President Jonathan Koppell Opening Day Town Hall Remarks to Faculty and Staff

Full Transcript:

I’m excited to see everybody. 

This is the best time of year, the campus comes to life and the energy is palpable, and in a very positive way. Let me just say, this is a tumultuous time in the world. There’s a lot of stuff going on. It is quite moving to see how people feel about being in this place and the sense of home that I get from talking to students, to staff, to faculty. I don’t mean just in a physical sense, in the psychological sense that home is a place where you belong. 

I’m going to come back to this idea more than once. This needs to be a place where everyone feels valued, where everyone feels that they can be themselves, and that doesn’t just happen organically. It requires conscious effort. It’s so noticeable when you talk to the students who are enrolled here, and many of the people who have spent decades of their lives working here. 

We have to resolve together to consciously make a commitment to keep cultivating that environment. Never has there been a time when it’s more important. So, let me start by just saying a huge thank you. Thank you for the work that is done. Thank you for the work that is done in service of our students. We had these recognition slides going. We can’t possibly have enough slides, and the word literally is used a lot. I literally don’t have time to thank every person individually, but it is important that we recognize the effort that’s been done. And the effort that’s been done not just starting today, but it was a very busy summer. By the way, I never say welcome back. Don’t say welcome back. There are a lot of people who never left. So, there’s no welcome back. There’s no “How was your summer?” So I’m going to sort of go through quickly a lot of stuff. Let’s jump right in and start off with a metaphor.

Everybody loves a metaphor. And the metaphor is a ship on the ocean. Why? We are increasingly in volatile seas, not necessarily stormy, right? But the waves are getting bigger. So, the question is, what happens when you’re dealing with an environment that’s more volatile when you’re trying to navigate seas where the waves get bigger? By the way, some waves are predictable. That’s good. We’ve known that the demography of this country is going to pose challenges for some time. You’ve heard of the demographic cliff and that the number of students who are graduating of college age is going to be plummeting over the next several years. So, we’ve known that that’s coming. 

Some waves are unpredictable. So, this past spring, I assume most people here are modestly familiar with the FAFSA debacle, where all of a sudden somewhere between 500 and 800,000 people who are eligible to go to college, eligible to apply for financial aid didn’t do so, and that’s a tragedy for them because a significant portion of them will never pursue college. But it also posed a challenge for all institutions of higher education and, indeed, for many smaller institutions, it was the death blow that put them out of business. I’m not exaggerating. Read the Chronicle of Higher Education or Inside Higher Ed, and you can see that was what pushed many institutions over the edge. And some waves are man-made, right? 

We are in an unusual time where higher education itself – is the subject of political debate and the entire conversation of, “Is college worth it?” is a constructed storm. Right? Where the data are not ambiguous, that you’re better off with a college degree than without one, which doesn’t mean that everybody should go to college. Let’s just get that out there. It’s sort of like, not that there’s anything wrong with it, right? It’s the same idea. But there is no doubt that your odds of a more prosperous, healthy life increase with a college degree, but now we have to grapple with that issue. 

Now, in this situation, right, there’s two things you can do. You can pretend that the ocean is the same and nothing needs to change. And there are a certain number of institutions for whom that is fine. Because they’re super rich, because their reputation and investment in elitism and exclusivity makes them basically immune to changes. They don’t have to change. Their ship is solid no matter how crazy the ocean is. And there are another set of institutions like, they’re taking on water. They’re facing life and death. We’re in neither of those situations, which is a good thing. Our boat is solid. We’re doing well, but we recognize that the waves are getting bigger. 

The question is, what do you do? My strong belief is you take advantage of this time to prepare yourselves for a future that you anticipate and for a future that you don’t anticipate. That’s what we’re trying to do is build a university that can withstand the uncertainty, and that means looking at everything we do – our internal systems, how they operate, how they interact with each other, where there are opportunities to do better, what new technologies are coming on the horizon that we can incorporate – AI being the most obvious one – but not limited to that, our ability to use partnerships in the community and in higher education, to strengthen ourselves and be of greater service, both locally and globally. All of these are the questions that we must ask now. 

And so, in a moment, I’m going to go and meet with our students, and I like to lean into our motto of carpe diem, which is an important lesson to seize this opportunity. We shouldn’t be afraid of the future. Carpe futurum. Let’s just lean into the fact that the future is going to be different and be ready for that. Make bold choices. Don’t be afraid. And I always want to make one point, when people question the choices that we might make or the investments we might make. I don’t mind people questioning the things that we choose to do. Just understand that doing nothing – is a choice. Sticking with the status quo is a choice. I would argue, in some ways, the riskiest choice an institution can make. And so, we have made some design choices and will make some design choices in the years ahead, because we don’t want to be swamped by a wave that we know is coming. 

So, the first thing you need to do when you’re rebuilding your ship is to have a really good crew. We’ve got a couple of new leaders. Meredith Gatzke joins us as our Chief Human Resources Officer. By the way, great, great picture. Where is? Meredith’s there. She’s a real person– but, like, Meredith, we’re going to go out and we’re going to kill some whales or something. Argh! 

