Office of the University Chancellor

In Defense of Liberal Education

I want to begin by asking a fundamental question – what is the basic mission of this campus? Answered simply, it is, of course, to provide students with an excellent education and to pursue outstanding research.

Everything else we do necessarily depends on these two fundamentals. Without our research mission, many of us would not be here. And without our educational mission, none of us would be here. Service and engagement are also very important and may almost be considered a third mission. But these still depend on the first two.

Simple answers will not suffice when we are trying to understand a complicated institution like Indiana University.

To rephrase that original question, what sort of education does IU Bloomington represent?

It is, I submit, an unashamedly liberal education in the great tradition most eloquently described and defended in modern times by Cardinal John Henry Newman.

In fact, one of Indiana University’s greatest strengths over its lifetime has been its ability to adapt to the changing needs of its students and to the demands of the research environment. Keeping in mind the lofty goals of any university, we must also attend to other factors that, however far they seem from the world of our classrooms and research laboratories, nevertheless shape the very texture of our intellectual community. Beginning with a topic of the greatest interest to some, the budget, I will move in this address through enrollment, undergraduate and graduate education, and research dollars. By way of conclusion, I will turn to somewhat more expansive topics, which include available space on campus, the arts and humanities, our developing international strategy, and the status of ongoing and recently concluded dean searches. All of these are linked one to another to form the fabric of our university.

The great tradition of liberal education that IU exemplifies, and that Newman described over a century ago, asserts that essential to the training of good citizens is an education in the breadth of human knowledge, from the sciences to the humanities, from the social sciences to the arts, and instruction in the skills of both analysis and discrimination.

This same type of education is necessary before a professional education can take place or as an accompaniment to it. It is a training, as Newman says, that develops “habit[s] of mind which last ... through life.”¹

As Newman notes, “... all branches of knowledge…form together a whole or system;…run into each other, and complete each other,…[I]n proportion to our view of them as a whole, is the exactness and trustworthiness of the knowledge which they separately convey;…[T]he process of imparting knowledge to the intellect in this philosophical way is its true culture;…[and] such culture is a good in itself.”²

There are those who assert that an education of this kind is a relic of the past, not in tune with our modern technology-saturated times. But I claim on the contrary, as I am sure many of us do with the greatest of conviction, that it is in fact the best kind of education for these times.

There is no better evidence for this than that other countries are adopting this model. For example, the University of Melbourne in my native Australia is moving from the traditional British model of higher education to one much closer to the American model of liberal education.

In a world where many argue that the future economic, social, and political fabric will be in constant flux and people can be expected to have multiple careers in one lifetime, a liberal education provides students with exactly the right sorts of skills and training to be adaptable, with Newman’s “habits of mind” of analysis and discrimination.

Indiana University Bloomington serves the state by making an essential contribution to Indiana’s economic development and its emerging knowledge economy, providing the state’s exceptional students first with an excellent liberal education and then with the possibility of further education at the highest standards in nearly every profession.

But Indiana University does more.

The genius of the modern American research university is that it fuses Newman’s tradition of liberal education with Vannevar Bush’s momentous idea in his 1945 report, “Science: The Endless Frontier,” that universities should conduct most of this country’s basic research.³ Academic research laboratories would be guided by the most stringent conditions of peer review and buttressed by academic freedom. This fusion of liberal and professional education with open research is at the heart of what has become the best system of higher education in the world, and which is, in this state, exemplified by Indiana University.

Liberal Education at IU Bloomington

But we cannot stand still – our critics and competitors certainly are not. There are those among our critics who consider IU Bloomington to be, what the draft report on the Future of Higher Education commissioned by Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings calls, a “‘mature enterprise’: increasingly risk averse, at times self satisfied, and unduly expensive.”⁴

At IU Bloomington, nothing could be further from the truth.

