Fourth Annual
State
of the College Address
October 27, 1994
Matthew Goldstein
President
Baruch College
The City University
of New York
WE ARE NEARLY at the mid-point of the
semester, but let me begin with a belated welcome to the members of our faculty
and staff who were new to Baruch College this Fall. We are delighted to have
you with us, and I look forward to a long and rewarding relationship.
In preparing these remarks I was struck by how much has happened at Baruch
over the past few years. You - the faculty, staff, and students - deserve
the credit for what has been accomplished: in short, that we are today a stronger
and more focused institution. I want to talk about some of our accomplishments
and the challenges that remain, but first permit me a slight digression.
AS YOU KNOW, CUNY has recently taken
quite a battering - and an unfair one - in the press. Distortions of our retention
and graduation rates abound, as do claims that remediation has grown so extensive
as to swallow the resources needed for educating the well prepared students.
Though there are no simple answers, we cannot be passive and let the critics'
voices go unanswered. In the end it is our students whose degrees may be compromised
by this pernicious rhetoric. For this reason, we took this fall's issue of
Inside Baruch, which usually is distributed only locally, and mailed
it to all 55,000 alumni on our lists, and included a letter to the alumni,
addressing these concerns. Although it was aimed at a different audience,
I look forward to hearing any thoughts of yours about this letter and how
best to handle these difficult issues.
Our need to maintain and expand alumni loyalty
and support for the College is one of the most important efforts of my staff
and myself. And it's another area where faculty members play very important
roles. Although helping the College in this area takes you away from research
and consulting, Baruch is better and stronger for it, and I want to express
my thanks for this help.
As faculty members you get calls from Zane Berzins asking
if you'll be interviewed by the media. You get requests from Lois Cronholm
to serve on committees and to give presentations to alumni groups and the
Baruch College Fund. Andrew Grant calls on you to develop more grant proposals.
You also get calls from Hersey Egginton and Terry Karamanos to help with alumni
affairs and development activities. Terry and I call upon some of you to join
us in meetings with public officials and business leaders. Sam Johnson requests
many kinds of involvement in student affairs. Edith Pavese asks you to write
or be interviewed for Inside Baruch or Baruch Today. To all
of these calls for help beyond the classroom, you have been responding generously
and energetically. I want to thank you. I want to indicate the appreciation
that all of us feel - students, faculty, and staff - for the many faculty
members who have been furnishing that extra measure of service that makes
it possible to strengthen the foundation for non-tax-levy support of Baruch's
well-being.
LET ME ADD a further note about the
many committee requests you receive, usually from the Provost's office. Democratic
processes can be slow and are very labor-intensive, but I think you'll agree
that it's worth the extra effort on everyone's part. The College would stagnate
without the vigorous involvement of the Faculty Senate directly in governance
and also in providing wise counsel on an ad-hoc basis. The search committees,
the P & B processes, the revision of governance documents, and the special
expanded activities this year in reporting to Middle States all require the
active and caring participation of large numbers of faculty members. This
devotion to the well-being of the Baruch community by so many of you in the
audience is remarkable and immensely gratifying.
For a college of our size the creation of a new school
and the reassignment of units of a previously existing school are once-in-alifetime
events. Both of those actions have profound implications for Baruch and for
individuals within the College.
We undertook these changes after long and careful deliberation
at every level. I want to convey my appreciation to the faculty and administrators
who devoted countless hours to committee meetings and public hearings and
drafts and re-drafts of all the documents that outlined our proposals. I particularly
want to thank the faculty members of the units in the School of Education
and Educational Services for their guidance and cooperation during this difficult
transition period.
OUR NEW SCHOOL positions Baruch to meet
a growing need
in the City for better policy analysis and implementation. The 'School provides
innovative mechanisms to bring faculty together across the traditional disciplinary
boundaries to work on common areas of interest. It will attract students with
special skills and high levels of aspiration. It will attract external support,
and it will bring Baruch to the attention of those whose attention will be
particularly beneficial to the College.
No school in New York is better suited to this task. Baruch
already had a set of strong programs in just those areas where urban needs
are most dramatic - health care, school administration, labor relations, public
management. Our faculty also has expertise in emerging areas of importance,
including nonprofit management and privatization issues.