I think maybe intimidated by Meredith’s picture, we don’t even have a picture of David Chun, who is our new Chief Information Officer. David, wake up so they can see you — leading our IT team. Jessica Murphy also has joined us. A critical position, Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education Success and Academic Innovation. Fred Bonato comes back from St. Peter’s to lead our health college. And last but not least among our new leadership, Theodora Berry. Please stand up, wave. Very excited that Theodora Regina Berry has joined us from the University of Central Florida, where she led initiatives resulting in the highest graduation rates for transfer students and second highest rates for first time students among colleges for two consecutive years. So excited by what she’s going to bring to Bloomfield College, as we refine the model of education that’s going to make Bloomfield a leader nationally. We still have work to do to determine the leadership for the Bloomfield campus. More on that in the weeks ahead. An overall incredible infusion of talent, not the least of which I’m pleased to point out that our deans and our provost dean have added 32 new faculty members joining us this Fall and 33 that will start in the Spring. That is a lot of work to bring on that talent. So, thank you, everybody, for making that happen. 

Let’s jump into a quick state of affairs and talk about enrollment. I’m not going to linger on the budget situation, except to say our budget from the state point of view is stable. Some increases related to the state’s investment in the outcomes-based allocation. That’s very good for us, but it’s a reflection of our performance, that we are educating underserved populations and doing it at a high rate of success. And the state’s investment in success is an investment in Montclair State University. I’ll take that seven days a week. 

I’m also pleased that Bloomfield College of Montclair State University earned recognition in this budget as a part of the constellation of public institutions in New Jersey. Still work to do, but great progress. It remains the case that we live and die, as contemporary public institutions do, by our enrollment. And our enrollment is particularly strong. We, just to give you the sort of bottom line, Montclair State University enrolls today over 24,000 students. So, if your image is of little old Montclair…yeah, that’s not what we are anymore. We saw a 10% increase in the number of freshman applications and a 6% increase in deposits. We are enrolling at present over 4500 new first-year undergraduate students and over 1300 new transfer students. 

That’s an impressive achievement. I see Wendy is smiling. Wendy, our Vice President for Enrollment, appreciation to Wendy and the Enrollment team, and also our Communications team, who are getting the word out about what we are doing at this university. And I feel like I sometimes need to say it to ourselves, right? What we are doing here is rather special. 

People need to embrace the reality of the new Montclair and what we represent. I’m particularly proud that 42% of our incoming freshman identify as first-generation college students. That’s a remarkable achievement. I believe we are probably as a student population overall 50% Pell, if not overall, close to it. Our first-year class last year was 58% Pell. So, I’m pretty confident that we are a majority Pell-eligible institution. Wrap your brain around the significance of that, of what we are trying to pull off here, and I’ll come back to that in many ways. The question, though, for universities, I believe, the central question in terms of that ocean metaphor not to beat it to death is – who are the learners of the future? Right? We know who our current students are. We can see the changes that are happening in the composition of our student body, as we are increasingly the university of choice for, as I say, first-generation, underserved populations. But as universities adapt, we have to be thinking about what that’s going to look like in the years ahead. 

Two ways at least that we are thinking about the future. One is that the learners of the future are not American. That is to say, as the population of people going to college in this country is going down, the population of people who want a university education around the world is exploding. This past spring actually, Wendy and I were in india. You might be aware that Governor Murphy has launched a New Jersey-India Commission. There’s an increasing recognition that India is the dynamic growing country of the future, and there’s a huge opportunity for Montclair to be a part of that nation’s future. Our international enrollment has tripled in just a few years. I expect it will go up further in a geometric fashion, not exclusively relying on students from India, but by reaching out to parts of the world that are underserved where people are yearning for opportunity. So, that includes southeast Asia. It includes sub-saharan Africa. It includes Latin America. 

There’s an opportunity for Montclair to be part of the solution in those places to do the same thing that we’re doing here, partially by attracting students to come to our campus in New Jersey, and the incredible environment that we offer as a cosmopolitan state that is diverse and offers resources for people from all over the world, but also by forming partnerships in those countries to try and create accessible, affordable education for the millions of people, billions, who can’t afford to come to the United States. And lastly by creating a better learning environment for our students, so that they can integrate international experiences into their undergraduate and graduate education and they have the opportunity to interact with students from around the globe on our own campus. This is not just about enrolling students from other countries because it’s good for the bottom line. I want to be clear on that. It is. It is, but it’s about building a richer, better university and meeting our mandate to make high-quality education accessible to people who are hungry for opportunity. Nowhere in that sentence does it say “only people in New Jersey.” Right? Our mission is to make education accessible and to empower people through education to be difference-makers in their own lives and in the communities. 

