Gee outlines challenges facing faculty, University

Thank you very much, Ken. I appreciate all of you being here, and I appreciate the judicious nature of your business before the Senate.

Gee's five challenges to the Faculty Assembly

1) "We must renew our commitment to the undergraduate experience at Vanderbilt."
2) "We must reinvent graduate education at Vanderbilt."
3) "We must re-integrate professional education with the intellectual life of the University."
4) "Our fourth challenge, and the one which will enable so many of the others, is for us to reexamine and restructure economic models."
5) "We must renew Vanderbilt's covenant with the community."

I also want to thank the Blair Quartet, too, for their work and for their impressive performance, and I am glad that this assembly was able to serve as a showcase for them necessarily so because they are faculty. Today is, of course, about celebrating your work as a faculty. It is your day.

I want to thank all of you for making Constance and me feel so welcome to be here. I also want to give special thanks to my predecessors, Chancellors Wyatt and Heard, without whose efforts I would not have the opportunity to talk to you today, and for them I am grateful.

I have had the great good fortune of getting to know many of you over the past seven months. For those of you with whom I am not yet acquainted, I hope that this is the beginning of a long relationship and the introduction of a conversation which will take place over many years. I have much to say to you this afternoon. I know that we will have much to say to each other over those years.

I want to introduce several people to you today. The first is my spouse, Constance Gee. I introduce her to you not only as my partner but also as new faculty. She is an Associate Professor at Peabody College. Now, she is important to me, not just for the obvious reasons, but also for my position here, for my duties as a Chancellor. She is herself a teacher and a scholar, and through her I get to experience, to be reminded every day, what faculty life is like, through her, I remember what demands are on you as well as what rewards come to you. Through her I am reminded always of the pressures of teaching and research that rest on all of you. Constance, you are here. Will you please stand and be recognized by your colleagues?

I want to introduce to you as well David Williams, who will serve as vice chancellor, general counsel and secretary of the University. I introduce him to you today in his other capacity, as Professor of Law, and as a new faculty member at Vanderbilt. David, will you please stand and be recognized?

[Applause]

I haven't heard such a round of applause from a faculty group since I announced to the Brown faculty I was leaving.

I also have been privileged to meet with many of Vanderbilt's new faculty.

I met with them over lunch last Friday at the Wyatt Center, but I know all of you have not yet had a chance to greet them. New members of the faculty, please stand to be recognized. Will they all please stand to be recognized? Welcome, your new colleagues and I salute you.

Ladies and gentlemen, today, I am here to celebrate who you are, and what you have accomplished, and what we have accomplished and what we will accomplish together. This assembly is a celebration that will begin our ongoing conversation.

Before I start, let me note that this is only the third time in 40 years this faculty has had an opportunity to hear from a new Chancellor. That of course is very averment to me, but I will also say to you that this is a very special moment. And because I have decided not to have an inauguration, all of you have made me feel very welcome as you have Constance, I have much to say. I will try to say it as expeditiously as I can, but nonetheless, I think you should expect from a new chancellor to hear who I am, what I am, what my values are what my expectations are of myself and of you and our relationship and where I see the future of this University. So sit back and relax and enjoy yourself. If you have to leave, I will not be offended at all.

One of the first mistakes I ever made as a university president was to take the advice of Clark Kerr, former president of the University of California, who stated to me that a university president should not become too involved with the university. That advice is erroneous, and I was wrong to take it. I believe a university president -- a Chancellor, now -- which by the way, is a term that I am still having difficulty coming to terms with--my wife calls me your highness I might note --The University Chancellor must have passion about the University. And I do not want to use language irresponsibly, so let me stress the fact that "passion" at its root means suffering and agony. Not that I am in agony as we speak. But I want to be precise about that fact. If I feel passion for the University, if I feel that passion for the University is a requirement for my work, that means I will be so deeply involved in this school that its successes and misfortunes are my own, that I feel them as deeply as my own. I am inextricably bound to it, as much as if we were strung together by nervous tissue. I have to believe unequivocally in the institution to which I belong, and I want you to know clearly that I do.

