Introduction

President Nietzel:

Good afternoon. I’m pleased that you are in attendance and look forward to making this presentation on the State of the University to you. The format will be a little bit different today than what we have used in the past. We will go through this presentation briskly. We have budgeted this to end about a quarter ‘til or ten ‘til one so that there is ample time for questions and we’re prepared to stay and answer questions as long as you have them. This entire presentation will be on the web. It will be posted during the hour that we are here together and then there will be supplemental material that will also be available as back-up with more details on the over-all PowerPoint presentation that we’ll share with you this afternoon.

Missouri State University is poised and prepared to continue to make significant progress on its long range plan. And what we want to do today is summarize the accomplishments of the past year and then identify the 12 priorities that we have discussed with the Board of Governors and have received their approval and direction to go forward with.

12 for Today, 5 for the Future

The title of this speech is “12 For Today and 5 For the Future” refers to an attempt here to connect these 12 priorities that are of immediate concern to us in the current academic year with our 5 long term goals for the institution.

A Review of the One Dozen Priorities For 2006-07 (Implementing the Long-Range Plan)

So first I’ll review the dozen priorities that we shared with you a year ago.

Implement compensation and evaluation system

The first was that we would implement a compensation and evaluation system. The faculty handbook has been revised and that revision completed. A performance evaluation system has been developed for the faculty and implemented for the first time. We’ll continue to work on refinements in that, and Greg Burris will have more to say about the performance evaluation system pertaining to the staff a bit later. And, we have made some real progress on salary goals. This past year and the year before we had a combined 4 and 5% salary pools for the University – a 9% over those two years. Last year we made progress with our Associate Professors and our Assistant Professors with respect to CUPA averages and we fully expect with the 5% pool that goes into effect this year that we will make some progress with our Full Professors. We did not make progress with them last year in comparison to the CUPA averages, but I’m confident that we will this year because of the magnitude of that overall pool.

In process is still our Work/Life Initiative which is an attempt to integrate conditions for personally satisfying life with a professionally productive one. It’s aimed at some policies in particular for the staff. A survey of that of staff concerns in that area has been done and we are looking at implementation and consideration of some policies in the work/life area.

Establish greater statewide and national presence

Our second goal for last year was to establish a greater statewide and national presence. We have engaged in a much greater outreach to alumni and donors and legislators; particularly alumni and donors outside of the State of Missouri. We now have a St. Louis office dedicated to the recruitment of students in the St. Louis area. We are conducting more alumni club events and connections in major cities and we’ll have a little bit more to say about that in Brent Dunn’s share of the presentation. And, we continue to expand the advocates for Missouri State. The advocates are a grassroots organization of alumni and friends who communicate support on behalf of Missouri State University to policy makers.

In process, we will, this year, fund and launch a counterpart to the St. Louis office in Kansas City and we do plan to expand our use of electronic communications with alumni – particularly in connection with a more aggressive advancement effort.

Promote success of new administrative leaders

Third, we hired a number of new leaders for the University. In each and every case these seven categories we conducted national searches with the exception of the Honors College and International programs and very pleased to have all of these individuals now in place at the University.

Advance state and federal legislative agenda

Fourth, we worked hard on state and federal legislative agenda and we were successful in getting the Lewis and Clark Discovery Initiative passed on behalf of all of the public universities in Missouri. Yesterday the judge ruled on the request by plaintiffs to issue a temporary injunction against the transfer of funds. He did not rule in their favor and so we anticipate on Friday that the funds will be transferred from MOHELA to the Office of Administration. We were successful in getting funding for our cooperative engineering program with the University of Missouri-Rolla and we were successful with additional supplemental funding for West Plains. We’re still working on federal requests this year that are consistent with our priorities – particularly in research areas and also with the Missouri Innovation Academy, a special program that we started with our own funds this past summer. We still need to secure the one-time start-up funding for the program with UMR. We’re optimistic that we will be able to do that. And, all the institutions are working for these next two years on the development of a new funding model for the appropriations to public universities in Missouri that will address core funding, performance funding and special strategic incentives.

Prepare new comprehensive fund-raising campaign

Fifth, we have throughout this past year been working for the preparation of a new comprehensive campaign and we’ll have more to say about that. That’s obviously all still in process as we point toward launching that campaign sometime in the fairly near future. We will continue to emphasize endowments to support faculty and students. As of today we have 18 endowed faculty positions. Two years ago we had three. So that has been a six-fold increase in the number of endowed faculty positions at the University and we’ve had a very nice run up in terms of endowed scholarships as well. I can’t give you what that number is right now or what it was two years ago but its been a very appreciable increase. And, we will look in this new campaign at support for major new facilities or renovated facilities in Life Sciences. Obviously there are some nice, private giving opportunities associated with the University Recreation Center, for plans for Art and Design, and continuing to look at Athletics facilities and the possibility of some investments and improvements there.

Continue major capital and infrastructure initiatives

We’ll spend a lot of time on this later. The University is engaged in a number of renovation and capital projects, more than at any other time in the institutions history. Obviously, JQH Arena, you can see the progress being made on that. We’ll talk quite a bit more later on FREUP and the seven or eight renovation projects all for academic buildings that that money, that’s the Lewis and Clark, or sometimes known as MOHELA money will be dedicated to. We have a plan in place for the Recreation Center; that one will probably take a little bit longer to bring on Board. The ERP is our new enterprise wide administrative computing system, initial funding has been put in place for that and a lot of progress made on the demands for the initial module in that which is the finance module. We have funded the boiler replacement and we hope to have some announcements about a downtown Arts Complex – a public announcement soon.

