INAUGURAL RESPONSE President Deborah Stanley Oswego State University September 9, 1998

Distinguished Trustees Gardener, Traylor, Chancellor Ryan, Mrs. Dorsey, dedicated Members of our College Council, I am honored that you are present here today on behalf of the State University of New York. Your individual and collec tive leadership is immeasurably important to the future of New York State and to all of our students. You are significant partners in the endeavors and the successes of this institution.

Monsignor Furfaro, your words and your wisdom have been a part of many of the important ceremonies of my life. Thank you.

Senator Wright, Assemblywoman Sullivan, Assemblyman Luster, Chairman Jerret, and Mayor HammilI, thank you for attending and for the productive and enduring associations that each of you have built with this campus and the State Univ ersity.

Ken Auletta, I am honored by your presence and sincerely grateful for your address. Over the course of a distinguished career you have enlightened readers’ understandings of contemporary culture and set a wonderful, aspirationa l example for our students. We at your alma mater take great pride in your accomplishments, and we are extremely grateful for your continuing involvement in Oswego State.

Marion Stanton and Dave Cristantello, your participation in this ceremony is but a small sample of the many positive connections that each of you and all of the alumni, business, education, and community members here today have nurt ured with Oswego State. I know of no time when support from the greater community has been as high or as beneficial as it is now. The trust you place in Oswego State is truly sustaining. Thank you, all.

I want to acknowledge my colleagues who are the SUNY Presidents led today by President Taylor of SUNY Cortland. You are a group of extraordinarily able and willing leaders; I never fail to learn from you in all our interactions.

I am thrilled and thankful too that many delegates are here from other colleges and universities, especially our own former president and my very generous friend, Stephen Weber. President Weber moved this institution forward at a pa rticularly critical time in our history. He asserted clear leadership in addressing difficult questions of purpose in relation to our public mission, and he guided us through economic challenges to our vitality and viability. He encouraged us to embrace c hange in order to find solutions.

I am sorry that President Virginia Radley could not be present today. I came to this campus at the beginning of her presidency, and I want to recognize the position of importance that the principles of her presidency have here even today. Insuring high academic standards and striving for that level of intellectual integrity which assures quality are concepts she helped to firmly attach to our conceptions of who we are.

To all of our accomplished and committed faculty and staff, thank you for the gifts of your constant professional contributions as well as your insight and spirit. I am honored to be your colleague. And, to our loyal emeriti, who co ntinue to help us nurture our ideals, we need you. To inaugural committee members, thank you for honoring this campus and me with this ceremony of celebration. And, to every one of our wonderful students led by Student Association President Scott Wiley, a leader in every sense of the word, thank you all for the generosity of your participation. I am proud of you; you supply the life force of Oswego State. You carry our legacy.

I have had the blessings of constant love and support from family and friends. Their presence here today means a great deal to me. My mother, Johanna Flemma, has been unwavering in her confidence and more importantly has been the mo st significant member of the tag team I have enlisted for over thirty years to help raise four children. For that, Mother, I am deeply grateful and so are they. I am enormously proud of our children: Jennifer, her husband Michael and their son Blaise; Joe and his wife Jill; Paige and Jackie. They have a way of keeping me grounded in areas of basic importance. And, to Michael Stanley, my best friend and unending source of wisdom and joy, thank you.

I am extremely proud and incredibly privileged to serve as President of the State University of New York at Oswego. Today, this inaugural ceremony does not mark a literal beginning, yet, it provides the appropriate dimensions of cel ebration to recognize the newness of our optimism and the energy of our collective resolve to engage the future. It also allows me the opportunity to speak about the future. Today, I want to share with you my vision for Oswego State, a future which I beli eve flows naturally from our present and keeps faith with the history of our college and the traditions of the academy.
 