How else will learners of the future look different than the learners of today? They will not match the traditional model of how we think of a student going to college. They graduate from high school and enroll for four years. That’s not  first of all, that’s not accurate today, but it’s certainly not going to be accurate in the future. There are tens of millions of people who have some college credit, but have not managed to finish their degree. We want to serve them. There are people who want to return to college at a different pace, at a different modality. We have to adapt ourselves. 

In January, we will launch a new academic calendar. You might say, well, “What does a new academic calendar have to do with nontraditional learners?” We want to create a university that offers year-round access. The model that we will move to, where we have a full term in the summer in addition to the traditional fall term and spring term creates a 12-month-a-year university, including the shorter winter term, similar to what we have already, which allows students to complete the degree on the time that they want to, not the time that we’re used to operating and that people did 100 years ago. Who cares what people did 100 years ago? I don’t think our students need the summer to harvest crops or go to the Hamptons. They want to get done. They don’t want to be borrowing for housing in the summer months when they’re not earning credits. They want to be able to complete their degree and move on to careers at their own pace and so we need to adapt to that. Other institutions are doing so. Believe it or not, the state of New Jersey is leading on this with Summer Tag, allowing students to get financial aid in the summer months. So, we adapt to that. Does that require us to change? Yes, it does. Is it going to make us have to do some things differently than we’ve always done? Yes, it will. That’s the point. Right? You can’t change and satisfy the needs, you can’t navigate the future without adapting yourself to some extent. 

The launch of Montclair Unbound will be greatly accelerated as we work with Collegis education to help us offer multimodality degrees, again meeting learners where they want to be met. Having them come to campus once in a while, but being able to engage online in a synchronous and asynchronous fashion. That’s what students want. That’s how they mesh their education with their lives. We need to be leaders in offering education in that way, and I think that’s going to be a huge plus for this university, and we’ll be recognized not only for what we offer, but for the mindset that we demonstrate in so doing. It also means looking at the organization of the university to ask, are we structured internally to maximize our accessibility and the optimization of our programs? So, a few years ago, we decided to separate the College of Education and Engage Learning and College of Community Health to underscore our commitment in those areas. 

The provost announced that Keith Strudler, the Director of School Communications will be Dean of the forthcoming College of something – Communications and Media. We don’t know what the name is exactly, but that will forge its own identity as one of the most dynamic and impactful units of the university and will allow us to underscore the College of the Arts’ incredible national reputation. Again, I don’t sometimes know if people understand the way in which we’re regarded. Our arts programs are viewed as world class. And I meet students in Music, Theater, and Dance who come from around the country to be part of this university because of those programs. We’re starting to earn the same reputation in Media and Communications and by giving each of these units a strong, independent identity, we will be able to underscore that, attract more and increase the value of those degrees for our students and the opportunities for our faculty and staff to do great work. That reorganization will be taking place over the course of the year. I’m very excited about the launch of that. 

These things are not easy. 

You may remember that we have this project around this thing called Bloomfield College. So, I’m very excited about the progress. Now, last Fall we began our inaugural first semester of Bloomfield College of Montclair

State University. On June 28th– before the clock struck midnight, we successfully completed with the U.S. Department of Education the Change in Ownership and Change in Affiliation. Where did Althea go? I saw her a second ago. Althea Broomfield. Not Bloomfield, she probably thinks her name is Bloomfield. Althea Broomfield-Michel. Our university counsel did heroic work to get us across that finish line. So, congratulations to Althea and many others, and many others. And I don’t know is Joanne Cote-Bonanno here? Joanne led the charge to have Middle States recognize this organizational change. It sounds funny to say so, but now the real work begins. Kidding, of course. That was a lot of work. But what Theodora is here to lead, and we’re excited by, is to define what Bloomfield College offers as a distinctive experience to undergraduates, to enhance the opportunities of those students to realize their full potential. 

The organizational work of getting Bloomfield integrated into Montclair was gargantuan, more than it should have been to be honest. If you think about the ways in which we were forced to jump through hoops and do goofy things, it is tragic in a way because other institutions closed because they couldn’t navigate that obstacle course. And opportunities for students will disappear because they couldn’t navigate the obstacle course that accreditation and federal regulations and blah, blah, blah–

People will look at what we’re doing here and understand how is it possible to do this? Because these kinds of combinations where you can critical distinctive pathways within single comprehensive institutions, pathways that are purpose-built to help students find success and leverage their strengths, their identities, their backgrounds as tools to help them get across the finish line, this will be the key for higher education thriving in the years ahead, because if we can’t figure out how to make this work, you’ll end up with a totally homogenized landscape of higher education, which will work for many people, which is fine for those people, but not so good for those who don’t thrive in that environment. 

