Moeser to step down in June; outlines UNC's challenges

In his State of the University Address on Sept. 26, James Moeser announced his plans to step down in June 2008 as Chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In his address, Moeser outlined both the University's accomplishments during his seven years as chancellor and four major challenges that the University and his successor will face. The following are excerpts from Moeser's speech. For a full text or video excerpts, click on this link: http://www.unc.edu/chan/special/

 

Excerpts – State of the University Address

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Chancellor James Moeser

September 26, 2007

Great Hall, Frank Porter Graham Student Union

 

Personal Comments

The principal lesson I learned as a concert artist was always to get off the stage before the applause stopped. Nothing is more embarrassing than being stuck out there with no applause. The second lesson was to be conservative with encores. “Always leave them wanting more,” my teachers said.

Those lessons stuck, and I think they apply to me as much today as they did in my years on the concert stage. Thus, I am announcing today that I shall relinquish the position of chancellor of this great University at the end of the fiscal year, June 30, 2008.

Let me hasten to add that this is not a retirement for me. After a year’s research leave, I shall return to the campus with the most exalted title this University can confer on an individual – professor.

I make this announcement today to give the Board of Trustees time to begin a search for my successor, with the hope that this individual can assume his or her responsibilities on July 1, 2008.

I will be fully engaged as your chancellor in the year ahead. … I do not intend to waste a minute. 

 

Celebrating Success: Building Momentum for Excellence

This University is on an incredible roll. … There is a lot to celebrate in Chapel Hill because we are making great progress on virtually every priority that we have set for ourselves.

Enhancing the Learning Environment

This year’s first-year class is again the most academically qualified in Carolina’s history. We received over 20,000 applications, up from 16,000 a decade ago. The average SAT score for this fall’s first-year class was 1302; 10 years ago it was 1220. This year 77 percent of our newest students graduated in the top 10 percent of their high school class; a decade ago it was 66 percent. This year’s class is also more diverse than ever.

Carolina leads the nation in access and affordability. Through several key policy decisions, Carolina has become more affordable to a larger number of North Carolinians than ever before. Kiplinger’s Personal Finance magazine has concluded six consecutive times that we are the best academic value in public higher education. Universities and entire states are following our lead when they model programs after the Carolina Covenant, and this May we will graduate our first class of Carolina Covenant Scholars.

We also set the bar high for graduation rates, a critical measure of undergraduate quality. Our goal is to match the six-year rates for Berkeley, UCLA and Michigan by 2010. Last year, they were at 87 percent, while we were at 84 percent. It is too early to report progress on this front. On the four-year rate, even though last year’s results exceeded those three same peers, we set a target of 75 percent by 2010. Here, I am pleased to report some success. Since last year, we have improved the four-year rate from 71 percent to 73 percent.

Strengthening Faculty Resources

With regard to faculty, we have improved how we pay, recruit and retain them because they are this University’s number one priority. Our goal is to take average faculty salaries up to the 80th percentile of our peers. We are roughly at the 50th percentile, and we may reach the 80th percentile as early as next year with another solid legislative session and a modest increase in campus-based tuition. State appropriations helped slash the gap between current salaries and the 80th percentile from about $21 million last year to $11 million this year for all tenure and tenure-track faculty. This is real progress.

More competitive salaries are helping recruitment and retention. Last year we retained 72 percent of faculty who received outside offers to whom we made counter offers. That was our best showing in five years. We were at 52 percent in 2006 and 40 percent in 2003. We received almost $1 million from the recruitment and retention fund created by the Legislature at President Bowles’ request. Those dollars helped attract nine nationally known scholars and keep six of our strongest faculty who received outside offers. Most importantly, as our salaries become more competitive, fewer faculty will even be tempted by outside offers.

 

Looking Ahead: Challenges and Opportunities

Every part of the University is positioned for the kind of distinction that we expect at Carolina. We have come a long way, and I am pleased to report that the state of the University is excellent. However, I am not going to use my last year as chancellor for an extended victory lap. We have some real challenges to face. I want to do all I can this year to address the issues that, I believe, will dominate my successor’s tenure. There are four major challenges.