Our identity as a provider of quality professional education
- with a special emphasis on the administrative sciences - is a major asset.
Baruch's School of Business is excellent. All of us in the College take pride
in its professors' achievements, their intellectual stature, the School's
high regard among business leaders, and its ever more promising future.
But as the nature of the economy changes, our concerns
must expand. Business itself operates in an increasingly complex relationship
with government. Government itself continues to grow even in a conservative
anti-tax climate: it is worth noting that for all the talk of public sector
retrenchment, more people work in New York government jobs today than five
years ago, while there are roughly 300,000 fewer people in private sector
jobs. For a college like ours, it was no longer appropriate to offer "public
administration" as an add-on to a thriving business curriculum. Nor was
it advantageous to ignore opportunities for an expanded Baruch role in policy
research and development.
After the University's Board of Trustees authorized the
creation of the School of Public Affairs last Spring, the University administration
provided some special start-up support in lines and dollars. And this summer,
as you know, we recruited Ronald Berkman as Acting Dean, established a core
faculty, recruited nine new faculty members, and opened the School.
That was the easy part. Now we need to fulfill our ambitions
and make this School a significant force in the public policy community of
the City of New York - and, if we can, in a wider arena. Seven weeks into
the term, the School is on its way. This summer we contracted with the Louis
Harris organization to establish the Baruch-Harris Survey. The goal is to
help government, policy advocates, and the media understand trends in public
opinion in order to develop more responsive policy.
This December the School will host its inaugural conference.
We expect an audience of about 150 public affairs deans and other academic
leaders, government officials, and major researchers. This is a national conference,
and it will focus on major issues in the discipline.
WITH THE ARRIVAL of the School of Public
Affairs and a new, more coherent and balanced mission for the scholarly and
public service activities of Baruch as a whole, I hear from many people that
the place feels more and more like a single college, and less and less like
a collection of schools.
At Baruch, the liberal arts and the professional disciplines
are equal partners in preparing our students for the world. If we do our job
well, it is here at Baruch that our students cultivate their lifelong interests,
sharpen their curiosity, and develop their understandings of the world at
large. It is our responsibility to ensure that they leave not only as highly
skilled professionals, but as interesting people and as creative citizens.
As I said before, more and more it feels like we have one
faculty, rather than three, directed to one common mission. This new integration
and sense of unity is important because it brings better cross-fertilization
of ideas and new intellectual stimulation. But it's also important in cultivating
a sharp, powerful image of Baruch in the eyes of people off-campus, be they
journalists, business leaders, alumni, or people in government. Furthermore,
it also helps to engender among our students a stronger sense of belonging
to the College. And this Baruch identity is essential to increasing alumni
loyalty, which in turn is needed for expanding the endowment revenues we need
to better support teaching, scholarship, and student activities and services.
There's one more way that faculty and staff help contribute
to the coherence of the College and to our students' sense of belonging. And
that's all the innumerable small and large gestures of friendliness and warmth
that people at Baruch extend to students to diminish the alienation of bustling
city life. One of the nicest gestures that I want to mention is that many
of you invite international students to your homes for Thanksgiving dinner.
I don't know who you are by name, but I do know that a number of faculty and
staff participate in this program, coordinated by Mark Spergel's office. For
those who aren't familiar with this program, I should also say that, if you
request it, the College will buy the turkey for you.
LET ME TURN now from organizational to
physical structures. No event that I can remember has done more to lift Baruch
College's spirits than the completion of the 25th Street Building. Think of
what a facility like this conveys to our students - and to prospective students.
This new building tells the world that we value the fifteen thousand young
men and women who meet our standards and who choose to be with us, and that
we intend to make their experience at Baruch College a time of high quality.
Reflecting on the effects our new building has on Baruch
students, I am aware that as faculty members we appreciate its beauty in the
context of other great libraries and research facilities we have worked in
over the years as students or researchers. This kind of quality is new to
Baruch, but the experience itself is not new to us. Yet for so many of our
students, it is an entirely new experience, it is a quantum leap into an environment
not previously experienced.
