Remarks by Provost Stroble at Fall Convocation
October 9, 2006
I LOOK FORWARD to Fall Convocation every year -- in 2000 when I first joined the University of Akron, I was officially welcomed at this event; for the next several years, as Dean of Education I enjoyed welcoming those whom I had helped to recruit, and now in this role as your Provost, I have the privilege and opportunity to address you, the campus community, about the topic that commands our attention: student success.
As I begin my fourth year as provost and my thirty-fourth year as an educator, it's natural for me to start thinking about student success by reflecting on my own experiences.
Looking back on my career as an educator, I see two distinct stages. I had been a high school teacher for 10 years, a doctoral student for three, and an assistant professor another three at Northern Arizona University when my husband and I welcomed our daughter Emily into the world.
Thus, the pre-Emily and the post-Emily years!
From that point on, I saw the calling of teaching differently. Where once there were diverse individuals in my classes, now I also saw them as people who were others' children. I felt a fuller responsibility for each student's success. This feeling intensified as my daughter entered kindergarten and moved through the elementary grades, middle, and now high school. It became clear that
- her success as a learner depended upon my engagement with her teachers and her schooling, and
- this engagement was challenging for me, for her, and for the schools she attended. I needed her teachers to make a strong connection with my child, and I then encouraged the teacher education students I taught to feel that same responsibility.
And now I am compelled by the desire that this community will fully embrace The University of Akron's students' success.
One conversation from my time in Arizona haunts me. A young Latino teacher related his growing up experiences in a Phoenix barrio. He concluded his story, saying: "Remember that families give us the best that they have."
And I would add: they deserve the best we have.
What is our best?
RECALLING THE LANGUAGE of Design for Our Future, we are our best when "all that we do is marked by the principles of engagement, innovation, and inclusiveness." As we craft the content of our curriculum, create comprehensive learning environments, establish expectations for our graduates, construct buildings, collaborate with local and global communities, and pursue programs of research -- we tap the transformative power of engaging, innovating, and including.
When we are our best, it means that we -- all of us, together -- plan for student success. It does not happen by accident. It is deliberate. Intentional. Purposeful.
Author Jim Collins says it well in the best seller "Good to Great," "Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice, and discipline."
Yes, our students deserve the best we have, and we are learning how and working purposefully to do just that.
An excellent example of our commitment to giving students our best is illustrated by a very thoughtful and diverse group of our colleagues who have been meeting to study how we can strengthen the rate by which our students attain their goals -- completing courses, certificates, degrees. Our colleagues were charged to take the broad principles of Design for our Future and apply them to the specific problem of student retention. This group, now called the Student Success and Retention Committee, is studying those factors that impede student success and those that advance it. They are bringing together the best available research and will gather input and ideas from all the key campus players to generate strategies that will form a strong foundation for our work with students. In every respect, the path designed by the Student Success and Retention Committee reflects our very best.
In the composition of its membership, the committee exemplifies a shared leadership between Faculty Senate and university administration. By committing to a rigorous schedule of weekly 7:30 am meetings throughout the summer, committee members demonstrated a passionate commitment to their work.
Through teamwork, collegiality, and mutual respect, they gave their best, creating a challenging and successful learning environment for themselves.
In their focus, they challenged our assumptions about the topic of "retention," and in fact renamed themselves to redefine the focus on students' goals rather than our own.
And in their development of a detailed action plan and their desire to continue to engage the topic of student success, they show us how to enact leadership that is engaging, inclusive, and innovative with attention to results.
If you read the recent Perspectives from the Provost written by co-chair Dr. Rudy Fenwick, you know that our colleagues felt keenly the need to launch the fall semester with an engagement activity that celebrated what they and we have accomplished in the start of a great fall semester -- namely, putting our students at the top of our priorities.
While continuing to consider how best to engage ourselves and our students successfully, they organized us to host an afternoon of hot dogs, entertainment, and T-shirts that few of us will forget.
While one afternoon does not engagement make, the feeling on campus on Student Appreciation Day was infectious. Some 400 of us served 5,250 hot dogs, gave away 4,900 T-shirts and various mementoes of the day, and enjoyed the feeling of a campus community in ways that brought this new Landscape for Learning alive.
It was one sunny, glorious afternoon that made us all feel a part of something larger than ourselves, our own units, and our own status as faculty, staff, contract professionals, students.
Thanks to the Student Success and Retention Committee, we gave the best we have. We created a campus feeling that will persist not just in memory but in action. The challenge is to continue to give our best repeatedly, relentlessly, and in all the complex ways that support our students' success. For this institution and our community, we measure our greatness by our students' success.
WORKING AS A COMMUNITY, we have transformed the physical appearance of our campus, enhanced our academic programs through our leadership in the scholarship of teaching and learning, "skyrocketed" our research, partnered with University Park Alliance to revitalize campus neighborhoods, recorded significant increases in enrollment, led in lawn-to-lawn wireless capacity, and soon will launch a three-year focus on undergraduate research with other Carnegie SOTAL institutions. The results of this collective work are impressive and reveal our potential for future greatness. Everyone here deserves congratulations for these accomplishments. We did it together.
Engagement is not just nice; it is necessary. And as promising as our path is, we can be certain that challenges lie ahead as well. Many of them are known -- state funding, for instance, and energy and benefits costs. Where many people see only the challenges, we seek opportunities. Working together, we look for innovative ways to increase revenue and improve our efficiency while breaking out of our cycle of annual shortfalls. We must succeed, and we will succeed.
As Dr. Proenza discussed, higher education is challenged to provide greater accessibility, accountability, and affordability.
Our focus on student success serves our students and us well as we consider what we are learning from self-studies prepared for program review and the plans we have developed to assess our students' learning in more than 100 undergraduate and graduate programs. Without credible evidence, we cannot really know how successful we or our students are, and it is up to us to devise assessments that matter to us and to the publics we serve. Absent assessment, we will not know if we have reached our goal of institutional leadership characterized by engagement, innovation, and inclusiveness.
For me, a young teachers' words, born of his growing up experiences in a Phoenix barrio, echo across time and space when I was still a new assistant professor and was not yet a mother. "Remember that families give us the best they have." They continue to reverberate in the professional life I aspire to live -- one committed to student success and excellence.
And as we go forward today, we, as members of the UA family, carry his spirit with us because more and more families' children are joining us and entrusting us with their education.
Our students do deserve the best of what we have, and thanks to you, our best promises to become better and better.
