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Dennis Rittenmeyer, Calumet College of St. Joseph
August 25, 2004
Welcome!
The 2003-2004 school year was another great year for Calumet College
of St. Joseph. Indeed, in many ways, it was our best year in decades.
That is not say our year did not also have its frustrations and even
failures. Nevertheless, as we have remarked on numerous occasions, our
successes have been more than our failures, and they have been greater
than our failures. Let me recount briefly what I believe to be significant
milestones in the 2003-2004 academic year.
First and foremost, our enrollment reached a 20-year high. For the first
time in my 17 years at Calumet College of St. Joseph, we topped 1,300
students. Obviously, we are making every effort to ensure that this year
our enrollment will grow even more.
All centers of our enrollment activity contributed to this success. The
traditional program enrollment has grown 21% in the last three years,
and our compliments go to the admissions' and student affairs' staffs
for their continuing efforts in building that enrollment. Degree Completion
enrollment continues to be strong, law enforcement continues to grow,
and we saw new life in our healthcare management enrollment. Our Athletic
Program continues to grow and contribute traditional students to our college.
Our Transition-to-Teaching Program, with the largest enrollment in the
state, continues to make important contributions to our enrollment and
to our community. And, our graduate program continues to be strong.
Because enrollment grew and, therefore, our finances, we were able to
make continuing improvements in our building, provide more support for
professional development, increase salaries at a rate above the national
average, helping to close the gap between ourselves and our peers.
The college's image in the community also continues to grow. No longer
are we recognized as a frail and, therefore, somewhat insignificant institution,
but rather as a growing, dynamic college making important contributions
to the quality of life in our community.
Perhaps the best, but not the only, example of those contributions is
the activity of our Law Enforcement Institute. In addition to making continuing
efforts to professionalize law enforcement, the Institute has also undertaken
a number of important contractual projects. These include helping the
cities of Gary and East Chicago revise their operations manuals, leadership
and supervision training for the East Chicago Police Department, working
on the development of a law enforcement support center that is currently
targeted by Congressman Visclosky to receive substantial federal funds
for its initiation, holding the first Expeditions Project jointly with
the Quality of Life Council that highlighted the professionalism of law
enforcement in Northwest Indiana, the continuing publication of our newsletter
which is mailed to an increasingly large number of law enforcement professionals
throughout Indiana and Illinois, and an annual conference on important
issues in law enforcement.
Other important outreach activities include Dr. Damashek's Lunch &
Learn Program, the hosting of local crime-watch meetings on our campus,
and the recent "Camp-U-Can" programming for Clark School students
and numerous others.
During the 2003-2004 year, we sped up and expanded our ongoing planning
activities. Not only did we hold another successful administrative retreat,
but also a very productive trustees' retreat. We have been engaged with
American City Bureau (Don Voss here present) in an ongoing strategic planning
exercise, the end result of which will be a planning document which is
in its final draft stages.
We have also continued our important Center for Excellence discussions
in law enforcement and have expanded those discussions to include a new
Center for Excellence on social justice issues. Both sets of discussions
have been an uplifting and exciting experience for all who have participated.
They provide ample opportunity for members of the college family to engage
in these important discussions and also to dream what might be the future
of Calumet College of St. Joseph as we take these two important programmatic
areas and seek to build and enhance them for the benefit of all in our
institution, but also the greater community as well.
We also were pleased to receive a $750,000 grant from Lilly Endowment.
That grant has enabled us to significantly enhance our student services'
program to include a formalized internship program, the new bridge program,
and the creation of a new department of student support services. The
grant is also enabling us to take our strongest and best known programming
in law enforcement to other areas of the state.
Currently, we are waiting to hear the Endowment's decision on another
grant proposal submitted this summer, one which would enhance the intellectual
capital at our institution. This was a state-wide grant program, and the
college has requested $1M to pursue this initiative.
We held another very successful annual ball and raffle. We have enhanced
our fund-raising activities through increased alumni activities and broader
recognition that our college is here to stay and is a significant asset
in our community.
All of this positions us well for the 2004-2005 academic year. While
many of the activities, I just mentioned, are ongoing, none of what we
do is totally secure or insulated from forces which may deter our efforts.
Thus, as we look to begin this important year, we must be clear in our
direction and focus our resources.
