<p>Being Excellent and Becoming Eminent</p>
<p>Joseph A. Alutto
Executive Vice President and Provost
The Ohio State University</p>
<p>Address to the University Senate</p>
<p>February 16, 2012</p>
<p>Good afternoon. Thank you for this opportunity to discuss our universitys academic directions. It is an honor to be a Senate member and a privilege to come before you for this annual discussion.</p>
<p>Today, I would like to share some thoughts on increasing the universitys academic reputation and visibility. I use the phrase share some thoughts deliberately, as it signals the importance to me of give and take, receiving and hearing feedback, and flexibility leading ultimately to action. Indeed, Ohio States move from excellence to eminence requires us to act together as One University, particularly as we aggressively address major initiatives.</p>
<p>With that in mind, let me start our conversation by commenting briefly on this academic years priorities. Their successful implementation will require the best efforts of all of us. As displayed on our web site, my colleagues in Academic Affairs and I have identified initiatives we believe most critical to the universitys success during the 2011-2012 academic year. These priorities touch on every aspect of our academic life at Ohio State. Let me mention just a few of these by way of example.</p>
<p>First, spurred by faculty, the movement to semesters has encouraged a level of innovation and cooperation across colleges and departments that is a source of appreciation and collective pride. Completion of that effort is essential to our future.</p>
<p>Second, with over 10,000 graduate students and a faculty committed to graduate education, we continue to set an example for other universities in terms of program assessment and the willingness to allocate resources for programs achieving excellence.</p>
<p>Third, recent faculty efforts in creating new networks between faculty and programs in the Environmental Sciences and Life Sciences are serving as models for this university and others. But the process is just beginning and must be continued.</p>
<p>We are also accelerating the enhancement of student experiences through broadened curricular offerings, new housing and residence life programming, and improved access to academic and career advising services.</p>
<p>Finally, I would like to make explicit a core, overarching priority that is built into the fabric of this great university: the College of Arts and Sciences. The efforts of college leadership and faculty have been remarkable and are perhaps best evidenced in new teaching and research programs crossing over 40 units of the college.</p>
<p>This is a level of integration and innovation that makes us the envy of our peers. This progress is spectacular, ongoing, and will continue to provide an outstanding foundation for academic programs university wide.</p>
<p>But I would like to explore in some greater detail three issues affecting all of our academic lives. First let me comment on faculty reward and recognition.</p>
<p>This year and on into the future, I will be working with deans, chairs, and faculty groups to articulate policies for broadened reward and recognition for faculty achievements. This focus builds on the evolving landscape for promotion to full professor. We need a truly One University approach to clarifying promotion standards for senior faculty.</p>
<p>One change has been to expand the creative endeavors portion of the core dossier to cover commercialization activities, including disclosures, patents, options, and licensing agreements. In addition, more specific and more flexible criteria for promotion to full professor have been codified in the promotion and tenure documents of a number of our colleges. These new criteria allow the colleges to recognize a diversity of paths to the rank of professor.</p>
<p>Vice Provost Susan Williams and the Rules Committee have worked together to seek a modification of Faculty Rule 3335-6-02, which in the past defined only scholarship and service. The time has come to expand the rule to include a definition of teaching, one which embraces e-learning and distance learning; classroom, studio, and clinical instruction; extension and continuing education; and advising and mentoring.</p>
<p>By defining teaching as well as scholarship and service, the rule will properly acknowledge the tripartite role of the tenure-track faculty. And this, in turn, will formalize a promotion system that recognizes and rewards all aspects of faculty performance.</p>
<p>All of these actions reflect the reality that attracting, retaining, and promoting the most able and creative intellectual force in the country is paramount among all the priorities serving to guide us. This is something that Ohio State must do if it is to make the move from excellence to eminence.</p>
<p>Let me now turn to a discussion of the resource base necessary for achieving this eminence.</p>
<p>Supporting and enhancing faculty excellence is at the heart of a call to increase external research funding and increase efforts to generate the support necessary for success. This can be accomplished through the three Discovery Themes I will discuss in a few minutes, and also by the broad, innovative, and often interdisciplinary research that so typifies our faculty. External review after external review of our programs, departments, and colleges lauds our facultys scholarship, an endeavor that forms the foundation for all that we do. That commitment to an eminence based on scholarship must never be forgotten, even as we address other aspects of institutional success.</p>
<p>As we all know, we are entering a period in which financial resources to support those essential activities are becoming increasingly difficult to secure. Yet those of us in leadership positions have an obligation to do all that we can to ensure a resource base that supports faculty, staff, and students as they seek to explore and understand the essence of life in an increasingly complex world. This requires finding support for world-class scholarship and insight along with the transfer of knowledge across generations that will determine the future of our society.</p>