Since 2000, we have seen the foundations laid for a major renewal and revitalization of the intellectual fabric of almost the whole campus. Under the Commitment to Excellence Program (CTE), and with the reallocation of resources by the schools and the campus, the following major new initiatives have been established right across the gamut of the liberal arts and in the professions:

In the arts and humanities, new programs to renew leadership both in the arts and humanities, and in the School of Music, to develop a new focus in American studies and to expand activities in arts administration.

• In the life sciences, new programs in human biology, cognitive science, vision research, and multidisciplinary science.
• In the sciences, a new Department of Statistics, as well as new programs in environmental science, cybersecurity, and science education.
• In international studies, a major new initiative focusing on the “Two-Thirds” World – that is, the entire developing world.
• And a new program to improve graduate recruitment and lower-division instruction in eight top-ranked departments in the College.

These bold, energetic, and creative initiatives will ensure the expansion and development of major new areas of academic opportunity while sustaining traditional areas of IU Bloomington’s academic and scholarly excellence.

And in the areas of the life sciences and information technology, increasingly essential to the future development of the state’s economy, we have also seen three major new developments since 2000:

• The establishment of the IU School of Informatics, the first new school on this campus in 30 years, under the leadership of Dean Michael Dunn;
• The establishment of the Pervasive Technology Laboratories with the support of a generous grant of $30 million from the Lilly Endowment, under the leadership of Dennis Gannon and others; and
• The establishment of the Indiana Metabolomics and Cytomics Initiative, or METACyt, with a further generous grant of $53 million from the Lilly Endowment, under the leadership of Ted Widlanski and others.

In total, all these initiatives are bringing in around 350 new faculty, post docs, graduate students, and staff to IU Bloomington and will bring in many more in future years. This year alone we have welcomed around 100 new faculty to IU Bloomington, many hired through these initiatives, some hired by schools reallocating resources to areas of new opportunity, and most from major research universities.

And we have, and will ensure, that these appointments reflect a diverse global community so as to provide role models for all students.

This is not a campus “risk adverse and self-satisfied.” This is a campus reflecting deeply, educating tirelessly, innovating relentlessly, creating brilliantly, and always vigorously moving forward—all in the great traditions of a higher education system that is the envy of the world.

But as I said earlier, all this has been the laying of foundations, and so it is. There is much now to be built, and demanding challenges lie ahead of us.

In the rest of this address, I will identify some of these challenges and then describe how, with your help and essential involvement, we can, together, begin addressing many of them.

Budget

The first and most critical challenge is the campus budget.

Two factors made what is always a difficult budget particularly difficult for Bloomington this year.

A last-minute legislative decision capped undergraduate non-resident tuition at 4.9 percent for the second consecutive year, which led academic and non-academic units on campus to reduce their proposed budgets by $3.1 million.

On top of that, the General Assembly reduced the state appropriation to Bloomington by $2 million, which meant that we started the budget process last spring with a major problem.

Fortunately, the university tax was cut by $400,000, and the campus was provided with access to $1 million in utility savings. Thus, we were able to increase faculty salaries by an average of 4 percent this year. Professional staff salary increases averaged 2.7 percent, and support and service employees’ salary increases averaged 2.5 percent. In addition, the campus fully funded a 13.6 percent increase in faculty/staff health care and other benefits and a 40 percent increase in the cost of student academic appointment health insurance coverage. These kinds of increases will continue to be a campus priority since the costs of losing top-rate faculty and professional staff members to other institutions is severe.

However, the campus faces other very serious budget issues in the next biennium. Unearmarked state support— the funding that is used to sustain our core operations— has fallen by $14 million in the last five years. While we hope to stem this decline, it is very unlikely that Bloomington with be able to attain its priority objectives and maintain the quality of its programs without tuition increases that exceed those of the last two years.

For example, as tuition grows, Bloomington will face an increasing need for financial aid. This year, the campus allocated an additional $4.7 million to its financial aid budget to provide both merit- and need-based financial aid for students attending IU Bloomington. Without including loans or work-study, over the last two years, the average grant for students from families with income of less than $50,000 has increased by 57 percent (from $6,030 to $9,487). The good news is that the average out-of-pocket cost to attend IU Bloomington has actually fallen by over $1,700 in the last two years for lower-income students.