Promote diversity efforts

We will continue to work hard to promote diversity efforts as we did this past year so these are all listed still as in process. For this current year we had a ten percent increase in minority students are Missouri State University and an even larger percent increase in International students attending the University. I think those are terrific accomplishments. We will continue the President’s Commission of Diversity and look forward to recommendations we receive from that group. The Missouri Innovation Academy and the Missouri State Promise Scholarship are both initiatives aimed at increasing diversity in terms of economic diversity, or socio-economic diversity, and they are aimed at promoting the chances for students who come from very low-income, from poverty backgrounds, making sure that that financial condition is not a barrier to their success, their enrollment, and their ultimate graduation at Missouri State.

Advance Academic Affairs priorities

We said we would, last year, advance academic affairs priorities, and in Belinda’s area we of course have strengthened considerably the policies and procedures in our promotion and tenure considerations. We launched some new graduate programs last year and we had the initial request for proposals in funding of the Futures Initiative – about $700,000 dollars awarded for those eleven areas. In process, Belinda in working on the development of rigorous, external academic program reviews and also a second round of the Futures RFP. And, as you know the $700,000 for the Futures is the current recurring funding that is available for that initiative.

Improve budget process

Improve the budget process, the third one percent reallocation now; we said we would do three of those. That has been accomplished. Half of that one percent reallocation stayed within cost centers and half went to University-wide initiatives – primarily to the salary pool.

We continue to work with the Executive Budget Committee in the budget hearing process. At the Friday Board of Governors meeting we will lay out an entire annual calendar for all budget considerations. When they occur, by whom do they occur, and also how do they relate to requests that the University must advance on up the line; particularly for the state appropriations. And I’ll have a little bit more to say about the carry forward and salary savings that have been achieved in these past two years in just a bit.

Increase research achievements

We want to continue to increase research achievements. Last year JVIC opened. The Phase one of JVIC, we’re ready to march right in to Phase 2 and the increased capacity that that will bring. We set a new record in extra-mural funding – nearly 22 million dollars. The first time the University has gone over 20 million dollars in extra-mural funding and that, of course, is a testimony to the terrific work of the faculty and the staff responsible for writing those grants and developing those contracts in support of University expertise. We are going to look at trying to provide some more research space with a very selective conversion of some classrooms that might currently be under-utilized to laboratory space. And we want to continue to look at policies and procedures for facilitating the research activities – particularly the research and outreach activities of the faculty.

Promote a successful intercollegiate athletics program

We said we would work on a successful intercollegiate athletics program. As you know we have finally accomplished compliance with prong one of Title IX, meaning that the percentage of our athletes, intercollegiate athletes, who are women is comparable to the percentage of our graduates who are women. We made some improvements in selected facilities. Some of those required also by an agreement with the Office of Civil Rights. And, we have been able to maintain the fiscal stability of the Athletics program. Two years ago there was no increase to the, excuse me, last year there was no increase in the subsidy to Athletics, this year the only increase was for support of the scholarships which of course is recycled and becomes recurring funding for the overall university.

In process still is attending to some competitiveness. In particular you know we had a difficult year with our Lady Bear Basketball program. We made changes that we thought were necessary there and look forward to that program in particular picking it back up and achieving at the level that we’ve come to expect. And we’ll continue to look at some facility improvements – we replaced some bleachers in Plaster just recently. We also still have some Title IX issues with respect to facilities to attend to.

Develop and prepare full membership of Board of Governors

And then finally last year we said we would develop and prepare a full membership of the Board of Governors in association with the fact that the composition of the Board changed from a Regional one to a Statewide one. We were able, with the Board, to complete and gain their approval of the Long-Range Plan.

In process still is a more ambitious use of a committee structure. The Board now has three committees: Academic Affairs, Student Affairs, and a financial committee – Fiscal Affairs. Those committees meet almost every time there is a Board meeting. It allows Board members to become much more educated about the operations of the University. We make a greater use of a consent agenda which hopefully will free up time on the Board meeting themselves for significant, important discussion. And, on occasion as we’ve been able to this past year actually get a Board meeting over in something less than two and a half hours which we were able to do I think twice much to the delight of all of us, particularly the Board members, many of who are now travelling pretty long distances for these meetings. We still need to finish two Board appointments and we’ll then have a full compliment for the Board of Governors.

Top 12 Priorities for 2007-08 (Implementing the Long-Range Plan)

Let’s now turn to this year and the 12 priorities that the Board of Governors have agreed with us that we should pursue. First thing that I want to share with you are some key financial indicators. This pertains to the financial health of the University in the operating budget. This doesn’t have anything to do with auxiliaries, this doesn’t have anything to do with designated funds, this is just the operating budget - the budget that you think of in terms of your salaries, your academic programs, your support programs. And I want to contrast the past two years with respect to where we are.

Key Financial Indicators

First thing that I want to share with you are some key financial indicators. This pertains to the financial health of the University in the operating budget. This doesn’t have anything to do with auxiliaries, this doesn’t have anything to do with designated funds, this is just the operating budget - the budget that you think of in terms of your salaries, your academic programs, your support programs. And I want to contrast the past two years with respect to where we are.

First of all, if you look at the fund balance the University had at the end of June 2005 and where we are now, you will see that that has increased by a factor of two and a half times. This allows the University to make some strategic investments and we’ll use about 5 million of that 35.5 million this year for some one-time projects. And those are all the projects that I shared with you in the budget presentation to the joint meeting of the Faculty Senate and Staff Senate last spring. This is a very nice gain. Understand this is one-time money, when it is spent it does not come back so we look at it primarily for one-time purposes.