And so, that’s what we are trying to do to give meaning to the fact that Bloomfield College is New Jersey’s only Predominantly Black Institution, only one, that is a four-year institution – we have no HBCUs in New Jersey – that we can take that status and make it mean something other than a statement about the demographics of the college. But actually use that status, breathe life into it, and make it a resource that helps students find success. I urge, if you haven’t been to the Bloomfield campus. By the way, do we have any Bloomfield folks here? All right! Welcome. If you haven’t been to the Bloomfield campus, go check it out. I was there on Friday to welcome the new students. It is a distinctive environment where students find a place where they can be themselves and navigate that transition to college and professional success more comfortably than maybe some do at Montclair. It’s not better. It’s not worse. It’s different. We thrive in different circumstances. And so, I’m very excited about that and very excited about how the Bloomfield campus will grow. So, terrific work there. 

The discussion of the PBI status is a nice segue to something that’s very relevant here as we try to give fuller force to our status as a Hispanic-serving Institution. And many of you know the discourse nationally is how do you go from being a Hispanic-enrolling institution, again, a demographic observation, to a Hispanic-serving Institution where you take that feature, the identity of your students and turn it into a strength, an asset that can be leveraged. Our leader in this space, Katia Paz Goldfarb, Where is Katia? Katia. Katia has done a fantastic job. 

We host the Hispanic Student College Institute. We did so again, bigger than ever. It underscores what the opportunity is to do great work here, and we will continue as we pursue what’s called the Seal of Excelencia, which is in recognition of what we do. But what frustrates me when people speak of HSIs is it’s immediately a deficit mindset, that you have to provide things to help them succeed. Okay. That’s part of it. If you think that there’s a population that is not as prepared for college, then absolutely you must be attentive to it, but why not also see the possibilities that come from that background as a strength? So, I’m particularly excited that Provost Junius Gonzales and others are working on an oral history project building Spanish Language as an Asset, encouraging programs that link together Spanish-speaking and Spanish cultural knowledge to our academic programs, to treat our students as possessing an advantage, rather than a deficit. That’s what it means to me to be an HSI. It doesn’t mean running away from the deficits, and I’m super proud of the MEGA initiative that Danny Jean and others lead that focus on some of the disparities and outcomes, but you can’t only view things in this glass half empty way. 

It’s particularly impressive that we’re doing this while we continue to accelerate as a research institution. I’ll get to that in a moment, and do great things. It shouldn’t be that those two things don’t go together. Right? That shouldn’t be surprising. It’s not. That’s our strength. But it must go together because you increase social mobility, you increase opportunity by making college more accessible, at a high level of quality. The reality is many people are happy to say that higher education should be accessible to everybody, but they’re not willing to say that everybody should have access to the same opportunities in higher education. And again, to underscore what we’re doing, no doubt you’ve seen headlines about some of the early data on how affirmative action is affecting elite universities. Pretty stunning numbers. Declines of, you know, 5, 6, 7, some state 10% of minority representation at elite institutions. You know how many people we’re talking about? Ten, 20 people at these institutions. I’m not saying that’s not significant. Remember how many people attend Montclair? 24,000.

So, yes, we should pay attention to the consequences of these policy changes at elite institutions, but in terms of altering the fabric of society, what we do matters infinitely more than what happens at MIT or whatever. I’m not saying it doesn’t matter. I’m saying what we do is going to have more profound implications, and our ability to build a high-quality research institution where every student has access to any opportunity imaginable is going to be the key to solving equity gaps in society writ large. That’s just a fact. Okay. So, that makes what has been done, not just little feathers and bells and whistles. It’s fundamental to achieving this mission. Right? Of saying, inclusion and quality go hand-in-hand and must. 

In the last fiscal year, the university set a new record-high for Research and Development expenditures, almost $45 million dollars. That includes our own investments alongside externally sponsored research, which also was at an all-time high in terms of external funding. This, as I think most people know, is measured by the National Science Foundation, and is a major component of the Carnegie classification system – I’ll come back to that in a moment – which designates Montclair as an R2 research institution. It so happens that some alterations in that formula put us on a path in all probability to be an R1 institution in general. People often ask that question. It’s now possible. It gets into the weeds a little bit. 

I like to focus on the substance of what’s getting done, rather than the numbers. Even though, I’ll cite them especially when they’re good. I’ll always do that like everybody else, but the substance is what matters and that’s why those examples from the slides before. Let me just talk about a couple of other things. For example, a $3 million dollar grant from the national science foundation – this links together with where I just was – that focuses on HSI institutional transformation, the effectiveness – it’s got lots of syllables because we can’t help ourselves, the effectiveness of psychoeducational counseling in STEM internship research experiences. Interestingly, this project came out of the terrific Green Teams initiative which many people are familiar with in the PSE&G institute led by Amy Tuininga. I don’t know if Amy’s here. But I know Lora’s here. Where’s Lora? There’s Lora! Good story, though, because the initial application was not supported. They said come back to us with some refinements and we’ll look at it again. This happened 19 times! But the 19th time was the charm. 

And so, the point there is that, first of all, keep at it, but second of all, we can link together our research and our mission to do great things. The project aims to enhance mental health and inclusion in undergraduate research and internships, increasing participation for underrepresented students by providing social and emotional support. And a terrific team effort to bring that in. 

