity to the next generation, and putting them to use in service of the world;
• and the humanity, civility, and kindness with which we regard and treat each other as members of such a committed community.

Guided by this set of values, the campus has used this difficult period to strengthen its foundation, to reimagine its academic programs, and to protect and build its physical and technological infrastructure. It has rigorously assessed its operations, seeking in every case to protect our shared and core academic mission. It has sought to keep the opportunity of a Bloomington education affordable, a commitment for which we have been nationally recognized. And we have come through this period without diminishing the number or diversity of the tenure-track faculty, or the quality or diversity of the student body. We have maintained, and in many areas improved, the quality of our academic programs.

The new School of Global and International Studies is but one example of the willingness of our campus to think with integrity and imagination about our future. As we stand at the dawn of economic recovery, through these and other efforts our community has taken, we are poised to transmute the trough of the Great Recession into a channel for inspiration and hope.

In this, my first State of the Campus address, I outline my assessment of our position at this moment in time. I will describe as faithfully as I can the state of our faculty, our students, and our programs as we emerge from the recession. We undoubtedly face challenges, and I will state those, as I see them, as clearly and plainly as I can as well.

Yet we face those challenges from a position of relative strength. If we seize this opportunity as a campus to shape our destiny, to participate in a sustained, engaged and comprehensive conversation about our future, we can look ahead to exhilarating possibilities.

The College and the schools are the engines of academic excellence in Bloomington. We are, though, collectively more than the sum of the schools that make up this campus. Our collaboration is needed to recruit the best and most diverse global student body, to bring the best faculty to Indiana, to build programs that let the best minds easily transcend disciplinary borders, and to take the rigor and discipline of the liberal arts and sciences and connect it seamlessly to the vocations made possible through professional schools.

By the end of next fall semester, if we work with integrity, good faith, and a spirit of inclusion and collaboration, if we use this time to state our challenges and aspirations with clarity, if we are rigorous in our thinking and if we continue to look for the points of intersection among our programs, we can emerge with a strong vision to shape our campus's future as we aim towards Indiana University's bicentennial in 2020. Engaging the campus in this conversation, and emerging with this sharply focused blueprint for the campus, is my top priority for the coming year.

The Imperative Of Faculty Renewal

I start with our faculty. By many measures of individual attainment, we have maintained an excellent faculty through the recession. This fall, our campus saw the induction of ten faculty members at our College of Arts and Sciences into the prestigious American Association for the Advancement of Science. In the last few months, we have seen Professor George Kuh of the School of Education awarded the Robert Zemsky Prize for innovation in higher education; Professor Marjorie Lyles was elected the first woman president of the international Strategic Management Society; Professor Rowland Ricketts became the first Indiana artist named a United States Artist fellow; Professors Sarita Soni and Larry Thibos received top honors from the American Academy of Optometry in recognition of their distinguished careers; and Menahem Pressler received the Yehudi Menudin Prize for the Integration of Arts and Education from Queen Sofia of Spain. I could name many others. We are all proud of the recognition of our colleagues across the campus.

At a macro level, the composition of our faculty has changed, and we need to discuss the meanings of that change for the excellence of the research we do and the programs we deliver. While the number of tenure track faculty grew significantly in the five-year period that preceded the recession, it has stayed exactly the same since the recession began in 2008. Among all the academic appointees on our campus, our tenure-line faculty are uniquely charged with our research and graduate education missions, the missions that differentiate this campus. This academic year, I asked the vice provosts for academic affairs, research, and graduate education to present their biggest challenges. As a result of their presentations, I asked Tom Gieryn, Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, and Sarita Soni, the Vice Provost for Research, to analyze all the sources of campus-level support designed to assist our faculty in achieving research excellence and external funding, and to assure the return on our institutional investment in their success.