Recently at an event in the seventh floor Conference Center,
I was approached by a young woman, who asked if I was President Goldstein,
and then told me, "This place is so beautiful. It's so much nicer than
where I live." To which I could only respond, "It's nicer than where
I live too."
How satisfying it is to visit The William and Anita Newman
Library and the sixth floor computer center just to observe the quiet but
intense activity of students silently at work in this gracious but technologically
powerful setting. It is also very interesting to see how it's filled even
on Friday afternoons - contrary to the perception that CUNY students won't
come to campus on Friday.
I would be remiss if I did not once again acknowledge the
person at Baruch who has been responsible for our campus. For eighteen years
Marilyn Mikulsky managed a half-dozen buildings in the middle of Manhattan
into which fifteen thousand people walk every day. Working within the constraints
of union contracts, building leases, and tight resources, she tried to keep
the campus functioning smoothly and attractively.
Soon, we will choose an architect for Site B - the new
facility between 24th and 25th Streets. Let me give you a sense of the magnitude
of that enterprise. Site A provides 173,000 square feet of usable space, but
Site B is projected at 416,000 square feet - more than what we have at 360
Park Avenue South, for example.
In addition to the new building, we have recently added
new space in our rental buildings, moving some departments and adding new
lounge spaces, cafeterias, and a Student Center. Let me invite those of you
with offices on 18th Street to visit the new spaces at 360 Park Avenue South,
especially the new student activities space on floors 14 and 15. And conversely
for those of you from 26th Street, come down to 18th Street to see the new
labs, offices, and the top floor cafeteria with its marvelous skyline views,
expected to open in a few weeks. These new common spaces greatly advance the
sociability of Baruch's environment. The dedicated staff in Campus Planning
and Facilities worked tirelessly over the Summer and into the Fall to get
the added 150,000 square feet ready for our use, and we owe them our gratitude.
We still have a long way to go before we can honestly say
that the quality of our environment matches the quality of our program. But
the recent advances have been significant.
I WOULD LIKE to tell you a little about
three development initiatives we've undertaken in the last year. The Baruch
College Fund went through a strategic planning process, and has repositioned
itself for expanded activity and significantly increased generation of revenue.
The Board is also growing larger and has a clearer mission for raising new
funds. It now has subcommittees with faculty and student participation to
provide the Board with first-hand knowledge of the intellectual and creative
activities at the College. Over the next several months, the Fund Board will
study the possibility of a major, multi-year fund-raising campaign. This new
campaign would not replace the current activities, but would supplement them
with contribution levels orders-of-magnitude higher than we have seen in the
past. A first for Baruch, such a major campaign must be carefully studied
and planned. But only with new sources of funds on a new level can Baruch
meet the challenge before us to provide services and resources for faculty
members and students commensurate with the state-of-the-art facilities found
in Site A and planned for Site B.
Two essential activities in preparation for such a capital
campaign are an improvement in services to alumni organizations and the development
of a more coherent, powerful, and effective image of Baruch in the media,
in the minds and hearts of alumni, in the plans of prospective students, in
the understandings of elected officials and in the perceptions of leaders
in business and public service. In constructing the foundation for a successful
capital campaign to produce richer revenue streams, we have asked and received
advice and counsel from many faculty members. We appreciate your help and
will continue to depend on you for this vital assistance.
DEVELOPMENT ACTIVITIES are vital to the College's well-being in the abstract and in the particular. And the particulars, of course, are individual faculty members and students. The human side of fund-raising was brought home to us recently by a letter one of our scholarship students sent to the family of a donor. Let me share with you a few sentences from that letter.
Dear Mrs. Abramowitz:
I am the recipient of the Jesse Abramowitz scholarship this
year. You and your daughter spoke with me after the ceremony on June 1.
First of all, I would like to thank your family for the award
Also I want to tell you that you and your daughter were absolutely right to
come up to me and tell me that you are the family who gave this scholarship.
Only after that did I realize that there are real people and real lives behind
any scholarship -- not just names.
