2001 and Beyond
State of the University Address
Steadman Upham, President
Remarks delivered to the faculty, staff, and students of Claremont Graduate University
7 September 2001
The date 2001 carries a very special meaning and significance in modern pop culture
thanks to the art of Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke. In my own psyche, 2001 continues to
mean the future and an endless frontier. Pity that calendrics and the march of time have now
rendered more than half of “2001” to the past. There is a cruel irony in this situation, because as
2001 passes into the past, the year itself represents the future for Claremont Graduate University.
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It is the first year of our full autonomy and independence within the Claremont
Consortium.
It is the year we set a new academic vision for CGU based on the pursuit of ideas across
disciplinary boundaries.
It is the year that we broke the $100 million barrier in permanent endowment.
It is the first year following the successful completion of our record breaking capital
campaign, providing new momentum in fundraising that we continue to enjoy.
2001 marks the year that CGU has developed into an academically strong center of
advanced learning. For the first time in its 76-year history, CGU is financially sound and
energized around a vision of graduate education that will make our institution a truly great
university. We must remember the spirit of 2001 as we go forward because it is this spirit that
represents our accomplishments, our hopes, our aspirations, our endless frontier.
I am proud to report to you that the University finished the 2000-01 academic year in a
very strong position. We have again balanced the University’s budget. Congratulations and
thanks to each CGU employee—staff and faculty—who contributed to this significant
accomplishment. We are beginning to acquire the habits and discipline of fiscal responsibility,
traits that will underwrite the University’s security in the years ahead. Everyone should take
great pride and satisfaction in this development.
We have recorded another outstanding year in private fundraising, reaching nearly $11
million, our third best fundraising year in history. Progress in fundraising came on all fronts as
we continue to emphasize fundraising for endowment, growth of the annual fund, and planned
giving. Moreover, CGU’s endowment continues to grow. As a result of our balanced budgets,
our energetic fundraising, and our investment strategy, we have added nearly $30 million to
CGU’s permanent endowment during the last three years. In this time of weak and uncertain
markets, we especially owe a debt of gratitude to the Board of Trustees’ Committee on
Investments for its management of the University’s endowment. The Board’s strategy is a
testament to patient and enlightened investing.
We have weathered most of the summer heat with only modest disruptions from the
state’s energy emergency. The benefits of CGU’s decision to install generators on the campus
power grid are being realized every day. Moreover, because of conscious conservation efforts by
all of you, energy usage at CGU is down more than 20% over the same period last year. I thank
and congratulate each of you who made this result possible.
If our successful conservation efforts constitute the good news, then the bad news is that
despite our significant reductions in energy use, CGU’s energy costs are up sharply—nearly 50%
over last year. Fortunately, we budgeted for such an increase, but the net result of this dramatic
rate escalation is another unwanted increase in the cost of education.
As we start the Fall semester, University enrollment is not as high as we had planned, and
this means that we shall be adjusting some budgets downward to compensate for the decline in
projected revenue. Meeting goals for student recruitment and enrollment management are
essential for securing the robust academic future we all envision. This year we will fall short of
our enrollment projection by about 40 students. In financial terms, our inability to attract these
students means that we shall not have approximately $800,000 to invest in the future of CGU.
This shortfall places at risk the carefully designed initiatives we have all worked so hard to
implement—the multi-year salary increases for faculty and staff, expansion of the University’s
information technology staff, and upgrades to the IT infrastructure.
Because of the importance of meeting planned enrollment targets to CGU’s future, I do
not believe we can continue to recruit students using the procedures we have followed for the
past many years. We have aggressive new for-profit and nontraditional competitors that are
unencumbered by the sunk costs of campus, tenure-line faculty, and library. They spend their
discretionary dollars instead on mass-market advertising and targeted corporate recruiting. They
offer fully on-line degrees. Whether we like it or not, they are staking claims to graduate and
professional programs in business, management, accounting, educational leadership, teacher
education, and psychology, and from my vantage point, they appear to gaining ground.
The inroads made by for-profit and nontraditional providers of graduate education are
disturbing, but even more troubling to me are the findings from a recent survey of students who
were admitted to CGU, but chose to attend another university. The most frequent reason cited by
these students for declining CGU’s admissions offer was that another school provided more
financial aid; that is, not because the faculty or programs were better elsewhere, but because
CGU did not provide enough financial support. To what schools did we lose students? The
schools most frequently mentioned by surveyed students were Chicago, Harvard, Stanford, MIT,
and Columbia—all among the wealthiest of private universities. But we also lost students to
several public universities, including Northern Iowa, Kansas, San Diego State, South Florida,
Virginia Commonwealth, Northern Illinois, Hawaii, and Penn State-Smeal!
