Building Campus Culture
In addition to these specific academic and student life goals, there are three additional goals that cross over these two areas and contribute directly to student engagement and success. Critical to our students' success is their ability to live and work in a diverse environment. Even more fundamentally, we seek to use diversity and difference to improve what and how our students learn. To do this we will:
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Provide multiple opportunities for students to embrace difference and learn skills for living/working in a multicultural world, across curricular, co-curricular, local and global contexts.
The most recent National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) once again notes the exceptional level of participation of students in co-curricular activities, from clubs to service to intramural sports. As in most universities, one of the most intense forms of co-curricular activity is the student-athlete competing in intercollegiate sports. The challenge to compete at the highest levels is demanding everywhere, but it poses additional challenges at a school like Miami with its high academic standards. And the academic success of our student-athletes is impressive. This past year the cumulative GPA for ICA was over 3.0 and the graduation rate was 79 percent: only 2 percent behind the university cohort which, as noted above, is the ninth highest public university graduation rate in the nation! We provide the ultimate opportunity for the student-athlete, the opportunity to compete at the highest levels both athletically and academically. This spirit of competition, the drive to succeed at the highest level, adds to our sense of student engagement throughout the university and supports our drive to be the best. Thus our goal is to:
Finally, recognizing that the new generation of students connect, communicate, and learn in a dense maze of technology, we seek to provide an exceptionally effective technological environment. We want our students to be wired not only to each other, but globally. We want them to be able to pursue their academic interests any time and anywhere. We want them to be able to organize and to act together, even if geographically dispersed. We want technology to enable the highest levels of intellectual and personal engagement. Thus we seek to:
Miami is about to celebrate its 200th year, an enviable and proud moment in our history. It is a great moment to look back to see where we have been; it is an even greater moment to look forward to where we want to go. While we may be concluding our first two centuries, even more importantly, we are launching our third century. I do not know if the founders of Miami could ever have imagined such a place as Miami is today. But because of their efforts, and the many generations of faculty, staff, and students who have come before us, we can now imagine an even more impressive future. The strategic goals I have outlined are the waymarkers for the road ahead. They are critical steps in achieving success. Ultimately, though, success requires more than strategic goals. If we want to be among the very best in higher education, we need to understand what it takes to go to the top.
In my view such success starts with a relentless commitment to excellence. Excellence is not a part-time attitude. It requires everyone to press to excel at the highest levels every day, in every way. Whether we think of it in terms of manufacturing's six sigma approach, or continuous improvement, or simply an irrepressible fire in the belly, we need to have the vision, and the passion, to become the very best at everything that we do.
We must also combine all of our activities, and all of our divisions, into a common vision for the future. We need to recognize that the seemingly separate parts of our university are actually intimately linked. Whether we are talking about the fusion of teaching, scholarship, and service into a spectacular learning environment, or the combining of the curricular and co-curricular, or intellect and character, in the development of the whole person, we should see connections everywhere. We need to be an engaged university that obliterates boundaries between our activities and pushes beyond the boundaries of what we have already achieved.
Above all, we need to understand why we are here, to understand what motivates this quest for excellence. It is human nature to compete, but our mission as a public university goes much deeper than that.
Last spring, Valerie and I were honored to be invited to speak at a half-day workshop organized by classified staff in Student Affairs. Specifically, we were asked to offer insights into how to "have it all" in an era when there is so much expected of us in both our personal and professional lives. One of the key points I discussed is the value of knowing how our work matters. To make the point, I related an apocryphal story of an encounter at a Boeing facility between a group of visiting dignitaries and a custodian. One of the visitors stopped to ask the custodian what his job was, and the custodian replied, "I build airplanes." What an extraordinary sense of purpose he had!
So I turned to the group and asked, "What do we build?" I asked this question rhetorically, expecting only to provoke thinking among the group, and was startled to hear almost immediately the reply, "We build students." What a great response. But a moment later came a second response, even more global in its reach. "We build the future," offered another. In my view, she had it exactly right.
For the past two hundred years, consciously and unconsciously, Miami University has been building the future. As we stand on the brink of our third century, more than ever we should understand the power of that purpose. Through our students, through our scholarship, through our creativity, and through our service, we build the future. With uncommon vision, and with a relentless commitment to the highest standards of excellence, we, each and every one of us who are Miami, the Engaged University, proudly embrace that challenge. We will make the world a better place.
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