The practical demands of that relationship are most of all that I listen to you, and listen carefully. Our relationship requires that we learn from each other, and work in a constant interchange and dialogue with each other.

That is particularly important because I know that in many ways my experience within this institution will differ from your own. Even as Constance is a day-to-day physical reminder to me of the life of a faculty member, I am not she, although she is nothing but frank with me. And even though I stand before you as a member of the faculty, I realize that despite my best efforts to avoid it, I live in rarefied air. I realize that although an administration may exist for decades, senior faculty have invested the totality of their professional lives in Vanderbilt. The chairs we awarded earlier are a sign that honors that investment. I have to listen to you, in order to do what is best for the University, and I will never be able to do that if I live in a castle surrounded by a moat that only a privileged few are allowed to cross. I will not be able to serve this University if I am inaccessible to you. I intend over the course of my time here to carry on a conversation with you.

That conversation will take place in many different forums. It has already begun.

I have met with you individually; I have spoken with you in small groups. This assembly continues those dialogues and encourages more. Everything I say to you this afternoon, every single occasion of our speaking together is a part of that greater conversation. I want you to feel able to debate me, and to disagree with me. I give you permission to do that. I encourage you to do it, and I expect you to do it, and after that dissent I expect us to work together on a common course of action.

I want our time together here to be marked by informed debate and by community responsibility. That means that you are responsible, just as I am responsible, although I take the blame, for what happens at this institution. I believe in faculty governance. Let me just say that again. I believe in faculty governance. I believe in faculty focus. Change in an institution like ours must be centrally driven, but not centralized, and it will never, ever come unless it is faculty-supported and faculty-led. This administration will be neither hard-hearted nor hardheaded. It will not overlook the quality, excellence, experience, or wisdom of this faculty, but will embrace it. If you have been waiting for a greater chance at involvement, it is here, and your responsibility now is to seize it and to participate fully in it. You have every right to passion and for this University.

Vanderbilt's bylaws require that the University's faculty meet at such times as it may appoint or at the call of the Chancellor so I call you here today so that you may be honored and celebrated. We meet at the beginning of the academic year to be reminded of our purpose as a body, of our duty as teachers and scholars. The Faculty Assembly calls us to examine ourselves professionally. So how do we do that? And, what questions do we ask?

I have observed that at Vanderbilt teaching and research are balanced more accurately than at most schools, which compare to us. Excellence in teaching is even a requirement for tenure, here. Often, however, our teaching duties are viewed as a sacrifice: "How great we would be if only we did not have to teach!" I want to stress to you that in no way are teaching and research antagonistic. Teaching activates research. Research feeds teaching. The two sustain and inform one another. An excellent example of this occurs in the freshman seminars sponsored by the College of Arts and Science. In these seminars, faculty work deeply and attentively with small groups of freshmen on interdisciplinary research topics. These seminars exemplify what a university should always be: a place where teaching is viewed not as a load, but as an opportunity.

It has been said in the past that research is the mind of the University and teaching its heart. One is provoked to ask what this model implies. Are students taught without the full intellectual engagement of the teacher? Is research performed without compassion, or without the aim of service to the community? This model suggests a university divided, not integrated. We must seek for a more holistic approach. Teaching and research are not mutually exclusive; they are mutually inclusive. We must perfect a balance within the University. We have to create an atmosphere in which all faculty members are encouraged to take seriously both their teaching and their research, an atmosphere in which teaching is seen as a form of scholarship. If it proves necessary for us to reshape the reward structure, to redefine what is meritorious scholarship, then that is what we will do.

As we create a vision for Vanderbilt's next era, we must extrapolate what that mission could be, from what is taught at this University. And we must ask ourselves what message we send to the world through our actions. Ladies and gentlemen, a critical question that has been asked me by some of you and that is what is our ethic as an institution? What model do we present to our students? Nothing we do is nonacademic. Let me try to rephrase that in the positive -- Everything, and I believe this deeply, everything we do at this University is academic. The University is an object-lesson for students. It is, or it should be, a Utopian community, based on the most enlightened teaching on social organization and business organization. We must examine whether we are consistent with the humanitarian principles we teach. Do we match them? Do we value lifelong learning enough to show it through our policies, especially those policies that affect support staff? Are we exploitative or humane?