That analysis revealed both overlap and gaps in our support for our faculty, and suggested the need for fresh thinking about the campus's support for each point in our faculty members' careers. It also identified a number of generational issues in the ways we provide support, and pointed to the need to think at the campus level about interdisciplinarity in hiring, promotion and tenure, to find ways to imbue hiring at the school level with national and international-level campus priorities in research, to promote our faculty more effectively at the national and international level, and to align our institutional support with the stages of an academic career. And it suggested the need to double down on our support for our diverse faculty, who face special time demands for service and mentorship.

In a clear statement of IU's commitment to the certain knowledge that excellence requires diversity, I am pleased to note that during this period of constrained hiring, the number of minority faculty grew by 31%. Our steadfast commitment to diversity is evident even if one looks only at faculty who identify as members of underrepresented groups, including the increasing number of faculty who identify with multiple heritages. Among that group, even when faculty hiring was flat, this campus has seen growth, in simple numbers or as a percentage of the whole, in every underrepresented group in the 2008 to 2012 period.

This year, in collaboration with Vice President Ed Marshall and Affirmative Action Officer Julie Knost, I have charged the deans to look carefully at all the areas of their programs with the diversity of the faculty in mind, and have revamped the strategic hiring initiative to assure that we are moving on this front in every part of our academic programs. Vice Provost Gieryn will lead the strategic plan working group on the tenure-line faculty, which will address these questions and others the group identifies.

In addition, I announce today that our campus has become an institutional member of the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity. This innovative Center works with faculty members (and graduate students and post-docs, our future faculty) in support of their success. NCFDD has special expertise in mentoring diverse faculty, and works with faculty members both before and after tenure. This service is designed to empower faculty members through mentoring, skill building, and peer groups with others in similar situations – for example, being the lone minority faculty member in a department, or raising small children while working toward tenure.

Before we became an institutional member, there were already about 40 faculty members and graduate students who had made their way individually to the center. One of them was Mary Murphy, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. Asked whether the program served her, she said, "I have accomplished more than I ever thought possible. In fact, everyone I know who has done this program has had explosive productivity." Just as critically, she observed that this support system resulted in a substantially better quality of life for the faculty members who were involved in it. In the next few weeks, faculty (both pre-and post tenure), post-docs, and graduate students will receive initial invitations to participate, and we will have a major workshop to kick off this initiative on April 24.

As at other research-extensive institutions, the number of our faculty whose appointments are focused solely on undergraduate teaching has grown quite significantly during the period from the start of the recession. Our lecturers, clinical faculty, and adjuncts play a critical role in our undergraduate teaching mission, and the roles these colleagues play in undergraduate program development is more significant than ever before. The Bloomington Faculty Council has affirmed the importance of a clear statement of mission and responsibilities for these colleagues, and a regular path to review and promotion for those in full-time teaching roles.

I have asked the Center on Innovative Teaching and Learning to develop programming specifically to support the teaching-ranks faculty in their quest for excellence in the classroom. In addition, I have asked Sonya Stephens, the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, to head the strategic planning group on undergraduate education. In addition to other issues I will discuss in a moment, that group will examine the roles of teaching-rank faculty in the classroom, in online courses, and in program development, and make recommendations for assuring the quality of this vital part of our faculty.

Nothing is more important to the quality of the work we do than the strength and quality of our faculty, and the strategic plan will include a comprehensive examination to assure that the campus aligns its resources effectively to hire and support the best faculty possible.

The Imperative of Educational Excellence

As the Council on Graduate Education notes, "[T]he competitiveness of the United States and our nation’s capacity for innovation hinge fundamentally on a strong system of graduate education."[1] Assuring that strong system is critical to the development of knowledge and is, as the report notes, "a strategic asset" for the country. Our system of graduate education has been a beacon to students around the world, and its health and strength remain a central part of our mission.

