UNIVERSITY AS A `COMMUNITY OF LEARNERS'

Southeast Missouri State University President Kala M. Stroup addressed the school's faculty on Sept. 9. The central theme of her remarks was the university as a "Community of Learners." What follows are excerpts from her speech.

The year 1991 began with the news that the next state appropriation was going to be "flat" at best, so we prepared a 1992 operations budget that was very lean, with no salary increase for anyone. Then we learned just before the fiscal year began that instead of merely a "flat" appropriation, we would actually receive a reduction of almost a million dollars. Then a month into the first semester, another million dollars, was withheld, and we were forced to do some very creative juggling, including hiring freezes, a campus shutdown over the Christmas break, and mid-year tuition increases.

You endured a year without a salary increase, and severe limitations on purchases of supplies and equipment. Some of you went without secretarial help for longer-than-usual periods of time. I know there were times when your morale was low. But the faculty and the staff did what had to be done and our students were well served despite the budgetary pain. That is a tribute to all of you. Through internal reallocation, cost containment, and student fee increases we were able to give faculty raises which averaged 5.8 percent for 1992-93. That does not mean we are satisfied. It does mean that in Missouri's continuing low tax environment, the University has done a good job in compensating faculty fairly while keeping student fees at reasonable levels. Missouri continues to ask its public colleges and universities to do a better job with available resources ... to reallocate and redesign to achieve quality.

Some of the best news comes from the University Foundation. The public phase of the capital campaign was announced just two years ago, and the goal was set at $25 million. When the campaign formally closed on June 30, we had raised a total of $28.5 million in cash, in-kind gifts, and pledges.

It is important to acknowledge the participation of our faculty and staff in the capital campaign. The Foundation reports that 300 of our faculty members made gifts to the campaign totaling $463,074. Thank you for that significant contribution to the success of the New Vision of Excellence campaign.

In my first address to the faculty in 1990, I presented a vision of who we are and who we can be as an institution. Some of those statements are still true today. We still need to strengthen the quality of our student body from the transfers to the new freshmen; we need to strengthen our student success ratios; and we need to strengthen the quality of student life on the campus. We need to continue to seek professional accreditation in Business, Interior Design, Recreation, Mass Communication, and our new Masters of Nursing and we will need to continue to work together to make those goals come true.

In the last two years, we have denied admission to more than 700 applicants who would have been counted as entering freshmen in previous years 400 last year and 300 this fall.

We are denying admission to students whose ACT scores and high school records indicate they have a poor chance of success at the University. We think this is the most honest way to deal with students. It is best for the taxpayers of Missouri, best for the faculty, and best for the University in the long run. There is also an external reason for our more rigorous stance on admission and for emphasizing retention. Part of our state funding in Fiscal Year 1994 will be tied to retention and graduation rates.

This year we decided to give all incoming students a very clear statement of our academic expectations. As we continue to admit only those students who are capable of doing University-level work, we need to work together closely as an institution to help more of them persist to graduation. You are the University's primary point of contact. You see these students every day and interact with them. There is considerable research to show that early intervention by a caring faculty member can often make the difference between a student's persisting or dropping out. Faculty intervention may be as simple as referring a student to the new Campus Assistance Center.

We want Southeast Missouri State University to have a clear and coherent philosophy that communicates high but reasonable challenges and expectations for students. These expectations can be buttressed and reinforced by an ethic of caring in this community of learners a community in which we all participate.

We have the potential to be a very caring, humane, and challenging, learning campus. The size of our campus, the concern of our faculty, our history as a university, our residence hall system, and the potential of our student affairs staff make it possible for this campus to be one that truly integrates the objectives of the University Studies program and the University goals into the out-of-class life of our students. We have an honors program; we have the National Merit scholars; we have music, art, and theater departments; we have all the ingredients; and we have the potential to be an even more intellectually stimulating campus. We are able to make the quantum leap of becoming a truly mature comprehensive university a university where "either/or" statements ("teaching versus research") or monolithic reward structures are incompatible with our notion of different missions for each of our colleges. There is no one perfect model, for each of our colleges needs to develop in different ways. This would make us a comprehensive, pluralistic university in its truest sense.

Clearly, as a university we can be united in our commitment to the importance of teaching and the importance of the faculty member as a mentor and learning and teaching guide. Clearly, we can focus on learning and creating that caring, humane, intellectually stimulating environment. Clearly, we can be a campus which is unified by our need to work with external groups to improve our resources and the understanding of our mission. We can be a campus unified in our core curriculum and University Studies program. We can be a campus unified in valuing both the liberal arts and the disciplines and the professional preparation programs. We can be a campus unified in our ability to problem solve and our approach to working together in the community working together in a way that uses persuasion and argumentation, rather than dissension and hostility, and recognizes fact, not fiction, and data, not rumors.