Good morning.
I'm Warren Burggren.
I'm the Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs
here.
Joining me is Christy Crutsinger, who
is our Vice Provost for Faculty Success,
and other duties as assigned, it seems quite often.
I'm really pleased to welcome you here.
I had not quite expected to see the entire ballroom
full of people who are so keen and eager to move forward
with instruction of the highest quality.
And I'd have to say that the students in our university
are in good hands, just looking around the room this morning.
Mark Wardell mentioned one of the bold goals that we have--
and there's a little flier here that I've got.
You'll see these around.
You'll hear about our strategic plan on four bold goals.
And the four bold goals, as Dr. Wardell mentioned,
the first one is to offer the best undergraduate experience
in Texas.
The second is to offer the best, or to excel at research
and graduate education.
And we merge those two together.
The third goal is to be effective and efficient,
as we are stewards of state money, and indeed your money.
And the fourth goal is to be relevant,
to the partner up with the community around us,
and that can include the international community,
to make relevant what we do in both the classroom, the studio,
the laboratory, and the field.
Dr. Wardell emphasized that first bold goal.
And the emphasis here might be on bold.
Some of you, a few of you, as I saw some of our faculty
administrators do a year ago when we introduced this goal,
really?
Warren, you want to offer the best undergraduate programs
in the state of Texas?
That's pretty much a stretch goal, isn't it?
My response to that these aren't four easy goals.
These aren't four simple goals.
These are four bold goals.
But the truth is that no other university
in the state of Texas is making that claim,
that they're going to offer the best undergraduate education.
Now in a way, it's a little bit simplistic,
because as you know, some students
will want to come here, because they want to really extract
as much intellectually as they can
out of their, hopefully, four years here.
Some want to come here and be in an altered state for as much
of that period of time as they can.
Some want to come here and see winning football
teams, and basketball teams, and women's volleyball teams,
as do I, as I hope you do as well.
But what that constitutes, that best undergraduate program
is going to differ from student to student.
But what is clear, what is clear,
is that the consistent part is the high quality of teaching.
Our goal is to be a National Research University of 45,000
students, and I'm going to spend just a minute
talking about the role of the interaction of research
and teaching.
And that might seem like a curious thing
to do at a forum that is so focused on helping you develop
your teaching skills.
But in fact, there's an old paradigm.
You may have heard this-- teaching versus research.
You may have heard professors say this in the past,
or you may have read it in academic settings, or something
like that.
The idea that teaching and research can't cohabit,
or at least if you really excel in teaching,
then as an institution, or perhaps as an individual,
what happens is that the research aspect diminishes,
or vice versa.
We recently compiled a list of the top 50 research
programs, research universities, in the United States,
and independently, the top 50 undergraduate programs.
Interestingly enough, it was a little bit more
difficult to generate the undergraduate programs.
Everybody seems to be focused on ranking the research
universities.
But the remarkable thing to us was that about 30
of the universities that appeared on one list
also appeared on the other list.
In other words, you can do it all.
You could be a top research university
and offer top undergraduate and graduate programs.
So that is very much something that we want to emulate here.
We want to appear on both of those lists
as soon as we possibly can.
Now interestingly enough, as many
of you as graduate students are thinking about,
this yin and yang, this conflict,
certainly in terms of time, it might be a conflict.
But let me just share with you a recent study
by David Feldman that appeared in Science a year ago.
And it was entitled "Graduate Students Teaching Experiences
Improve Their Methodological Research Skills."
And I'm going to quote from this.
"Students who both taught and conducted research--"
and for this purpose, we're going to define research
very broadly.
Performing artistry, visual arts,
a wide variety of activities of scholarship.
"Students who both taught and conducted research
demonstrate significantly greater improvement
in their abilities to generate testable hypotheses
and design valid experiments," writes the lead author.
"These results indicate that teaching experience can
contribute substantially to the improvement of your research
skills."
So don't get out into the classroom, into the laboratory,
face these eager undergraduate students who
want to learn from you, and be thinking in the back
your mind, man, I could be doing something else right now.
You are doing something else right now.
And that is that you're improving your ability
to focus, to do critical thinking,
and to bring your intellect to bear on your scholarship
program as you go forward.
Your job is not ensuring that teaching
is done-- every instructor does that, of course--
but rather, that student learning is achieved.
And that's kind of an odd way to flip it,
because we're talking about teaching, teaching skills,
and so on.
But your goal is to make sure that the students are learning.
I'm going to finish with just a couple of thoughts.
The first is that-- and people who know me around campus--
I think particularly the faculty know that I go off on this riff
fairly frequently about what you do that first day in class.
And what has been done too often in the past is that you show up
in the assigned time, and hand out a syllabus,
say here's the syllabus, read it, we'll see you next week,
or we'll see you next Wednesday, or we'll see you whenever.
We've had focus groups with our students.
And our students, our undergraduate students--
we know our graduate students are getting better.
Our undergraduate students have had
an increase in SAT points of 11 points over the last two years.
These are the best students we've ever had.
And you know what?
They're making demands that we've never
seen before of the instructors in the classroom.
And one of the things that we know from focus groups
is that these students are saying, teach us.
Help us learn.
And do it on the first day.
We're here.
We're eager to learn.
Well, there's going to be someone asleep in the back row.
But generally, they are there and eager to learn.
So we have put together a series of exercises,
and you may or may not hear about them today,
in which you can actually challenge your students
in a meaningful way, and set the tone for the rest
of the course of the semester.
And then finally, I'm going to end up on kind
of a somber note in a way.
There was a study that came out a few years ago
that talked about the top two reasons
why freshman drop out of college.
The first reason was that after that first year,
they failed to make a single friend.
Now, that's not your responsibility,
to help your students make friends.
We have people who are concerned with that,
our Vice President for Student Affairs, for example.
However, the second reason, this is something
you can do something about.
The second top reason why freshman drop out of college
is they fail to be inspired by a single professor.
They haven't been inspired by anybody
who's been in front of them in the classroom.
Isn't that a sad indictment?
I hope none of the students that were surveyed
went to the University of North Texas,
because your challenge, our goal,
and what we live every day is to try and be that inspiration.
I remember a lecture one time, and I swear to God,
I saw a lightbulb about a foot high
appear above the student who was sitting in the front row.
I remember that I cherish that.
And I think that is your goal, is
to try and be the one who generates
that light bulb every time you get--