Everything we now do rests on an assumption for which, I think, there is abundant evidence: we are in very good shape. Any comparison of Emory with her sister institutions will reveal a university given vigor by a powerful endowment and a recent history of sound management. The quality of both the faculty and the students has been on a steady rise for some time; we are in the enviable position of being able to recruit additions of the highest quality to the faculty ranks; the students entering the undergraduate division and both the graduate division and the professional schools are bringing to Emory superior credentials, better with each passing year. Our research funding is steadily on the increase, even in a national climate of reductions. Our campaign efforts, soon to reach their goal of $400 million, are a clear sign of the high esteem in which we are held by our alumni and our many friends. The physical plant is in excellent shape; we live in a secure community within a region of the nation that is fiscally healthy and confident. And the difference we make to Atlanta is substantial: the University's indirect economic impact on the city totaled more than $2.4 billion in 1994.
Any assessment of our relatively secure state of affairs must be measured against the condition of higher education in this nation. In many places, it is embattled and on the defensive. Our many critics have delivered stinging attacks on the failures of what, nationally, we are seen as doing. The nation's curricula, particularly in the undergraduate area, are thought amorphous and devoid of intellectual rigor; research in many universities is deemed arcane and devoid of practical benefit; college teaching at some institutions is seen as having been delivered into the hands of unqualified graduate students who teach in classrooms deserted by the regular faculty; and the tuition and fees for private higher education are seen as increasingly out of touch with the financial resources of many ordinary Americans.
That we at Emory have the blessings of fiscal strength, a record of good management and the advantages of our own history should not hide from us the challenges we still face in these areas under scrutiny. We have made progress with some of them; with others, we have considerable distance to travel. David Bright will soon bring forth the results of a lengthy re-evaluation of the undergraduate curriculum of Emory College, Dean Bill Murdy will be doing likewise for Oxford College, and we await the deliberations that will ensue. The TATTO program, now four years old, is our vigorous and sound attempt to guarantee good teaching on the part of those Emory graduate students who do enter the classroom, but some of our classes are too large and the intimacy of exchange on which good education is premised is thereby in danger. We have dampened the growth of tuition, while adhering to an admirable (if expensive) program of undergraduate financial aid, but Emory is still too costly for some of the undergraduates whom we would most like to enroll.
And, despite a record of growth in the physical plant that few universities have been able to manage during the last few decades, we still have building projects that must be completed (or begun and completed). We still lack, in certain places, the proper infrastructural support for our primary mission: excellent research fused with excellent teaching. A good performing arts center and adequate housing for both chemistry and physics head this list. We must also be mindful of other pressing needs in Emory College and in the School of Nursing.
We have now triumphantly concluded, with the appointment of James W. Curran, our search for the new dean of the Rollins School of Public Health, our youngest and fastest growing academic unit. A national search for the vice president for health affairs has captured the attention of the American health community, and the search committee will be engaged, throughout this fall semester, in its demanding and important task of finding a fit successor to Charles Hatcher. The successful recruitment of such a person is crucial to the future of the University; on the shoulders of this office will rest the enormous complexities of leading a health sciences community dedicated to research productivity, clinical practice and medical education, all activities undergoing scrutiny as our nation debates the future of health care. Vice President Bill Fox has announced, with the name of Stephen Moye, the selection of an associate vice president for public affairs, a new position that will help us to forward Emory's message to legislators in Washington and Atlanta. The search for the new director of the Carlos Museum, a facility whose impressive collections have brought many people to the campus, is now under way. Lastly, a search for a vice president for research is beginning; the officer occupying that post will strengthen all of our efforts to reinforce one of the University's primary reasons for being--to develop new learning and to serve as a primary engine for discovery.
As I have thought about the legacies of the leadership preceding me, I count among our blessings Billy Frye's eloquent Choices and Responsibility--Shaping Emory's Future, a document serving as one powerful guide for our planning. Its five areas of discourse--the continuing need we have to unite good teaching to productive
research, the crucial importance of "community," the priority we should give to inter-disciplinary intellectual efforts, the steps we must take to keep our infrastructure at one with our most important research and teaching needs, and the vigilance we must practice to make the University a very good neighbor both locally and globally--were defined after months of campus testimony and deliberation led by the provost. The terrain of our life that they cover is, thanks to Billy Frye, etched into our conscious awareness of Emory's condition. Now we must establish the means by which the problems and the tough realities they have brought to the surface can be addressed effectively. Hence this letter to you.
I want, in this brief document, to focus on two issues: what Emory, in its collective identity, should now be doing to fortify and take fuller advantage of its extraordinary resources; and what it should be doing with those national and international issues, educational and scholarly, whose engagement is its proper destiny.
The first of my topics is internal and, in important ways, technical. It is primarily one for my administrative colleagues and me to deal with. But everyone on the campus should know how certain important decisions are made. In sum, I believe that we must consolidate our many processes of decision-making, processes each meritorious in its own regard, that constitute the world of administrative responsibility at the University. If Choices and Responsibility--Shaping Emory's Future is one marker directing our future, we have yet to fashion a supple coordination between the aims and the means of the University. We must not allow the latter to hold sway over the former. Rather, as we recognize the aspirations and goals defined by such guides as Choices and Responsibility, we must calibrate the depth of fiscal and other resources needed to realize them. In sum, what we want to do comes first; then comes the tough-minded appraisal: can we do it?