But it will be necessary to further increase financial aid if we are to improve student quality, increase graduation rates for underrepresented minorities, and further increase affordability. These will not be inexpensive initiatives.

We must always remember that other institutions want our best faculty and currently pay more. We are committed to reversing this slide, but the costs will be substantial. Eighty percent of all new revenue generated by the campus this year went to compensation. If we are going to increase compensation, we must increase revenue. There is no other way.

While the share of revenue going to faculty salaries has declined, an increasing share of revenue has gone to professional salaries, benefits, and student academic appointees over the last five years. Pressures to do even more in each of these areas to reward these superb people will be acute in upcoming years.

But it is essential that we move forward to take advantage of new opportunities. IU will submit a special request to the Indiana General Assembly for a total of $50 million in annual funding to support implementation of the university’s Life Sciences Strategic Plan in Bloomington and at the Medical School in Indianapolis. State investment in this initiative provides an outstanding opportunity by increasing the substantial and growing university engagement in the life sciences to help develop Indiana’s life sciences industry– an industry where Indiana has a competitive advantage over many other states.

This request builds on the considerable success we have had over the last few years with the wide range of new initiatives in the life sciences funded by CTE, METACyt, and through reallocation in a number of the schools. As with the successful IT initiatives funded by the legislature in previous years, this bold new initiative holds enormous promise for IU.

Enrollment Management

One of the two principal missions for IU is to provide an education of the highest quality to our students. But as a major research university, we also need to constantly strive to recruit excellent students.

IU Bloomington has already taken steps to ensure that it will be more selective, especially in terms of its undergraduate students. In 2005, the Bloomington Faculty Council passed a resolution to this effect, and in April 2006, the Board of Trustees approved a new undergraduate admissions policy for the Bloomington campus that will take effect in 2011. Ultimately, this policy will improve the intellectual climate of campus and the economy of the whole state.

Our enrollment numbers for this fall suggest that we are already well on our way to achieving our goal. Though we have the largest incoming class in IU Bloomington history (7,259 freshmen), it is also the most talented class in recent history. This new class arrives with SAT scores 10 points higher than last year’s, even in a year when the national average SAT score went down 7 points.

We have increased the number of National Merit Scholars at IU Bloomington by 21 percent, and the number of valedictorians has increased by 6 percent. The average SAT scores of African American students have increased 27 points. Although the numbers of these students have fallen somewhat, the overall number of minority students has remained about the same. Clearly, we will need to increase the efforts and resources in this area in order to double minority enrollment by 2013, and I have asked for a plan in the next month as to how to increase minority enrollment next year.

Earlier this year, I appointed Dr. Roger Thompson as vice provost for enrollment management to implement our new, more selective procedures, to help us attract the best and the brightest students from Indiana and elsewhere, and to increase minority enrollment. He is developing an integrated approach to student recruitment and enrollment services that draws on our excellent academic programs, our tremendous alumni network, and our ability to build the infrastructure necessary to support cutting-edge recruitment and marketing initiatives.

Put bluntly, we are in a battle for brains.

We want IU to be the institution of choice for high-achieving Indiana students. In order to make this happen, we will be targeting students much earlier in their college selection process, and thereby cultivating an improved applicant pool by widening its scope to include highly recruited high school sophomores and juniors. Meeting our goals for higher admissions standards will not happen overnight, but our new recruiting initiatives promise to help us achieve these goals by 2011.

Another way to address this issue is through financial aid. I have already mentioned the increases in financial aid that have allowed IU to compete more effectively for academically meritorious students regardless of their financial need. However, strategies in this whole area need a comprehensive overhaul to ensure we are fully leveraging our considerable resources, and to help identify further ways to make an IU education more affordable to those in need.

