2008 Convocation
August 20, 2008
Northern Michigan University
Les Wong, President

“Circumstances may cause interruptions and delays, but never lose sight of your goal. Desire is the key to motivation, but it’s the determination and commitment to an unrelenting pursuit of your goal – a commitment to excellence – that will enable you to attain the success you seek.”   -- Mario Andretti, world-famous race car driver

Download audio of the 2008 Convocation address (mp3)

Thank you, Dr. Koch for the nice introduction.   And thank you Dr. Poe for your comments as well.  I want to welcome two members of the Board of Trustees who are here today, Mr. Jack LaSalle, and Mr. Steve Adamini.  The Board’s support of Northern has been clear and strong.  Phyllis and I appreciate the support of the Board, the university community and the kind people of Marquette County and the special people of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.  One of the defining characteristics of a truly special university is a healthy and robust relationship between the university and its hometown.  Here at Northern, we appreciate and respect this relationship and we remind ourselves every day that our relationship is a reciprocal one.  Our students, faculty, staff and programs like the Superior Edge reflect our commitment to be a part of our hometown in big and responsible ways. 

I am fortunate to be entering my 5th year as the President of Northern Michigan University. In the jargon of our students, this is my “super senior” year.  But there is one big difference.  We do expect our super seniors to graduate and move on to new adventures.  I have no plans to graduate in the sense of having to leave Northern, and I hope to continue to be a part of the wonderful progress and momentum this university is experiencing.  A walk around campus and around the bustling activity of Marquette and one is hard pressed to believe that we are part of the struggles of Michigan.  But we are, and we continue to be seriously affected by the economic struggles of the state.  My comments today will be a mix of NMU’s recent accomplishments, our path forward and the challenges that remain in our way.  I remain confident in our collective ability to excel, to continue to do “the right thing” and to stand proud of the effort of faculty and staff to prepare our students for a lifetime of learning and leadership.

When I speak of the bustle of the town, I do mean more than just Northern.  Considerable activity among our neighbors bodes well for Marquette, the U.P. and especially Northern.  And it is especially important for me to make mention of this work today.

The commitment by CCI to restore and sustain the Empire and Tilden mines will protect and create hundreds of jobs.   CCI’s related effort in renewable fuels means more jobs, and when the Kobe Steel project begins, even more jobs.  I want to commend CCI for offering a bright and positive glimpse of the future.  NMU stands ready to assist and support this effort.

I want to congratulate Bell Memorial in Ishpeming.  CEO Rick Ament and his staff are preparing for a new hospital to serve the medical needs of the west end.  They are immensely proud of their project and I am excited for Bell and share its pride in delivering excellent services.  The community spirit supporting that effort is pure U.P.

Our next door neighbors, Marquette General Health Systems, are redefining themselves in one of the most competitive and expensive industries in America.  Its CEO, Gary Muller and his team are to be commended for the tough and difficult decisions they have made and will make over the next year.   I have been impressed with the effort and join them in seeing a bright and successful future.

And I offer a special “welcome home” to Ishpeming’s National Guard 107th  Engineers Battalion.  Phyllis and I know what it is like to wait for our soldiers to return home.  I thank them for their service and I look forward to seeing many of them return to NMU to resume their studies.

There is no better topic to start my formal remarks than with the topic of enrollment.  Enrollment  reflects one of the more important measures of the health and momentum of an institution.  We have seen considerable growth over the past 10 years.  We also saw our first minor decline last year.  However, as I look at this coming year, there is both optimism and concern.  On the optimistic side, our enrollment this year rebounded somewhat from last year’s slight decline – our first decline after nine consecutive years of growth.  I am pleased to report that our Fall 2008 enrollment, as of today, is holding strong compared to Fall 2007.  Faculty, staff and an admissions team that I believe to be one of the best admissions offices in the Midwest eliminated an expected loss of 1.0 – 1.8 percent.  Additionally, the residence halls are at capacity and I was told a wait list now exists for some of the facilities.   Let’s also not forget that we’re going to hand out 6,000 laptops in the dome this weekend.

We continue to attract students from a broad region of the upper Midwest.  This is a clear sign that families and students both within and beyond the region recognize the value proposition we offer:  great programs at an affordable price.  Our retention is also recovering from last year but I’ll get to that in a moment. 

In the context of higher education nationally, NMU’s ability to sustain a successful enrollment management program is amazing.  Rural universities across America are struggling and most states are or will be experiencing significant budget cuts.   The Northern Experience with our laptop program, the unique assets that accompany our location, our engagement with the community and our continuing efforts to internationalize the curriculum is attracting students.   Our focus on a regional enrollment initiative will not abate as the demographic curves foretell a shrinking high school population throughout the Midwest, Great Lakes states and especially in the U.P. 