Everything we do is academic. Everyone who works here is engaged in an academic endeavor. I simply would urge you never to utter the word "nonacademic" on this campus, because it does not apply here. We have to treat all who work here as both teachers and leaders, no matter what they do. The staff that supports us, without whom we could not accomplish our work, and the students, for whom our work is done, are our partners in this academic effort. The gardeners who mow the lawns and trim the bushes and maintain the trees do all that work so that you will have a beautiful landscape in which to think high thoughts. The secretaries who send your faxes do so that you will have more time for your intellectual pursuits. So many people work in so many ways to allow this University to perform its function.

An academic community clearly will not be one unless we value all of its members and unless we understand that respect for the individual is the only way to earn respect for the University and for its intellectual values. What is the purpose of learning humanities, if one's basic humanity is compromised? What is the purpose of studying ethics if one cannot expand those ethics into an imaginative and generous sympathy with other individuals? What is the use of studying novels, if one cannot apply one's learned experience of imaginary lives to her understanding of the lives of the real people around her? What is the use of theories of empowerment or diversity or multiculturalism if we cannot act on them in our own community? We must extend the theoretical into the practical. We can do so much with what we know.

If we can agree on a list of first principles, and then come to discover that we are engaging in actions that are inconsistent with those principles, then we should desist from those actions. If we discover principles that the University is not helping to maintain, develop and extend, then we should broaden the scope of our activities accordingly.

I have listened carefully over the past few months to the concerns you have shared with me about the future of Vanderbilt. Today I am able to share with you my own viewpoint, which has been informed by your work and your views, which have ranged, by the way, from the benign to the revolutionary.

I emphasize your participation so much because a true learning community demands full participation. It requires strategic compromise and cooperation. In our case, it requires that we restructure how we communicate and interact, how we conduct business and how we collaborate with each other. We cannot succeed in this partnership unless we are responsive to each other. We have to leave our individual preconceptions and predilections at the gates, and see ourselves as contributing parts of a greater whole, if we want to maintain our standard of excellence. We must rise above our individual and departmental concerns, and put our interest in Vanderbilt's future ahead of our own interests. Rather, we have to make it our own interest. I want us to sound to the wider world like a chorus, rather than a cacophony.

I want us to sound to each other like a chorus, rather than a cacophony. I want us to share the joy in achievements everywhere in the University. Any achievement without the joy of relationship is empty indeed.

What I am describing is a difficult balance to achieve. It demands of us that we unite under one shared sensibility. I will not be fearful of encouraging a moral climate that elicits a respect for the human spirit, for honor, for law, for the pursuit of knowledge and the life of learning, and for the human capacity of self-transcendence.

I cannot avoid advocating those values for fear of offending someone. There is a greater danger in having no motivating value, in being nebulous. The danger lies in having no direction or nothing to get our minds around as members of this community.

It is imperative that we work together in a spirit of cooperation and resolve. We must have unifying ideas, and an identity with each other. We will learn to celebrate our successes and our victories together, and we will get over backbiting and assigning blame. We will learn to treat one another with dignity and civility and common sense.

This commitment to a unified vision, a vision of unity for the whole University, should never prohibit a commitment to diversity and pluralism, alternative views and dissent. If we are unable to have free and open discussions, free and open debates, then we have no right to call ourselves a University. However, we need to develop a way to celebrate and encourage pluralism and the alternative view without losing our focus.

I realize that at the moment we have almost too much fragmentation on this campus, with academic departments and colleges divided from one another. This is a negative pluralism: a pluralism of parallel lines that never meet, parallel universes that never intersect. Our colleges often exist so independently of one another that they are not even bothered by one another, and that is no community. There is no unity in that model, but simply a habit of being left alone and leaving others alone. It is a vertical model, in which each substantive area works exclusively with itself.