Consequently, I have established an Affordability Task Force, led by Vice Provost Thompson, to carry out this task. This task force will be conducting a full review of our financial aid policies and issuing their first report in October. Our goal is to shape a financial aid strategy that encourages all talented Hoosier students to attend IU regardless of their financial situation. This task takes on added importance in light of the Spellings Commission’s criticisms of the high costs of higher education.

All of our efforts in this area will require strong partnerships with the academic divisions, schools, and colleges to create a strategic, consistent message for IU. Our goal is for Enrollment Management to work collaboratively with academic programs to coordinate messages and ensure that students’ experiences once they reach IU match what they learned about our university before their arrival.

It is also important that we show the high schools around the state of Indiana that it is a “new day” in student recruitment. To this end, Roger and other administrators in his office have developed and maintained an aggressive schedule for visiting key high schools around the state. So far, the response in cities such as West Lafayette, Carmel, Indianapolis, Muncie, Fort Wayne, South Bend, and Bloomington has been extremely positive with crowds of up to 100 students at some meetings.

Given that we are facing increasingly fierce competition, we must mobilize all the resources of the campus and the schools as well as their faculty and staff to ensure that IU Bloomington is the institution of choice for the most talented and diverse group of students from throughout the state, from across the nation and around the world.

General Education

As we seek to become a more selective and academically distinctive institution, a major academic challenge for us this year will be to establish and finalize a general education curriculum. Such a curriculum is in fact a way of helping to ensure that all students at IU Bloomington will receive a liberal education of the kind this campus represents. It will allow them the opportunity to explore many subjects, developing a broad range of knowledge, without fear of adding years to their programs of study because they decide to change their major.

It has been the culture and tradition of the campus to set curriculum within the schools or in the College. A campus-level general education curriculum builds on these traditions.

President Herbert’s 2004 inaugural call for a general education curriculum at IU, strongly endorsed by the trustees, has led to a sustained and energetic renewal of discussions about how best to define a general education curriculum at IU Bloomington that draws on the strengths of Indiana University and distinguishes it from its peer institutions.

A proposal for an IU Bloomington general education curriculum was introduced to the Bloomington Faculty Council earlier this month. This proposal was positively received, and it is scheduled for final consideration in October. Rollout of the curriculum will begin in fall 2011, which will coincide with the start date of the new undergraduate admissions policy.

Such a curriculum will also enable IU Bloomington to play a leading role in statewide discussions about a seamless education system between high schools, community colleges, and the state’s research campuses.

Graduate Education

Just as undergraduate education is one pillar of IU Bloomington’s strength, so graduate education is another. Graduate education is, in fact, a vital part of the research enterprise; some claim that one-third of all research done in universities is done by graduate students. Hence, the challenge is to be able to recruit the very best graduate students.

Recruiting such graduate students also plays a key role in helping to attract and retain the best faculty members. Thus, the quality and diversity of our graduate students has a strong effect on the quality of our academic programs, which in turn determine the excellence of the education we provide for our undergraduates.

At IU, the University Graduate School promotes and supports excellence in graduate education for individual students, faculty, departments, and the university as a whole. I have recently appointed Professor James Wimbush as dean of this school, and under his leadership it will continue to work with the schools to recruit the best graduate students.

Funding is vital to attract such graduate students to any research university. Unfortunately, in recent years, IU Bloomington’s graduate fellowship funding has lagged behind the packages offered by other top schools, although we have made some progress in changing this through CTE. Private donors have recently provided gifts and bequests totaling over $35 million to the Graduate Fellowship Program, including large bequests for fellowships in the humanities, to create highly competitive financial aid packages that will greatly increase our ability to recruit the most sought-after students. And to further improve financial aid packages, the Graduate School will continue working to improve graduate student health benefits.

Many of these objectives will be addressed through the creation of a University Graduate School Development Office. The goals of this office will be to increase IU’s ability to compete among peer institutions for stipends for the best students, to enhance student diversity, to increase and improve student services and support, and to support student research and professional development activities.

