In June we also received a report from the ad hoc Advisory Committee on Faculty Salaries. You will not be surprised to hear what the Committee found: “UW salaries are behind those of our peers in every school, college, and department on campus, and at every rank.” UW salaries would need to increase 15 to 20 percent to reach parity with the average of salaries at eight peer public universities.

The recommendations of both these committees will be under discussion in the coming year. Please read these reports, consider their recommendations, and join the conversation.

There is no better way to promote an agenda for change than through new faculty appointments. Think of your prospective new colleagues as agents of change, and craft position descriptions accordingly. Does your department need someone to provide leadership in experiential learning, in the application of knowledge in a certain area, in outreach to industry or public schools? Then go find them and bring them here. There are outstanding men and women who would love an opportunity to come and help you bring change to the University of Washington.

The second arena for transformation is graduate education and research. Here, building on our traditions of excellence, we respond to the needs of both the state and the nation. You all know the UW’s record, and I spoke of it earlier—our outstanding success in winning federal research funds and the high national ranking of so many of our programs.

On the state level, there is a heavy demand for new post-graduate degrees, to serve the needs of students and employers. Here are a few of the programs we have recently created. A new Master’s of Management evening degree program is being offered for the first time this quarter in Bothell. New master’s and doctoral programs in industrial engineering are starting this quarter in Seattle. A Distance Learning Master of Social Work was established in 1997 in response to requests from Olympic Peninsula residents. A Master of Nursing program has been offered in Tacoma since 1996. The state’s need for such programs will continue to drive change in graduate education at the UW.

In doctoral education, the UW has just received a singular honor—and responsibility. Our Center for Educational Development and Research—CIDR—has been chosen by the Pew Charitable Trust to head a national project on re-envisioning the Ph.D. CIDR will convene educational leaders from around the country to talk about re-shaping doctoral education for the future. Our own Graduate School will launch a similar conversation here on campus. These initiatives represent an important part of the larger conversation about how higher education should be serving society.

The University Initiatives Fund was designed to enable us to seize new opportunities, especially in graduate education and research. By January 1999 all eight of the first-round UIF projects will be up and running. They represent exciting new directions that we would otherwise not be able to pursue. This past year the UIF guidelines were revised to make the process more inclusive across units and disciplines. The second round of UIF proposals will be submitted and evaluated this year.

Are you and your colleagues preparing a UIF proposal? Some of the most exciting and creative work is happening where disciplines intersect. The UIF offers an opportunity to build new structures there for inquiry and teaching. I urge you to imagine the possibilities and seek out colleagues who will join you. We must use the UIF to establish the University’s signature programs for the century ahead.

On the federal level, the climate is favorable to university research. Congress will almost certainly increase research funding significantly. Since our faculty is very good at competing for these dollars, the UW will benefit from the new national investments in research. This is a good thing for our University, our students, and our state. The bad news is that our research infrastructure—space and equipment—is inadequate to support the expected growth. This is, in fact, a national problem. It represents a major challenge for research universities to address in the coming years.

To make the most of federal opportunities, we will have to generate more support for our research here in Washington. Increasingly, the big, important, cutting-edge federal projects require some level of matching funds. That means state investment or corporate support or both.

The UW must take the lead in making the case for government, business, and university cooperation in support of research. Over the years our state has not done a very good job of developing these three-way relationships. As one step, we are resubmitting to the 1999 legislature our Advanced Technology Research Initiative. This joint UW/WSU proposal would use state funds to recruit specially qualified faculty “clusters.” Each cluster would collaborate in research with a leading local industry, such as pharmaceuticals or micro-electronics. Such a pooling of state, university, and corporate resources could foster research that has direct local benefits—to our economy, our citizens, and our students.

Let me turn now to a final large area of change now under way at the University of Washington: our new partnerships with other educational institutions and our new areas of cooperation around the state and around the world. The goal here is to be even more responsive to the needs of our people than we already are. As in the other two broad categories I’ve discussed, the platform for change is the excellence the University has already achieved and the distinctiveness of its mission as a research university.

Many of you have long been involved in programs with and for the K-12 schools. Now such programs must have a much higher institutional priority. Partly this is a matter of citizenship—a recognition that the UW, as the state’s flagship public university, has an obligation to help make the state’s entire educational system the best it can be. And partly it’s a matter of enlightened self-interest. Most of our students come to us from the state’s K-12 schools and community colleges. Partnerships that promote excellence elsewhere in the system will raise the level here, too.

Last fall the UW created a new Office for Educational Partnerships (OEP). Besides coordinating programs already in operation, the OEP has worked with faculty and staff to initiate a whole range of collaborative projects with the schools. The new Teaching, Learning, and Technology Program provides on-line training for K-12 teachers who want to integrate educational technology into their classrooms. We’ve just run our second Summer Science Institute in Forks, for Olympic Peninsula teachers seeking help with the state’s new “essential learning requirements.”