 

OUR HISTORY

Oswego State, like the State University of New York and most of the great public universities, was originally created in response to social needs. At Oswego in 1861, the responsibility for training teachers was literally combine d with administration of the Oswego City Schools. Our founder, Edward Austin Sheldon, was both first president of the Oswego State Normal School and superintendent of city schools. He lived a life committed to the mission of public education, preparing st udents in content and training them to teach. From the first year of the Oswego Normal School, the curriculum consisted of "thorough instruction of the . . . intellectual faculties and the proper methods of developing them . . ." Several hours each day we re devoted to theory and several more to practice.

Sheldon was a visionary. He believed that there could be no progress without change. The school made significant progress during his tenure. Oswego was one of the first American colleges to use the scientific laboratory method. Shel don encouraged his faculty to adopt a "psychological outlook" when schooling students, and he added physical education and shop to the course offerings. He also explored the best climate for teaching and learning, once writing against "forceful methods", concluding that, "The best work is done where there is a warm, sympathetic relation between teacher and pupils." His pioneering spirit lent the school its identity as the fountainhead of teacher education. His ideas instilled in us a tradition of educatio n, both intellectual and useful.

Oswego has always been responsive to the greater needs of society not only in what was taught but also in its organization and size. The growth of our school was directly connected to the growth of the country and the increased dema nd for teachers. In the late 1800’s, the industrial revolution made the need for a better prepared work force imperative so our curriculum expanded to educate teachers who could train children in the industrial arts. Our traditions often grew in atte mpts to meet the practical needs of our students. In the 1920’s and 30’s, Camp Shady Shore became a "tent city" for adult students and their families who came to continue their education and update their degrees in the summer. In the mid 1940
46;s our faculty debated--in what our own Dorothy Rogers defined as endless discussions--a general education curriculum and we added more electives to broaden education programs. The forties also brought an influx of returning veterans funded through the GI bill. The government was underwriting a more educated populace to build a strong American economy, and our curriculum grew to meet those demands. In 1950, we added our first master’s program.

Then, the baby boomers grew up and were too numerous to be completely accommodated elsewhere, so our college and other State Teachers’ Colleges across the nation added liberal arts degrees and many new facilities in order to me et the demand. Later, in the business minded culture of the 1980’s, professional schools grew and, at Oswego, we established the programs which eventually evolved into our School of Business. Oswego developed from a single purpose teacher training sc hool to a comprehensive university by incorporating the traditions of the academy with the needs of society.

PROGRESS TODAY

I am in the very fortunate position of having taken up the responsibilities of the Office of the President after having been a member of the Oswego campus community for many years--years which allowed me to form great affection and deep respect for Oswego State and its people and years that also helped me understand that higher education, transformative of individuals, is fundamental to the well being of the world. I arrived here to teach, to be a part of that heightened sense o f existence that students have when they awaken to the fascination of ideas and the power of thought. I love teaching law; students connect to legal cases through their own experiences. It is always absorbing to me to observe the intellectual growth of in dividuals as they learn and to know that the impact will reach far beyond that one person’s experience. Rooted in every well educated individual is the promise of contributions to the greater good in civic, economic, humanitarian, and cultural realms .

Perhaps the telling phrase there is "well educated", a phrase also important in how the public now views the academy. The public’s continuing trust and support for higher education seems at least partly dependent on our ability to serve the current needs of society. Events of the day illuminate a need for more motivated and informed citizens, competent and flexible workers, and resourceful and caring community members. Prospective students and their families, elected officials, employers, and the press are all asking in various ways. What is the value of a traditional undergraduate college degree? What benefits does it bestow in terms of the individual and society?

We might read those questions and their implicit criticism as a signal that society has already lost faith in traditional colleges and universities. But they may instead signal frustration because colleges and universities are perce ived as failing to meet the needs of contemporary life.

A college education was once universally seen as the rock upon which one built a secure future of opportunity and hope. It still has that place--perhaps not as securely as it once did, but it is evident in the column space and the a ir time the press now devote to higher education that individuals are still interested in colleges; interested in which are educationally the best, the "best buys", the most connected to employers, and so on. And, people still see a college or university education as the means to personal growth, financial success, and social advancement. A college degree is still a major part of our citizens’ dreams for themselves and their aspirations for their children.

