Letter from the President

October, 2009

Dear Colleagues:

By now, much of the news about the semester underway may be known to you.  But I am still in the habit of writing a letter like this early in the fall of each new academic year. So here it is.

The “big news” is, of course, about our record-setting enrollments. As it turned out, all of our usual predictors underestimated the number of students who would enroll this fall – an error in direction much preferred over the opposite – and rather than the expected 2% growth, we experienced a growth of nearly 7% over the fall of 2008.

The number of new “freshpersons” is “up” by nearly a hundred to a total of 1,740 – and more than 70% of them have come to live in campus housing, another very significant change from most of our University’s history. The number of transfer students also increased, and the anticipated decline in graduate students did not materialize – growth in the Business and Health Sciences programs more than off-set losses in the College of Education.

We also experienced an increase in the numbers of international students and now have some 458 students from 36 countries taking classes on campus.

Taken together, there are now 10,498 individual human souls taking for-credit classes, plus another couple of thousand in the Osher Lifelong Learning Program and various non-credit and continuing education courses. The campus is a busy place and . . . yes, I know . . . parking is a problem.

The sports teams are winning and the Theatre and Music seasons are about to begin. And in a particularly salutary effort, our Student Association won its annual competition – the “Battle of the Valleys” – by raising some $38,000 for the Boys and Girls Club of Saginaw.  Once again, the student leadership was outstanding in this service initiative.

We greeted 29 new faculty colleagues this semester and about that many new staff. These colleagues come to us from a variety of places and institutions – also from several nations around the world.  An interesting note: about one-third of all our full-time faculty colleagues have joined SVSU in just the past five years  And a new three-year agreement was reached with the Support Staff Association, thanks to the good work by all those involved.

We also began the semester with several new facilities completed – the Living Center Southwest, the addition to the Arbury Fine Arts Center and the new Health Services Building, operated in a collaborative agreement with Covenant HealthCare – and construction on the new $28 million Health and Human Services facility is well underway.

Another interesting note: We have now completed some $175 million in capital expansion at SVSU in just the past decade, increasing the total size of our campus by more than 67%.

And so . . . we are clearly off and running on the 2009-2010 academic year. The Fall Focus lecture series has brought and will bring several outstanding speakers to the campus and will also showcase our own colleagues who will deliver key presentations. We are in the process of seeking new deans for three of our colleges, and the hiring cycle for some 19 new faculty has just begun.

There are, of course, challenges ahead.  As I write this, Michigan still has not passed a State budget for the year, so we must deal with that uncertainty. And we know that the next few years will not likely bring about a reversal of the recent trends in which state funding shrinks and the burdens of increased tuition rates fall ever more heavily on our students and their families.

At the same time, there are also tremendous opportunities ahead, this year and beyond, as we look to invest in initiatives that will deepen our curricular offerings and services and research programs. Stay tuned as more and more of these are announced.

The economy of our State and region continue to struggle, of course, and the University is not immune to these problems. But as our enrollments indicate, never has the University been more important to our State and region and never has our responsibility to serve our students been more critical to them and to the future for all of us.

I’m enormously proud to be among you and part of this work. Let’s keep at it.

Best regards,

Eric