The insurance fund balance – as you know the University is self-insured with respect to its health care. The Board has asked us to keep a three month reserve in the insurance fund. A three month reserve is approximately $3 million. You see that that has increased by 54% in the two years and we’re approximating a 5 month reserve in the insurance fund.

The operating central reserves – that is money at the Presidential level that does recur every year to handle emergencies, to handle priorities, to handle, in some cases, the need to add a recurring source of support to an initiative that we might not have planned at the beginning of the budget cycle. And, you can see that that has doubled from $1.6 million to over $3.3 million.

The endowment has increased by over $15 million. That is a 39% increase in the University’s endowment and that is powered both by new gifts to the Foundation as well as, with the exception of the past couple of months, a very good market. And you will see that that has not, these fund balance, central reserves and other indicators of financial health have not been accomplished by a big run up in enrollment. The credit hours have changed by about 2.5 percent, a marginal increase in the number of semester credit hours that we are delivering, so I applaud you for the fiscal stewardship. I think the move to cost center approach to budgeting has helped people become more literate about the University’s budget and obviously you’ve been very good stewards of the money.

We now need to look at what’s the best way to use this money to advance initiatives of the University.

Progress on capital projects, including...

So the first of the 12 goals that, priorities that we’ll talk to you about today is capital projects. This is the largest set of capital projects either under construction or planned or in anticipation that the University has had. FREUP we’ve got some very good news on, obviously with the law suit, JVIC we’re prepared to move into Phase 2, but I’m going to ask Greg Burris if he would come forward to give you a little bit more specific material on each of these projects with the exception of the Engineering program space, we don’t have any more details on that right now, although we anticipate that space in Kemper will be made available for the Engineering program when it is up and running. Greg…

FREUP

Greg Burris:

I’m a little unprepared. I was told this was a roast for Jim Baker, but I’m going to go ahead and try to go through this. As Dr. Nietzel mentioned, we’re going to fly through these slides pretty quickly, but I want to hit some highlights. FREUP, you’ve probably heard about, it stand for Facilities Reutilization Plan. The focus here is on reutilizing and renovating our existing facilities rather than going out and building new facilities. So we think this is a smart thing, it has been our top request for a number of years. $29.7 million, 7 buildings – what are those buildings, here they are:

FREUP (Continued)

They are on three campuses, and on the Springfield campus we have Siceluff Hall built in 1930’s, it’s in our historic quad and in desperate need of renovation. It will host English, Modern and Classical Languages, and the Writing Center and maybe a few other smaller units. Temple Hall and Kings Street Anex, both Science facilities, and they need electrical infrastructure upgrades as well as HVAC upgrades so that we can upgrade the science labs in those two facilities and that will occur in the near term. Hammons Student Center renovations will occur to accommodate the Health Physical Education and Recreation department. So, what that means is that Hammons Student Center becomes the home of an academic unit and we’re working currently on that programming study. On the Mountain Grove campus: Shepard Hall. Shepard Hall has science labs in it and it will require some renovation. And, on the West Plains campus Gohn-Wood and Hass-Hoover halls will be developed, and that will include in Gohn-Wood some accommodations for counseling, advisement and the four-year programs in Hass-Hoover academic support center, classrooms, computer lab and tutoring space.

JVIC

JVIC, as Dr. Nietzel mentioned, Jordan Valley Innovation Center, we have completed Phase one and we’re working on Phase two. Phase two will be a $7.6 million renovation of buildings 3 and 5; in just a second I will show you what buildings 3 and 5 are. $5 million from the Lewis and Clark Discovery Initiative and $2.6 million from federal sources – we’re very excited about this.

Jordan Valley Innovation Center

On this graphic, buildings 3 and 5 are the blue and yellow facilities. The purple and green facilities were the Phase one, those are already renovated and so we’re focusing again on the blue and yellow portions of JVIC. This is a view looking from the northwest corner of that complex.

JQH Arena Project Budget

JQH Arena project, just one slide, I just want to bring you up to date on the budget. The good news is we are within budget. As you can see from this spreadsheet, we’re within in all categories; however, we still have $5 million worth of construction to bid that has not been done yet. So, it’s a little too early to be celebrating, but at this time we feel pretty good about it. One explanation is that, you see FF&E, that stand for Furniture, Fixtures, and Equipment, this will be again 11,000 seat basketball arena it will have other uses as well. It is the largest capital project in the history of the University. If you take the top four capital projects that Dr. Nietzel listed earlier, they total to be $125 million worth of capital renovations and construction.

University Recreation Center

University recreation center – we use the term “University recreation center” for a purpose, because it will be available to students, faculty and staff. Right now its going to be located in McDonald Arena. So, right now we’re in the middle of a programming study to move HPER into Hammons Student Center and determine the best way to do that. How do you fit that academic program into that space? We’re developing and RFP for an architect to work on that project and develop the new recreation center and there is real heavy student involvement in this and it is because the students are paying a good chunk of this project so we want them involved.

University Recreation Center (Continued)

Here are the revenues and expense projections, there are a lot of numbers on here, but the things you need to know are starting this semester the students are paying into the new recreation center fund so we’re starting to accumulate some monies so we can do the design, so we can start the remodeling as soon as we’re ready. We’ll have some one-time revenues and then the annual revenues from that fee and the important numbers are the $2.8 million for the rec center revenues exceeds the $2.7 million anticipated expenses. So, with this budget model, we feel like we can cover the costs.

Public-Private Student Housing

Public, private student housing – right now we’re developing an RFP. We think there is a lot of opportunity to bring developers on to campus or to have developers develop on their land; hopefully near campus. And so we’re developing an RFP and we’ll send it out on the street soon that will give developers an opportunity to tell us what they could do on our land or what they would do on their land to help develop and provide some additional types of student housing. Specifically in some gaps where we need some more student housing.