Just as the Office of Enrollment Management plans to enhance IU’s visibility to prospective high school students, so, too, will the Graduate School work to improve its visibility within Indiana University and to external agencies and constituents. Dean Wimbush and other Graduate School leaders will be visiting regional campuses and meeting with chancellors and program and student representatives in order to better identify the needs of the campuses regarding graduate student services.

They will also work with federal and state legislators, business groups, and agencies to explain the vital contributions that graduate students make to the university and the necessity for improved financial support to help encourage the highest-achieving graduate students to attend IU. These changes will allow the Graduate School to continue to play a central role in fostering a highly supportive environment conducive to scholarship, research, and professional and career development for graduate students throughout the university.

Funding Research

Education is clearly one of Indiana University’s two fundamental missions. The other vital and fundamental mission is research. The majority of funding for this research comes from external organizations.

The Bloomington campus had another superb year in terms of awards received from such organizations. For fiscal year 2006, IU Bloomington faculty had 799 successful proposals resulting in awards totaling more than $124 million. Net of the two large one-time Lilly Endowment awards received last year (METACyt and Excellence in Indiana Initiative), award dollars increased by 9 percent over the prior year. Total awards at IU Bloomington have increased 38 percent and 83 percent over the last 5 and 10 years, respectively. These are outstanding numbers that highlight the excellence of the research our faculty is conducting.

Mention must also be made of the dedicated hard-working staff in the Offices of Sponsored Research Services and Research Compliance who ensure that all the proposals that the campus submits – nearly 1,300 last year – are processed in a timely fashion and comply with all federal rules and regulations. Likewise, staff members in many departments across the university are vital to the health of our programs and help faculty pursue their research missions.

Of the total of $124 million in awards received, $78 million were awards from federal agencies and $46 million were awards from non-federal sources such as foundations and commercial and nonprofit entities. IU Bloomington had a particularly successful year with both the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), which together represent 44 percent of all campus award dollars and 70 percent of campus federal awards. For fiscal year 2006, IU Bloomington received over $29 million from the NIH and over $25 million from the NSF, increases of 12 percent and 19 percent, respectively. In light of the relatively flat budgets of those two federal agencies over that time, these increases speak volumes, once again, about the level and quality of research on this campus.

However, in order to compete for such funding, the basic research and scholarly infrastructure— from microscopes to library holdings— must be in place to enable faculty to mount competitive proposals.

Mechanisms must also exist to enable faculty to develop ideas to the point where they are mature enough to form the basis of a strong proposal. In short, we have to invest more internal IU money to get more money from outside IU.

One internal program that supports the development of new research ideas is the Faculty Research Support Program. This is aimed at supporting the general development, expansion, or enhancement of individual faculty research and creative activity. In its most recent round, it provided support for 34 percent of proposals received, and it distributed a total of $1.5 million. Funded proposals came from the Schools of Public and Environmental Affairs, Optometry, Law, Informatics and Computer Science, and 10 different departments in the College, including the Archives of Traditional Music, Central Eurasian Studies, physics, and biology.

The Special State Research Funding Program primarily targets major items of equipment and infrastructure to support “team” research and scholarship as well as multiple user facilities that have the potential to receive federal funds. Just this past year, the program funded fourteen different projects for just over $4 million. Five departments in the College received funding from this, as did the School of Optometry, the School of Education, and Health, Physical Education, and Recreation (HPER).

The challenge, then, if we are to continue to increase externally funded research, is that we must continue to increase our internal research investments, both at the school and campus levels. This includes increasing funding for new faculty start-up packages, which are growing rapidly everywhere. But such funding is under severe strain, and the challenge will be to find ways to continue to increase it.

One way of doing this will be to more effectively use campus centers and institutes to pursue large-scale funding opportunities, which bring with them significant indirect costs. A new campus center focused on research in STEM— science, technology, engineering, and mathematics— was announced earlier this year. Discussions are also underway to establish new centers in environmental science, national security, and the social sciences. I have developed new procedures for the establishment of centers and institutes to facilitate their creation and evaluation.