CGU is an expensive school, to be sure, but the economics of different graduate programs
are difficult to compare. Harvard, Stanford, and Chicago are also expensive schools. Their vast
wealth, however, allows them to offer generous graduate fellowships to prospective students. At
the present time, CGU cannot compete head-to-head with the billionaires if the size of financial
aid packages is the determining variable for a prospective student. But what about all those
public universities to which CGU is losing students? Those universities are not wealthy.
CGU’s endowment ranks in the top 10% of all colleges and universities in the country.
More importantly, CGU’s endowment per student (now calculated to be more than
$100,000/student) ranks even higher. CGU contributes approximately 20 percent of its annual
operating revenue directly to student financial aid, a proportion that is far greater than nearly all
public universities. In other words, CGU’s endowment is comparatively large. Thus, the answer
to CGU’s student recruiting problem goes beyond the size of our endowment.
There are at least three reasons why CGU does not compete as well with public
universities as we might expect. First, because of the design and organization of the Claremont
Colleges, CGU cannot offer paid teaching assistantships to graduate students for undergraduate
teaching. Virtually all of the universities with whom Claremont Graduate University competes
for students offer paid TAs as a part of a recruitment and financial aid package. Most TA offers
range from $8,000 to $15,000 per annum, depending on the amount of teaching required and the
academic discipline in which the teaching takes place. Because of the employment status of
these graduate students, some or all of the normal tuition charges are waived. In addition, most
schools make promises of multi-year financial support using the TA as a primary funding
mechanism.
Second, at most research universities, and certainly at the very best such schools, faculty
research grants are used to support graduate research assistants (RAs). In the sciences and social
sciences, a significant portion of financial aid for students is derived directly through such
faculty support. Until recently, faculty at CGU did not have a culture of grant-getting. This
situation is changing rapidly due to the commitment of our faculty and to the outstanding efforts
of Dr. Susan Steiner and her able staff in the Office of Sponsored Programs and Research. Our
goal is to build annual faculty research volume to $20 million in the next few years. As this
aspect of our enterprise grows, so too will the financial aid that is available to recruit and retain
graduate students.
Third, many of the universities that drew students away from CGU this year are explicitly
recruiting master’s students. At CGU, more than 60 percent of students are doctoral students.
Doctoral education has been CGU’s historic strength, and we do not want to change this fact.
But we must continue to adjust the balance of master’s to doctoral students. An increase of just
25 master degree students over current levels will help us meet our modest enrollment
objectives.
We will, of course, continue with great energy to raise money for student financial aid,
but we also must address these other three issues. To this end, I will be working with the
Council of Presidents of the Claremont Colleges and with our Board Chair, Larry Glenn, to
engage the Board of Overseers of Claremont University Consortium about the looming problem
surrounding graduate teaching assistantships in Claremont. Throughout the history of the
Claremont Consortium, individual colleges have avoided implementing policies that impede the
progress of other consortium members. We now face this issue squarely over TAs in Claremont.
At the present time and simply put, the policies of the undergraduate colleges are preventing
CGU from attracting and retaining the graduate students we seek to enroll. I have already
written a letter to each Claremont College board chair and president describing this problem and
asking for consideration of the TA issue at the September CUC Board of Overseers meeting
(September 13, 2001).
I have also asked Provost Ann Hart and Jim Whitaker, associate vice president for
enrollment management and dean of students, to work aggressively with the academic deans and
program coordinators to redesign our recruiting processes. We must look at the recruiting
process from the time a prospective student inquires about a program through his or her initial
enrollment. We will be centralizing aspects of the recruiting process to Dean Whitaker’s office
to maintain more consistent and productive contact with prospective students. We will be doing
things differently, and I ask for your cooperation and support of Dean Whitaker and his staff.
As a university, CGU boasts a highly respectable yield rate of more than 40% on students
admitted for graduate study. If we can increase the number of qualified applicants during the
next recruiting period, then we can also move total enrollment closer to our projected target of
1,240 FTE. I ask you all to remember this number—1,240 full-time equivalent students—since
it is the equilibrium enrollment that will allow CGU to advance. Ironically, this was the
enrollment target set for the University in 1997, so I am not advocating a new or dramatic
enrollment increase.