<p>To accomplish this we must invest in the sciences, the arts, and humanitieswhile simultaneously supporting the application of such knowledge to dynamics of life as diverse as medicine, political science, engineering, social services, law and business. In effect, we must find ways of meeting students needs for access to the excellence that leads to eminence. At the same time, we must also provide the incremental funding that will sustain the intellectual talent essential for creating the knowledge on which success must be based. That means resources must be found for investment in faculty, staff, facilities, and student aid. It is increasingly clear that we cannot expect such new funding levels to flow from state or federal subsidies.</p>
<p>That said, I am aware that some are questioning recent efforts to alter our portfolio of resources. So, let me mention three of these resource-generation initiatives in greater detail.</p>
<p>To begin with, broadening the scope of our commercialization activities will allow our faculty discoveries to reach a broader audience and encourage their use for the ultimate benefit of society, one of our core university missions. Our colleagues make often amazing discoveries each year, many of which simply sit on a shelf or otherwise do not achieve their full potential. We want these discoveries to have the broadest possible reach. Interestingly, enhancing our visibility also attracts capital to be used for advancing university aspirations. We are currently at the bottom of our peer universities in commercialization efforts. This is in such clear contrast to the quality of our faculty and its research activity. We must become better at using that excellence to generate investment capital for core support.</p>
<p>Second, if we move ahead with leasing the management of our parking facilities, we will realize a significant, immediate source of revenue that can be used in pursuit of our goals. The purpose of such an action is not to make money for its own sake, but to support our core mission.</p>
<p>Lastly, I should mention proceeds from the sale of the century bonds. These resources will be used to fund $2 billion of capital expenditure projects on campus, essential infrastructure for high-quality research and teaching. That type of investment is often overlooked when considering the impacts of faculty additions or program expansions for students.</p>
<p>Creating and investing funds generated in these new and innovative ways will not turn Ohio State into a business. Far from corporatizing the university, this approach will enable us to support and sustain our core values, however volatile may be the world around us.</p>
<p>Please remember that we are engaging in these initiatives for a purpose. All of these new funds will be channeled to priorities identified through Ohio States academic planning efforts of the last few years.</p>
<p>And this brings me to the third and final overarching focus that I would like to discuss with you today: strategic planning for our future.</p>
<p>Over the past two years Ohio State has engaged in a number of long-term planning exercises designed to prioritize the universitys goals and objectives and to guide strategic decision-making for the next ten years. It begins with academic planning that informs and drives planning for support services such as facilities, human resources, information technology, housing, and so forth. To be effective, these planning efforts must engage the entire university in an integrated fashion, from the Board of Trustees to our academic units. As a result, Ohio State is now following an approach that merges all lines of planning as we strive to reach our overarching aspiration: the rise from excellence to eminence. This approach is founded on Ohio States vision, mission, and values as well as four core goals and a focus on three discovery themes that will inform activities throughout the university.</p>
<p>Our vision, mission, and values statements are so fundamental to our institutional identity and integrity that it is important for us to regularly review and recommit ourselves. They appear on the website of the Office of Academic Affairs as a constant reminder.</p>
<p>Underpinning our mission and future success are four institution-wide goals focusing on (1) achievement of demonstrable excellence in teaching and learning, (2) creating knowledge through research and innovation, (3) supporting outreach and engagement, and (4) exhibiting effective resource stewardship.</p>
<p>The universitys move to eminence will also be founded in the universitys three discovery themes of Health and Wellness, Food Production and Security, and Energy and Environment. These themes emerged from wide-ranging discussions with colleagues, reflect past and future investments, and encompass issues of world-wide importance. By design, they tap uniquely broad and deep institutional expertise and reflect key issues that both face society today and will need to be addressed well into the future. They are thus the next expression of the universitys ongoing commitment to creating, advancing, and applying knowledge in areas critical to Ohio, the nation, and the world. They fully reflect our land-grant heritage.</p>
<p>These discovery themes provide us with opportunities to bring together various initiatives that may have evolved independently. We have many small initiatives in these areas that would better leverage their impacts if coordinated and supported in a more systemic fashion, a message we keep hearing from outside review teams and policy makers. By uniting these efforts, we will have greater regional, national, and international impact.</p>