To this end, I am asking each of the members of the Program and Budget Committee--the provost and vice president for academic affairs, the executive
vice president, the vice president for health affairs, the vice president for institutional advancement, and the vice president and dean for campus life--to organize the entities reporting to each of them so as to be able to describe to me in the fall semester their most important needs and their most important inadequacies. The deliberations that collectively constitute forward fiscal planning and allocation of resources will be based on these "field reports." We will thus be able to bind all resource allocation to primary principles; we will not permit ourselves to find our way only by successive ad-hoc steps.
I am also asking the Office of the Executive Vice President to organize the presentation of the University's total fiscal resources so that all decisions can be made in a central and efficient way, one that will prove responsive to the academic imperatives of the institution. We all respect the integrity of identity reflected in decisions arising from the individual units of a large organization, each formulating its own plans. Local autonomy is rarely without merit. However, I want to see the success of that autonomy measured in terms of the larger scenario of the University's aspirations.
In the fall, therefore, the primary business of my office and the Provost's Office will be to review the plans that each of the deans will submit on behalf of his or her school. The committee will thus have a good sense of the aspirations of every school or division and will be able to see how those aspirations should be lodged within the larger University aims. The decisions to be made during the year by the Program and Budget Committee will all issue from the connection newly to be forged, and thereafter to be preserved, between what we know we must do and our means of doing it.
As those meetings progress during the school year, the committee will be mindful of what the academic deans noted in their "Open Letter" appended to Choices and Responsibility, namely, that "Emory University needs to be committed first and foremost to the life of the mind. As we plan for the future, we must ask whether our choices and strategies will strengthen the abilities of faculty and students to engage in intellectual discovery." The deans go on to note that the best way to address the challenges we face is in "a synergistic and holistic approach." That being true, two rules of our strategy must then follow.
The first is that responsibility for the educational and fiscal integrity of each element of the holistic organism that is Emory will devolve directly on the administrative leader of that element. That responsibility will be defined by its adherence to our primary educational and intellectual aspirations. The second is that the facts of those human resources, and the fiscal, curricular or infrastructural facts--must all be accessible to any interested party, including, of course, members of the faculty. Only if the facts behind our planning are apparent to all involved in this enterprise will we generate a sense that our work is genuinely collective and responsive to the University's largest obligations.
The second, and much more important, issue has to do, as I have said, with the national and international problems, educational and scholarly, with which it is to be the destiny of this University to engage. It is not the proper course of every academic institution to be national in its scope and aspirations, but I believe that some institutions, owing to their advantages and to the intensity of their energy, have exactly such a mission. Emory is such a place. With the quality of our faculty and students, with our fiscal health, with our location in a section of the country that is rising in capacity and confidence, and with our freedom from some of the encrusted traditions and immobilities of other universities, we will find that we can have triumphs not available to others.
What are they? What will they be? Here, only examples can suffice. That is because the faculty of this institution must be the primary source of intellectual innovation; they must lead while my administrative colleagues and I follow in supporting roles. But let me start things off. First, we must concentrate more on issues that naturally lend themselves to collective attention. Health and disease in all of their aspects comprise one such issue--health and disease in their clinical, cultural, economic, political, sociological, historical and anthropological manifestations. Here is a topic of enormous importance to which several of our schools--Medicine, Public Health, Nursing, Law, the Graduate School and the College--can profitably turn their attention.
Another focus of collective action is the force with which complicated ethical issues have gained their rightful place in the agenda of the nation. Our colleagues in Theology, Law, the College, the Graduate School, the Business School and all of the medical sciences can properly unite to articulate more clearly how ethical dilemmas should be studied and resolved. Emory is fortunate to have on its campus the Center for Ethics in Public Policy and the Professions; it can serve to bring these dilemmas to focus.
We hope also to call on The Carter Center to provide its wisdom, based on its mission-oriented experiences in the world, as we pursue both of the matters I describe above. We must give further reflection to the fact that no university in the nation has an asset as valuable, or as promising, as The Carter Center. Its future benefit to our students and faculty, as well as to the world, must be explored.
As yet another instance, I would like us at Emory to train our attention on a central issue important not only to what we do daily, but to American higher education in general. The issue is teaching, and the problem is the proper assessment thereof. We must concentrate our energy and imagination on an evaluation of the quality of our teaching. Most of the faculty, here and elsewhere, spends most of its time on teaching. How good is that teaching? How good are the means by which we evaluate it? And, perhaps most importantly, how good is the institution in recognizing and rewarding the good teaching we have? The need to address this question is, of course, always with us. But its presence today is made vivid by the fury of attention it has been given by students, parents, commentators and civic leaders. If we at Emory can provide illustrations of what we mean by good teaching, and if we can show how good teaching is assessed and rewarded, we will have made a substantial gift to American higher education in general. To explore the question, I will call for a report to the larger Emory community by the end of the 1995-96 academic year about the ways in which we define good teaching and about the instruments we employ to satisfy ourselves that teaching has been properly measured and respected.
Another issue has to do with a topic I mentioned in my inaugural address, namely "equity," and the ways in which it is pursued on our campus. How are people treated when they function as members of our community? How should we accommodate ourselves to changes in the American workplace? In what ways are we most likely to generate for each person working and studying here the sense that he or she genuinely matters to the University's greater purposes? I am gathering together a group of people from around the campus to begin talking about this topic.
If we want to be as strong as the evidence shows we can be, we will have to engage such issues and others as important, and as taxing, as these. If we want to pay the price of eminence, we will have to show that the compass of our collective attention is no smaller than that of any other university. After one year on the campus, I know that Emory can strengthen itself by an expanded and deliberate focus on what is most important to its vitality as an intellectual, pedagogical and research center. Therefore I look forward to 1995-96 as a strong and productive year for us all.
William M. Chace
President