Arts Complex

The downtown Arts Complex – there is an Arts advisory committee that has submitted its recommendations. This was chaired by Wade Thompson the chair of the Art and Design department. Our Art and Design department is scattered all over the campus and so this is a chance to bring them into one geographic area. Downtown made sense because downtown and the arts seem to go together. We are in the process of negotiating right now with the owner of a complex and there is the potential here to have the development in such a state that we could start a phased migration of Art and Design into this complex by a year from now – by the Fall of 2008.

Improve retention/graduation rates

President Nietzel:

The next two priorities for the year will be presented by Dr. McCarthy. The second one here is the improvement and retention and graduation rates of our students. We retain 74% of our students from the first to second year and in six years we graduate 52% of those students. We would like to do significantly better than that and we believe we have students whose academic capabilities will make them successful as we become more aggressive with respect to these numbers. We have hired and actually had a consultant come it to give us advice about student engagement and student success. Belinda has appointed Cindy Pemberton as the Associate Provost for Student Success and we formed a special team that went away from campus to study important things about what other universities are doing about engagement with particular attention to the first year. So, I would ask Belinda to come forward and present some more material on student success and what we hope to accomplish there.

Student Success

It is important to put this whole area into context. There is a tremendous amount of federal interest in higher education right now and it comes from some very reasonable sources. The federal government puts about $120 billion into higher education every year. Some if for program support, a good bit is for research support, and even more is for students to use as loans and support for their higher education and experience. When you put that much money into something, you tend to be very interested in it. We also know that there is an awful lot of concern about pricing of higher education, and unfortunately, although we hear a lot about the increase in tuition, the increase in tuition costs as compared to the cost of living, cost of buying an automobile, we know it is much much more expensive relatively to price out higher education. We’ve sort of lost the battle of communicating what higher education really costs because one of those very significant areas which the federal government contributes to high education is through student support. It doesn’t cost as much as it appears to when you look only at price, but that information is not as readily available. So with a tremendous amount of interest from the federal government in higher education, because of what it spends, and because the federal government is in pretty difficult times right now on terms of the balance sheet, there is an interest in looking at the accountability that we have. No Child Left Behind is the federal government’s approach to accountability in the public school system in K-12. And I think there is a great deal of interest on the part of higher education to develop our own system of accountability prior to having the federal government impose one on us. The approach to doing that is the voluntary system of accountability. That voluntary system of accountability looks at three major measures of learning: persistence, retention rates and graduation rates, engagement generally measured by the National Survey of Student Engagement, and learning outcomes measured through a variety of means. That makes information available more readily to students and their parents as they look at comparisons in higher education. We are going to be looking at some of those very same things as well because it is the right thing to do, but also because there are many many folks encouraging us to do so.

As we look at where we should be and where we are, in terms of retention rates we’re in the 70s, we would like to be in the 80s. In terms of the six-year graduation rate we’re in the 50% in terms of how long it takes a student to graduate. We want to get up to 60%.

Student Retention Rates (First-year first-time Freshmen)

We have been better in the past in terms of first year retention – freshman to sophomore year retention. 2004 was a very good year. We need to learn more about what has caused the dips and what has caused the increases.

Six-year Graduation Rate

In terms of six-year graduation rates we are making progress, we are moving forward on this but we know there are more things that we can do.

Student Success (Continued)

We most recently received information on student engagement just a few weeks ago from the National Survey of Student Engagement that was conducted in the spring. And, we got a lot of good news – very high rates compared to our peers and other Carnagey institutions and regional institutions in terms of faculty’s involvement with our students. Very strong statements from our students about the quality of advising they receive. Again, strong statements in terms of their commitment and understanding of public affairs and their experience of cultural and campus events.

Student Success (Continued)

We did identify, however, some areas in which there is room for improvement. Our students don’t report as high a level of academic challenge as their peers at comparable institutions. They also do not report as high, not with great differences, but not as high as we would like and not has high as their peers in terms of their experience in active and collaborative learning. And, not surprisingly, given the challenges we’ve had in the past with diversity, many of our students do not report the same levels of involvement with persons especially from differing racial and ethnic groups as their peers report. And finally, in every single dimension in which we looked, freshmen appear less engaged and report less of these activities than our seniors do. By the time we get to our seniors, they have these strong experiences in terms of diverse learning environments and active and collaborative learning. Our freshmen somehow are not being reached as effectively as we would like. So there are a number of different things we’re doing to accomplish this. First of all, we want to put the tools in the hands of our faculty to accomplish their goals. I know many of our faculty look at the students that come in to them in terms of the freshmen experience and the sophomore experience and want to connect their level of expectation with what capabilities, interests, and motivations the students have. How do we ensure that that happens?

Student Success Initiatives

We’re putting together all the resources we currently have on campus and adding to that through the creation of a faculty center for teaching and learning. The resources and training that will be provided under that include assistance in course design – not just for online learning, but for all of those who are interested in looking at their objectives and how to best accomplish those within a semester or a different format. Web-based instruction is going to be something that we increasingly offer the faculty in terms of a quality curricular redesign and redevelopment experience. We want faculty to have the range of opportunities to teach, and we want them to have the range of skills available, whether its teaching in large classes, small classes, team building, group projects, a range of activities available in terms of instructional support.