Future Challenges: Growing to Serve North Carolina

First, enrollment growth will be, without question, the single most critical issue facing my successor. The UNC system expects to absorb approximately 80,000 additional students by 2017. Chapel Hill is already growing, and we will grow more to respond to the needs of an expanding and more diverse population seeking access to higher education in North Carolina. This is a huge challenge, and we must meet it. We cannot freeze-frame this University or embed it in amber. Rather we must continue to evolve and change to serve the public that created us and sustains us.

This fall, for the first time in our history, enrollment exceeded 28,000, about 4,000 more students than we had when I arrived seven years ago. Under our current trustee-approved plan from several years ago, enrollment will increase to nearly 30,000 by 2015. The question is, given what we know about the state’s growth, will this be enough? And, if not, how will this University accommodate more?

The limiting factors for growth are resources and quality – resources for faculty and support staff; the necessary infrastructure of classrooms, offices, parking and transportation that allows the faculty to be a presence on the campus; and the amenities for student life that support the personal and social development of our students.

Quality is the other metric of control. We must ensure that admissions standards for undergraduates remain highly selective, and we must continue to push for higher graduation rates, which in itself will create more capacity. We must do nothing to degrade the quality of the entering class or of a Carolina degree. And we must increase support for graduate students, ensuring that Chapel Hill will continue to attract the world’s finest young scholars to our graduate and professional programs. Indeed, it will be critical that we maintain the roughly 60-40 ratio of undergraduate to graduate and professional student population. This is crucial to the academic ecology of a research university.

I do not minimize the challenges that growth brings. While we should never compromise on quality, we and our successors must never send the message to the people who own this University that the door to opportunity has been closed.

This fall, we will undertake a comprehensive update of our campus master plan, beginning with a space needs assessment for various degrees of growth, to incorporate recent master planning by the UNC Health Care System and the School of Medicine, and also to take into account the possible programmatic uses of all of our outlying properties, including Carolina North and Mason Farm.

Future Challenges: Competing in the Research Arena

The second most urgent challenge facing the University is the intensifying competition for research support.

In my installation address in 2000, I described the investment that we had just made in 18 faculty positions to support a new genomics initiative. That dramatic investment speaks for itself. Seven years later, UNC is a world leader in genomics and genetics research. Later, we made a similar investment in advanced materials science and nanotechnology.

Last year, I announced a goal of securing $1 billion in external research funding by 2015. It remains the audacious goal I described: “to take UNC to another level of excellence and prominence as a research university.”

To reach this goal, we must make some fundamental course adjustments. UNC has benefited enormously from the run-up of the NIH, but now we face a new federal reality – the decline in real dollars at NIH and a new federal escalator in the physical sciences, energy and technology areas under legislation signed last month by President Bush. This initiative received initial Congressional funding this year and will ultimately double funding in these areas.

To be successful in this new environment, we must make new strategic investments. We must increase our research capability in the physical sciences and build even more bridges between the biomedical and physical sciences. We must define new technical areas and approaches that create a competitive advantage for Carolina.

Simply put, we must devise a new strategy for innovation that builds on existing strengths, but that also includes recruiting and supporting new faculty who will foster multidisciplinary collaborations and lead new initiatives, both large and small.

I have asked Vice Chancellor Tony Waldrop to chair a faculty task force to develop a short list of big ideas for new investments. The objective is to position Carolina to be successful in this new environment. This group will identify three to five broad thematic areas in which UNC will invest to increase its competitive position, taking into account existing strengths, as well as new opportunities. One of these broad themes has been given to us by the North Carolina General Assembly: cancer research.

Future Challenges: Finding the Resources

The third challenge will be to identify the resources for new investments. Let me be perfectly candid about what this means. Today, we could not make the investment in genomics that we did seven years ago because we do not have the resources available centrally. We have prided ourselves on placing our assets in a distributed manner, as close to the ground as possible. This has been an effective strategy for individual principal investigators to be successful in an environment of steadily increasing funding. It has maximized individual entrepreneurship. With this strategy of decentralized deployment and control, we have created internationally competitive departments, schools, centers and institutes. However, there is a huge downside to this strategy when the rules of the game suddenly change – and they have suddenly changed. We have little ability to steer the ship to change its course.

