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     It has also been a remarkable period of growth for our faculty and professional staff – more than half of whom joined SVSU within the past decade. As with the physical growth, we can expect a period of more stability with our human resources over the next few years. Put simply, we are now facing some lean times and will likely have to make do without additional staffing or other resources.

     As you surely know from news reports, Michigan’s public universities’ current year state appropriations were reduced first by two percent, and then most recently by another one and one-half percent. The total base budget revenue loss for SVSU was more than $900,000.

     Next fiscal year presents more ominous circumstances, and we enter the year without those extra revenues that allowed us to manage this year’s problems. The share of our University’s operating funding from tax sources has been steadily declining for several decades. The same is true for public universities all across the fruited plains. This year, for the first time, the State is providing less than half of SVSU’s General Fund budget – considerably less than is obtained from tuition income.

     Some commentators have described this subtle but profound change as a shift from what was public higher education first to “publicly supported higher education,” and now to what might best be described as “publicly assisted higher education.” Like many other public services our universities are now fundamentally reliant on user fees – tuition – and thus far more directly subject to and vulnerable to the forces of the market economy.

     So how and why has this happened? And who is to blame? The answer is that it has happened over a succession of years while governments have struggled to balance the competing needs and desires of tax-resistant citizens. And no one in particular is to blame – neither governors nor legislators nor lobbyists – and everyone is to blame.

     Taxpayers, including you and me, swoon when political leaders sing for us the siren song of lower taxes – even if the real benefits to individuals are barely noticeable and even if the putative economic stimulus they create is dubious. And in the same breath those same taxpayers – again, including you and me – angrily demand safe streets and smooth highways, good schools for our children and free prescription drugs for our grandparents and, of course low tuition at public universities. But the states, unlike the federal government, have to balance their budgets each year. And political leaders and wannabees know too well that we taxpayers are not stern lovers of truth, and that politicians who tell us we cannot have both lower taxes and every service and benefit our hearts desire tend to lose elections.

     And so Michigan, like most of its sister states, is in financial trouble – and this condition is not merely a temporary inconvenience. Some lucky people will enjoy tax cuts, if they even notice them. Meanwhile, cuts in state appropriations will require a combination of reductions in what we provide students and increases in the tuition rates that we charge them.

     So, again, who is to blame? We are – all of us. As Cassius said: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves.”

     The good news in this regard, if there is any, is that our enrollments are strong and that SVSU continues to have the lowest tuition rates of any public university in Michigan. It is our goal to remain in that position.

* * *

     Lest we despair, it is important to note that in some ways this University has been in such a position before. We are not strangers to hard times. Probably as a joke, my colleague Chris Looney dug up one of the first of my widely-unread “Dear Colleagues” letters to the faculty and staff – sent more than a decade ago.The cruel truth is that I could just as well have sent it yesterday.

It read:

"I want to underscore, again, that we do not face a budget 'crisis' – things are not that grim. But we will need to exercise greater care in the management of our resources this year; there will have to be some additional restraints; we cannot do all that we had hoped to do. . . ."

     We are now again in the midst of a recession, but not a crisis; and we enter this lean time with considerably more strength than at any earlier time in our history. Part of the credit for this relative strength is owed our otherwise unheralded colleagues who manage the University’s financial resources. They are not just tight-fisted Scrooges – though they are surely that – they are also highly competent professionals. While some other institutions have careened recklessly between spending sprees and financial calamities, we have generally flattened the fluctuations of “boom or bust” economic cycles.

     We will be limited, perhaps severely, in what we can do or provide in financial support during the next few years. Yet I remain confident that we can protect the University’s strengths and continue to make progress. Another colleague, to remain unnamed, recently sent me another bit of memorabilia – a little slogan that I had passed around a decade or so ago. It reads thusly: “Being short of money is bad, but not as bad as being short of ideas.”

     Even during times of scarcity we simply cannot stop doing new and better things. There is an initiative underway, for example, to develop a “Center for Business and Economic Development” to support both creative opportunities in our Business College and the economic development efforts of our surrounding region. This semester we will also inaugurate an intellectual journal – to be called Cardinalis – which will project the cultural and intellectual life of the campus into our surrounding region. Again, we cannot simply stop doing new things – though we will have to be more creative from a financial standpoint as we try.

* * *

     The true “state” of a university, of course, is measured not just by dollars and headcounts and square footage – it is measured by its intellectual health.

     Yet assessing the intellectual health of a university is a tricky business. Things like enrollments, endowments, financial assets, and buildings can all be measured and counted with some precision. Things like ideas generally cannot. And so we are left only with some fairly imprecise indicators with which to make fairly subjective – and possibly self-serving – judgments.

     Having said that, it pleases me to tell you that I regard the intellectual health of this University to be quite robust. So there.

     Several years ago I began a custom of personally hosting a party for faculty who had recently published a book. I had to “call it quits” a few years ago. It may well be that I’m just not the party animal I once was, but in fact the literary output of our faculty became too prolific. I have asked the Library to put on a special display of books authored by our faculty over the past decade, and I urge you to give it a visit. Such scholarly work – together with the bounty of articles and papers and grant-sponsored research and service projects and performances and creative works by our faculty and staff – speak loudly to the intellectual maturation and to the elevated expectations of our academic community.

     Another sign of intellectual health is the increased involvement of faculty, staff, and our students in discussions and debates on the important issues of the day – not just those political issues on the world stage, but the ethical and aesthetic and cultural issues that are raised in our classes.

     And agree or disagree with them as you may choose, we must admire those who march around the Leaping Gazelle Fountain in the bitter cold, demanding that the rest of us at least think about what we believe on the critical issues of war and peace in our time.

* * *

     There is other evidence of academic health. The American Assembly of Colleges and Schools of Business accredits only about 25% of the master’s level business programs in the country, and we look forward to joining that company in the very near future. Colleagues in the College of Business and Management have done fine work, persisting through the problems that plagued these efforts in the past.

     Finally, we can genuinely look forward to the opportunity – and I choose that word carefully – to come together on a comprehensive self-study for the upcoming visit by the North Central Association. This is a massive effort on the part of a few and a major effort on the part of many. We can look at our strengths, and at our weaknesses, with the self-confidence of a strong and vital University. And from what we learn, we can become better.

     And so, the “state” of our University is better than it has ever been – I honestly believe that – but its continued health will require care and prudence and patience for a time. We will need to pull together.

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