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Newsletter

The President’s Perspective

March 2009

Dear Colleagues:

This is a busy and exciting time of the academic year. While I know we all are working at a frantic pace to stay on top of all the year-end activities, there are some important issues rolling along in the background about which I want you to have complete information.

Budget

This is the No. 1 topic for all of us—at home around the dinner table and at work when we chat with friends and colleagues. In administrative offices, it is the core of literally every set of broad discussions. As you know, there are two primary sources of revenue for our operating budget: our state allocations that make up about one-third of the budget, and tuition that is now about two-thirds of the budget.

Earlier this year, Gov. Granholm proposed a state budget for 2009-10. In it, she called for a 3.2 percent cut to the allocations for all state universities as well as a tuition freeze for the coming year. For WMU, a cut of 3.2 percent in state appropriation is equal to a reduction of greater than $3.6 million. As I reported at the last Board of Trustees meeting, a reduction of this level, combined with other mandatory budget adjustments, would place the University in an overall permanent budget deficit of greater than $14 million.

In normal years, we would adjust for the deficit by raising tuition a modest amount while continuing to practice extreme thrift in our expenditures. However, this is not a normal year for the University, our country or our state. Gov. Granholm’s proposal that tuition be frozen was made with the caveat that federal stimulus dollars would be directed toward universities to help them stave off draconian cuts. The proposal would help in the short run, but would have long-term consequences as we consider what will happen two years from now, when the stimulus expires and the funds disappear, leaving our base funding and operating budgets to literally fall off a cliff.

We are working hard to avoid such a dire situation. I have testified in front of the Legislature and held meetings with elected officials and the state budget officer. My message to all is consistent. The past five years of budget cuts have left us very lean and with little flexibility to avoid substantive reductions to our academic programs—something that simply is not acceptable as we prepare our students for a 21st-century knowledge economy. We must continue to do all that we can to sustain opportunities for current students and those soon to join us.

As we close this fiscal year and prepare for 2009-10, we will undoubtedly need to tighten our belts again, and it is likely that we must take a budget reduction of about $5 million for fiscal year 2009-10. I will be working with the provost and others on campus to ensure that budget reduction decisions are made carefully and in a way that allows us to continue to maximize the strengths of the University. At the same time, I want you to know that time, energy and a lot of creative thinking is taking place about these issues. With your help, we will find additional ways to operate more efficiently so that we can fulfill our pledge to our students and ourselves that we will preserve the quality and value of a Western Michigan University degree and our well-deserved status as a comprehensive research university.

In the meantime, I encourage you all to do everything you can to reach out to our students, to keep them and their needs first and foremost in your departmental planning and spending and, of course, to make a special effort to encourage them to stay on their path toward degree completion. While overall unemployment rates are approaching new highs, for those with a baccalaureate degree, the percentage without jobs is reported at a modest 3.4 percent.

The state budget discussions will continue into the early summer before we know more. On campus, we will move forward to make preliminary decisions so that we can transition smoothly into the fall semester. I want you to be assured that we are working very hard on behalf of you and our students. I have communicated to the Faculty Senate my promise to keep the University informed on budget discussions as we move through the next few months. While the immediate problems are daunting, I remain personally convinced that our resiliency is such that we will find a way to overcome the short-term challenges.

Enrollment

Many of you have asked what you can do to help. We continue to see a healthy number of applications and active admits for this coming fall—both for new freshmen and transfer students. That is the result of hard work by our admissions staff and the careful attention of each one of you. It is critical that we not let up on our attention to enrollment, and we work diligently in our community effort to improve student retention. Each percentage point increase in enrollment means approximately $1.3 million in revenue. We need your ongoing help to attract new students, to hold onto the admitted students, and to retain our current students.

Contact with alumni, donors and prospective students

Over the past two months, I have called on friends and alumni in California and Florida, and I have been attending receptions around the state and in Chicago for prospective students. The response to the WMU message in all quarters has been a positive one. I sometimes wish that more of you had the opportunity to hear how much alumni value what we do here. You also would be heartened by the level of enthusiasm prospective students and their families exhibit. I cannot stress enough how important both audiences are for our continued success.

Student achievement

• We chose March 24 to honor seniors from every department on campus during the annual Presidential Scholars Convocation. The honorees include a young woman who intends to spend time in the Peace Corps before going to work in the nonprofit sector, an undergraduate researcher whose work in nuclear physics has been presented at Argonne National Laboratory meetings, and a mother and U.S. Army veteran whose degree will allow her to teach children with special needs.

  These awards represent the highest honor a WMU undergraduate can receive, so I urge you to reach out to your department's scholar. Send a note of congratulations or stop them after class to highlight their achievement. You'll find a complete list of those 46 students listed alphabetically by department in WMU News.

• We’ve just learned that sophomore trombonist Hana Beloglavec has won the U.S. Army Band’s National Trombone Solo Competition in Washington, D.C. Last Friday she performed in the finals in front of a six-judge panel and several hundred participants. Her faculty mentor, Dr. Steve Wolfinbarger, tells me that the audience reaction to her performance was incredible, and just before the winner was announced, a trombone professor from another highly-regarded music school leaned over and said to him, “Someday she’s going to be legendary!”

Faculty achievement

Two important faculty initiatives have been prominent this month. Both represent wonderful illustrations of the values this University holds dear.

• This weekend, March 28-29, the culmination of three years of work funded by the National Science Foundation will take center stage when the “Human Enhancement and Nanotechnology Conference” takes place in the Fetzer Center. The event is organized by Dr. Fritz Allhoff of WMU’s philosophy department and his colleagues at California Polytechnic State University, Dartmouth College and the University of Delaware. The focus is on the ethical ramifications of enhancing human performance for sports, academics, military goals and even cosmetics. The organizers have generously opened the conference up to free attendance for anyone who wishes to listen to the presentations of leading scholars in this field.

• Last weekend, the work of Dr. Charles Ide and his colleagues in our Environmental Institute was the focus of a fundraising event in Nashville, Tenn. The money raised will allow Dr. Ide and his WMU team to work with Vanderbilt University Medical Center researchers to identify the cause and treatment for an “orphan disease” known as MSA—multiple system atrophy. This degenerative neurological disease affects 100,000 people, and the gene expression work Dr. Ide and his team do may pay benefits to those who suffer from similar diseases. This is a wonderful example of the translational research for which WMU is known.

Commencement

We’re getting very close to our April commencement, which is our largest ceremony each year. Commencement is the celebration of all that we represent, and it offers a number of opportunities for staff and faculty to congratulate so many students who have worked so hard to find success. We hear from families how meaningful and impressive such moments are, and I urge you to be a part of the ceremony for your college.

As always, thank you for all that you do every day to help our students be successful and allow us to continue building our statewide and national reputation. I appreciate your continuing support, counsel and friendship. This is a very special university, and I am proud to work along side each one of you. If we continue to pull together, if we care for and support one another, and if we always make our students and their welfare our priority, Western Michigan University will weather the economic storms ahead, and we will be stronger for the effort. Together, we will do it.

Best regards,

John M. Dunn
President