Realistically, we cannot expect the state to provide all of the new resources we will need for major new initiatives to the degree that it has done for cancer. We must find these resources internally. In a budget of over $2 billion, finding sufficient new investment capital should not be an insurmountable challenge, but it will challenge our traditional ways of doing business. Over the coming year, I shall ask the provost to develop with the deans a satisfactory method of capturing funds sufficient to allow some significant new investments in selected priority areas.

Future Challenges: Replenishing Faculty Resources

The fourth challenge is the essential resource of people – especially tenured and tenure-stream faculty – the people who do this research and provide service to the state. They are the key to everything. This is the supreme challenge.

According to a white paper by Bob Lowman, associate vice chancellor for research, nearly 41 percent of our faculty are 55 years of age or older. Nationally, about half of all faculty leave the workforce by age 66, and 90 percent will have stopped working by age 70. (I should note that more and more faculty remain highly productive well into their 70s, a trend that I find myself applauding more and more. It is amazing how my own views about this have changed in the past few weeks.) Based on these national trends, we expect at least 500 tenured faculty members to retire in the next decade. That is more than double the rate of the past several years.

Besides those 500 new hires required by retirements, we will have to replace 1,300 faculty who will resign or not be reappointed, and find another 225 faculty to cover the current enrollment growth projection for 2015. That suggests, according to Lowman, “the need to recruit and hire approximately 2,000 new faculty members over the next eight years, or about 250 faculty per year.” This number does not include potential new faculty hires supported by the cancer research fund or accelerated enrollment growth.

To put these numbers in perspective, we now have nearly 3,300 full-time and part-time faculty. Hiring 2,000 faculty in eight years is the equivalent of replacing about five of every eight faculty.

The overwhelming prospect of replacing that many faculty is even more daunting when we remember that every other college and university in America will be facing similar problems of aging faculty, if not the same growth in enrollment.

This has huge implications. I suggest that we cannot approach this issue of faculty replenishment in the old mode of doing business – where departments and programs essentially clone the appointments made in the 1970s. In some cases, we may choose to replace a retiring specialist in the organ music of J.S. Bach with another Bach specialist, but I do not believe that even that position (which is probably mine, by the way) ought to be made without serious examination of larger alternatives.

Some of our major competitors are recruiting whole faculty teams, not just individuals. We have seen that in some of their raids on our best research groups. Clearly, they have an institutional strategic purpose in these recruitments. That is the nature of the game today, and not only in big science. This is how we would build expertise in faculty with global or environmental perspectives, to name just two examples. Carolina has many individual strengths and an interdisciplinary culture that position us well to play in this game.

This is a challenge and an opportunity to position UNC to realize its goal of being the leading public university – one of international pre-eminence.

 

Embracing Change and Holding Fast to Our Culture

There are a few advantages to having come late to Carolina with first-hand experience of other university cultures. This University is truly unique. It is a place that is open and free, that celebrates excellence wherever it occurs, that honors teaching and embraces selflessly a tradition of public service. We are a university with a healthy ego, but an innate modesty and lack of pretension.

This is a place that, for many years, I held in high esteem from afar. I shall never forget the first time Susan and I walked on these brick paths eight years ago, knowing that we were about to have the high privilege of leading this great institution. I got goose bumps then. … I still get them today.

This is a place we have come to love with every fiber of our being. I understand how it captures our students, who fall in love with it on their first visit; how, as World War II Veteran O.G. Grubbs wrote so beautifully in words inscribed in our new alumni memorial, “Chapel Hill is in my blood just as much as the sand and pebbles from the walks used to be in my shoes.”

I believe this University has the strength of character and maturity to embark on the bold and audacious initiatives I have described and not lose or endanger that wonderful culture of openness, freedom, civility and collegiality. We love this place, but we must not let our love of it lead us to complacency and self-satisfaction. Once again, Carolina is called to lead – to lead change – to reinvent itself for the 21st Century, holding fast to the incredible ethos of our bedrock values.