Speaking of Carnegie classification, most people know the research classification. A few years ago, the classification around community engagement was added. Montclair is a community-engaged university, one of a relatively small number of schools that are designated for their achievement in working with the community and creating partnerships. This year, a new designation was created to recognize schools that are committed to cultivating Leadership for Public Purpose. You’ve heard me talk about the foundation we have in public service, and my belief that we need to be leaders in this space. So, I was very excited about this and particularly gratified that we were one of the first 25 schools in the country to earn the designation as a Leadership for Public Purpose university. 

That’s in recognition of a variety of programs across the university. But let me just quickly underscore something, again, to reinforce who we are and how distinctive our profile is. Of those 25 universities that are Leadership for Public Purpose universities, ten are also community-engaged universities. They embrace the idea that we are training our students to be effective in public service, and that we see the university itself as having an obligation to be in the community and serving the public interest. There’s ten of us that are in that category. Of those ten, six are research universities. Right? R1, R2, whatever. They are committed to creating knowledge at the highest level, preparing doctoral students to be researchers. Of those six, two or maybe three are majority-minority institutions. So, just understand the rarity of an institution like ours, that takes the assignment to prepare students for public service to make a difference in the world, to embrace our own obligation, to be an inclusive university that serves the population of the state that we exist to advance, and to not compromise one iota on the quality of the academic work that we do every day. That puts us in a category of two or three institutions in the country. I mean, I think that’s something to be enormously proud of, and I just wish more people knew it. I’m working on it, nationally. But I wish more people knew about it here. I mean, we joked about this in my previous speeches- “I had no idea.” And I said that about people who come to campus, it includes people who work here. So, spread the word. 

A couple of cool things that were in the highlights. I want to mention one. Dr. Jennifer Urban is here. A great project that she developed called Planting the Seeds of Character Growth. I think it typifies what we’re trying to do here. So, the purpose of this project is to develop and evaluate an interdisciplinary character education course that infuses virtual reality experiences into that curriculum and meets the character-focused learning objectives set forth in the new SEEDs general education curriculum. Key elements of the project include a four module character education course. 

Modules will focus on character and the exploration of character virtues. As dr. Urban puts it, “In these particular divisive times, character education, ethical reasoning and a focus on community engagement have never been more important.” I couldn’t agree much more with that statement. 

This is a terrific project. It illustrates the creativity of our faculty, and also the embrace of technology, and the opportunities to alter our pedagogy to be responsive to where our students are at, and I’m so thrilled by this work and the work that it represents. I also want to use this as a moment to celebrate the work between the provost, his team, and AFT to develop a new track for teaching faculty. This is a monumental achievement that is not possible without cooperation, and I’m excited to give the status and career structure to our teaching faculty that they deserve. They’re a critical part of the university. And thank you, thank you for that. And thank you also to the thousands of adjunct faculty, without whom we couldn’t have a university, and who are integral to the learning experiences of our students. I often say, you know, our students don’t know. They just know it’s professor whatever. Like, they don’t know. And so I can tell you that this university is stronger because of the dedicated adjunct faculty that we have. Okay. let me change gears for a second. 

This is usually where we stop. Right? Like, oh, we have students. We have faculty. That’s a university. Turns out there are a lot of other people that work here that make this thing go, and the university operations is a complex ballet. That’s a new metaphor. It’s an aircraft carrier, with all apologies to Shawn. He’s a submarine guy. But there’s so much going on every day, and when people come to this campus, they see the physical infrastructure. They see what’s going on and they’re impressed before they even know what goes on inside the buildings. And I just want to recognize that, and talk a little bit about some of the things that are going on. 

Obviously, when you add thousands of students, you have to figure out how to scale to meet the demand. It’s not just about adding faculty. It’s not just about adding staff. It’s about figuring out how to make the university work in a new way. And yes, I know parking is still difficult. Moving right along. So just a quick note on facilities. I do think it’s important to recognize the physical environment of our campus is a critical ingredient to students’ success. I hear it from every student who’s moving in that when they came to campus, they felt like this was their place. And they just were blown away by how nice it looks. Everybody’s a little surprised at how beautiful it is. It is not easy to make this all work. But I want to highlight something that I think is a really exciting development: that the university, through the hard work of our Facilities team, was recently registered as an apprentice site by the U.S. Department of Labor and will have our first cohort of apprentices starting this fall in University Facilities. 

That’s a real tribute to vice president Shawn Connolly and the team that already is doing ESL and other things. It underscores that we are a community of learning, and that includes our staff and includes every person who works here should have the opportunity to learn. Other ways around the campus, all kinds of things are happening. Seventeen percent more increase at Red Hawk Central. We’ll be adding a Red Hawk Central at our Bloomfield campus. Lots of stuff happening in collaboration with Gourmet Dining. Starbucks is open! We’ve been talking about someday, there will be a Starbucks. So long that it feels weird to say it’s open, but it’s there. And in a month, the pub will be open, what a month? Couple weeks, Dawn says. “1908,” but we’ll all call it the Rathskeller, because – I’m old school that way. But that’s exciting. That’s a great thing. 

