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State of the University Address
Robert A. Wild, S.J.
January 29, 2008, 3 p.m.
Last year I used the occasion of this address to celebrate the 125th anniversary of the founding of Marquette by imagining what Bishop Henni might say had he been able to walk among students and faculty in the year 2007. This year I invite you to join me in looking forward to contemplate Marquette’s future. I sense that at this moment in our history the university is at a crossroads. We have achieved great things, accomplishments that even a decade ago seemed almost beyond our reach, but know we still have much we yet need to do. Let me provide a few examples of several of our most recent accomplishments:
Application numbers continue to climb, for example, almost 15,000 freshman applications for next fall (14,959 as of today), up 14% from a year ago, 33% over two years ago, and in fact are up across all academic areas, undergraduate, graduate, and professional alike. Numbers are just one measure, and a somewhat artificial one at that, but the fact that we continue to attract gifted students desirous of accomplishing great things with their lives — now that’s worth celebrating.
We enjoyed a record-breaking year of fundraising with more than $100 million in gifts coming into the university in fiscal year 2007; and $84 million so far in 2008.
We added critical new academic components: two chairs in Engineering, an endowed deanship in Business parallel to that already in Engineering, a new professional doctorate in nursing practice, a master’s in biomedical engineering and a minor in music, among others. We opened a center for community service in the Law School and a community health services clinic run by nurse practitioners in the Marquette Neighborhood Health Center and on Milwaukee’s southside re-opened a Dental Clinic to provide oral health care to the large number of underserved in that part of our city.
For the second consecutive year a Marquette faculty member was named Wisconsin’s Professor of the Year. Last year we celebrated when Don Neumann was honored. This year Kris Ropella in Biomedical Engineering is the well-deserving recipient.
In the last few months Marquette purchased a number of properties along Wisconsin Avenue and Wells St. that in part will provide us with more student residence space and also a suitable site for the College of Engineering’s Discovery Learning Complex. Here our concern is definitely with the future: to have when the time comes enough space to be able to expand further.
In spring construction will start on a student services/ administration building that will occupy a good portion of the area between 12th and 13th Streets on the north side of Wisconsin Avenue and will replace two outdated office buildings that we are currently using. A lot of planning is going on with regard to this $25 million structure, especially to make it truly serviceable to students — for example, to locate the Registrar, Financial Aid, Admissions and Bursar’s offices in a centralized area so students can get quick, easy access to whatever personnel they and their families need to consult at different moments of the admissions cycle. We also plan on housing in this new facility the entire staff of University Advancement and the senior administrators who currently reside in O’Hara Hall.
Our endowment returned a noteworthy 19.2 percent as of June 30, 2007 and put us ahead in endowment performance of almost 80% of all schools reporting in the NACUBO FY 2007 survey. A couple of months ago it was approaching $400 million. But right now? Well, a less pretty picture, but we are still running ahead of the benchmarks we use to measure performance, and that is the main thing.
Our Big East Conference affiliation continues to pay big dividends for us in terms of national exposure, alumni engagement and student recruitment. We’ve had some big wins — Notre Dame and Wisconsin come to mind — and suffered through several defeats as well – the league is tough! But our young women’s basketball team is beginning to come together with a major win recently over 22nd ranked DePaul.
Finally, a word or two about what more and more energizes the work of all of us, our university mission. If we ever doubt the importance of that, just listen to our students and what they say about their experience here. In that regard it is worth noting that out of all the 28 Jesuit colleges and universities, last fall Marquette attracted more students from Jesuit high schools than all but one other Jesuit university, Seattle U. Boston College was the third most popular school. Our splendid new Faber Center opened this past year and is assisting interested members of our faculty and staff, whether Catholic or not, to deepen their spiritual life and so also their commitment to the values and mission of this university. And our annual Mission Week is almost upon us. The theme is “Faith Doing Justice: War, Peace and People of Faith,” the programs being offered about this very contemporary topic look very interesting, and I encourage you to participate in some of the planned events.
That’s a whirlwind tour of the year, but it provides a sense of our momentum. But as I peer into the future, I see two significant challenges in front of us that I would like to discuss with you today.
Challenge #1: admissions policies going forward — we’ve celebrated eight consecutive years of record applications for our undergraduate programs and this present year is no exception. I am pretty happy about that — those who were here in the early and mid-1990s know the anxiety of an admissions shortfall. Going forward, however, we surely don’t want to return to those times, which is why a lot of discussion and planning is going on about how we should proceed going forward. Shifts in the demography of college-age students seem clearly on the horizon, and the growing cost of higher education is becoming a huge challenge for our students and their families. While we are having real success in building a stronger endowment, at present we remain significantly dependent on tuition. Hence the need to plan carefully in this critical area.