<p>The scale and scope of these discovery themes is sufficiently broad to imagine that faculty from almost every college and all six campuses of the university, if they chose to, could actively contribute to these efforts. However, let me hasten to add that even as many faculty members concentrate their focus on discovery theme issues, they and others will also continue to advance core disciplines. What this means is that faculty whose work does not fall neatly into one of the discovery theme areas need not fear that we are asking them to abandon their particular pursuit of scholarship. That is not the intent. As these colleagues pursue excellence through high-impact teaching and learning, their contributions will continue to be nurtured and encouraged by colleges and departments or schools. After all, our budget model keeps the majority of resources focused at the college and department level where choices about areas of eminence can be reflected in resource allocations.</p>
<p>We are essentially discussing a mixed model of investment in excellence where there are college and department choices about priorities as well as university-wide emphases. When those choices intersect, the greatest impact is possible. But there will always be the flexibility for local decisions about priorities that help achieve core university goals. This mixed model presumes a level of coordination that should be reflected in strategic planning and its underlying processes.</p>
<p>Of course, strategic planning is not new to our institution. Ohio State has always had a strategic vision and a defined path for achieving it. The first major step in Ohio States current strategic planning process began upon President Gees return to the university in 2007 and his identification of six overarching guiding philosophies. The strategic planning effort continued with the Board of Trustees approval of the One Ohio State Framework, the universitys comprehensive effort to redefine how we think about our physical world. More recently, the Trustees have approved a new model for university advancement, laying the groundwork for the university-wide integration of alumni relations, communications, and marketing and development functions.</p>
<p>While the Board of Trustees has been engaged in these planning efforts, Ohio States 14 colleges and the Regional Campus Cluster have simultaneously been developing multi-year plans that are aligned with the institutional goals I mentioned earlier.</p>
<p>Department-level strategic plans are being developed and will be integrated with their colleges strategic emphases. Plans for the universitys support units such as Student Life, Business and Finance, and Human Resources will be refined over the coming months and driven by evolving academic objectives.</p>
<p>What I want to underscore here is that all of the universitys strategic plans at all levels arefor the first timebecoming roadmaps to the same place: the achievement of academic eminence.</p>
<p>Up to this point, however, I have been talking about the process of strategic planning. Let me now say more about the purpose or goal of such planning.</p>
<p>Strategic planning is of course not an end in itself. The purpose of strategic planning is to chart our path toward a shared vision by clarifying points of progress and developing the metrics that will allow us to assess progress. Our path, as articulated by President Gee, is leading us from the acknowledged excellence of today to the anticipated eminence of tomorrow. This is the point of every single university strategic plan.</p>
<p>But it should be apparent that to fulfill our ultimate strategic goalmoving from excellence to eminenceOhio State needs a clear and aggressive goal defined in a way that allows us to know whether we are making progress and assess when that goal will be achieved. This goal must be simple enough to be understood while guiding behavior at all levels of the university.</p>
<p>I believe the goal that is sufficiently ambitious yet appropriate given our aspirations is that by 2020 Ohio State University will be consistently recognized as being among the top ten of all public, comprehensive research universities. This goal is simply a focused, measurable way of saying that as faculty and staff we owe our students and society the very best in the discovery and dissemination of knowledge.</p>
<p>Now, those of you who are not new to this institution are well aware that top ten status has long been discussed as a desired goal. But the message I want to convey to you is that what up to now has been longed for can now be planned for. Let me explain.</p>
<p>There are many different university ranking systems, including US News & World Report, the American Association of Universities, and our own internally developed set of key assessment dimensions. None of these is perfect and none reflects all the dimensions of excellence many of us believe should be relevant. However, when one looks at the vector, pattern, or clustering of different rankings, one does find some levels of consistency. That is, universities listed in the top 10 to 15 of any one ranking tend also to be found at some point within the same range of other rankings. This outcome results from the fact that most assessments use similar metrics, although they may well combine such measures in different ways, accounting, in part, for different outcomes. As we have examined a wide range of assessment systems, we see considerable overlap in assessment dimensions. These include measures of faculty quality and achievement; student quality and post graduate success; academic program quality; measures of student experiences; overall resource availabilities; and overall assessments of perceptions of institutional quality.</p>
<p>But, in its simplest form, to be consistently ranked among the top ten of all public research universities regardless of ranking source, a university must invest in attracting and supporting outstanding faculty and students. In addition, it must combine these into programs of academic study that have impact.</p>
<p>For Ohio State, this means that, first, we must increase the number of highly talented research and teaching faculty at Ohio State Universitythat is to say, tenure-eligible faculty. After reviewing some initial analyses and assessing the effects of different actions, I believe that an eight to ten percent increase in the cohort of tenure-track faculty, with a mix of both junior and senior appointments, will be reflected in significant rankings improvements. To accomplish this, we will be increasing funding to cover recruitment of faculty, including compensation costs as well as start-up funding, space, and staff assistance for research purposes.</p>