Another way to garner additional funding is to plan more systematically and strategically for the acquisition and support of our large-scale research facilities. As a first step in doing this, I have asked Vice Provost Sarita Soni to carry out an inventory of all facilities of this kind at IU. This will also be very important as part of the inventory the Committee on Institutional Cooperation is doing of all such facilities among all its members with a view to making unique facilities at one member’s site more widely available to the others.

While vice president for research, I commissioned two task forces on research space at IU Bloomington and at IUPUI to assess the need for present and future research space on those campuses. In August 2004, these task forces issued their joint report, which starkly stated that the lack of research space was the biggest single impediment to IU reaching its full potential as a research university. They also identified that a total of around five million gross square feet of space, including around two million at Bloomington, would be needed over the next 15 to 20 years.

All of us on this campus see around us every day the evidence of this dire space shortage. Addressing this critical problem is one of my highest priorities. Let me describe three ways this is being done.

First, new buildings are close to completion, and the construction of others will soon commence. Simon Hall— our first major new building in over 20 years— is nearing completion and will be operational by summer 2007. Later this year, construction will start on the next major building at Bloomington, the Multidisciplinary Science Building II, which is slated to be completed by summer 2009. In addition to these major projects, a myriad of smaller building projects has begun or will soon begin. These include the Griffy Research Preserve Building, designed to support the new CTE-funded Interdisciplinary Environmental Sciences program, the Hutton Honors College, the Henderson and Atwater parking garage, and the Office and Teaching Laboratory Building. All of these are scheduled to be completed by fall 2007.

Second, IU’s capital request to the upcoming budget session of the state legislature includes funds for new construction and renovation. Funds are being requested to construct the new Cyberinfrastructure Building (CIB) and the new Life Sciences III Building (also known as the Systems Biology Building). Funds are also being requested for the complete renovation of Jordan Hall, the home of our outstanding biology department. We are also seeking the full restoration of renovation and repair funding, so essential to the renovation and repair of our vast network of buildings, and of plant expansion funding, necessary for operating our new buildings.

Two important decisions have been made about these new buildings. One concerns the location of the CIB, which has been changed from a site behind the Geology building to a site at the corner of 10th and the Bypass, near the present site of the Wrubel Computing Center. Being off campus in an area with more space will allow a less expensive building to be built, and it will also form the nucleus for future growth in this area focused on economic development. The other decision is to establish a planning task force for the Life Sciences III Building chaired by Professor Jeff Palmer in his role as chair of the IU Bloomington Life Sciences Advisory Task Force. Key to our role within the state’s economy is the development of incubator space for IU Bloomington’s technology transfer activities, especially in the life sciences, which are already expanding rapidly, and which can be expected to expand even more rapidly should the legislature fund IU’s major budget request in this area.

A number of these activities, especially those associated with METACyt, can be expected to generate intellectual property of potential commercial interest, which will require a facility with appropriate wet lab capabilities, where this intellectual property can be “incubated.”

Hence, I am announcing the formation of another task force to be chaired by Professor Ted Widlanski, the CEO of METACyt, to investigate the establishment of an incubator facility for IU Bloomington for the life sciences and other areas. This is also an appropriate context in which to stress how essential it is for the Bloomington Faculty Council to approve a new intellectual property policy for Indiana University in a timely fashion this year.

But it is now time to begin planning beyond the completion of these buildings and beyond the upcoming budget session of the state legislature. A third and final way, then, of addressing the space problem is to review how we are using some of the older established buildings on the campus.

Franklin Hall is in a central location in the Old Crescent, the academic heart of the IU Bloomington campus. It has for nearly 35 years housed the office of Enrollment Management (and its predecessor units) and a number of other administrative units. However, the need for such a prime central location for many of these units has waned in recent years. As well, it has been the university’s practice to ultimately convert all the buildings in the Old Crescent for academic ends.

Hence, I am announcing the formation of two further task forces that will begin their work in October.