James Wimbush, Dean of the University Graduate School, not only served on the committee that produced the Council on Graduate Education report, but also will serve as the council's president next year. He has looked comprehensively at the challenges in graduate education, both nationally and at our campus. He has agreed to chair the strategic planning group on graduate education, and has identified a number of issues that our campus must address. Chief among them are the time to degree, particularly in the humanities and the social sciences; the rate of completion of Ph.Ds; the need for career counseling and information about alternative careers; funding for graduate students; and the lack of a diverse pipeline. Dean Wimbush will lead the strategic planning group in this area, and make recommendations for actionable, immediate steps we can take to support our graduate students, reduce their time to degree, and provide alternative paths for those students who determine that their futures lie outside the academy.

The quality of our undergraduate experience depends on our ability to recruit a highly qualified, diverse, and, in this century, global class; to provide an excellent set of academic experiences to all of our students; and to assure that our students have the highest-quality advising that permits them to complete their degrees in a timely way and move effectively to the next phase of their lives.

Who are our students, and how can we best help them navigate their academic careers successfully and move into the larger world?

1. Recruiting a Highly-Qualified, Diverse, Global Class

Our undergraduate student quality has remained stable during the recession. For the entire period, even with larger classes, we have retained the average GPA and SAT, which had increased dramatically during the five years before the recession began. During that same period, since the beginning of the recession, the diversity of our student body has also increased, from 11% to 14.6% among all domestic minority students, and from 7.3% to 10.6% among underrepresented minority students.

As I entered my current position, I worked with Vice President Ed Marshall, Vice Provost David Johnson, and Vice President John Applegate to understand the challenges we faced in recruiting both a highly qualified and a diverse class. I have assembled a group to think creatively about the ways in which we recruit students generally, and that will be a part of the strategic planning process. Today I want to talk specifically about our commitment to the diversity of our student body.

Our commitment to diversity is not an afterthought or an add-on. It is central to our mission. A democratic society depends on visible pathways to power and leadership for all of its citizens. In this country, those pathways almost inevitably, and certainly most consistently, pass through the gates of the university. As dean of the law school, president of the Association of American Law Schools, and provost of this campus, I have three times over the period of a decade made this point in briefs to the United States Supreme Court.

Since my appointment in July, I have worked closely with Vice President Ed Marshall to coordinate the ways in which we recruit, support, and shepherd to graduation and careers the minority students who entrust us with their futures. This fall, Vice President Marshall and I instituted a regular Diversity Roundtable, designed to assure that all parts of the campus administration are working in concert around the success of our students. The Office of Enrollment Management and the Office of the Vice President for Diversity, Equity, and Multicultural Affairs are working more closely than ever to analyze our recruiting activities and provide more focused efforts to increase the student presence. The programs that are targeted for their success, such as Hudson & Holland and Groups, are undergoing leadership transitions, and, as a result, it is an excellent time to think through the ways in which those programs succeed, where they face challenges, and to what metrics they should be held accountable.

The Hudson & Holland students in particular have historically been, and continue to be, significantly above the campus average in on-time graduate rates. This fall, IU added $1.9 million to support the recruitment and retention of students into this program, resulting in a 21% increase in the number of Hudson & Holland students in the entering class, to a record 271 – double its number in 2010. In addition, I have committed $300,000 to support study abroad opportunities for students in these programs.

Moving forward, I will continue to work closely with the Vice President to assure that Bloomington students are leveraging all campus resources effectively, and that we are thus freeing up resources to make available the specialized support that each of our populations of students most needs.

Those special populations of students include, increasingly, undergraduate students from overseas. The number of international students has climbed, making us the 11^th-ranked destination university in the United States. For the development of all of our students, who live in a world that is utterly and globally connected, this development is a stunningly good thing. Learning to work with those from cultures around the world is a critical skill for all of our students, and makes possible surprising leaps in learning.

I'll share a story from Professor Hilary Kahn's class on human rights and the arts. She had a student from China, who seemed to be struggling with the writing assignments. But because this class was about the arts, it also involved art projects. This student created for his project a portrait of the Chinese artist and activist Ai WeiWei. The portrait was composed out of QR codes, and if you used your phone to activate the codes, they took you to websites about censorship. So here was a student who not only grasped the coursework on a very deep level, but was able to bring in examples from his own background and share them with his classmates in a tremendously powerful way.

