Descripción de resultado

The early activity of environmental scanning led us to conclude that the University of Michigan would face a period of unusual challenge, responsibility, and opportunity during the 1990s.

We continued to benefit from our reputation as the flagship of public higher educa-tion, the pace-setter among comprehensive public research universities. In terms of the quality of our human resources, we had never been in a better position. We employed a faculty of great intellectual strength and unusual breadth. We enrolled a student body of a quality that was unsurpassed by any public university in the nation. The roughly 400,000 degree holders from the University of Michigan repre-sented an extensive network of leaders who could have extraordinary impact and influence on the future of their university.

We also enjoyed an unusual opportunity to attract financial resources. While state support had certainly not been as strong in recent years as it once was, we neverthe-less were located in a relatively prosperous state, which certainly had the capacity to

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better support, sustain, and enhance an institution of the quality of the University of Michigan. In the 1980s, we had learned how to play the game of attracting federal support far more effectively. Despite constraints on many national research pro-grams, the University of Michigan’s federally sponsored research had increased quite significantly, with good potential for further growth. Furthermore, we had benefited from an increase in support from the private sector, particularly from our alumni and friends, who had recognized the impact that their contributions could have. The Campaign for Michigan of the 1980s generated $160 million to sustain the institu-tion; and the level of annual giving to the institution had increased to $60 million per year.

Perhaps our most important opportunity of all stemmed from the very nature of the institution’s charter. Unlike most other public institutions, the University of Michi-gan had constitutional stature. That is, the Board of Regents of the University derived its power directly from the constitution of the State of Michigan and hence was on an equal footing with the state legislature, governor, and other state bodies.

This provided the University with an unusual degree of autonomy: we could control our own destiny; we could set our own standards and expectations; and we could pursue our own goals and values.

In a sense, we enjoyed the autonomy—the control over our own destiny—of private institutions. And at the same time, we received the support of a public university.

As a sidenote, it might be of interest that the $300 million we received each year in state support corresponds to the income received from an endowment of roughly $6 billion—comparable to the endowment of Harvard in 1990. As a result, the Univer-sity of Michigan in many ways benefited from the best of both the public and private worlds of higher education. The opportunity to increase the achievements and distinction of the University significantly was certainly available.

With the opportunities came some very important responsibilities. The first responsi-bility of the University was to our students, the “raw material” entering our institu-tion that represented the most valuable resource of our state and nainstitu-tion. We be-lieved that we were enrolling not only the most outstanding students in the history of the University, but also perhaps the largest number of outstanding high school graduates of any university in the country. The extraordinary quality of these stu-dents required an extraordinary commitment; we had to be responsible stewards and provide the kind of education so richly deserved by these students.

We had a similar responsibility to our faculty. During the 1980s, we hired almost 1,000 new faculty in the University, drawn from the best institutions throughout the

world. These new faculty represented a valuable resource, and we needed to pro-vide them with the opportunity to develop their talents to the fullest by providing them with the environment, support, and encouragement to push the limits of their abilities.

The University also had a particular responsibility to achieve the strong participation of underrepresented minority groups among its students, faculty, staff, and adminis-trators. Fundamentally, the strength of our state and our nation was (and is) depen-dent upon the full participation of all citizens, regardless of racial, ethnic, or cultural background—and the University of Michigan needed to play a leadership role in this regard. We had to achieve new levels of understanding, tolerance, and mutual fulfillment for peoples of diverse backgrounds.

The final area of responsibility was to our state, our nation, and, indeed, to the world.

The University of Michigan was, after all, a public institution, and as such, it had an important mission to respond to needs of our local community. Furthermore, the university had long served both the nation and the world through its instructional and research programs and needed to continue to do so.

If we were to grasp these opportunities while meeting our responsibilities, we had to face as well several important challenges. These challenges were not so much con-cerned with resources, state funding, or physical facilities. Rather, these challenges revolved around the very nature of what we believed the University was and what we wished it to be. I termed these the challenges of excellence.

The first challenge before the University involved our rededication to the achieve-ment of excellence. It was time for Michigan to pick up the pace a bit by building a level of intensity and expectation that compelled us to settle for nothing less than the best in the performance of faculty, students, and programs. Whether we liked it or not, the University was engaged in a highly competitive race for the necessary resources. Other institutions that in years past were not regarded as our peers were now accelerating rapidly. It was the achievement of excellence that would set us apart—that would provide us with the visibility to attract the human and financial resources, the outstanding students and faculty, and the support from the public and private sectors so essential to the enterprise.

Second, we needed to commit ourselves to focusing resources if we were to achieve excellence. In years past, regular increases in public support had allowed the Uni-versity to attempt to do a great many things, with a great many people—and to attempt to do them all very well. However, in the future of constrained resources

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that we faced, we could no longer afford to be all things to all people. Quality had to take priority over the breadth and capacity of our programs and become our primary objective. To echo the words of Frederick Terman, Provost of Stanford during the 1960s and the father of Silicon Valley, we must strive to build “spires of excellence,”

not “plateaus” of uniform but necessarily lower quality across all disciplines.

Third, as we focused our resources to achieve excellence, we needed to keep in mind that our highest priority was academic excellence: outstanding teaching, research, and scholarship. The University of Michigan’s reputation would not be built on the football field nor in the concert hall; it would be based on the quality of its activities in scholarship and instruction.

Fourth, the University needed to be responsive to changing intellectual currents. Aca-demic leadership demands pursuing the paths of discovery that influence the evolu-tion of intellectual disciplines. Increasingly we were finding that the most exciting work was occurring not within traditional disciplines, but rather at the interfaces between traditional disciplines, where there was a collision of ideas that could lead to new knowledge. All too often academic institutions tended to regard their role more as the keepers and transmitters of knowledge, rather than as the creators of new knowledge. They became trapped in tradition. At Michigan, we wanted to stimu-late a transition to a change-oriented culture, in which creativity, initiative, and innovation were valued. We needed to do more than simply respond grudgingly to change: we needed to relish and stimulate it.

Fifth, the University faced the challenge of diversity and pluralism. Our ability to achieve excellence in teaching, scholarship, and service would be determined over time by the diversity of our campus community. We knew our responsibility to reach out to and to increase the participation of those racial, ethnic, and cultural groups not adequately represented among our students, faculty, and staff. Beyond this, we faced the challenge of building an environment of mutual understanding and respect that not only tolerated diversity, but sought out and embraced it as an essential objective of our University.

Finally, the University faced the challenge of collegiality: the need to pull together and unite our academic community behind common goals and values. It was an unfortunate fact that unusual strength in the disciplines could frequently create centrifugal forces that pulled people and programs apart. We needed instead to develop a process that drew together independently strong people in the pursuit of common objectives.

1 Much of this section is drawn from a series of lectures by Dr. Allan Spivey, Professor of Business Administration and a key participant in our strategy planning activities.

2 Peter Schwartz, The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World (New York:

Doubleday, 1996).

3 James Brian Quinn, Intelligent Enterprise: A Knowledge and Service Based Paradigm for Industry (New York, Free Press, 1992): 473.

4 Karl E. Weick, “Small Wins: Redefining the Scale of Social Problems,” American Psychologist Vol. 39, No. 1, (January, 1984): 40-49.

5 W. G. Bowen and H. T. Shapiro, eds., Universities and Their Leadership (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).

6 Peter Flawn, A Primer for University Presidents (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990).

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The Planning Environment