Workday, you might have heard this. It’s not an epithet. It’s a product. You say, why Workday Student? We’re going to…And by the way, it’s not a $27 million app. No, it’s not that. The whole point here is to reinvent our student information systems to make us more effective in advancing positive outcomes for our students, to make it easier for our staff to do the hard work of registering students, enrolling them, getting the curriculum to match up, making it more seamless when we interact across units. It is not easy. Nobody ever said it was going to be easy. The goal is not simply to implement a new software package, but to change the way we do things, and ultimately put us in a position to look comprehensively at the progress of each one of our students and intervene as early as possible when there are even hints that he or she is getting off track. That’s ultimately what this is about. Eliminating friction and creating greater capacity to help students. 

That’s also what the Transfer Evaluation System which we’ve implemented is about – to make it easier to bring students in from other universities, give them credit for the courses they have without it being a manual run-around process. Every bit of change, whether it’s technology in facilities or anywhere else, is about amplifying our impact, reducing the barriers to success, and so, sometimes I must say, the one that– it’s written here and I just– that we are implementing optical character recognition to read transcripts. I mean, like, we also have slate. Anyway, we get paper transcripts and we would, like, enter them by hand. So, now we’ve moved up to optical character recognition. Okay? It’s happening. It’s something. 

At the other end of the spectrum, another amazing faculty achievement, Dr. Weitan Wang ran in-person workshops for Advanced AI for Teaching in partnership for the Montclair Robotics and AI Seminar series. Dr. Pavlo Lushyn has been engaging students in exploration and critical examination of AI in his courses. There’s many other places in the College for Education and Engaged Learning where they’re doing an AI study hall. Here’s an interesting observation. It’s interesting to think about AI not just as a way that people can cheat, or as a way to create efficiency, but it’s a way to level the playing field here. If you haven’t used AI Tutors who work with you on an assignment and ask you questions, you haven’t realized what the power of this thing is. It’s much more than a way to up your plagiarism game. Right? It’s a way to have customized learning. We have to learn how to use it, and we have to learn how to convince students that there’s an opportunity here, but I’m excited that our faculty are seeing it this way and embracing that opportunity. Okay. I’m actually on a decent pace. 

So, let’s move along. 

Accreditation. People say, my god, could there be something more hellacious than talking about accreditation? And the answer is probably no, but it does create an opportunity. The accreditation process, the heart of that, is a self-study exercise, and we’re well on our way. We have a leadership team. We have a steering committee, people have joined eight working groups, over 100 staff and administration. I’m deeply grateful for them doing the work. It is hard work. It does require a serious examination of self and ask where we can be doing things better and how we are meeting our mission. It also requires that we engage in a strategic planning exercise and I’m excited that we are one of five AASCU institutions, thanks to Junius’ leadership in getting us to this point, that have been chosen by the Gates Foundation to get support to develop our strategic plan. We had our first meeting under the aegis of this initiative on August 12th, and we will be developing a strategic framework through this Gates partnership and as part of our Middle States accreditation self-study process in the months ahead. A terrific opportunity to take a step back and ask those questions about whether we are prepared for the future that is emerging.

Critical and at the center of that will be student success for all the reasons I’ve already said. That involves the partnership of two units, obviously Academic Affairs and Student Development and Campus Life. I’ll come back to that in a second. But the student success action plan that was created by Academic Affairs is already being implemented to deal with recommendations on alignment of services, student experience, and so on. It goes well with several other initiatives that I don’t have time to get into. I mentioned the SEEDs curriculum. I’m very excited that after Junius, how many years, 19 years? Nineteen years of talking, we have updated our general education curriculum. Obviously, work to be done in its implementation. We also have a newly revamped Honors EDGE program that revamps the Honors program, now under the leadership of Professor Jeff Strickland, and it puts creativity at the center of the Honors experience. 

Something that makes a great deal of sense in an age of AI and machine learning. The one thing we can do that the robots can’t do is come up with new thoughts, to be imaginative, and so training students to harness their own creativity capacity is the centerpiece of what university education needs to look like in the years ahead. So, very excited about that. And many other things that, again, I’m going to have to go through quickly, but I’m trying to deal with questions and so, one of the questions was about international experiences. In my perfect world, I could wave a wand and every student at Montclair would have an international experience. 

And a lot of our students went on those this summer. Students in Greece, you can tell that’s Greece. A faculty-led dance trip in India, many other great experiences all over the globe. I would love to see more. It also requires creativity because our students can’t necessarily spend a semester abroad, because they have jobs and they have families that they’re taking care of, they have different needs. So, we have to create experiences that work for our students in lots of different shapes and sizes, and I’m excited about that along with other experiential opportunities that shouldn’t be restricted to only those students who can take an unpaid internship, or forced to leave their jobs where they’ve acquired seniority and so on. We need to figure out how to do those things for our students. 