<p>Given that we hire about 250 faculty members per year through normal attrition, achieving such an incremental recruiting goal will not be easy. Complicating this effort will be the reality that the production of new doctorates in critical areas has declined considerably, and the availability of existing talent has been decreased through demographic factors and competition from universities worldwide.</p>
<p>But in the absence of such an initiative, we will not succeed. Put another way, great faculty provide the entrance fee that allows us to stay in and win the competition for recognized excellencean excellence that, in turn, attracts and retains additional great faculty colleagues and stimulating students. This is a truly virtuous cycle that we must nourish.</p>
<p>And this brings me to a second major initiative. While the quality of our student body has increased considerably, and our graduation rates have improved, we still lag behind our very best peers. To succeed we will have to invest in the student experience in ways that increase graduation and completion patterns, while, at the same time, competing aggressively for the very best students state wide, nationally, and internationally. To accomplish this, we will be increasing levels of student scholarship support and investments in classroom and other learning environments and technologies.</p>
<p>The third major initiative flows from a commitment to the first two. That is, we must develop funding well beyond the levels we are currently experiencing and deploy that funding in ways that magnify impact. Such resources will be needed to recruit and retain faculty, staff, and students and also to create the facilities and infrastructure essential for their success. Our current funding levels are not sufficient for this purpose. If we are serious about bringing to the State of Ohio the benefits associated with being an acknowledged top ten public research university, we must find the resources to address faculty, staff, and student needs.</p>
<p>Assessments from our evolving strategic planning activities indicate that to respond to these needs effectively, by 2020 we will need to deploy about $5 billion in annual expenditures above our current financial allocations. This is a very significant increase in our funding base, and there is little point in setting such a goal unless we can commit to generating this level of incremental funding. Fortunately, also as a result of our strategic planning activities, Senior Vice President for Business and Finance Geoff Chatas and I, along with Vice Provost Mike Boehm and others, have been identifying sources of funding that would be available as we pursue this goal. We believe it will be possible to generate the funding necessary for success.</p>
<p>In broad terms, over the next eight to ten years we should be able to reallocate about $1.4 billion through cost savings, attract $2.9 billion in incremental annual funding, and identify $700 to $800 million in new non-recurring income, such as that derived from monetizing assets.</p>
<p>We will be discussing such issues in far greater detail with deans, chairs, the Senate Fiscal Committee, and others. Please remember that we will still not be able to do everything because resources will be finite, even if our imaginations are unlimited. The main point is that we believe we will have the resource base to support the faculty, students, staff, and programs characteristic of the very best public universities in the world, and to accomplish that within a relatively short period of time.</p>
<p>Armed with this information, and starting with todays discussion in the University Senate, we will launch broad explorations about how this goal can and will be achieved. This is truly one of those big issues that I mentioned at the outsetone that needs the involvement and support of our entire academic community.</p>
<p>Achieving our goal will not be easy, even as new resources are generated. We will have to be disciplined in our commitments, data driven in our assessments of progress, and willing to make difficult choices about where we can and should achieve eminence. We will need to be vigilant in our planning processes, while also allowing for the level of experimentation and innovation essential to our culture.</p>
<p>It is also important to recognize that our ability to focus on a goal of this magnitude has been made possible by a university president who has never been hesitant to dream audaciously, a Board of Trustees that believes passionately in this university, a governor and legislators who recognize the centrality of this university to society, academic leaders who truly believe their function is to support and nurture the exciting excellence found in our faculty, staff, and students, and alumni and supporters who are willing to invest in and underwrite our dreams.</p>
<p>This is one of the few occasions in my time at Ohio State when our aspirations have been systematically aligned with resource availabilities; when dreams for success are guiding resource generation; when the potential for integration of efforts across units is fully embraced; and when there is understanding that the nobility of our purpose demands achievement of eminence, even in the face of environmental challenges and internal inertia. All of this has been made possible by the foundation created by our predecessors, a willingness to envision a future different from the past, and a commitment to using academic achievement for the greatest good.</p>
<p>And now, I would like to thank my fellow Senate members for giving me the opportunity to share these thoughts. I look forward to exploring these issues today and in the future. I will now welcome your questions.</p>
<p>Source: [Provost</a> Alutto’s Address to the University Senate 2012 - Office of Academic Affairs - The Ohio State University](<a href=“http://oaa.osu.edu/provost-address-to-senate-2012.html]Provost”>http://oaa.osu.edu/provost-address-to-senate-2012.html)</p>