This past summer I sent out two update memos telling the college family
of the exciting activities that had been under way. Everyone in the college
family received these memos so I won't recount what I said in them. It
is important to note, however, that this was an exciting and very busy
summer, and moreover, it represented, yet again, significant progress
at our college.
At this time last year, I opened the school year by suggesting that Calumet
College of St. Joseph was in a new place. I reiterate that comment today,
not to suggest that we are in "another" new place, but rather
to indicate a confirmation that we are a changed institution.
Perhaps there is no greater indication that we are now a different institution
than our graduation this past year. Graduation is always an exciting experience,
but in 2004, we graduated more baccalaureate students than ever in our
history. Furthermore, a significant number of our total graduates, more
than 10%, were students who completed requirements for a master's degree.
While we anticipate this year's graduating class may be somewhat smaller,
by virtue of the cyclical nature of our adult programming, we expect this
upward trend to continue. Just as significant is the Higher Learning Commission's
recent review of our application for a second graduate degree. The Master
of Science in Education has been approved by the readers' panel and the
Institutional Actions Committee, and as of this morning, per Sister Michele,
by the Board of Directors of the Higher Learning Commission. Congratulations
to all who helped make this application a success!
Thus, we are witnessing another milestone in our college's evolution.
No longer are we tied to the past, which, while glorious at the time,
saw the college graduate mostly associate degree students and a few baccalaureate
degrees.
And, so as we continue to affirm that Calumet College of St. Joseph is
in a new place, we must also continue to review our actions, our policies,
our commitments, and make sure that we do not lose ground in this race,
but, in fact, build upon our successes, confirm our progress, and move
forward as rapidly as our resources and talents will take us.
During the past year, we have been involved in significant planning activities.
I have confessed to many of you that I don't particularly like planning
because I find it so difficult to make formal, long-range plans in a time
of uncertainty. Rather, I prefer to remain nimble, taking advantage of
opportunity when it appears. Nevertheless, continuing discussions about
our future are important, so that we make sure we both understand our
current position as well as the value and, equally important, the liability
attached to every opportunity that arises.
I have suggested that to participate in planning at Calumet College of
St. Joseph and to keep one's sanity, we must maintain a high tolerance
for ambiguity. My reasoning is obvious. What we decide to do today when
faced with new opportunity, we may choose not to do tomorrow. Thus, again,
it is important to recognize that in our history, we have successfully
taken advantage of opportunities and enjoyed more successes than failures
and successes which have been grander than our failures.
Still, past success is no guaranty for the future. Thus, we must continue
to chart a future as best we can know it, both knowing what we want and
assessing realistically our chances for success. Many of you know this
story, but I believe it bears repeating.
One of our ongoing planning activities is our Center for Excellence discussions
on law enforcement. We have actually been holding these discussions for
over two years. They have given birth to the Law Enforcement Institute;
"The Register," our law enforcement newsletter; several bully-pulpit
strategies; newspaper articles and opinion pieces; direct appeals to elected
officials on issues pertaining to law enforcement; grant applications;
contracts; and numerous other activities-every one of which has been successful.
Still, one of the proposals, sometime ago, was that Calumet College of
St. Joseph exercise a leadership role in organizing and implementing the
first in a series of 12 Expeditions, representing the 12 Quality of Life
Indicators with co-sponsorship by the Quality of Life Council.
This idea was the "brain child" of John Davies, present here
today as he was last year, and John appealed to our group and to me directly
to take on this responsibility and lead the way for Northwest Indiana.
Over a period of approximately six months, every time John would bring
up the idea, I told him it was crazy, and I didn't want to do it. I thought
it was filled with liability, represented a tremendous amount of additional
work, and if we did not do it well, it would be embarrassing. I felt the
risks were just too high. Nevertheless, John persisted to the point of
occasionally eliciting a frustrated response from me.
However, subsequent to having a conversation with Dan McDevitt of Lansing,
one of our closest friends and one of the best police chiefs in all of
the Calumet Region, in which he said he thought it was a great idea, and
he was sure the entire law enforcement community including his department
would participate and help us, I changed my mind. Subsequently, we inaugurated
the Expeditions project. Over 17 law enforcement agencies participated,
hundreds of local community leaders showed up, and countless visitors
as well. It set the "bar" for all of the subsequent Expeditions
projects and ensured that everyone in Northwest Indiana knew that Calumet
College of St. Joseph was the undisputed leader in law enforcement education.