If you were here over the summer months, you saw that we had a lot of activity, many new pre-college programs that are enrolling hundreds of students, and an expansion of our summer bridge programs that engage local partners like East Side High School in Paterson and Passaic High School. I’m very excited to see those things grow to bring more people to campus. I talked about the critical role that Student Development and Campus Life has in student success. There’s nobody more dedicated to our student well-being than our VP for Student Development and Campus Life, Dawn Meza-Soufleris. Dawn? And our Dean of Students, Margaree Coleman-Carter. I don’t know if Margaree, is Margaree here somewhere? 

They recognize that probably the single greatest challenge we have right now and we saw it even in the first few days on campus is student mental health and well-being. This is not a Montclair problem. This is a national problem. Now, there’s positives. The biggest positive that I see is that students are not only willing to recognize the need for help. They’re eager to. They sign up for “Uwill” which is an online session. They go to get appointments with CAPS. They are recognizing their own frailty, which is amazing, inconceivable from when I was in college. And they’re also coming up with their own ideas to meet the need. 

So, I’m excited that Artem Beliavski is here. Artem? Artem is a student member of our Board of Trustees, but also the leader of the zen den idea to create these spaces on campus where students can go and find a place of quiet and reflection and I’m very excited to see what Artem’s work will yield in terms of those zen dens. There’s a Hope and Healing interdivisional task force that’s working to create multifaceted initiatives again to focus on positive mental health and mindset for our campus. And this doesn’t only come from the places you’d expect. I’m excited that our university police department is engaged in this effort. They created a victim services position to align with the model of continual care for students and community members impacted by negative activity on campus. This work doesn’t stop. Just want to be clear. It never stops. We are a large community with thousands of people who are experiencing all the stuff that’s going on in the world, and it is constant. And so I appreciate particularly the training that was created for mental health first aid providers and we had over 400 people on campus here and Bloomfield who signed up for mental health first aid training coordinated by CAPS. 

Major appreciation for that. A lot of times people say, well, all these new positions, universities are “bloated with staff.” You hear that a lot. “They’re bloated with staff.” By the way, not this university. We’re the most efficient university in New Jersey. Again, just saying. I don’t know if you knew that. Most efficient university in New Jersey in terms of how much money we spend to get a student a degree. It’s a very impressive achievement. Sometimes I’d like to spend a little more money to be honest. We’re working on that, but it’s a tribute to what people are doing. It all starts with the student, and figuring out these obstacles. Mental health is one of them. So, yes, we’ve added staff to think about mental health, to think about well-being. Yes, we’ve added that because that’s the reason why students are not completing a degree. That’s not bloat. That’s recognizing the needs of your students and being responsive. Right? So, just when you hear that bloat point, there’s a little bit of an answer. Okay. I wanted to come back to something again, questions about the organizational culture survey we did.

The biggest outcome was the creation of the Office of Inclusive Excellence and Institutional Equity, IE squared is how you say that. Isn’t it cute? I can’t help it. Is Ashante here? Ashante Conner is leading that effort. The mission of IE2 is to advance Montclair’s inclusive excellence initiatives and promote cultural intelligence and a welcoming environment for all by providing an integrated shared equity approach to structure, policy initiatives, and programming. I’m very excited about this next step. We want to get away from a regulatory mindset and embrace an aspirational mindset. It doesn’t mean that we’re not going to do the regulatory stuff. We still have to make sure that when people feel they’ve been harmed or treated unfairly, that they have a place to go, and we’re making that more robust than ever, but we have to get beyond that and get back to where I started. This aspiration of being a place where everybody feels home and valued and welcomed.

And so, that’s what IE2 is about. Please watch your email. There will be opportunities to participate in these activities. And I really do look forward to seeing how we can continue to drive the campus culture in the right direction. So, I am a strong believer that our obligation does not end at our own campus walls, and that we have to be deeply embedded in the community. That’s what that community engagement classification is about, and we’ve done a great deal of work along these lines. 

I think people are familiar with the efforts that we’ve made in Paterson, which are getting recognized and, in particular, the partnership at Hinchliffe Stadium, which is exciting. I was delighted that this fall or whatever, in the last few months and continuing this fall, we will have a community advisory board that becomes an integral part of our operations. The point of the community advisory board is to have a mechanism by which we can hear from the community. So, the challenge for universities when they are in the community is that typically we go – we, “higher education” – go in the community, and we say, “this is what we’re going to do, and you’re going to be grateful… and we’re going to take pictures of kids looking service-minded.” Yeah, it turns out that that actually can be kind of annoying. And if you really are going to do community engagement right, you have to be a partner and ask questions and listen and that’s what the work in Paterson has been about, and that’s the approach to community engagement that we’re trying to build at Montclair State University.