At the intersection of high hopes and skepticism, higher education’s role in society has moved to the center of the public’s agenda, and we are being scrutinized as never before. There is a critical need and a great opport unity for colleges and universities to muster the traditions, new ideas, resources, and will of the academy to provide for a vital future.

A commitment to teaching, scholarship, and service--the three main thrusts of university life--manifests an involvement with the future that is inherent in the academy. Teaching and learning shape the future. In its essence, teachin g is an act of ultimate hopefulness. Implicit in the drive to find, interpret, apply, and transmit knowledge is the intention to affect the future: our future, our students, and through them, the future of humankind. We, and, through us our students, must be armed and inspired to be able agents of that future. All of higher education is being asked to organize and reorganize its academic and intellectual assets in order to preserve not only the academy’s value but society’s strength for future g enerations. As we begin the next century, it is crucial that we take up the challenge.
 
 

NEW AND DIFFERENT CHALLENGES

As a social institution, American higher education--especially public higher education--has always been influenced by economic, societal, and political forces operating as an invaluable asset preserving and extending American cu lture. But two of the powerful challenges we now face, the proliferation of massive amounts of new knowledge and the generation of new communication technologies, are much more difficult to harness in the academy because they alter aspects of formal educa tion and educational processes. Inventions of the past such as telephones, automobiles, and airplanes certainly brought monumental change to society at large, but not necessarily monumental in the work of the academy. Today, we have revolutionary technolo gical changes on our campuses--change which affects the work of our faculty, the expectations of our students, and the content of our curricula. To cope we have had to complexly revise our organizations and substantially escalate our costs. In 1989, when I first became Executive Assistant to the President, our office did not have even one desk top computer. Nine and one half years later, computer use permeates this community and we have determined that we will spend almost $2 million every four years to r eplace computers for faculty and staff alone. Computers have changed the workplace, adding incredible excitement to our work but also exponential expense to our operations. Computers have also changed teaching and learning, and it is the impact that techn ology has made on learning--in creation, transmission, and use of knowledge--that is the greater impact by far and perhaps the more difficult to understand.

The explosion of knowledge is changing our lives and our work. It is often hard to judge if the changes are, on balance, for the better. As has always been the case, to quote Martin Luther King Jr., "All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another". We have faced many problems in efforts to keep our institution current by organizing and distilling new information into usable knowledge. In the last ten years we have added nine new major programs at Oswego.

We also installed a development staff to help blunt the withdrawal of state support, instituted programs to help us realize inclusion and diversity, and watched our physical plant become more undermined and outmoded as we suffered a long with everyone else through the protracted recession of the northeast, a recession which also reduced the number of new faculty we could afford and stagnated salaries. The work has been demanding for every member of the college community. Yet, through out this period of limited resources and reevaluation of our priorities, we here at Oswego have not been standing still.

I believe we have known all along that the fate of higher education is not secured just because we have survived or even because we have conquered recent threatening forces. We serve different students today in vastly different cont exts of work and society and that trend will accelerate. Colleges and universities by their nature help shape the ideals, interests, and actions of American society, and we cannot escape by demur--or by retreat into the past--the requirement that we assur e students a relevant education.

SERVING STUDENTS AND SOCIETY

The word relevant in relation to the academy has a vivid past. It was the mantra of my college generation. But relevance in this sense no longer connotes a "pick and choose" curriculum composed by the fairly arbitrary choices o f the individual student as often resulted twenty five years ago. Relevance now is an imperative exhorting colleges and universities to provide both curricula and climate designed to help students assimilate deep levels of discrete knowledge in the discip lines and to also acquire intensified ability to synthesize information so that their learning can be more available to them in all of the functions of life.