In order to make this kind of experience possible, we have an obligation as teachers to be intentional and thoughtful about the ways in which we address these global classrooms. Professor Portia Maultsby in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, for instance, is committed to engaging all of her students. Each student completes a student profile at the start of the semester. Based on these profiles, she creates small groups with the most diverse possible arrangements of nationality, race, and ethnicity. The result, she says, is that students learn new ways of approaching questions and issues beyond what even she can offer them.

For example, she posed a question about public education, and by talking in their assigned small groups, the students had a chance to discover different ways in which education is structured and delivered around the world.

I am often struck by the courage and sheer guts our international students demonstrate in coming to study in a new culture and often in a new language. We owe these brave and interesting students an excellent academic experience. During the past semester, I requested that Vice Provost Pete Goldsmith convene a group to determine what specialized services our international students need. As a result of that group's recommendations, I am working to augment our advising, writing lab, and English as a Second Language services. I am exploring the use of advisors with language skills and other best practices for this group. And as part of our strategic planning process, I have asked Hilary Kahn, a nationally recognized expert in the development of global competencies, to head a working group to recommend not only such best practices, but also visionary practices in integrating a global student body.

Just a few weeks ago, I went to Dublin to establish our new international partnership agreement with Trinity College. While I was there, I met with Ireland's president, Michael Higgins. He is an IU alumnus who received a Master of Arts in sociology here in 1967. I am amazed by how consistently our alumni are willing to open their doors to the IU Bloomington community, even doors to the home of a president. That's just one example of the caliber of the international students who come to IU Bloomington, and the influence they go on have throughout the globe. Just think of the kind of future we are building when we guide those students – future leaders from more than 100 countries – and the opportunities we are creating for students from the United States to build relationships around the globe. We must do this with intentionality and integrity and a commitment to the highest standards of education for these students.

2. Fulfilling the Commitment of Shared Goals: International Experiences, Undergraduate Experiences, and Internships, Through Integrated and Holistic Advising

The large number of international students on our campus is matched, at least in scope, by the large number of our domestic students who study abroad. As the result of sustained efforts to assure that our students have the opportunity to experience other cultures directly, IU Bloomington is now 7^th in the nation in the number of students who study abroad. The provision of international experiences is in keeping with the historically global nature of this campus, and with the commitment to the shared goals for undergraduate experiences identified as part of the general educational curriculum.

Appropriately for a campus like ours, those shared goals include not only the possibility of an international study experience, but also the possibility of an undergraduate research experience, and the possibility of an opportunity to explore different career options through internships. While we know how many of our students study overseas, we do not have benchmarks on undergraduate research and internships for our undergraduates.

As part of our strategic plan, I am asking the undergraduate education group to develop a set of benchmarks for these activities and then to commit our campus to making available one of these experiences – either study abroad, undergraduate research, or an internship – for every single undergraduate student who studies with us.

In order to make such a promise real, and to make possible on-time completion for our students, we will have to up our game around advising, both academic and career. Numerous faculty committees are now joined by the IU Student Association's Voice Report, which I received last week, in calling for broad reforms of advising on this campus. In particular, every constituency that has looked at advising has recommended that advising be more holistic, more integrated across the campus, and more student-centered.

This year, I have taken two steps to respond to these voices. The first is to provide academic advisors with a new and powerful set of tools, which will be deployed within the next few weeks. As part of an 11-university pilot project, Indiana University will partner with Education Advisory Board in a Student Success Collaborative. This initiative brings the power of analytics, using campus data going back ten years, to advisors' fingertips. It will provide academic advisors with a powerful new set of predictive tools to help students navigate the complex terrain of our academic offerings and to make better, more informed choices that will lead to quicker success. This tool will also permit academic leaders to see exactly where bottlenecks to student success are occurring, and where programs lack the capacity to provide qualified students access to classes and majors. This tool, coupled with the ongoing and excellent work of the FLAGS project, will help all of us move to a more integrated and holistic approach to academic advising.