While more and more families believe that a college education is essential for their children, we believe that there will be fewer 18-year-olds sufficiently prepared for collegiate-level work than in the past and that a greater percentage of college-bound students will be first in their family to pursue a college degree and therefore generally with significant financial need. We’re very conscious that we cannot keep pressing our tuition costs endlessly upward, for, as I say, it’s becoming more and more stressful financially for families to contemplate college. Consequently, in the fund-raising campaign that we have quietly embarked upon this year, we are focusing above all on building a large pool of endowed scholarship resources for students in all of our programs, undergraduate, graduate and professional.
At present tuition covers 65 percent of the cost of educating a Marquette student – a figure that makes clear how important tuition is as a revenue source. However, more than 85 percent of our undergraduates receive some form of financial aid, and we annually are spending $65 million to provide such aid, much of it in the form of tuition discount. Given that, we ourselves and our Board of Trustees recognize clearly that we must increase our endowed scholarships substantially in order to provide a higher level of financial aid and to take the pressure off of our operating budget. More recently a number of our first-generation college students have started to run into financial problems in supporting their education, and some have dropped out altogether, a phenomenon we are very unhappy about. In that regard, I am convinced that our first responsibility must be for the students who already have enrolled so as to ensure as best we can that they can go forward to graduation in their respective programs. If that means temporarily admitting fewer first-generation collegians, then with regret, but facing our own fiscal realities, so be it. So you see that we have a real challenge here and must work intelligently to turn this situation around.
We aren’t alone in facing this changing reality. Both our Jesuit peers and universities around the country are struggling with redefining their admissions strategies for the future. We want Marquette students to be less driven by what they owe in student loans, more intent upon what they can become through their Marquette education.
Our endowment as of last June stood at $360 million, having increased by $59 million from June, 2006. Better management of the endowment and an increase in gifts explain our improved performance in this critical area during the last few years. Of course, at present we have limited ability to control the impact of what can only be characterized as very volatile investment markets, although elements of our endowment portfolio are now designed to make money no matter what the market conditions – or so we hope! All that said, the fact remains that, however improved, our endowment lags behind that of many of our peer universities, and I remain firmly and strongly committed to the task of building it as fast as we can to the billion dollar level. We simply must grow this critical resource to accomplish our goals for the future, particularly to provide better financial assistance to students.
Before we leave this topic I’d like to share with you the story of one of those students, a young woman named Kathleen Cullen. I do so to give you a sense of what many of us hear from our students as they struggle to prepare themselves to accomplish great things as they go forward in life:
As she was growing up, Kathleen Cullen’s home was filled with the antics and activities that are natural in a family with four little girls. But quite unexpectedly tragedy struck when Kathleen was in third grade; her father, a prominent Milwaukee alderman, died at age 40 of heart disease. Kathleen’s mother carried on and did her best with limited resources to help her daughters to become fine young women.
With help from an endowed work-study program Kathleen attended a Catholic high school in Milwaukee. But tragedy again touched Kathleen’s family when her mother learned she had breast cancer. Kathleen recalls how difficult it was to study. Her mother — not her classes — became the center of her universe. Of course Kathleen’s grades were affected, and with them her hope of winning an academic scholarship.
It was in high school, however, that Kathleen discovered her passion for serving others. She decided she wanted to enroll at Marquette, to share in this school’s mission with its emphasis on excellence, faith, leadership and service. But it was clear to Kathleen that without significant financial assistance, this would not be possible.
I am happy to tell you that today Kathleen is a junior here at Marquette with plans to graduate in 2009 and teach high school English. She also is planning to earn an advanced degree someday. …Maybe in international affairs and law, possibly in special education and counseling. . . . she will decide late. But her future is once again filled with hope and possibility.
Kathleen’s dream to attend Marquette was made possible because of financial aid, and she is proud to tell us that she participates in everything possible and has even studied abroad through our service learning program in South Africa — all without a single loan. “What I began learning,” she says, “about service to others has been enhanced during my time here at Marquette. The Jesuit ideals of ‘Men and Women for Others,’ ‘Faith Seeking Justice, ‘ ‘Cura Personalis’ — they are important in my life now.”
I have no doubt that Kathleen, and ever so many like her, will amply repay us for our confidence in their efforts. This is our mission here at Marquette. This is our commitment. Together we help our students create such hope-filled personal stories — one gift, one story, one young person at a time. When we talk about endowment, ultimately we aren’t talking about numbers or timelines or the amount needed to fund a certain level of scholarship or professorship or research enterprise. We are talking about real students with tremendous potential and hope that can either be warmly encouraged or stifled and crushed out. That’s really what’s at stake in all this.