So we’ve created a community advisory board to listen, and we’ve created a community action nexus to serve as an interface between the university and the community, and that is going to be a powerful vehicle. I would again encourage all of those faculty who are doing this work to participate in the Collaboratory platform, because that’s how we capture all the work that you’re doing and how we know what’s going on and how we connect the dots. I’ll highlight in particular I’m excited that on October 26th we will host William Paterson university in a football game at Hinchliffe Stadium, which I think is cool. I’ve decided it’s called the Hinchliffe bowl. I think it’s a neat way for us to be present in the community, and if you haven’t been to the stadium, it’s a good time to come and not just go to a football game, but check out the Charles Muth museum of Hinchliffe Stadium, which is part of Montclair State University, and is doing fantastic work engaging the community. 

Okay. so, with the last few minutes, I just want to to close by recognizing where we’re at as a country. This is going to be a tumultuous fall. There’s an election. You might know that. There’s an election. There almost certainly will be more protests, just as we saw last year on campuses across the country. And I think what a lot of universities have done and I’ve written a couple pieces on this, so you may have read this already. I think what a lot of universities are doing is putting their hands over their heads and saying, please, please, please, not us, make it go away, I don’t want to be on TV. Yeah, that’s sort of uninspiring. First of all, you don’t wait for something to happen. You’ve got to be proactive, and so, we’ve tried to be proactive in talking to students and talking to community organizations to try and have lines of dialogue and I think that’s worked well for us. 

We’ll continue to do that. But I think that what we ought to do is embrace our obligation as a learning institution, and try and teach people how to be constructively engaged in a democracy, and so we are part of several initiatives. In fact, in August, we hosted the Citizens and Scholars Faculty Institute which was created by the Institute for Citizens and Scholars with the aim of equipping faculty with skills to foster dialogue in the classroom. We have people who participated in that. I want to recognize some of our own faculty who participated. Jason Williams, Brad van Eeden-Moorefield, Jessica Brater, Tanesha Thomas, Emily Isaacs all were part of this effort. 

Look, this is a process. You don’t build democratic culture and democratic skills overnight, but we have to embrace that if we are truly committed to being a public-serving institution in a democracy then we have to do that. That’s why I also was one of 60 university presidents who signed on to the College Presidents Consortium and committed to creating a campus-wide immersion initiative, which involves the development of an action plan to cultivate democratic engagement, and we’re in the first cohort developing this action plan. We already do a lot of this stuff. We have voting initiatives. We have various civic engagement initiatives, but by creating this plan, we’ll be able to put it together and have a method by which we expect our students to learn to have the ability to understand different points of view, engage in constructive discourse, and create productive solutions, not just conflict. So, I’m very excited by this. Yeah. And let me stop by saying – because there were a couple of questions about this. They said, well, what’s the approach to expressive activity on campus? Because I know that’s something that people care about. And, look, college is a transition. 

It’s the first time for a lot of people to be exposed to people with different backgrounds, sexual orientations, religions. It’s a time when people are figuring stuff out. It’s a time when people are learning to express themselves, and hopefully also to reflect. We have a policy that guides this. You can check it out. It’s an expressive activity policy. So, I’d urge you to look at it. But let me underscore a couple of things, because I think that this gets lost sometimes. Yes, I believe in free speech. We are an institution committed to free speech, both in principle and because we are subject to the first amendment as a state institution. Free speech does not mean, never has meant, that I have the right to say anything I want to anyone at any time in any place. That’s not my opinion. That’s what the constitution has been interpreted to mean. So, we have restrictions on time, place and manner. Right? That is part of how we work. And that is partially because we have legal obligations to create an environment where people can study, where people are not adversely impacted by the activities of others. 

But that’s what free speech means. It also is true that we have to learn and accept the fact that we will hear and see words that we do not like, that make us uncomfortable, maybe even angry. That is also part of our environment. And there are challenges putting all these things together. As part of our commitment to civic discourse and engagement, yes, we’re going to be training, but we will work to protect the rights of all members of our community so that every student can enjoy a sense of belonging, as well as a seamless learning experience devoid of interruptions. That means that there’s going to be conflicts. Right? That we’re going to be balancing, and we’re going to continue to make our best effort to balance those things in the days, weeks and months ahead. That’s what it means to be a democracy embracing institution in 2024. I hope we can lead. I’m sure there will be bumps along the way, but I appreciate the commitment that I’ve seen in my time here to those core values. 

It has never been more important, and it is integral to our mission to embrace them. So  –  thank you. Look, if you knew how much good stuff is on the cutting room floor –  you would be amazed. There’s so much good going on at this institution, so many people working hard to do good things, and so many fantastic, brilliant, creative students that inspire with the things that they do thanks to the support of this institution. If you don’t feel good being part of this institution and what it means, you need to go and see the counseling and psychological services because this is a great thing to be proud of. Thank you, everybody. We now have a barbecue – right? Where is it? In lot 17. So, head up there, get something to eat, enjoy the beautiful day. Have a great semester.