This fragmentation can easily occur at a private research university like ours, where faculty are deeply committed to and passionate about their disciplines. The price of such a concentration, however, can be that we end up limited, limited in what we are able to see, and in the ways we are able to think about the very subjects we love so much.

I am reminded of a documentary I saw once about zebras, which showed a herd of Grevy's zebras (the largest species of zebra) intersecting and mixing with a herd of a smaller species of zebra. Not once did the two herds acknowledge each other. Even though they were all zebras, they were of different species and so of no importance to one another. It was as if the two types of zebra did not even see each other. Well, our colleges and departments and divisions are too often like these herds of zebra: coexisting, but never interacting, with faculty members from different colleges passing one another on the quadrangles as if they existed on separate planes. This, by the way, is not always by choice, I know, but we have to remind ourselves that we are all colleagues, that our colleagues are not only those faculty in our own department but faculty across the University.

This fragmentation, this disconnect, this Balkanization, has been brought about in part by our financial models, but again we have to interrogate our own motives and ask ourselves how often we hide behind Every-Tub-on-its-Own-Bottom, and let it serve as an excuse for our failure to accomplish a goal. How far have we internalized ETOB, how much have we made it part of our fundamental thought structure?

We have to learn to think universally, and not parochially. We have to be the University; we have to be the University, all of us. We must use a horizontal model, rather than a vertical one. We have to accelerate the integration of departments across the intellectual life of this University.

We are favored with such a remarkable geography. I think of it as an intellectual sociology. So much is jammed onto this campus, this wonderfully complex organism. Today, Constance and I walked, within 10 minutes, we walked from arts and science buildings, past the Law School, past the Divinity School, past the Owen School of Management, past the School of Nursing, past the School of Engineering, all the way to this remarkable Medical Center.

We are at this University afforded such unique opportunities for intellectual synergy because of this. Our campus is a great intellectual laboratory. We have to take advantage of such interconnectedness. We can be symbiotic. But we are often kept from each other -- and why is that? Why do we not function more as the marvelous unit that we could be?

We must support more fully efforts like the University Chaplain's Mentoring Program, which assigns senior faculty as mentors to junior faculty of another discipline. The Chaplain's Office also sponsors a Monday Lunch Group that helps bring faculty from disparate disciplines together into common conversations. Such work deals directly with community-building. It enriches scholarly discourse by making scholars aware of other work that may support or refine their own, and which they would never meet if they remained exclusively within their own departments.

Interdisciplinary centers like the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities could be expanded to serve and represent a variety of colleges. Administration should encourage such groups and such efforts, be they as informal as a brown-bag lunch, or as institutionalized as the Robert Penn Warren Center. We could institute a system of reward and recognition for scholars who bridge disciplines.

I do believe that Vanderbilt is often encumbered by past success and the sometimes ponderous weight of tradition on this campus. That has to do with economic tradition as well as social and intellectual tradition. The comfort of tradition is a catalyst for nothing, and we need to reclaim a sense of urgency, to stop reacting. We must create a new tradition, a tradition of change, a tradition that values change as important.

We have to liberate energies that have been imprisoned by our motives, procedures, habits and thoughts. Universities are places of energy, but not of energy expended to maintain the status quo. We have to open up possibilities for change.

I will respect the traditions of this University, but I will also harness and nurture new ideas and new traditions. Vanderbilt has great strengths that must be sustained, but the same time we must identify new opportunities and move swiftly to place Vanderbilt at the forefront of intellectual life in this country. We must have a bold and clear understanding of what our future encompasses.

I know that each of you wonders, of course, what will come of the rhetoric of change: the reviews, the plans, the ideas. Each action we take will be performed lovingly, and out of respect for our academic and institutional heritage, but it is time for us to look ahead, and begin to consolidate, reconfigure and prepare for the future while respecting the past and furthering Vanderbilt's mission. We will be taking actions that transform. We must develop vision in order to do this. We must have the courage to make strategic choices.