An inventory of K-12 outreach programs at the UW presently lists about 150 programs involving nearly 100 departments and colleges. This is impressive, but it prompts me to ask you: Is your department involved with the K-12 schools? Is your discipline contributing all it can to the education of Washington’s children?

At the community colleges, we also have new partnerships and collaborations, but there is room for still more. Transfer students need to hit the ground running when they get to the UW. A major issue then is the coordination of curricula and advising between community college programs and their UW counterparts. This is a work in progress, but one important step was the creation last year of the first shared advising positions between the UW and community colleges, at Shoreline and Bellevue.

We need more educational partnerships to promote wider access and more seamless progress through the system. Here are a few ideas:

Statewide educational partnerships represent one kind of opportunity for the UW. Global partnerships represent another. There is a growing focus here on international education, as there should be in a state with as many global trading partners as Washington. Since 1994, study abroad by UW students has increased more than 60 percent, and the number of foreign students on our campus has grown to more than 2,000. Many UW units have contracts with international partners, especially in professional programs like public health. The UW is currently home to eight federally supported international centers. To coordinate and lead further expansion of these international opportunities, we have just established the new International Faculty Council. My own efforts to extend the UW’s international partnerships include a trip to Japan and Korea this past summer and another to China this fall.

International Studies Associate Professor Resat Kasaba teaches a graduate class on the origins of the global system.

Is your department or program building international relationships? Are you encouraging your students to study abroad? Are you participating in international research collaborations? Recent grants from the European Union and the Ford Foundation recognize that the UW is a leader in international education, but there is more we can do.

Whether your work is most relevant internationally or locally or both, the UW needs to recognize and reward faculty and staff who successfully bring their academic expertise to larger communities and the world. I am thinking of the civic scientist who is fully engaged by a question of scientific importance, who cares about the discovery of new knowledge and about the importance of the question for the non-scientific community, and acts on both. I am thinking of the civic humanist who is fully engaged by the creative processes and fundamental values of human civilization, who cares about deepening understanding and about the transmission of knowledge to the broader community, and acts on both. This year I will ask the Faculty Senate and the Board of Deans to develop the University of Washington Civic Scholar Initiative. The goal will be to hold up as models individuals whose passionate commitment to learning benefits the larger society—the civic scientist and the civic humanist.

Some of you may wonder how your research could possibly be relevant to ordinary citizens. For inspiration, I refer you to astronomy professor Bruce Margon. At a recent faculty dinner he said, “Everybody knows that astronomy is the field that does nothing for anybody.” Nevertheless, last March, when the news broke that an asteroid might collide with the earth—not until the year 2028, mind you—Professor Margon and his students quickly put together a Web-site about the asteroid, using pictures from our new Apache Point telescope. The next day that site had 125,575 “hits.” I can’t resist passing along a comment from another faculty member at the dinner: “Congratulations, Bruce—now you’re doing nothing for everybody.”

The UW, in fact, does a great many things for a great many people. Our work is essential to the quality of life in Washington and to the advancement of knowledge nationally and internationally. But we cannot succeed in the 21st century by doing things the way we’ve always done them. Indeed, we will have to stop doing some things we do now as we respond to new needs and challenges. Those decisions about what to stop must lie with you in your departments and programs.

And we will have the courage to do these things—to make the UW a different place in 2005 than it was in 1995. It will be better academically, more efficient and cost-effective, and more responsive to the needs of the people everywhere.

There are, however, two areas in which our efforts alone cannot accomplish what needs to be done. The first is the diversity of our institution, and the second is our ability to recruit and retain outstanding faculty and staff. Here, we need help.

First, diversity. Over the past several decades, the American people have achieved a historic expansion of opportunity for all citizens, regardless of race or ethnicity or gender. Doors have been opened to education, to employment, to public service, and to civil rights. In higher education, there are five and a half times more African American students enrolled today than in 1965—greater than twice the rate of growth of the total college population. For other minority groups the gains have been comparable.

The UW has also placed great emphasis upon the diversity of its faculty and staff. This allows our students to study with men and women who bring different backgrounds and strengths to the classroom. Out of many recent efforts to diversify our faculty, I want to mention the model initiative in our social science departments last year. Collectively they decided upon a bold course of action to recruit new colleagues, and they were successful. Your departments can do the same.

We have not yet completed this work of diversity or achieved the full measure of human equality, but historic progress has been made, and among its most successful tools is affirmative action—an imperfect but highly effective means for expanding opportunity, broadening the pool of people considered, and opening doors that used to closed.