We want to make sure everyone of our classrooms meets the needs of the faculty in terms of the state-of-the-art multimedia facilities. And we want to make sure BlackBoard is providing the support needed as well. Faculty and program support in order to achieve the goals of the faculty this fall we’re going to be offering some funds to make course redevelopment and redesign available to the faculty. Both those who are interested in creating innovative format courses, something that might last over a four-week period as opposed to 16 weeks, a weekend course that might have online training in the middle and then weekends again, innovative formats, courses that are aimed at enhancing student success by reducing the obstacles that are experienced by students in some of our freshman courses that have as many as 1/3 of our students not passing a freshman course. This doesn’t mean that the students aren’t capable or the faculty are not doing the things that they should, but there is a different set of expectations in the different amount of strategies that are available that we can make successfully available to our faculty.

And finally, we want to look at the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Faculty need to have the opportunity to compare and contrast different strategies of teaching and to see what we learn by conducting research on our own scholarship. And then one area that is developed very recently that will be part of this RFP for curricular funds is Leadership in Public Affairs. Someone said to me this morning that “leadership is the engine of public affairs.” We have been looking at this area with its ethics focus and community service focus, and global focus, one of the things we all have not said but often have felt in our hearts that we want to help our students step forward and take the lead in these very important initiatives. We’re going to give faculty the opportunity to develop some courses in those areas they think are most important for their own fields in terms of developing leadership.

Student Success Initiatives (Continued)

We certainly need to know more about why students come in the fall and don’t come back in the spring, or come for their first year experience and don’t come for the second year. We need to do some research – are there gaps that students are falling through, are there cracks that they are falling through, is there some administrative changes that we can make? We also need to organize our first year experience and that begins with orientation. So the students are turned on and engaged when they come in the summer, they have a success course, currently we’re using IDS 110, there is a group of faculty that are going to be looking at that, what we can achieve with that course, getting students excited and motivated and skilled with all of the tools they will need to be successful at Missouri State.

We’re going to look at the General Education program. Are we offering the kinds of instruction, the right courses at the right time, in the right place? Are we delivering the quality of faculty instruction, are we delivering the content that we wish to? These are opportunities faculty will have to evaluate these issues.

We’ve just started out first Living/Learning Community this year and there is a lot of excitement about how we can do this even more successfully. Whether we tailor this in terms of the majors of students, in terms of interests like environmentalism, we feel there is an awful lot we can do to both enhance the learning experience – and this is the focus of all of it. When those students said they didn’t feel the level of academic challenge that they thought they would or that their peers said, that is a challenge to us to find ways to hit students 360 degrees in terms of the challenge and the opportunity of being in this college learning environment.

And, we want to work with our commuter students. Many of the students who don’t return after that first year are students from our local area. We’re actually more successful with students who come from the St. Louis area or from Kansas City – those who really make the choice to leave home and start their four-year , five-year college experience. We want to work just as hard with those students who are living at home and maybe not realizing the transition from high school to college as successfully.

Student Success Initiatives (Continued)

There is a lot we need to do in terms of diversity and inclusiveness. We’ve got a minority faculty hiring program where resources will be provided to cover the salary of the minority faculty member hired for the first three years of employment, plus funds going back to the department who has successfully made this appointment.

We also are doing a lot in terms of campus and community outreach and we have two outstanding individuals – Juan Meraz from our College of Business who is a Provost Fellow this year working in this area, and we’ve recently hired Wes Pratt who is going to be our diversity coordinator working with the community as well as local public schools and private schools in this area.

We’re going to be doing a climate assessment this fall to learn the experiences that our faculty and our students have had on this campus in terms of being a minority in terms of experiencing and being a minority in terms of interacting with others. And then we’re going to develop an awareness program based on the data that we obtain from the climate assessment to try to assist all of us in thinking a little more clearly about what it means to be different in one way or another and to work as part of the larger community.

Student Success Initiatives (Continued)

A lot going on in terms of International education and partnerships as well; two Provost Fellows there. International Student Services has been moved to the reporting arrangement in the Extended Campus overseen now by Steve Robinette whose doing an outstanding job as you can see by virtue of the number of increases we had in international students. We’re going to connect for the first time on this campus, foreign language study, area studies Middle East Asia and Latin America, and experiential programs so individuals will learn to speak Spanish, for example, study the areas of Latin American study and have an opportunity for study away. In fact, I think there is a new free course being offered now, Friday evenings, Thursday evenings at 6:00 or 6:30 and immersion course in Spanish, but that is just the beginning. We also want to make sure that as we are working for study away opportunities for our students that faculty have the same opportunity to have an international experience and bring their own excitement back into the classroom.

Strategically expand distance learning

The third goal for this year is to strategically expand distance learning. And Dr. Nietzel gave us the challenge of certainly we want to increase distance learning opportunities and web-based instruction in a variety of ranges, blended courses as well as other types, but strategically expanding distance learning means we make degree programs available for individuals who are not able to come to campus. And we’ve got three new terrific proposals that have come forward: a Master’s degree in Project Management which will be totally available online, certificate in leadership in fire science that will be part of the MSAS, and the Master’s in Theatre which is currently available but will be converted to web-based instruction so that faculty in the public school, students in the public schools who are public school teachers can take the courses and then come work tent theatre experience in the summer and get that more practical experience. We’re going to complete three programs that have already been started, the Bachelor’s degree in Nursing, the Master’s degree in Nursing, the Bachelor’s degree in Agriculture, and so that our students can get complete new degrees, we’re going to offer for a number of individual opportunities in terms of the general education program converting these three English classes and the literature class to online instruction.

Develop research infrastructure and environment

President Nietzel:

Thank you, Belinda. The fourth goal for us or priority this year is to continue to develop the universities’ research infrastructure and environment. I’m going to have Jim Baker provide some details for you on that. The four areas that we will pay particular attention to, to enable this progress is making sure our faculty have adequate time to be engaged in research and scholarship, that we have the necessary facilities and equipment for that work, that we continue to focus our investments on graduate programs where we think that we can make the best progress, and of course we will have another RFP for the future’s proposals. Jim, if you could give us briefly, some highlights on research.