We must learn to grow by substitution, rather than accretion. Last year, the "Lehrer News Hour" featured a story on some automobile designers that had completely redesigned the way an automobile works. Not just the exterior of the car, but its inner mechanics. The interior design was so simple -- a cylinder around a cylinder, and the car was moved by their spinning. Under the hood was clean and white, with only two large parts, spinning. The car could drive forever on very little fuel. One of the designers pointed out that there was no reason for this car not to be put into production, that it was so much cleaner and safer and more efficient than the cars we use, which can break in a thousand different ways. The crux of the feature was that if cars were redesigned today, with our present technology, there is no way any engineer would ever build an engine that looks or functions like the monster that powers our present automobiles. That engine has developed by accretion, by problem-solving along the way. If someone were asked to identify the basic function of a car, he would say, "To help us move from place to place swiftly and safely." He would not say, "To burn a lot of petrol." Why not use the model which allows the function to be accomplished with the most grace?

We have to realize that academic priorities should be the creative driving force of our identity, and the organization of the University should reflect those priorities. It should be clearer than it is, and simpler than it is, and its structure should more accurately reflect its function.

I have had almost seven months to gain a great sense of this University, of where we are and where we must now concentrate on going. I have come here and I have observed, and it is now time to move ahead. I am profoundly committed to the University, and that commitment allows me to say what I will say now.

We have every right to celebrate ourselves. We are justified in celebrating our achievements. I do not think that we do enough of that at this school. I do not think Vanderbilt realizes what a force it is, of positive change in the world, of intellectual service and community service (and do not think those are exclusive of one another by the way). We are better than we know we are, let me say that again, we are better than we know we are. Perhaps that is what keeps us going, that sense of second-best, of cultural hybridity, of inferiority. We tend to be driven by a negative elitism: if we are so good, then why are we here?

We have to stop using other institutions as our benchmarks, and set our own benchmark, in terms of where we are going. We have earned that right. We are a power everywhere on this campus. We have to claim all of our accomplishments as Vanderbilt's accomplishments, and realize what they mean: that they are remarkable accomplishments indeed, and that they belong to all of us, whether the signs outside our own buildings are brown or blue.

Let me just say, that I have the opportunity, and I won't go through all of these because of the time constraints, but I've had an opportunity to visit many of the laboratories, the libraries, much of what you are doing it is remarkable what this faculty is accomplishing. The pride and the integrity and the intellectual delivery are amongst the best in the world.

So the question is, how do we make the best better? How do we improve on something wonderful? First of all, by admitting that it is wonderful in the first place, and that its immense wonder has made us greedy for more. We have to arrive at a point at which we can say: we have come this far and done this well on a certain model -- what will allow us to reach even further and even faster?

As I have reviewed a number of issues over the past seven months, I have formulated five strategic goals for change at the University, which I believe are of the highest significance in our efforts to move Vanderbilt into its next stage of existence. The strategic planning process that is already under way is a blueprint for achieving these goals, which will serve as an architecture of change. These goals will drive us into all we are trying to accomplish. For today's presentation, I will call these five goals "challenges." They are challenges for you, for myself and for this University. They are challenges we shall meet in order to become what it is possible for us to be. They will initiate processes that will evolve us.

These are my ideas. This is my vision for what Vanderbilt can be, for what I believe our possibilities are, to which you will contribute through argument and discussion.

The first challenge I want to issue to you is this: we must renew our commitment to the undergraduate experience at Vanderbilt. We have to reaffirm the experience of undergraduates at Vanderbilt by interrogating not only the vitality and vigor of our curriculum but also the quality of our support for students: be it in advising, in the libraries, or more particularly in the facilities that support student life. Is the experience of an undergraduate student at Vanderbilt a total, immersed learning experience? If we are going to maintain a standard of excellence in an increasingly technocratic, globalized society, we have to do it by making Vanderbilt a dynamic, student-based learning community. We must be advocates for our students.

We have to ensure that our students do not believe that education stops as soon as they are out of class. Education is a continuum; it does not come in blocks of K through 12 then undergraduate and then graduate, and then learning stops; it is K through life.