When I received the College's letter notifying me that
I had been chosen for the Jesse Abramowitz scholarship, I cannot say that
I was really grateful or fully appreciated it. I just did not know to whom
to be grateful. What I really felt was pride; I was proud of myself and I
thought I deserved it. I did not even bother to find out who Jesse Abramowitz
was. But when you came up to me, after that ceremony, and told me that you
are from the Abramowitz family, I was so embarrassed that I could not say
anything besides "thank you."
I appreciate this award very much, and I will always remember
your husband's name with gratefulness. I came to the USA from Leningrad, Russia,
two and a half years ago. For almost a year I worked as a baby-sitter, then
I went to Baruch. I know the value of money and how hard it is to earn it
and it makes me appreciate your award even more.
I am grateful to your husband and to all of your family.
However, I want you to know that even if I did not get the award, I would
still continue to admire your husband's decision to establish a scholarship
because, in my opinion, it is the most unselfish decision that could ever
be made by any person.
WE SERVE MANY constituencies at Baruch
College. But the students who study here are the primary focus of our concern:
nearly thirteen thousand undergraduates and the twenty-three hundred graduate
students.
As faculty members, you don't need to be told about the continuing
enhancements of our curriculum. This is your province and the achievements there
belong to you. For certain efforts, faculty from different programs join together
to address particular areas of academic concern. This year, for example, a Task
Force on Communication Skills, chaired by Associate Provost Donald Smith, will
be looking at how we can help faculty to help students at every level, from
entering SEEK students to people completing master's degrees. A previous task
force on tutoring and related academic services put a small but effective "peer
consultant" program in motion and offered recommendations for new structures.
This program will be continued as a joint effort overseen by Lois Cronholm and
Sam Johnson.
This year we will be completing a Periodic Review required
by Middle States, and we plan to use that process to focus on how we can better
meet the full range of student needs.
Some things we already know, and they relate in large part
to needs that exist outside of the classroom. Some of those needs stem from
our role as a commuter institution. Others relate to the particular goals and
aspirations of the people we attract to the College. All of them present challenges
we are going to try to meet this year.
One problem is the limited and irregular communication on
campus. Almost all our students - whether full- or part-time - are here only
several hours each week. They generally sandwich in classes where they can.
We may wish that all of them were deeply involved in the daily life of the campus,
but we should be frank to admit that for many, a rational allocation of time
and energy dictates otherwise. Too often they know little about what's happening
outside of their classes and how things affect them, especially budgetary matters
and policy.
To help remedy this, I'm offering each of the student newspapers
a regular column - not just to communicate facts and Figures but to provide
a larger vision of Baruch's goals.
For me, one of the high points of each Fall at Baruch is
an off-campus event, the Student Leadership Weekend. Though it's not a secret
meeting, few of you are probably aware of it, and fewer have attended. Under
the guidance of Sam Johnson and his staff, about 100 students gather for workshops
and community meetings to develop skills, techniques, and strategies needed
for effective leadership. I always try to participate, and I find it exciting
to be bombarded for an hour of interrogation on every aspect of College administration.
(I also enjoy Wagner's operas. To each his own!)
Their questions are sharp - sometimes subtle, sometimes off-base
-- but always engaged and committed. All of us regard it as a productive exchange
of views and information. In fact, it's so valuable that we're in the process
of adapting this kind of event into an Open Forum with the President on a regular
basis for the entire student body.
Important concerns also relate to the variety of services
in career counseling and placement. Last year the Presidential Commission on
the Future of Baruch College reported that most )f our students "need academic
and career guidance at a more intensive, better-coordinated level." There
are some very good people providing high levels of service. But it's in scattered
locations with insufficient coordination. We're now starting to -e-examine our
career guidance and placement operations across he College. We are also asking
departments about plans to include faculty more deeply in academic advisement.
To help evening students make more rapid progress to the
degree and to allow more flexibility in course choices, we will try out a new
time schedule for evening classes this Spring. With minor adjustments to the
daytime grid, we were able to squeeze n an additional class period each evening,
so that students can choose from six time slots (three on MW and three on TuTh)
instead of only four.
Graduate admissions is revising its procedures so that we'll
lave a smoother, more efficient, and more applicant-friendly process. That should
allow us to increase graduate enrollment without reducing admissions standards.