Second, Vice Provost M.A. Venkataramanan and the IU Leadership program at Kelley have led a group that has made a set of concrete recommendations about advising, one that is sensitive to the moral imperative of service to our students and the need to work closely the schools. The group's broad goals were to:

• Provide opportunities for individualized exploration of academic interests and career pathways;
• Enhance the development of skills for self-authorship; and
• Support the successful attainment of career and life aspirations.

The group has recommended a common framework for academic and career advising which includes the integration of faculty at high-impact points in students' lives. The common framework will make possible the commitment, mentioned earlier, to a set of internship, international, and research experiences for our students, and includes powerful recommendations for an integrated, comprehensive system that has strong ties to career guidance. I will be sharing those recommendations with the deans later this week, and will ask the deans to address them in their budget narratives this year.

The Imperative of Program Transformation

Nothing has been more exhilarating than the transformation of our programs through the vision outlined in New Academic Directions. As a result of the faculty actions set in motion by that report, this campus has seen a remarkable amount of academic transformation. In the last year, we have seen the creation of the School of Public Health, which will have an immediate impact on the health of Indiana citizens and indeed the health of those around the globe. We have seen the School of Continuing Studies transformed into an overarching Online Initiative, which I will describe shortly. We have seen the organization of the School of Global and International Studies, which will ignite Bloomington's long tradition of global engagement in service of solving some of the most interesting and difficult strategic problems facing our country and the world.

We will see the merger of the School of Informatics and the School of Library and Information Science this July, permitting the development of path-breaking programs in network science that span not only throughout that school but also into the College. The Integrated Program in the Environment has its first director, the outstanding scientist Jeffrey White, and its faculty members have developed a new degree program in sustainability studies that will permit us to study and learn about the critical questions facing the environment in interdisciplinary and rigorous ways.

Other parts of new academic directions are now underway. Professor Kate Rowold will chair a group exploring an integrated program in design, which could leverage the outstanding Center on Art + Design in Columbus with the expertise of many faculty in many of our campus’s schools. I expect to constitute another group to do the same kind of thinking about the arts on this campus, which are among our greatest treasures. And, in the spirit of program renewal in New Academic Directions, I have asked Professor Robert Sherwood to head a group exploring how to leverage campus resources in the STEM fields (or, on this campus, STIM – Informatics, not Engineering), including how best to support the College and the School of Education in working together on the preparation of more STIM teachers.

I have provided additional funds to the departments that work most closely with women scientists for their professional development. I have worked with a wonderful group of women faculty and staff, as well as Dean Bobby Schnabel in Informatics and First Lady Laurie McRobbie, to launch a Center for Excellence in Women and Technology that will leverage all the campus's great strengths in this area. I have asked Dean Matt Auer and Associate Dean John Lucaites, and an outstanding group of faculty, to make recommendations about an Integrated Program in the Humanities. And, under the direction of Carolyn Walters, Associate Dean of the Libraries, and a faculty advisory group headed by Professor Ruth Stone, I have reorganized scholarly publishing by combining IU Press and a number of other scholarly initiatives. That group will host a series of campus discussions on the future of scholarly publishing, beginning this week.

Finally, this fall, I asked a group of faculty from the Department of Telecommunications and the Department of Communication and Culture in the College, and the School of Journalism, to state a bold vision for the future of those programs. I take judicial notice, if you will allow me a phrase from my old life, of the fact that the fields surrounding both the study of communication and the practice of journalism are in periods of rapid change. The study of journalism on this campus is 100 years old, and the practice of journalism is critical to a working democracy. But the field of journalism, in particular, has been the subject of numerous recent calls for renewal, from a major Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education to an Open Letter to America's University Presidents from the leaders of six major foundations supporting journalism education, insisting that journalism education needs reform. [2]

The committee's report, which was shared with the campus in December for comment, calls for the creation of a new school to encompass these related fields of study. That school would mount a comprehensive undergraduate degree with multiple concentrations and opportunities for specialization, and with the possibility of expanding into a set of professional masters degrees. The report made a number of recommendations about potential administrative structures. Finally, the report recommended that the faculty of the school be brought together physically, and that there be investments in new faculty in a variety of areas, from emerging new media to film production.