The way we can convince students that this is so is by creating an exhilarating learning experience here that extends beyond formal classes. We must create an environment with lures that curiosity cannot resist, that are subtly driven to enhance and underline what a student is learning in her classes. This stimulus is not a distraction from her proper studies, but bolsters them. By creating an atmosphere that is intellectually exhilarating, we will foster in students a greater commitment to their studies, and will get them in the habit of pursuing learning their whole lives long. We will create a taste for learning, a hunger for it -- may I even suggest an addiction to it?

Students should be able to integrate their entire educational experience. They should be able to perceive it as relevant in the world and informed by the world. This is the only way they will be adequately prepared to lead within their communities, and in their society. We must coordinate and integrate academic and student services in a way that recognizes the complexity of undergraduate experience.

I want to congratulate efforts such as Project Dialogue and the McGill Weekly Seminars, which achieve that integration, which bring intellectual debate and discussion into our students' very residences. The Provost's Office is currently identifying elements in residential-college systems which bear emulating here at Vanderbilt. We must maintain and ensure excellent learning and living spaces and services which facilitate interaction among faculty, students and staff, and which serve the academic, social and recreational needs of all students.

And I do mean all students. There is a lack of diversity on this campus, one that is either ignored or resented or lamented. It is one that particularly for economic reasons has been difficult to overcome.

But I want to emphasize that diversity travels deeper than the skin. Diversity shows in thought. Diversity originates in culture, in economic background, and in religious background. We will work specifically to improve minority faculty and student recruitment and retention. We will strive to create a climate within the University that is multiracial, multicultural and multireligious. The only way to prepare our students to lead in the world, I believe, is to give them a place to grow in that reflects a multitude of colors, thinks from a multitude of perspectives and speaks a multitude of tongues.

We do them a disservice if the only differences they encounter occur in the texts they read. And we do ourselves a disservice as faculty if we do not create a student body that is intellectually diverse and therefore stimulating. The quality of a campus' intellectual life consists not only in the teacher's challenging the classroom but also in the classroom's challenging the teacher.

I want to promote a spirit of community that is based on respecting and understanding differences, building on commonalties, and living and learning together productively.

Our mission, must be, over all, the preservation, and transmission of knowledge.

We will have no compromises on this front. A symbiosis must be achieved, then, between teaching and learning. We have a nearly even balance in our student population between undergraduate and graduate students. I want us to be a University College with a capital "C" and a capital "U." We must balance the two.

To this end, I issue the second challenge: we must reinvent graduate education at Vanderbilt. We must ask ourselves how to strengthen our graduate programs.

How do we attract the best graduate students? How do we bring them here, make them want to be here, when we are competing with other schools, when we are competing with corporations that woo them away with real money? What do we have with which to decorate our bower? Can we identify other areas of support for graduate education? Exploring these questions requires a vigorous review of our doctoral programs and fundamental changes in some of those programs.

This exploration requires us to invest further in our faculty and to recruit and support without relent the best graduate students. Ladies and gentlemen, we are in a war for talent, plain and simple: not only for graduate students who will attract the most accomplished faculty, but also for faculty who will attract the most accomplished graduate students. We must focus on improving the quality and effectiveness of our research capacities. Enhancing our graduate program is essential not only to our University's national and international reputation, but also to the basic functioning of this University community. Research and graduate education truly do inform the quality of our teaching and through that, of our undergraduate programs.

We must determine the standards against which support for graduate programs is measured, as well as the process for developing those standards and allocation mechanisms. We must possess the will to make tough and sometimes conflicting choices. We must commit to the proposition that to strengthen graduate education at Vanderbilt will require choices, and that inevitably there will be reallocations that sustain and enhance the quality of the entire University. We may be even required to eliminate and consolidate some programs even as we strengthen others, even as we examine new, less traditional graduate opportunities, such as master's degree programs, and postdoctoral work.

Our University must function as an integrated body. It is imperative that we investigate the contribution of every organ in that body.

So that brings me to my third challenge. We must, therefore, reintegrate professional education with the intellectual life of the University. As you well know, our professional schools are magnificently successful, but we cannot allow them to remain isolated within the University. They are a part of us, and the work they do is to the credit of all of us. They extend the University directly into the outer world through their work and the work of their graduates, and it is through the professional schools that Vanderbilt's presence is most directly felt within the community.

