Office of the President

Academic Goals for an Engaged University

So what, then, do we need to do in order to produce students with the profile I have just described? Let's turn briefly to the specific goals identified as part of "Making the Miami Undergraduate Experience the Best in the Country." The first set of goals relates to academic success, beginning with:

• Infuse the University with learning and discovery paradigms that focus on inquiry-driven, active forms of education.
  
• Complete the Top 25 Initiative and the transformation of introductory courses.

The possibilities for learning and discovery for a university student have changed dramatically in the last decade, along with the amazingly rapid improvement in the ability of the Internet to support original research by making enormous amounts of raw material available to most students. We can now seize the opportunity to instill in our students, and develop in our curriculum, an approach that rests on what I earlier this year described as the "student-as-scholar" model of education. This approach obliterates the boundaries between our teaching and scholarship missions by viewing students as active agents of the unfolding research agenda, and, in turn, by adopting the mindset of research as the motivating impulse of higher education.

We all know that a special research experience with a faculty member is the ultimate form of embracing the discovery paradigm and the student-as-scholar model, but how much better will our academic progress be if we can better create the right "habits of the mind" at the beginning of the Miami Experience? The Top 25 Initiative seeks to transform our approach to education at its foundations, when our students first encounter Miami. So far, the results have exceeded my high expectations. At a recent workshop preparing faculty and staff Miami Access mentors, I ran into Professor Leonard Mark from Psychology who immediately began to tell me of his Top 25 Initiative experience with Psychology 111. "I have done this course nearly 30 times," he said, "but this is truly the first time I will have taught it." In a subsequent, and eloquent, e-mail, he elaborated on why he was so excited.

"As faculty, we can tell students there is certain basic stuff that they have to learn before they come to the frontiers of our knowledge. The difficulty with that approach is that students rarely reach the limits of our understanding because their encounters with textbooks and faculty lead them to believe that they are the repositories of the truth, which is to be memorized for the exam. And the sad reality is that much of the content is forgotten in short order.

I am excited about the Top 25 Project because it recognizes the possibilities for student and faculty learning that we have in front of us at a university setting. The focus is no longer on the content of the discipline, but on how members of the discipline think, how they use evidence to reach their conclusions. I envision our course redesign in psychology as changing the way students think—we want them to learn to use evidence to support their beliefs, to justify their explanations based on good evidence. In doing so we hope these changes will transfer not only to advanced courses in psychology, but  more importantly, to courses in other departments. If we are successful, students will be able to take control over their own learning. They will be able to use the power of the Internet to satisfy their curiosity and, in doing so, demand good evidence to justify their beliefs as well as open up new vistas of information that they can incorporate into their existing knowledge structures.

In light of the problems facing the world today that this generation of students will have to address, will anything less suffice?”

Additional goals speak further to how we teach, whom we teach, and our commitment to student success. These include:

• Advance a culture that embraces difference and increase the proportion of minority students at least equal to the state of Ohio.
  
• Increase study abroad participation from 30 percent to 50 percent of the Oxford campus students.
• Increase the proportion of students involved with direct, meaningful research experiences with faculty and staff.
  
• Increase the six-year overall graduation rate from 80 percent to 85 percent, and narrow the gap for minority graduation rates compared to the overall rate.

Student Life Goals for an Engaged University

These academic goals are complemented by a series of goals relating to student life, goals that reflect personal growth, and a campus climate that promotes learning and achievement.

• Become a national model for the development of the whole person, with an emphasis on integrity, responsibility, engagement, and ethical behavior.

I am very excited here to highlight Miami's selection as one of 18 colleges and universities selected to participate in an AAC&U Project on Educating Students for Personal Responsibility and Integrity. Our contribution will focus on ethics and academic integrity, adding to the work of other universities seeking successful strategies to develop strength of character in our students. As our proposal notes, "Our aspiration is for each Miami student to be able to demonstrate and act based on Miami's goals for liberal learning: reflection, informed action, thoughtful decisions, personal moral commitment, ethical understanding, and civic participation."

Recognizing the inherent advantages that the Oxford campus provides for students to maximize the opportunities of their Miami Experience, we will:

• Successfully implement sophomore residency, thereby increasing student intellectual and personal development, increasing student engagement in the intellectual and co-curricular life of the university, and increasing sophomore year retention rates.

With about one-third of all students participating in the Greek community, the success of the Greek community both derives from and contributes to student success on campus. At its best, the Greek system provides exceptional opportunities for personal growth and the development of a meaningful community. As the original home of four fraternities and one sorority, we expect the best and set a goal to:

• Develop a model Greek community that achieves national recognition for its commitment to intellectual achievement, leadership, personal growth, and service to the broader community.