I don't want to suggest that every crazy idea really has merit or that
it will always take us or me six months to come around. Nevertheless,
the process by which we increasingly and more carefully accessed the benefits
and liabilities of the project certainly caused me to change my mind,
others to join with us, and, in the end, led to a very successful project.
Nowhere in any long-range plan has it ever been written that we participate
in something called the Expeditions project, let alone lead the way. Indeed,
nowhere has it been written in the past that we would launch a law enforcement
program, undergraduate or graduate, create an institute for law enforcement.
Yet, these are all opportunities that presented themselves over the last
few years, and we have attempted to take advantage of every single one
of these activities because law enforcement is "our football."
The reference to "football," I believe, is instructive. While
not wanting to offend anyone here present, who is a graduate of "our
extension in South Bend," I believe it is well known that it is football
that built the University of Notre Dame. Notre Dame is today an excellent
university, recognized as the premier Catholic university in the world.
But, that was not always the case. Indeed, during the time of Knute Rockne,
Notre Dame was not especially recognized as an outstanding institution.
The success of football built Notre Dame, and, yet, I am sure that for
the pure academics at Notre Dame, football was, and perhaps still is,
a bit of an embarrassment.
Nevertheless, it put Notre Dame on the map, and taking advantage of football
has made Notre Dame University what it is today. And, so I say, law enforcement
is our "football." We have undisputed excellence in the field,
we are recognized increasingly throughout the region, we have a grant
to export our program throughout the state, and we have a growing number
of activities and projects in which people have come to us for assistance.
And so, certainly, now our planning activities must take into account
that law enforcement is our "football." And besides, law enforcement
is an academic field, not a sport.
And, now, let's turn our attention to this year and beyond. Despite our
numerous successes this past year, much still needs to be done. With the
approval of our new graduate program in education by the Higher Learning
Commission, we must necessarily be about the business of building enrollment
in that program. There is substantial interest, but as we know, neither
interest nor need always translates directly into students. We must also
continue to review our existing programmatic inventory looking both for
ways to improve it and trim individual course offerings within programs.
We still have majors with far too many requirements, making it virtually
impossible to increase class size. That is not to say, that all of our
classes should be large. It is to say our class size continues to be too
low, and, therefore, too costly and inefficient. In addition, by trimming
courses within the curriculum, we can provide opportunity for our students
to graduate with more than a single credential. I have said for some time,
our working-class student body needs multiple credentials. Most recently,
the Lumina Foundation, in making recommendations on college affordability,
has suggested students need more options for credentials within the existing
baccalaureate curriculum, thereby providing them with more opportunity
to explore their professional interests and better insulation from economic
uncertainty.
Also, we need to continue to make improvements in our instructional facilities,
both to ensure that our programs are consistent with best current practice
in education, but also to create enhanced "curb appeal" for
our Admissions Office to recruit prospective students. In particular,
our science facilities need to be upgraded and, hopefully, this year,
we can make a decision as to whether that upgrade should occur where they
currently are located or in a new place where they could be located in
the future.
More generally, on the issue of curb appeal, it is critical to the future
of our college that we enhance our building and grounds. Much money has
been spent on the infrastructure in our building, and we must continue
to make those infrastructure improvements. Nevertheless, the general attractiveness
of the facility must be enhanced as well as the grounds surrounding our
college. The second floor renovation, which was completed sometime ago,
has made a tremendous improvement in our building, but we need to continue
to look for ways to make other similar improvements.
In that regard, I want to thank all of those who have and will be participating
in the repositioning of the library books, thereby opening the future
home of our "black-box theatre." I harbor no illusions that
the black-box will be fully equipped and operational in the near future,
but I do expect it will be usable for the first play of this year.
Next, the strategic planning exercise which we are completing with the
support of Don Voss of the American City Bureau needs to be brought to
a successful close. There has been ample discussion, ample opportunity
for everyone in the college family to make suggestions and comments, and
certainly plenty of introspection. The time has come now to bring this
to a close and agree upon the future directions of the college. Indeed,
some of those decisions have already been made.