Affirmative action is now at risk in this state. Without it, our freshman class last year would have had 18 percent fewer African American, Native American, and Latino students. And without these students, the academic excellence of our University would suffer. When a classroom includes students of different backgrounds, who bring different perspectives and histories to the conversation, that classroom gives a richer education to every student there. It provides better preparation for life and work in the diverse world of the 21st century.

This University has a long commitment to diversity, and that commitment will endure. But the future of affirmative action is now in the hands of the citizens of the state. We must sustain opportunity and maintain excellence.

The second challenge that we cannot meet alone is ensuring the quality of our faculty. Everything we do here depends on their excellence—the success of our missions, the accomplishments I’ve discussed today, the changes now in progress. Faculty are the foundation of the University. But there is a crack in that foundation: the gap between the salaries we offer here and salaries at the other competing universities. Our market for faculty is national and even international, and in every single peer group in which the UW’s quality has earned us a place, our salaries are well below average. The problem is compounded by the Seattle area’s housing market—now the fifth most expensive in the nation.

We have not yet lost a large number of faculty, but the pressure is building. Over the last three biennia, outside offers to our faculty have more than tripled, and our ability to hire the best entry-level faculty has weakened.

This is a problem we cannot solve by ourselves. We must have more state help for salaries and more flexibility in the use of other resources to address the salary problem. Without that help, the trickle of faculty now leaving will become a stream, and this state will no longer have one of the nation’s leading research universities. What a tragedy that would be—to give up a university like this one. Our students will suffer most if our best faculty leave.

Next month, the governor’s 2020 Commission will issue its report on the future of higher education in Washington. I hope and expect that the 2020 Commission will propose ambitious goals for higher education and advocate increased public investment. If it does, it will surely lead to a major statewide debate about the public purposes of higher education. The UW must provide high-minded leadership in this conversation, grounded in responsiveness to the needs and values of the people we serve and in recognition of the kind of University we are.

In this biennial budget year we must work harder than ever to communicate what we do at the University of Washington. I have become convinced—partly by the bus tour dinner in Spokane—that faculty, staff, and students can be extraordinarily effective spokespeople for the UW.

Last month I spent five days on the road visiting with public officials and opinion leaders across the state. For the first time on such a trip, different faculty and students joined me at each stop—faculty whose research was related to the needs of the areas we were visiting and students from those very towns. They were wonderfully persuasive advocates for their work and their University. We will be asking more of you to join us in other venues, including Olympia, and I know you will respond. In fact, each of you can help with your own friends and neighbors, or in your own public speaking engagements. You have compelling stories to tell, and you can tell them with the kind of passion and conviction we saw in Spokane. Through all these stories there is one basic message: the quality of the UW makes a difference—and its difference matters—to the people of Washington. Without greater public investment that quality is gravely at risk.

For the 1999 legislative session our goals are: First and foremost, raise faculty and staff salaries. We are asking for a 4.5 percent annual increase from the state, plus the authority to provide additional increases from UW funds. This will not erase the salary gap in one biennium. But it is the crucial first step in a multi-year strategy to restore competitive salaries at the UW. We will also ask for a special recruitment and retention fund, to help us hire and keep key faculty until our base salaries become competitive. Without a comparable fund voted by the 1997 legislature, our loss of faculty to outside offers would be far worse than it has been.

Besides salaries, our budget request includes:

Historically, state investment in higher education has followed economic cycles—down in the early 70s and early 80s, up again when better times returned at the end of those decades. But in this current period of prosperity and state budget surpluses, higher education has still lost ground. In 1990, the UW’s state funding per student was slightly above the average of the public universities we consider our peers—universities like Michigan, North Carolina, and UCLA. Today we are more than 13 percent behind that average.

All of us are engaged in the work of renewing and reinventing this University, of making the splendid achievements of our past a springboard for the excellence of our future. That is our job. But we cannot do it alone. Without greater public investment, change at the University of Washington will be of a much sadder kind than the change I have described today. It will mean decline instead of progress.

The essence of our case is this: public higher education is a public good. Its purpose is to advance our nation’s and the world’s most cherished goals—opportunity for all, wise and widespread participation in public life, economic and social progress, better and more humane lives for everybody. Educated citizens are a public good. New knowledge is a public good. Health and prosperity are public goods. Intellectual capital in the service of issues and problems is a public good. Whatever private goods the University promotes—and they are many—it is on this larger social good that our appeal for public support must stand or fall. And the UW’s appeal is strong.

When the new faculty and I toured the state in our bus last June, we saw all this in action. We saw the University’s footprints everywhere. We found all kinds of people who understand and appreciate our role. Somehow we must turn their good feelings into the new resources we desperately need.

If we continue to do our work very, very well; if we seize the right opportunities for change and renewal; if we communicate effectively what we’re doing—then we will have done all we can. That’s a tall order for the year ahead, but we must embrace it. And we will. ¶