AS MANY OF YOU KNOW, our large graduation
classes have prevented us from providing more than two Commencement tickets
to each graduate. And given the fact that our students would like to share this
event not only with their parents, but often with siblings, grandparents, and
even their own children, the limited supply of tickets introduced an element
of sadness in an otherwise happy day of celebration. The College's Commencement
Committee - another committee we ask you to serve on! - has found a solution
we will introduce next June. Baruch will have a ceremony on campus for awarding
all graduate degrees. Then we can offer three tickets per student to another
ceremony awarding baccalaureate degrees at the Paramount Theater. While the
two events will require a little more time and effort from faculty and staff,
costs will not be increased because of our using the College auditorium, and
all students will greatly benefit from the changes.
IN THE MIDST of these special efforts on
the new School, the new campus, new development efforts, and a new level of
attention to student services - the regular work of the College proceeds. Over
fifteen thousand registered this semester. In the academic year just ended,
we granted over twenty-six hundred degrees. We recruited forty-one outstanding
new faculty members, many of whom are here today.
Even within the tight budgets we've had for fiscal years
'94 and '95, the College has been addressing long-unmet faculty and student
needs. For example, we are committed to getting a computer to every professor
who needs one, and we are making significant headway. Though the process won't
be completed this year, the College has added over one hundred computers to
faculty members' desks over the last 14 months.
We continue to cultivate our centers and institutes, and
two relatively new initiatives are moving ahead aggressively. The Weissman Center
for International Business - among its other activities - is helping Kazan State
University in the former Soviet Union create a business school and is teaching
management methods to Russian banking, accounting, and utility executives.
The Small Business Lab, which went into operation last year, has already helped
more than 250 clients. Some businesses are very small - like a family-owned
ice cream store uptown that opened with the assistance of Professor Myung-Soo
Lee of Marketing. Others are larger. But they're all important to New York's
economy. And it's gratifying to be able to use Baruch's expertise in that kind
of direct public service. By the way, Professor Alvin Puryear, Director of the
Baruch Small Business Lab, has leveraged the University's Workforce Development
Initiative funding to garner an additional $500,000 of state and federal funds
to provide client services to small business entrepreneurs under Baruch's aegis.
Our faculty members continue to be very productive. Hardly
a week goes by that I don't see a Baruch professor quoted in the media as an
expert on a topic of national importance. I continue to be impressed by the
scholarly output of articles and books and by the national recognition accorded
in faculty members' research grants.
These are all things of which we should be proud. But the
real measure of an institution comes not from the glittering prizes or the new
initiatives - important though those are - but from the mix of programs and
people that characterize life here every day. We know how good those programs
are and how excellent the people are. But it's also gratifying when other people
know it too. Within the past two years Baruch was singled out for recognition
by Business Week and Forbes magazines. And last month Money
magazine listed us as one of the top twenty commuter colleges in the United
States - and one of the top ten
public commuter colleges. We continue to hold every accreditation for which
we are eligible. Our graduates continue to attract the favorable attention of
employers and graduate schools. We are, however, concerned about student attrition,
and we look for new ways to improve retention.
It is almost time to close, but I cannot leave this podium
without mentioning two very special people - Bud Connelly and Norman Fainstein.
Both of them have not only contributed to the institution, they have helped
to define it over the years.They are leaving their current positions at the
end of this academic year, and I'm delighted that both of them will be staying
on our faculty. There will be an opportunity for more extended appreciation
later in the year.
Let me leave you this afternoon with the following thought.
Institutions, like individuals, move along uncertain paths, and there are seldom
any guarantees. We are affected by any number of factors beyond our control,
particularly in terms of economics and government.
But within the sphere of what we can control - and let us
not understate our capacity to shape our destiny - the entire Baruch College
community can take great satisfaction in what has been accomplished recently.
We have defined our goals with the right mix of flexibility and precision. And
we've done it through a process as open and consultative as anyone could wish.
Many of those goals have already been achieved. If some remain as challenges,
they are manageable challenges. Though we should not be complacent, we can feel
very confident. These days, the future of Baruch College looks very bright.