Because of this engagement, they set high standards for the rest of the University.

They are leaders. Other schools may capitalize upon that leadership by working closely with them. Professional schools can share their resources and their faculty with graduate and undergraduate programs. For example: cross-listing and interdisciplinary work among the Law School, the Philosophy Department and the Department of Medicine could result in exciting new studies of ethics. Cross-disciplinary efforts only enhance the quality of each program involved. Why should undergraduates not have access to all of the best minds at Vanderbilt, regardless of their school affiliation? If we are truly a University College, we must make such movement possible. Drawing from our resources in our professional schools will integrate the University even further, making all schools richer.

It is easy to pay lip service to work across the disciplines, and across the colleges.

So therefore, our fourth challenge, and the one which will enable so many of the others, is for us to reexamine and restructure economic models.

Our budgetary system has made us very successful financially, but we must ask ourselves what barriers it creates to our intellectual life. Does it create, not only sociological divisions between departments that might otherwise be able to work more cooperatively, but an ethical confusion in identifying the mission of this University?

We are too tradition-based in our economic models. We rely too much on the old engine simply because it is what we are used to, even as we swear at it, overheated and steaming on the side of the road. We hide behind an ETOB model, with each division its own financial center -- a highly decentralized budgeting system. We use that as an excuse for our inability to do things: "You can't do that" how many times have I heard this? "You can't do that because the system won't allow it!" There is no system that will not allow us to do something.

We must have an open, transparent, integrated budget/planning process that will build confidence within our University community, that possesses the strengths of ETOB, but does not require as much negotiation, and speeds the distribution of necessary funds.

We have to streamline and improve the effectiveness of University operations (administrative and otherwise), and the first place to do this is within the budget. Our budget must be made more flexible, with intercollege transinstitutional support, with central funding available for investment in academic priorities that transcend school and departmental lines.

ETOB inhibits our sense of purpose. It confuses our mission, when we are preoccupied with cash flow and with who is picking up the check. I will seek your views on redesigning our economic models and on creating new resources and sources of revenue that are consistent with the University's mission.

I have also asked Vice Chancellor for Administration Lauren Brisky to chair an ongoing Vanderbilt Performance Review, which I have affectionately dubbed The Red Tape Reduction Effort. We are seeking to debureaucratize the functioning of the University while we study new economic models.

This investigation has drawn our attention to related issues. We simply cannot continue to raise tuition to ever-higher levels, or to create dollars at the margins, as a substitute for the comprehensive restructuring of the University's economic models. Our fundraising efforts must be strategic and not sporadic, and should support the academic priorities we determine in advance, and not the other way around. We simply cannot rely on tuition alone or overhead alone or fundraising alone as means of generating new revenue for the University.

As we formulate our mission, we must take into account this fifth challenge: we must renew Vanderbilt's covenant with the community. We are a private University, but we are in Nashville's, in the nation's, and in the world's service. We must rededicate our commitment to those larger communities, and continue to reach out to this wider world, to further our social mission.

We must perform a daily examination of conscience, to ask ourselves, are we making a difference in the world? What are our obligations to the communities that support us?

We have to admit that Vanderbilt is not always particularly known for our emphasis on service to the community. We do serve the community, in so many different ways, but the problem is that for some reason this is not visible from other points of view.

You have heard the phrase, "316 acres surrounded by reality," and the term "Vanderbubble," to describe the state of our interactions with the outside world.

And it is an outside world. One senses this in stepping off of hot, noisy, smelly West End and into our quiet green shades which buffer the noise from the surrounding streets so well. Inside, we are protected, which is good for thought, but bad for the view from West End. The shade and the fences render us at best invisible, at worst elitist and disengaged.

We have to make our good works visible. We have to publicize the good we do. We must promote our positive influence through strategic outreach to local, national and international presences. And we have to examine how we reward service at Vanderbilt.

Could service be honored with tuition relief? Or, with other kinds of distinctions?