FY07 Highlights: Sponsored Projects

Jim Baker:

I think the key is, briefly, given our timing. Good afternoon everyone. Competing for and receiving external funds enables the university to better accomplish its mission of education, research, and service. Essentially, I’ve got several slides, and what they show is that we’ve had a couple of very good years and we’re taking several steps to try to make sure that those good years continue and that we expand the research programs. Most of the effort on expanding the research infrastructure and the incentives is coming from the Provost office and the Deans of individual colleges. So, as Dr. Nietzel said early, really the effort from the faculty and staff is what really generates the drive to get more external funds.

Office of Sponsored Research & Programs (SRP)

Last year was a record year. I’m going to go through these slides very quickly. This chart simply shows that the money we get externally goes for more than just research; it goes for education, it goes for services, it goes for equipment. There is a wide variety of things we can accomplish with the dollars we generate externally.

Research Infrastructure

When Dr. Nietzel first arrived, he established the future’s task force, and most of you are aware of that. I won’t go through that in detail, but there were 11 focus areas. We spent a lot of time on these areas.

Research Infrastructure (Continued)

The first round of funding of the $700,000, I have just a couple of examples of that funding. The top one is $150,000 for an x-ray characterization and analysis equipment. You’ll notice that there is multiple departments that are going to benefit from that equipment. There is also a great leveraging that will take place, because that $150,000 investment will lead to several millions of dollars in grants that we’ll be able to achieve over the next few years. That’s the purpose of the Provost Incentive Program.

Research Support

The support, as we continue to build support, we’re hiring a grants writer to help us with all the things we need to do. There are several forms of funding for faculty and staff. Again, these are listed, and you can find them on the website.

Research Incentive and Support Programs

One of the new programs that we are really excited about is the Sponsored Project Award. These are cash awards for faculty that do very good work and accomplish great things with the research. And, again, there is a whole list of different kinds of funding that is available for faculty.

College Research Initiatives

The College and Research Institutes are very critical. Most of the faculty will be working with Deans and department heads. And that’s really where all of this is taking place. We are going to be assigning college budget officers. Those officers will help with post-awards and grants and so on. So, we think there’s going to be a lot of activity taking place at the college level.

JVIC Phase II: Advanced Manufacturing and Rapid Prototyping Facility

Just one final note, Jordan Valley Innovation Center, near and dear to my heart, we are moving right along. We will get into the second phase, and I’ll be happy to answer questions after this session if anyone has about JVIC.

Establish new degree programs, including...

President Nietzel:

Thank you. The university will continue to look at the addition of some new degree programs this next year. We do anticipate that we’ll be in a position to accept our entering class for the engineering programs with Raleigh for Fall of ’08. As you know, we have 2 degree programs with China, historically, an Associate of Arts degree administered through West Plains and then a business completion degree here for the Bachelorette degree. We are going to consolidate the China program, degree programs, to the Springfield campus. So, there will be a four year Bachelorette program at Springfield with business completion still as a major. This does open up the opportunity for greater faculty involvement and the possibility of additional majors being added for students at our Dali Yen campus. The university will seek special funding from the legislature to add 60 seats in allied health professions: Nursing, Physical Therapy, Communication Disorders, Physician Assistants, and Lab Tech Sciences. We will also seek funding from the legislature to launch a Pharm D program in Springfield, in which we would bring the University of Missouri, Kansas City ‘s accredited Pharm D program to Springfield, and offer it in collaboration with Missouri State University. The model will be very much like what we did with the University of Missouri at Raleigh with engineering. And, then, finally, we’ll look for opportunities that Linda has already mentioned to increase our international partnerships for our faculty being engaged in scholarship abroad for more international students being educated at Missouri State and for increasing numbers of our students who study away.

Launch new comprehensive campaign; increase opportunities for alumni outreach; increase national presence

The sixth priority for the year is that the university will continue to make progress in being prepared to launch a new comprehensive campaign. We’re going to have to work hard at increasing our alumni outreach, getting out beyond Springfield and the Ozarks, increasing our national presence so that our alums understand what the university is doing, and are motivated to help us with that. We have hired a campaign consultant. We are forming a steering committee. This year we will conduct a feasibility study to look at what the magnitude of the campaign should be, and we will also assess the staffing needs that we will have for that campaign. I’m pleased to introduce Brent Dunn to say a little bit more about the plans in the advancement area in general, but specifically in preparation for the campaign.

Advancement Staff

Brent Dunn:

The foundation ended the last fiscal year the second best, but we did that without a lot of staff positions. So, one of the key priorities within the first few months is to fill those positions. The Executive Director of Development has been unfilled for the last couple of years. And, we hope to make an announcement of the candidate in the next couple of weeks. The Director of Planned Giving is a new area that we have not had in quite some time. Planned giving is a key element to whether we’re in a campaign or we’re not in a campaign. But that position is now advertised and out on the streets. Soon we will be advertising for a new position in our alumni activities, filling my previous position and getting a Director of Development for a couple of the colleges.

Total Endowment

We had a great last couple of years; an increase in the endowment, the last 2 years, a 45% increase. I’d say that’s pretty good. We are close to 56 million dollars total for the endowment. The goal is to get that up to 100, 100 million. And, obviously, in that endowment includes the professorships, the chairs, and scholarships.