I do remain guarded and very concerned about the ability of the state of Michigan to deliver our appropriation as promised.  A 1 percent appropriation increase is moving in the right direction but does NOT cover our escalating operational costs, nor does it provide any kind of tuition relief to students and their families.  Keep in mind, despite the likelihood of a 1 percent increase in appropriation, the budget model approved by the NMU Board of Trustees for 2008-09, included $1.8 million in cuts and reallocations needed to balance the budget. 

Two thoughts I’d like you to take home:  our current appropriation is equivalent in dollars to 1998 and we’re serving a third (1/3) more students in 2008 than in 1998.  Second, we remain the second-most affordable university in Michigan and the approved tuition increase this year was the second-lowest in the state in both dollars and percentage.  We are concerned about access and affordability and we remain vigilant about preserving program quality while costs continue to rise.

The continuing decay of the Michigan economy puts extraordinary pressure on our students and their families to pay more and more for a university education.  And this means that families and students must make tough decisions if they want to attend.  For example, gas prices, the need for a summer job or two or three and a host of other issues adversely affected our summer enrollment.  Summer enrollments are included in our enrollment counts for the following fall and winter terms and, ultimately, our annual budget.  The decline in summer enrollments will be studied closely and our retention of sophomores to junior status remains problematic.

Last year, I asked every employee to think of one thing you could do to support retention.  Let me share with you something I did.  I asked my staff to give me the names of students who were awarded presidential scholarships and had not yet registered.  I took it upon myself to call each one and I would not quit until I had talked to every person on my list.  I talked to their parents, their siblings and eventually them.  One student got on the line and said something like, “Dr. Wong, I’m coming, thanks for calling”.  My point is that even I could contribute something to our retention effort.  Each of us can do something, even if it’s just one small thing to help students grow at Northern.

For us to remain at the top of our game, we must work to protect and enhance quality while recruitment, retention and revenue production will enable us to weather Michigan’s tough economic conditions.  A Q and 3 R’s, don’t forget this.  We can’t predict the efforts of the state to help us, but we can confidently act in our own best interest.  Remember:  Quality, recruitment, retention and revenue production.

The Road Map to 2015

I would like to use the framework of the Road Map to share with you some reflections from last year.  The economic gloom you read and personally experience each day has a way of dominating one’s view of reality.   While life for the university and our students is indeed a challenging one, the gloomy stories must not divert our attention from an equally compelling picture of accomplishments.  The Wildcats have been on the prowl and these highlights represent just a snapshot of our work.  Please know that there are many other snapshots equally deserving of our attention and being mentioned, but in the interest of time I’ll cite only a few.

Remember, the Road Map to 2015 identified three distinguishing features that defined our unique signature:  Information technology, our location in the Upper Peninsula and our internationalization efforts.  Let me share just a few thoughts in how those features are being refined; sometimes in quite unexpected ways.

Information Technologies

NMU is working with several industry leaders with next-generation wireless.   Northern is doing things here today, that will transform web activity and ultimately teaching and learning worldwide way before 2015. Don’t forget, NMU is ranked as one of the most wired and wireless campuses in the nation.  Our laptop program is one of the largest in the world and we continue to attract and work closely with IT industry leaders in research and development.   You know this, but what you may not know is that many of these industry leaders are already on our campus as part of their own research and development of new products.  I’m amazed and excited by what I’ve been shown and how our students and staff are involved.

Eric Smith also informed me late yesterday that WNMU-TV was awarded a $633,231 grant from the USDA Rural Development agency. This will finance the last step in digitizing WNMU-TV studios and includes the purchase of remote production equipment. Great work Eric and a special thank you to Congressman Bart Stupak’s office for their support and assistance.

International Opportunities

Last year about 200 students and more than a dozen NMU faculty members participated in out-of-country learning experiences including an Alumni Office sponsored travel abroad program to Italy.   The Alumni Office has more trips planned and this reactivation of the travel program is to be commended.

Another example:  Four NMU students have won the regional Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship to study abroad in the past five years, including 2008 recipient Kimberly Martino who is heading to New Delhi, India to study life sciences and to contribute to Rotary’s polio eradication campaign.

We also just learned that NMU will host two major speed skating events.  NMU will host the Olympic Trials that will determine the U.S. Winter Olympics speed skating team in September 2009 followed by a World Cup that November involving over 30 nations in the largest speed skating competition prior to the winter Olympic Games in British Columbia.

NMU’s location

A great example of using NMU’s location is biology’s Jill Leonard, who received a number of grants from the National Park Service to study coaster brook trout populations in Lake Superior and also geography’s John Anderton, who will use grant funds to support his work and that of his students at Pictured Rocks. 