We are actively engaged in pursuing the means to attain those objectives, to satisfy our desire for quality and excellence and to succeed at our primary mission: the transmission of knowledge. Our quest is bringing us to the underst anding that to do so we must provide an intense, coherent educational experience through integration of academic content, standards, location, delivery, and environment. That high level of integration in academic culture supports learning best and will fu lfill society’s expectations to produce those well educated individuals who are capable and motivated to engage in a lifelong pursuit of intellectual growth and who are best able to make a lifetime of contributions to society.

Perhaps the most important achievement of the past three years in regard to embedding relevance and engagement in the Oswego experience has been the design, approval, and implementation of a healthy new General Education program. It s requirements express our values and help us achieve the ends of professional and liberal learning. It was worth the long period of scholarly reflection and debate to arrive at a general consensus--worth it because it resulted in a better program and wor th it because it demonstrates our ability to act as an academic community, to act with courage and intelligence to create and initiate wide reaching curriculum reform. It was an ambitious goal but one that was absolutely relevant to the integrity of our a cademic programs.

It was also worth it because it started our movement toward integration of our various parts to create a comprehensive learning experience from our comprehensive offerings--a collective from a collection. A similar commitment to lea rning has infused other recent efforts:

Simply stated, Oswego State graduates, whether from the liberal arts disciplines, the sciences, or the professional degree programs will be individuals who have learned about learning, who have acquired skills and abilities of value in the workplace and who have achieved the virtues to live thoughtful, interesting, and worthwhile lives. This is the harmony for which our comprehensive university should strive--it offers a life of purpose and fulfillment for our students and ourselves . It aligns our expressed and fondest desires with the anxieties and demands of the public.

From our list of recent initiatives and our successes we have made incredible progress. If we commit to this path, the synergies produced can form a prism which will further transform our institution.

If we commit to this path, our faculty, staff, and students can found a more deeply established community for learning. Faculty will approach their teaching and their disciplines with a greater understanding of the whole educational experience of our students. We will engage more students in our scholarship in order to teach well but also in order to model an intellectual life. Our degree programs will recognize a collective concept beyond general education and will consider formall y incorporating other areas such as, graduate degrees, internships, research experiences, global competencies, and international experiences. Technologies may mesh into a new pedagogy throughout our institution, and we may employ those aids in the classro om and beyond to communicate with our faculty and students around the world. We may promise to stay connected with our graduates for a lifetime, anywhere around the world, offering our institution as a continuous and personal educational resource and reap ing benefits for our current students in those connections. We will bond as muses and mentors to our students and we will learn from them as well.

If we commit to this path, we will employ summer programs, urban school/college partnerships, scholarships, and alumni networks to bring more students from under represented groups and underprivileged backgrounds to study here. As T oni Morrison sees it, "The function of freedom is to free someone else." Education can help free a person from the constraints of the past and free a people from the injustices of the present. In Oswego, we are not physically located where a cross section of races and cultures has naturally formed, but we cannot maintain education without a cross section of races and cultures equitably represented in our programs and people. Greater diversity is educationally and economically important as well as right. A ccess to public higher education is what makes it inherently noble, and we must not forfeit our greater purposes by failing to be inclusive now.

If we commit to this path, our community will invigorate all members of our campus to become positive and interactive forces in the learning community. Staff members will find affirmation for their essential contributions and will u nderstand their connection to the collective experience. We will assure for ourselves and model for our students institutional coherence and strength through effective institution wide collaboration, governance, and planning. Colleagues will understand co mmunity as a responsibility and experiencing it as a reward.

If we commit to this path, Oswego will render more service in the greater community and be more publicly engaged. We will form partnerships that enrich the education of our students, expand our knowledge, and develop financial resou rces. We will model civic responsibility by matching our strengths to the problems of elementary and secondary schools, corporate organizations, private citizens, and public entities. Recognizing that we are crucial to the civic, intellectual, economic, a nd cultural life of this region and that the community is likewise an important support to our mission, we will foster more mutually beneficial partnerships which advance our goals and fulfill our mission.
 
 

OUR GREATER PURPOSE

In the words of John Dewey,

Thank you.