Comprehensive Campaign

The campaign, we do have a consultant on Board. Right now we are working with them, and they are on campus today, actually, have been here since Monday, working on a case statement, a 2 or 3 page document. Basically, the purpose of why we’re raising money. They have been, the last couple of days, visiting with our internal staff and really looking at ways of bettering, organizing, in preparation for a campaign. We will have a report on that at the end of October. They will come back in October and a lot of November doing personal interviews with donors. And it’s a one on one type of interview with about 40 personal interviews and that will help assess establishing a goal. We do not know what the goal will be, and we anticipate we’ll have a feel for that in early 2008. And then we may have a soft type of announcement in the summer, and then we will see where we are in terms of our funding and then make a public announcement.

10-City Tour

It is a priority to get outside the state of Missouri. And we have conducted many alumni activities throughout the United States, but we’re making more of a strategic attempt to get out to our good pockets of alums throughout the United States. Washington D.C., we go back about every December, and we are doing so this year. Atlanta, we were there and will continue. Chicago is a new area that we need to look at. Denver, we’ll be going in January to conduct some events. Phoenix is a great pocket of friends and alums. San Diego and Las Angeles, we’ll probably go back a couple of times this year. Obviously, we’ll have a big event coming up in December when the band is in the Rose Bowl parade. Florida is a new area that we need to concentrate as well as Dallas, Bentonville, the northwest Arkansas region, Tulsa. But we cannot forget about Kansas City, St. Louis, and we will be spending a lot more time in those cities, identifying our friends and potential donors.

Assess and improve campus safety and security

President Nietzel:

The seventh priority is not one I would have anticipated, but obviously the tragedy at Virginia Tech required not only this campus through the formation of a presidential task force but all of the institutions in Missouri through a statewide initiative to look at campus safety and security and make improvements where those were identified as being necessary.

Emergency Response Task Force

I received the report on August 1st from the Emergency Response Task Force under the chairmanship of Ken McClure. We gave the campus an opportunity, for about a month, to respond to it. We have identified 4 primary areas for implementation, and this Friday at the Board meeting I will share with the Board my recommendation that the university next year, excuse me, this current year invest about $300,000 in one time money for new notification system for our students. The study and improvement of some our door locking capabilities in classrooms, some backup generations for some important areas of campus, and also some faculty, staff, and student training with respect on how we handle emergencies.

Finish the Public Scorecard

The public score card was an accountability tool we made as part of our long range plan, and it is priority 8 for this year, which is to finish it.

25 Institutional Measures

It contains 25 performance measures if you look at the web with any regularity and monitor, you see we add some elements to the public score card with some frequency. This allows us to evaluate progress on these 25 goals. It is a key element for what the Board expected as part of a long range plan and we continue to post the results and update the measures as we have them updatable on the web. I’d like Kent Kay to come forward and explain a little more about the measure, particularly what we will be doing this year to try to complete the score card.

12 Measures Completed

Kent Kay

Through the end of the fiscal year, we have completed 12 of those measures. You can find that at the public score card, which can be accessed from the president’s web page. Those were completed within these areas, four of the basic areas out of the five, and they are being updated as information becomes available.

13 Measures Remain

We do have 13 measures remaining. These will be the more difficult measures as the information is decentralized. So, we will be working with departments across campus to obtain the information that tells the story of Missouri State. And we’ll be gathering that information through interviews and surveys.

Implement effective enrollment, financial aid, and tuition policies

President Nietzel:

Missouri State has a number of unique and innovative approaches to tuition and affordable education. CAPIT, of course, is our tuition plan that allows students 3 different ways to approach their tuition obligation. The Missouri State Promise is a scholarship unique to Missouri State intended for students who are at or below the federal poverty level . Access Missouri is a new state scholarship program aimed at need based financial aid. And, then, Senate Bill 389 is a new bill for higher education and that will constrain our tuition increases for the next few years to the urban CPI. I want to follow up with this by introducing Drew Bennett who will say a few things about what we are doing at West Plains, so you have an opportunity to hear about that. And then to Donald Ripley who will tell you a little bit about where we stand on a couple of these unique scholarships and tuition approaches. Dr. Drew Bennett, and by the way, our new Chancellor at West Plains, we are very pleased to have him as part of the team.

West Plains Campus

Drew Bennett:

Thank you. I have 2 slides that will talk about our efforts in increasing accessibility and increasing quality. To increase accessibility, enrollment is up significantly. We may break the record which was set 4 years ago for the number of students. That will happen later next week when we get to our 20th class day in census. Some of those enrollment improvements are due to a new format where we have focused to accommodate some of our commuter students, almost half of our students are commuter students, in a Monday, Wednesday, Tuesday, Thursday format as opposed to a Monday, Wednesday, Friday class schedule. This allows them to participate more. We also have several new initiatives which bring us new students and the partnership with the sheriff’s academy, with classroom sites at local businesses, 2 in West Plains, and today we are conducting a survey in Ava with Copeland Emmerson, which we hope, in the spring, will allow us to put in a classroom there. To continue this enrollment growth, we have a new program that will be coming online, a scholarship for more opportunity, which combines scholarship with a work program. Again, trying to make accessibility a key.

West Plains Campus (Continued)

Increasing quality of our students, we are focused on teaching excellence. I would like to point out that our honors program, which was started by Dennis Lancaster some years ago and thanks to a major gift by Mr. William and Virginia Darr, we are able to reach a new high of 50 students in our honor’s program. We may have some honor students in the audience from West Plains. Alex Pinion and Joe Driscoll, are you here? Okay, a couple of them right there. We are very proud of these students, so they get an increased opportunity to travel and exposure to other academic programs and 50% of our honor students transfer to Springfield. I would point out, as we talk about 67% of our students that do work on a degree that transfers to Springfield. We have our former student President and former student Vice President are transfer students here at Springfield. Are they here today? Rebecca Lucas and Sara Lunsfill. There’s one of them right there. I think that’s Sara. Sara was our Lady Grizzly or Grizzly mascot. But she has gone from being a Grizzly to a Bear. And another thing we are very proud of is 62.2% of those students that come to Springfield earn grades at least as high or higher than they did in West Plains. Attributing to our quality, I am certain that these students fall into that 62%. Otherwise, you are excused from the rest of the presentation and may proceed to the library. Thank you.