Also, Marcus Robyns is funded by the Michigan Council of the Humanities to collect “Narrative Histories of Immigrants in the Iron Range”.

These are just some of many examples of faculty who are engaged in both their discipline and NMU’s location, and in each case, students are active researchers with these faculty.
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The Road Map, itself has four major goals each with respective priorities.  These four goals are Innovation, Meaningful Lives, Leveraging Campus Attributes and Community Engagement.

Innovation

The Wildcat Innovation Fund

You will be receiving information soon on the Wildcat Innovation Fund.  I am serious about providing dollars for and supporting innovative ideas.  Dr. Koch, Gavin Leach, the VP-Finance and I are clarifying the application process, goals and benchmarks for applications.  Despite the state’s situation, we made a commitment to finance the creative efforts that come forward and we are going to honor that commitment.  How can we afford not to?  We won’t be able to fund every idea immediately, but we are going to start this year funding the ones with the most impact.  So if you have ideas about how the Road Map can be supported watch for information on how to submit a proposal.

Growing corporate collaborations

Intel®, sponsored two new summer interns at its Portland, Oregon research center.  Over the next couple years, more students will be selected and they will bring back a wealth of high-tech experience and knowledge.  Lenovo® has also stepped up and will be providing $20,000 in scholarship support to create and sustain what we’re calling the Lenovo Scholars Program. 

The Political Science department, along with the chair of the NMU Board of Trustees, Mary Lukens, helped to place eight students in internships for the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, many through major news organizations such as NBC, Time and Bloomberg.

A growing portfolio of corporate collaborations that enhance academic programs and our students’ educational experience is a high priority for the deans in each of the colleges, and I am confident that our efforts will help us to ensure that our programs are relevant and meaningful.

Provide new support mechanisms to enhance faculty and staff engagement in scholarship

Jeff Horn in computer science and mathematics is getting financial support from the Michigan Universities Commercialization Initiative grant to commercialize his Resource-defined Fitness Sharing algorithm that will help manufacturers improve shape nesting, or the problem of cutting out as many copies of a particular shape as possible from a flat material.  NMU will partially fund this project because we want to see more commercialization of our research happen here.

In just a few days, Provost Koch will be meeting with Dr. Jill Leonard to receive the report of our AQIP action project on scholarship.  Many of you have been involved with this very important effort and we appreciate your work.  That report (as well as the other two equally important AQIP action project reports for online learning and sustainability) will be shared with the campus and we look forward to implementing recommendations that will support and enhance scholarly productivity.

Facilitate global engagement

New collaborations with universities in Peru and Argentina will offer our students new locations for academic work, intercultural learning, language study and internships. We now have agreements with schools in Japan, China, Mexico, South America, South Africa and Sweden, along with our long-standing consortium opportunities in many other European countries.  We are particularly proud to recently have received a grant in partnership with Western Illinois University.  This is a prestigious $220,000 Department of Education grant to support exchanges with Brazil.  Kudos go to lead faculty, Ray Amtmann in the College of Business and the Executive Director of International Programs, Marcelo Siles for this work.

The Foundation will also be implementing this year two new scholarship programs to support our students’ study abroad efforts.  This could not have been done without the support of our private donors who endorse the vision of international studies at Northern.

Explore and act upon ways to expand graduate programs

Professor Julie Higbie and the Nursing program were awarded a $360,000 grant from Michigan’s Department of Labor and Economic Growth to provide for a nurse educator graduate certificate. This grant will produce more nurse educators to help address the nursing faculty shortage here in the U.P. and around the state of Michigan.

College of Business faculty have approved a new MBA program and will be developing new courses for that program in the coming year with a launch anticipated for Fall, 2009. 

Meaningful Lives

The most significant and most difficult short- and long-term challenges are in this category.  I want to encourage everyone to examine these priorities closely.  They require us to direct our best efforts to what many consider difficult and intractable issues.  These include our efforts to clarify and reinvigorate liberal studies and the Honor’s Program, making NMU more friendly to transfer students and improving the most fundamental cornerstone of a university: academic advising.

Next year at Convocation, I hope to report more of our successes in these areas.  Much needs to be done between today and a year from now.

Leveraging Campus Attributes

NMU residence halls Meyland and VanAntwerp received LEED certification (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), the highest level of U.S. building standards.  We have two of only eight LEED-certified residence halls in the United States and the first ones in the Midwest.  And we expect Hunt Hall to become the third one certified in the near future.

The Studio for Experimental and Eco-Design (or SEED) in NMU’s Art and Design is a new green design program for creating products that are sustainable, recyclable and made from eco-friendly materials.  A big part of this center’s initiative is to advise companies and organizations in eco-friendly design.
A couple of other green factoids worth noting:

• Since 1973 we’ve doubled our physical space and reduced heating requirements by 25 percent.
• Between 1992 and 2006 we’ve recycled over 5,000 tons of paper, 1,000 tons of metal and 32 tons of fluorescent lamps.
• We have reduced our water consumption by one-third.