The first, to be chaired by Vice Provost Roger Thompson, will investigate options for creating a state-of-the-art student services building and relocating units presently in Franklin Hall in order to free space in this building for academic purposes.

The second, to be chaired by Professor Tom Gieryn, will investigate the feasibility of converting Franklin Hall into an academic building for the humanities to also include classroom space, given that the move of the CIB potentially makes funds available for this purpose again. This task force will take as its point of departure the faculty report commissioned by Dean Subbaswamy issued in July 2005, and in particular ‘Scenario C’ of that report, which was focused on the exciting possibility of co-locating all of the departments and programs in languages and international studies.⁵ An architect has already been appointed to assist this task force.

The establishment of this humanities building task force also provides an opportunity to investigate some of the problems with Ballantine Hall, where many humanities faculty work and teach. Specifically, I have asked the university architect to provide me with a report on the feasibility of air conditioning this building, and this assessment will be considered together with the report of the task force.

All of the task forces I have mentioned will commence their work in October.

The Arts and Humanities

The arts and humanities have traditionally been one of the great intellectual and scholarly strengths of IU. Located primarily in the College and including our peerless School of Music, they have brought vast distinction to IU Bloomington for decades. I have just described actions I am taking to start addressing the severe space problems these disciplines face on campus. Internal funding to support research and creative activity in these disciplines has also been difficult to obtain.

However, while VP for Research, I established the New Frontiers in the Arts and Humanities program. It has proven extremely successful with only one in four proposals in the main category being funded. This program is in the third year of its five-year lifespan, and just last week called for proposals from faculty for this year. The goal of the program, as the call for proposals states, “is to help Indiana University faculty members to expand their work into disciplinary or interdisciplinary frontiers that promise new insights into the human condition or pursue innovative directions in artistic creativity.” Funding for the program is provided by a grant from the Lilly Endowment and is set at $1 million per year.

New Frontiers includes four separate funding categories: New Frontiers Grants, New Perspectives Grants, Visiting Visionary Scholars Grants, and Exploration Traveling Fellowship Grants. During fiscal year 2005-06, a total of nearly 45 projects were funded in these four categories, distributing a total of nearly $1 million ($956,586) over the course of the year. The library, four centers, and five schools— the School of Education; Health, Physical Education, and Recreation (HPER); the School of Journalism; the Jacobs School; and fourteen different departments in the College— received support. The New Frontiers Program has led to 12 proposals being submitted to external agencies, including the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Indiana Arts Commission, and Warhol Foundation, among others. Twenty-four presentations or performances have resulted from this funding, including books published by Oxford University Press and Harvard University Press, and 15 exhibitions have been held around the country and one in Italy. This is a fine record of achievement and only begins to suggest the productivity of the faculty in these crucial areas.

Given how essential this program is to the arts and humanities, I will seek funding for it for a further five-year period once the present Lilly Endowment funding is finished.

Also essential to the arts and humanities at IU Bloomington are units such as the IU Art Museum, the IU Library, the Lilly Library, the IU Press, and a number of facilities within the Jacobs School of Music and the Department of Theater and Drama. All of these provide a vital and rich array of superb resources and facilities for scholarship and creative activity in the arts and humanities across the whole campus. To help us more effectively develop and use these resources, especially in the context of the increasing multidisciplinarity of the arts and humanities, I am establishing the Scholarly Facilities Committee, chaired by Professor Susan Gubar, to provide me with advice and recommendations in this area. This committee will bring together representatives of all these units and a number of faculty to provide a forum for them to meet regularly to discuss the common problems that these sometimes-isolated units face. I will be providing the committee with a modest budget to help support multidisciplinary initiatives and opportunities they identify. This committee will also provide a forum through which to pursue exciting large-scale collaborative funding opportunities.