Challenge #2: in season and out, creatively and entrepreneurially, we must steadily increase the quality of the educational experience our students have both in and outside the classroom, especially in terms of academic quality. That’s a large order, of course, and we can’t solve everything all at once, but we must continue to tackle our priorities in this area one by one. In doing this we have seen real progress. Our School of Dentistry, for example, has joined the ranks of the top such programs in the nation. Their recent reaccreditation visit I can only call an amazingly positive experience. The undergraduate program of our College of Business Administration has been listed by Business Week two years running as among the top fifty in the nation. Health Sciences has received a steady stream of faculty and student awards and has several highly ranked academic programs. Through a lot of effort over several years the College of Communication not only obtained several very large gifts but has been creative in how they are now putting these resources, especially the William and Mary Diederich funds, to work in building the strength of their college.
At present we are directing special attention to two more academic programs, the College of Engineering and the Law School. Both have made strong efforts to strengthen the quality of what they are doing, both have been blessed with aggressively entrepreneurial deans who have planned well and who are determined to turn dreams into reality, both have faculties committed to the same enterprise and both have formulated plans that have powerfully engaged their alumni and attracted in the process some rather amazing gifts. Dean Stan Jaskolski of Engineering has convinced donors to support so far three new $5 million faculty chairs and has filled with the concurrence of his faculty two of these new chairs with scholars of national reputation who also have extensive hands-on corporate experience. Their charge is to work creatively with their faculty colleagues to transform how we deliver engineering education in their respective engineering disciplines.
Similarly, first Dean Howard Eisenberg and now Dean Joseph Kearney have aggressively worked to strengthen the quality of the Law School, to attract top flight faculty and, more recently, to build what should be a truly excellent and exciting new Law School building. Here once again donors are enthusiastic about the vision of the future that the Dean and his colleagues have articulated, not least the Law School’s vision of itself as the place in our community where public discussion of issues, truly thoughtful civic debate and discourse, can readily take place. We know about the amazing gifts that have been attracted by this both for the building and for endowed scholarship support for law students – the Law School no longer talks wistfully about a better future but is hard at work actively to achieve such dreams.
Right now lots of people are buzzing about what’s going on here at Marquette. That’s exciting, the sense of momentum and forward motion is strong, there is an amazing amount of wealth that has been generated by our alumni, and I am convinced that the future for Marquette is very bright. Would I have been so confident about all that ten years ago? Not a chance.
True enough, not all academic areas can have new buildings funded; there is inevitably a waiting list. And because of our present university priority of building endowment, we have deliberately limited the amount of brick and mortar projects that we can fund in the present campaign. But all academic divisions can identify areas that could be energized by the addition of a well-funded faculty chair; all can seek to endow their respective deanships as Engineering did in the last campaign and as Business recently has done. And all can pursue endowment funds to support better the research and teaching work of their faculty members as well as better scholarship support for their students. I encourage each and every academic area of the university to work with University Advancement (that’s important!) and with your respective alumni and friends to accomplish these sorts of thing. We need to build our endowment, and these sorts of projects all will do just that.
But note – it is not enough to tell donors that we, College X, Department Q, need this or that. The donors just shrug their shoulders, everybody has needs of one sort or another, they hear that all the time. Donors want their gifts to make a real difference, to have a powerful impact, to fulfill an exciting vision for Marquette’s future. Donors respond enthusiastically to ideas that are inspiring, creative, ambitious and hopeful. Faculty chairs and deanships are not principally about rewarding the chairholders, however important that is. Rather, as the experience especially of our Colleges of Business and Engineering have demonstrated, it is about creatively energizing and transforming the work we, faculty and students together, are accomplishing in a particular area, whether that be an academic discipline or a whole college. Getting these kinds of results will take work, and it will take commitment of time and energy, but the payoff is considerable, and I as president am always willing to help those ready to help themselves.
As we move ahead into the future, the road will at times be bumpy, and we won’t be able to see around all of the curves. But I am confident that if we can negotiate successfully the two challenges that I have spoken about and achieve what we are trying to accomplish, Marquette University will continue to be the academic aspiration of gifted students from all walks of life who seek for themselves an education that challenges them in a deep and personal way truly to “Be The Difference.”
Thank you.
Quick Facts About Marquette
| Identity: | Catholic, Jesuit, private |
| Established: | 1881 |
| Location: | Milwaukee, Wisconsin |
| Undergraduate: | 8,048 |
| Postgraduate: | 3,500 |
| Campus: | Urban, 90 acres |
| Athletics: | 14 NCAA Division I teams (Big East) |
| Colors: | Blue and Gold |