Clearly, the college has adopted a policy of growth-that is, we want
to grow our enrollment and grow our footprint and image as well. Growing
enrollment is a strategy to strengthen an institution, its quality, and
certainly its size and financial resources and impact. Inherent in adopting
that growth strategy, however, must be continuing improvements in the
management of the institution. Although there are some who would argue
that our institution is already too heavily managed, I simply do not agree.
Improved management of the institution is the only way we will reap the
benefits of growth. For, if we simply grow, but do not improve the management,
the oversight, and our cost recovery, we will simply be bigger but not
better.
There is no better example of this dilemma than our salaries. With the
support of the college's Board of Trustees, we have had a longstanding
commitment to lift our salaries annually. Those salaries have improved
every year, but one of the 17 years I have been at Calumet College of
St. Joseph. And, those increases have all been above the national average.
Admittedly, we started from a low base, and we remain at the low end
of our peer group. Nevertheless, we are in the cellar no longer, and our
salaries are increasingly competitive. Still, much needs to be done.
Our best comparative information is on faculty salaries, and there we
are at 85% of the state-wide average for our peer group and a lesser percentage
of the national average for church-related institutions. However, if we
want that to improve, as I assume we all do, we really only have two choices
in our professional lifetime. One, we can increase tuition leaving enrollment
stable. Since our tuition is still half of the national average for institutions
of our type, certainly one can argue we should increase tuition dramatically.
Most of us believe, however, that incremental increases should be our
strategy because a dramatic increase could drive away the very students
we hope to enroll.
The only other option is proportionally increased use of part-time faculty,
thereby making only modest increases in the size of the full-time faculty
as our institution grows. For it remains the case, that if we are successful
in growing our institution and increasing the institution's fixed expenses
consistent with that proportion which we have today, we will only be successful
in being bigger, and we won't make other improvements that are necessary
if we are to be stronger and better. The NCA warned us of this dilemma
several years ago. And, finally, I'd like to say a word about the evolution
of our profession, systems theory, and Calumet College of St. Joseph's
current situation.
There was a time when the predominant view in our profession was that
you just hire really bright people, well-educated people, and then let
them do whatever they want. That gave rise to disjointed and wasteful
organizational structures and an academic view that one could simply "pass
the best and flunk the rest" and move on with limited accountability.
The rise of professionalism in higher education and most recently the
accreditors' demand for continuing assessment of student-learning outcomes
have marked a significant departure from that historic view. Today, at
this enrollment-driven point in our history, improved management, as I've
already indicated, must be our hallmark.
Bob Sevier, Senior Vice President of Stamats, the consulting company
which we used several years ago, is a prolific author and pundit on the
profession. Most recently, he advocated more attention to a systems-theory
approach to our profession. He began his argument with an often told story,
one that even I have told before.
"It seems there were these fishermen, two fishermen in the front
of the boat and two fishermen in the back of the boat. The fishermen in
the back of the boat were bailing vigorously because there was a hole
in the back of the boat. One of the fishermen in the front of the boat
remarked to his colleague that he was sure glad that hole wasn't in the
front of the boat."
The obvious point of the story is that we are all in the same boat. One
of the reasons we have this meeting every year and have had it for 18
years is to make the point that we are all in this boat. A leak in any
one of our offices or in any vice-presidential area can, in fact, sink
the entire boat. That is not to say we should be busy doing someone else's
work or interfering with someone else's work because we don't think that
person is doing it well, or that we should be territorial and wall ourselves
off so that the hole in the other end of the boat doesn't sink us as well.
These approaches won't work.
Rather, it suggests we take an enlightened professional approach to the
system of which we are all a part-the system, that if it is successful,
as we have been, will, in fact, benefit us all. And, if there is a hole
in any part of our boat, it holds the potential to sink the entire boat
and all of us with it.
And, so, as we begin this year, I say again that we are in the best position
ever in the history of our college. We are stronger, we are better known,
we are a significant player in the higher-education enterprise of Northwest
Indiana to include metropolitan Chicago, and with the support of Lilly
Endowment, soon, Indianapolis. All of these activities represent opportunities,
but they are opportunities we must manage to make sure they are successful.
If we do, our track record of more successes than failures and bigger
successes than failures will continue.
I am proud to serve as your President this coming year. Good luck to
all of us! Thank you.
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