We are also working with the Sierra Club to resolve its concerns about our co-generation heating plant.  Despite what you read, it is not a coal plant.  Wood-biomass fueled, it will enable us to save upwards of a $1million per year, add over 100 permanent jobs to the U.P. and set the stage for us to commence with a much needed energy research program.

Community Engagement

One-Stop business service center

In partnership with the Lake Superior Community Partnership, Northern Initiatives and through grants from the Michigan Initiative for Innovation and Entrepreneurship Consortium a one-stop business service center will soon to be located in the Jacobetti Center.  New entrepreneurs will receive help in producing successful financial and marketing plans, Web site creation, e-commerce, information technology software, product design and prototype development services.

Demonstrated engagement

The Superior Edge’s mantra is “Learning to live a life that matters through community engagement • leadership development • diversity awareness • real-world experience”.  The Superior Edge, now in its third year, has 1,600 NMU students involved who provided over 200,000+ hours of service to the Marquette County community last year!

Six NMU students received the Michigan Campus Compact “Heart and Soul” Awards for community service.  Our student, Betsy Ott, received the Commitment to Service Award.

The NMU Athletic Department has received the NCAA Community Engagement Award in recognition of their outreach to the community.

By the way, the Student Leader Fellowship Program and the many, many Marquette County residents who volunteer as the program’s mentors were named one of four finalists for Michigan’s 2008 Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter Award, recognizing exemplary community-university collaborations.

Carnegie classification “Community-Engaged Campus” application

This week, NMU will apply to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching for the designation of “Community-Engaged Campus”.  We’ve always known we are a community engaged university.  But in completing our application, we learned that there are NMU faculty, staff and administrators that belong to more than 70 different community organizations.  More than four dozen hold leadership positions within these groups.

Now, one can understand my pride and my passion about being a part of the Northern experience.

Challenges Ahead

First, this academic year presents an additional opportunity for Northern to demonstrate its excellence during a visit in March from the Higher Learning Commission. As you know, NMU maintains its institutional accreditation via AQIP (Academic Quality Improvement Program), a program overseen by the Higher Learning Commission. Being accredited is not a choice for NMU – it is a necessity.  In March, a team of visitors will come to campus to learn more about programs and processes that we have in place that permit us to make good decisions for our students and for the university’s future.  All of us will work hard as we prepare for this visit.  However, AQIP plays a more fundamental role in how we carry out our core business.  With your help, we will demonstrate that we should be re-accredited, and that all of our units are good and dedicated to getting better.  Remember that we cannot accomplish any of our major objectives for the upcoming year – Road Map, re-accreditation, going from good to great – without each of you willing to play a role.   And we are not exaggerating when we say that each and every employee has a role to play and contributions to be made.

Second, the President’s Council and I have been working on a redraft of the university mission statement for some time.  I will be re-circulating the draft to the university community with the goal of asking the Board of Trustees to endorse this mission statement at its September meeting.  I want to be very clear: this is not a new statement, but a refinement of our current mission statement.  It is more succinct, clear, less confusing and much more in alignment with the Road Map.  Please take a moment to examine the proposal.

Third, quality, recruitment, retention and revenue production.  I won’t let you forget it.

In closing, Northern remains a very special place. As our national reputation and audience grows and as more and more people discover us, our challenge is to continue to protect the quality experience our alums and current students rave about. Economic study after economic study tells us that Michigan’s woes will not subside until 2013. Northern can’t wait that long.  We will do our part to help Michigan, but we must also not forget that our focus here at this institution is our students. Those license plates that punctuate the streets of Marquette and NMU that come from Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota tell us that our appeal is regional. While we are extremely proud to be in the U.P., our influence is much more extensive today than 10 years ago.

There is only one direction and that’s forward.  We’re not going to go slow, we’re not going to be reckless and we’re not going to be late.  We’re going to take some risks while preserving what has made us successful.  We’re not going to park this car in the garage waiting for a sunny day to go for a drive.   This trip needs all of us to be aware, to be engaged, to be in the car.

The note card you received today is one of many small but important points of engagement.  Fill it out and put it near a place you work or where you’ll see it each day.  When you have accomplished the stated goal, send it to me.  We’re going to be expanding the Road Map web site (www.nmu.edu/roadmap2015) to include our very own web-accessed GPS.  This site will keep you informed and up to date on the efforts of this university as we move forward.

So, we have a map, a finely tuned vehicle, we know the destination, we know who’s in the car and we know the rules of road

I’m ready to go.  I hope you are, too.  Have a terrific year.

Thank you.