One facility that would immeasurably enrich the campus is a quality cinema, especially given IU Bloomington’s traditional strength in film studies. Such a facility would allow students to study the great cinematic works of art presented with scholarly care and using the latest technology. Although we missed an opportunity with the Von Lee, there may be other opportunities. For example, the magnificent old University Theater that forms part of the auditorium is presently unused and could be converted to a superb cinema facility. And there may be other possibilities.

I intend to establish a further task force in the next few months to investigate the feasibility of establishing a cinema on campus.

International Engagement

IU has a great tradition of international engagement going back to the days of Herman Wells. Students from all over the world have studied at IU, and IU students, including many notable citizens of Indiana, have made their mark internationally using skills they first learned at IU. International studies in languages and cultures have also been a remarkable strength of IU for decades, as was confirmed recently in spectacular fashion by the award to IU of $16 million in federal funding for nine Title VI international studies and world language centers. And the possible development of Franklin Hall into a humanities building focusing on these areas has the potential to add still further to these strengths.

An international requirement is also a centerpiece of the proposed new general education curriculum, recognizing the emerging importance of providing a more globally orientated education for IU students. This will require us to expand our relationships with overseas institutions.

Becoming a more selective institution will also mean that we can be expected to recruit more of the best international students, which again means we will need to expand our relationships with international institutions.

So where do the best prospects lie for expanding these relationships? Over two-thirds of our 3,000 plus international students come from just five countries: China/Hong Kong, India, Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. The first two countries in particular are massively expanding their systems of higher education with an aim of competing with the best universities in the world in the near future. However, we send far fewer Bloomington students to these countries.

These countries, then, which have the most dynamic economies in the world, present wonderful opportunities for us to significantly expand our relationships with their best institutions to improve our access to their best students for recruiting purposes, and to provide major new study abroad opportunities.

Consequently, the deans and I will be focusing on visiting all of these countries over the next year with precisely these goals, though of course none of our long-standing traditional international partners will be neglected. In addition, I will be working with Dean for International Programs Patrick O’Meara and many others, to develop the university’s International Strategic Plan, which can be expected to reflect many of these themes and which we hope to complete by the end of the year.

Searches

Before I finish, let me say just a few words about the major searches that are underway. As many observers have noted, IU is presently going through a major leadership and generational change, and this is particularly evident at the level of the deans where, at the beginning of this year, there were six positions to be filled through retirement or resignation.

Based on the energetic and enthusiastic work of the two search committees chaired by Dean Lauren Robel and Vice Provost Sarita Soni, I have been able to announce a new dean of the College, Bennett Bertenthal of the University of Chicago, and a new dean of the University Graduate School, James Wimbush of the Kelley School of Business. I hope to fill the position of dean of the School of Continuing Studies very soon, and the searches for the deans of HPER and informatics are underway under the leadership of Deans Smith and Wheeler. I also expect to start the search for the dean of libraries in October.

Hopefully, all of these positions will be filled by the end of this academic year, and we will once again have a full complement of academic administrative leadership on this campus.

Conclusion

This, then, is the state of academic affairs at IU Bloomington. I have left much unsaid and many un-thanked, but I hope I have conveyed to you the message that the state of academic affairs is excellent, though many challenges lie before us. I have described a number of these but also described ways I am proposing we begin addressing them.

As I said earlier, the foundations for how to do this have been laid over recent years through the hard work of many people in this room and elsewhere in the university. Now the challenge in front of all of us is to build on these foundations to surmount these challenges as we approach the 200th anniversary of the founding of this great university.

Source Notes

1. Newman, John Henry. The Idea of University, ed. Teresa Iglesias (Dublin: Ashfield Press, 2009).
2. Ibid.
3. Bush, Vannevar. “Science - the Endless Frontier: A Report to the President by Vannevar Bush, Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development.” 25 July 1945. United States Government Printing Office. https://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/nsf50/vbush1945.htm
4. U.S. Department of Higher Education. “A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education.” Page 9. Washington, D.C. 2006. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED493504.pdf
5. Indiana University Humanities Classroom and Office Building Planning Committee, Final Report, July 12, 2005, p. 9, Scenario C.