Fall 2007 Summary

Don Aripoli:

Thank you. Drew, she’s a 505 maroon bear now. Just a couple of things the president mentioned, we began some initiatives. CAPIT is a way to provide an assurance of access and affordability. We have 25094 students this year. Missouri State Promise, unique to Missouri State this year. It’s saying to students that financial barriers should not impede your attendance. We have 23 students this year and there are about $36,000 going to that group. Actually, there has been a major change in the way financial aid is allocated. We normally would have gotten about $500,000. We have 2,630 students getting about three and a half million dollars this year, as a direct result in the change in Senate Bill 389.

End of First Week Fall 2007 Enrollment Highlights

With respect to enrollment, enrollment is good, obviously the winds can change. We’re up about 201 students. We were up 461 applications, 183 admits, down with first time freshman, though which leads to the issue of a yield. Total enrollment up, total credit hours up, and that’s all good news.

Improving Freshman Retention

As you can see, one of the ways we can manage enrollment is to keep the students we have here, here. And, one simple example would be if we could keep 1% more of the freshman, 26 students, tuition and fees over the 3 years more we would keep them would be about a $400,000 incentive. So, we need to look at ways to focus on retention and learning, and enhancing those activities. Let me turn it over to Dr. McCarthy to talk about graduate student recruitment and funding.

Graduate Student Recruitment Initiative Funding

Belinda McCarthy:

One of our most successful initiatives from last year was our graduate student recruiting initiative. This is supported by the graduate council and Dean Einhellig of the graduate school. We gave out awards, 12 awards in the fall of last year and 8 in the spring, for a total of around $60,000, $70,000 and were able to yield enrollment of 11%. The information here, I think, is a little more current than what’s in the other materials. For almost 600 graduate students, this fall.

Examples from 20 Recruiting Initiative Awards

One of the great things about this initiative was that it cut all across the university and every single college was involved. Here you see an example: Biology, Educational Administration, English and Nursing. Ideas that the faculty had had and graduate coordinators had had for quite some time, we were able to make it a reality.

Follow through on initiatives, including...

President Nietzel:

The tenth priority is that we keep on working on things we haven’t finished. And there are a number of these. In the interest of time, I’m going to change our format a little bit and go through these last slides on my own rather than turning it over because there’s quite a bit of content in them and you can pursue after the presentation. The second round of futures, we mentioned that. Belinda, and I will show you a slide here in a minute, has some outstanding initiatives to make sure we hire excellent new faculty. The ERP, we are making very, very good progress on that thanks to Ken Thomas and the work of his group. The Emergency Response Task Force, of course, I have mentioned that we will fund an initial, one-time expenditure of $300,000 in improvements. Dale Moore and his Work Life Group will continue to look at the survey we have done and make recommendations to me about ways to improve work life integration, a concept that many outstanding employers are looking to address. We will continue to do our professional development series for senior faculty and for administrators. And we think we have, with recent visit by the accrediting agency as well with the work of our consultants a good plan in place for improving our social work program to the level we all want it to be. Obviously, that’s been a challenge because of recent events and I think all of you are aware of with the program.

Recruiting and Hiring the Next Generation of Faculty

Here is a slide on the initiative Belinda will pursue in terms of recruiting and hiring faculty.

ERP – “U-Link”

ERP will be known as ULINK. This identifies the steps that have been completed as well as the ones that are in progress.

Work-Life Initiative

Here is a slide on the Work Life Initiative for you to look at later in terms of the work that that group has done, both with respect to a local survey as well as benchmarking our policies to other institutions.

Compensation System Changes

And then we still have work to do to finish the compensation system changes for the staff and Lynn McKenzie and Steve Thomas have briefed us just yesterday, the Compensation Committee, on the progress that they have made, and they have made outstanding progress towards being to bring the staff now completely into a performance based and equity based compensation system.

Promote ethnic diversity

Two other goals for the year and then we will be finished. Both goals were requested by our Board of Governors to make sure they were elevated to the institutional level, so that we stay attentive to them. And that is that we would implement the Provost plan for increasing the diversity of our faculty, a particular emphasis that the Board expressed to us about ethnic diversity, that we continue to do that in terms of our students, and that I continue to rely on and listen to and empower the President’s commission on diversity. So, we will gladly do that in terms of and I think it’s very important that we do that, and I appreciate the Board’s support for this particular priority.

Maintain a successful intercollegiate athletics program

And then twelfth, is that we maintain a successful intercollegiate athletics program. The Board wanted me to indicate that the 5 criteria that we use to evaluate teams or coaches or the overall performance of our program are ones that they support: competitiveness; compliance with rules and regulations; the academic success, and by that we don’t just mean eligibility, we mean actual academic success, the overall student athletes at Missouri State graduate at a higher rate than the non-athlete population at Missouri State; that these teams remain integrated in the overall campus culture and community culture; and that we stay within our budget and have our athletic program be as financially resourceful and independent as possible.

Conclusion

Those conclude the 12 priorities for the upcoming year and maybe we could bring the lights up, so that we can take your questions and recognize people who have them. If you need to go, obviously, please feel free to do so. But we appreciate your attendance and attentiveness to the presentation, and I’ll go ahead and just give a few minutes for people to clear and then take questions that you would have for us. Thank you very much.