I received comments on the report from almost every faculty member of Communications and Culture, Telecommunications, and Journalism, in addition to numerous comments from alumni and other faculty members. In addition, I have sought out the views of student leaders. I have analyzed carefully the history of student demand for the existing programs, both at the major and the credit hour level, the success of each program in attracting graduate students, and the potential employment opportunities for graduates of a combined program. I note both the strength of the report's recommendations on undergraduate education, and the need for additional work on understanding and assuring the promise of our production faculty and facilities, as well as additional work on the parts of the program involving graduate programs. Finally, I take special note, as did many of the comments, of the singular strength in film studies on this campus, and the possibilities for film production that could be supported by our astonishing film archives and the IU Cinema.

I have concluded that the programs have a bright future and will best serve students if they are combined into a single school, if the campus can invest the appropriate resources in facilities and faculty, and if the departments can repurpose their existing resources away from administrative overhead and towards their shared academic mission. I will make such a recommendation to the faculty, the president, and the Trustees later this spring. To facilitate the former, I am making available Franklin Hall, at the gateway to the campus, to house this combined school, with the understanding that we need to think carefully about the production facilities that are currently available. With respect to assuring that revenues go to academic programs and not administrative costs, I will recommend that this new school be within the College, and structured in much the same way as the new School of Global and International Studies.

I deeply appreciate both the good faith and the imagination with which the committee approached its work, the difficulty of that work, and the deeply substantive and thoughtful comments I have received from so many faculty members since the report was disseminated in December. There is much work to do, and I pledge to do it in a transparent and collaborative way. But the courageous commitment with which faculty have approached each of the parts of New Academic Directions has demonstrated when we remain steadfast in keeping our focus on the academic mission, even under conditions of uncertainty, we arrive at transformative answers.

The Imperative of the Global Century

I want to finish with the imperative of this global century. In August, the President announced the IU Online initiative. For Bloomington, that initiative focused initially on developing online masters and graduate certificate programs, which would permit our specialized programs to seek a wider audience. This spring, through IU Leadership at Kelley and under the direction of Vice Provost Venkataramanan, representatives of all the schools developed a set of degree and certificate initiatives, which they presented to me last week. Excitingly, many of these initiatives center on working with and through our international partnerships, primarily in India.

The development of these international partnerships, now numbering in the hundreds, has stretched from the days of Herman Wells through the work of President McRobbie, and deeply into the schools. Next week, I join many other academic leaders from Indiana University in opening our first international gateway office, in Gurgaon, India, near New Delhi. This step for Indiana University and for our campus is personally deeply meaningful. As dean of the law school, I worked with faculty here and in India for the last several years to develop relationships to further the school's educational and research mission. This facility is a tangible incarnation of our University's deep and historical commitment to global engagement, and will serve as a conduit for programs, research, and alumni of our campus to connect directly with us back home in Bloomington.

Conclusion: The Imperative of Aligning our Resources and our Strategies

I will end with a promise and with thanks. It is imperative that we continue to think strategically, and to develop a serious campus plan, to assure that we are putting our resources most effectively behind our best ideas. Such a plan will also assure those who support us, both at the state level and privately, that we have thought rigorously and well about our future. I promise that the development of this plan will be inclusive and faculty-driven, and will involve faculty governance bodies, both at the campus and the school levels.

And I close with deep gratitude. I have been in Provost's office for a year, and have been Provost for about six months. During that time, I have received the most gracious, tolerant, and good-humored support from everyone, from our students to our staff and especially our faculty. It is a privilege to serve such an extraordinary place, and all of you.

Thank you.