CGU’s weaker than expected enrollment, and the decline in revenue it represents, places
several commitments for improvement at risk. Foremost among these commitments is the
faculty salary improvement plan adopted by the Board of Trustees last year. We have
implemented year one of this plan, but if you will recall, implementation of years two, three, and
four of the plan are predicated on CGU meeting its revenue and fundraising targets.
I remain committed to the schedule specified in CGU’s salary improvement plan. Falling
behind in this effort will make our task of getting back to the 90th salary percentile much more
difficult. In fact, given our current revenue structure and the diverging trend lines between
CGU’s salaries and those of our peers, deviating substantially from the salary improvement
schedule may well make catching up impossible. However, we secured approval of the salary
improvement plan from the Board of Trustees on the basis of meeting performance benchmarks.
These benchmarks included a commitment to reach an enrollment of 1,240 FTE students in
2001-02. Since we have missed the target, we thus have a difficult decision to make about the
pace of salary improvement at Claremont Graduate University.
Coupled with our concerns about salaries is the need to focus our hiring strategies for
new faculty on the University’s diversity goals. Last year, we did not achieve as much as I had
hoped in bringing more diverse faculty into our academic community. And make no mistake,
CGU’s revenue structure is intimately linked to our diversity efforts. That is, we do not have the
luxury of using scarce salary dollars to replicate the current demographic profile of CGU’s
faculty. We must add diversity to the CGU faculty with each and every hiring decision we make
from this point forward.
Consequently, I have decided that all faculty searches this coming academic year will be
guided by the principles described in CGU’s successful proposal to The James Irvine
Foundation. That is, only diversity searches will be authorized, and only diversity hires will be
approved by Provost Hart in 2001-02. We will evaluate the success of our diversity hiring prior
to commencement in May 2002 to determine if we shall continue this strategy for the following
academic year.
As we enter this academic year, we face the closest of scrutiny by a committee of our
peers that is being convened by the Senior College Accreditation Board of the Western
Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC). The University’s reaccreditation self study grows
out of an 18-month process of community-wide involvement. The report is being authored and
assembled under the able leadership of Associate Provost Teresa Shaw and a committee of
faculty, staff, and students. The WASC site visit will occur in early March 2002. Between now
and then, many of the final preparations of the site visit will require your help and assistance. I
thank you in advance for helping Dr. Shaw complete this enormous and enormously important
task for CGU.
I conclude my remarks to you this afternoon with a few thoughts about transdisciplinary
teaching and research, and our efforts to cultivate a self-conscious intellectual style of learning
and thinking at CGU. After I circulated copies of a speech I gave last June called “The Aims of
Graduate Education,” I heard from many of you. Several of you commented on the concept of
“intellectual style.” Others noted my observations about academic disciplines evolving through
the pursuit of “central questions.” Still others offered notes and perspectives about
transdisciplinarity. I want to thank each of you who responded. Your insights and comments
exemplify exactly what we mean by an academic community being advanced and sustained by
the “great conversation.”
I am excited by the way CGU’s academic community has embraced the idea of
transdisciplinary teaching and research. Almost every day for the last few months, I have
learned of a new transdisciplinary project or initiative—a grant proposal, a new sequence of
courses, a travel and learning experience, a conference or symposium, even inter-college
activities here in town—being planned by CGU’s faculty, students, and staff. Through our
actions, we enliven and animate the abstract concept of transdisciplinarity. Transdisciplinarity is
really an idea about ideas, and our objectification of the concept through tangible academic
projects and programs exemplifies how the life of the mind can literally shape the daily affairs of
this university.
Finally, and in closing, I note that our academic community has reassembled for another
year of research, teaching, and learning together. The strength of this intellectual fellowship
moves us forward and is the foundation of all that we do. As we begin this year, let us reflect
upon this singular aspect of our enterprise: We are brought together each fall by the pursuit of
knowledge and by a mission to educate the next generation of society’s leaders. These are heady
words, but in the most fundamental respect, Claremont Graduate University is an ethical center
of learning responsible for the transmission of culture, one of 3,200 such “centers” in the U.S.
Everything we do should advance our own personal contributions to this mission. Let us
celebrate this fundamental aspect of the university, and rejoice that we participate in such a
privileged and enlightened vision.
I wish you the very best for the coming academic year.