What is the role of an institution like Vanderbilt? Why do students come here, when they can get an approximate education at Virginia or North Carolina? The great land-grant institutions were founded under the idea that students would return home after receiving their degrees to make their hometowns better places, to improve life there. While Vanderbilt does not operate under this model, we need to determine exactly what our commitment to the community looks like.

I believe it is this -- that we set standards for the world, that is the role of Vanderbilt-- to set standards for the word for other colleges to follow -- that we train students not simply to go home, but to be leaders, not just empty suits, not just walking jobs with no values. We set standards. We have the responsibility to lead change. Leadership means engaging people intellectually, empowering them and enabling them to make a difference in their own lives and the lives of others. If we could embody the notion of leadership in each individual within the institution, the character, chemistry and commitment of the University would alter substantially.

We must take advantage of our location in Nashville, Tenn. We must leave our isolation and our arrogance -- the "Vanderbubble" -- and be of our community, not just in it. We must become an engaged institution.

So, I will work to ensure that our days of being seen as isolated and arrogant are over.

The future of this University must be one of involvement with public issues and with public dialogue. People will come here because of what we have done to make our community more lively and interesting and creative.

We are obligated to work for the common good. We are obligated to contribute to the cultural resources of this community. We are obligated to bolster its economic vitality. We are obligated to link our intellectual resources and our research capacity to initiatives designed to improve the community's health and well-being.

Peabody students work greatly to improve the quality of local public schools. Doctors and nurses at the Medical Center work around the clock to care for the sick and the injured of our community. The new Ingram Concert Hall at Blair will be made available for public use. We should ask ourselves regularly how we can in the best conscience use the resources with which we are so richly endowed.

And now, to the final question, isn't that a lovely word? Why am I at Vanderbilt, and why are you? Why would we be at a small, elite, private, highly selective institution, when we are not really making a difference in the world? Or are we?

We have a particular role to play, and we need to remember this every day when we wake up. We are great because we are different. We are great because we think about ourselves differently. We have to be confident enough to set our own standards, although those standards should always be of excellence.

Our excellence is evident in our commitment to ethical conduct, in our honesty and in our integrity.

I do not think of Vanderbilt as a corporation. I am not a CEO. I am a teacher, and we are in our own unique business, that although able to benefit from corporate models, defies and transcends those models.

We have so much to achieve together.

I realize that I must earn your trust and support over time. I will be open to you, and candid with you, willing to listen to you and learn from you and, of course, I will take correction from you. I will communicate with you frequently, and I anticipate the same from you. I expect us to work as a team. You will participate in these processes of change. They will not, ladies and gentlemen, they will not come about through great reckonings in little rooms.

They are challenges to you, but to me as well, because you will check me against them, and I will myself every day, to see how well I have done.

So, ladies and gentlemen, we have the talent and the wisdom to experiment, to take calculated risks, to be practical, but also innovative and aware. We have it in our power to become the preeminent learning community of the future, a place where passionate deliberation creates resourceful solutions, where camaraderie nurtures tolerance, where enlightenment and logic minimize politics.

We have it in our power to be a place at the center of a revitalized American intellectualism for decades to come.

Well, I have had much to say this afternoon, and I realize that many of you do not have unlimited time, and that we have run long. I have had microphones set up for you, so that you could ask me questions, but I know that I need to let you go. So, I will leave the microphones standing and I will leave them open as a symbol that our conversation will continue. I thank you for your presence and your patience. And I thank you for the honor to serve Vanderbilt. Thank you very much.

The Faculty Assembly passed four proposals to change the composition of the Faculty Senate:
1) increase the total number of elected senators from 47 to 48;
2) increase the number of elected senators representing the School of Medicine from 11 to 13;
3) decrease the number of elected senators representing the College of Arts and Science from 16 to 15; and
4) cap the number of elected senators representing any one school or college at no more than one-third of the total number of elected senators. These proposals were put forth by the Senate Affairs Committee and were accepted by the Faculty Senate April 6, 2000. These changes will take effect with the Senate spring 2001 elections.