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Opening Remarks to the Faculty

President Linwood H. Rose
August 21, 2009

Good morning and welcome to the 2009-10 academic year!

Before I do anything else this morning I want to recognize someone who is special to this university. We have all served on university committees and many of us have chaired them. Some have loved the position, some have loathed it. Some have taken the word “service” to new heights. Al Menard is one of those individuals. Al is retiring at the end of this month. Al, if you could come forward I have something for you.  Dr. Rose presents a framed certificate to Dr. Menard.

To be the leading comprehensive university.
That is our vision statement, and in spite of the fact that we have prepared budget reduction plans for each of the last three years we remain on a course that will enable us to fulfill our ambitions.
But, the world in which we operate changes, and so too must the strategies and approaches we use to accomplish our vision. We are used to making the changes that one might call refinement or tweaking.

Sometimes more radical efforts need to be employed. I want to talk to you about one of those this morning.

Typically, on this occasion, I reflect on the accomplishments of last year and share some thoughts about the year ahead. I have usually covered items such as: new academic programs, new facilities, outstanding personal performances, national rankings and the like. 
This morning, because of the significance of environmental sustainability, and the pressing reality of the budget, I am going to forgo the review of our achievements and instead refer you to a summary of those accomplishments included in my remarks to the staff last week. They will be posted, along with these remarks on the web by early next week.

It always bothered me to “hit the highlights” in this address anyway because it is the excellence of what we do everyday that really makes us who we are. I want you to know that all of these efforts are appreciated.

So, for this purpose here is my year-end review:
Last year…..
We taught 4,200 sections of classes.
We, hopefully, caused more than a few people to reflect and think…
We graduated 4,500 students.
We housed 5,600 students.
We served 4,500,000 meals.
We raised 8 million dollars.
We managed 24,000 health center visits.
We carried 1,680,000 transit bus riders.
We hosted 46,600 official campus visitors.
We had 525,250 UREC visits.
We sponsored 52,200 intramural competitions.
We purchased 2,213 computers.
And yes, we consumed 188,286 bagels!

It was a busy year!

 A few words about the Budget and Enrollment
“Doing more with less” was an interesting concept in the 1980s when the phrase became popular. I think it is a little tired and worn out now because we have put it into practice so often over the last thirty years. Although there seem to be signs that the national economy is improving, Virginia is still experiencing actual revenues lagging what had been projected. As most of you know we have yet again submitted budget reduction plans of 5, 10 and 15 percent of our general fund appropriation. We do not know what reduction will be imposed, but we do expect that the Governor will tell us to tighten our belts yet again.

We will be able to manage a 5 percent cut without too much pain, but obviously the deeper we are cut the more our programs will be affected. As is our standard practice, everything will be done to protect the instructional program given that it is the heart and soul of what we do and it is the very core of our mission. Personnel layoffs will be a strategy of last resort.

Admissions
I indicated last year that if our resources were restricted we would not expand our freshman class as we had originally planned. This year’s freshman class as well as the number of new transfers was frozen at last year’s enrollment. However, we are even more popular than ever. This year’s class of new students was drawn from an applicant pool of 24,111 students, and I am pleased to report that the number of African-American and Hispanic applications increased by 17% over the previous year.

Stewardship of the Natural World
Last year at this time I announced the formation of the Institute for Stewardship of the Natural World, directed by Dr. C.J. Hartman. A display board for the Institute is available to observe in the lobby.

And, by the way, with this somewhat dramatic new emphasis on our stewardship responsibilities, in no way do I mean to overlook the great work that has been going on throughout our campus for several years. Alternative energy research by our faculty, recycling by our facilities management staff, architectural design reflected by our new LEED green dining hall, numerous environmental awareness programs by our students have all prepared a wonderful platform for a much broader effort today and tomorrow.

This past year I read Tom Friedman’s, “Hot, Flat and Crowded.” In fact, I have read it several times and it is continuing to have a profound affect on me. I urge you to read it if you haven’t.

Knowing what we know today, based on good science and good rules of stewardship, we have to change what and how we consume, how we respect what is around us, and how we manage our waste and by-products.

We have an opportunity to lead the world in developing laws, policies and actions that can ensure a sustainable planet. But despite our knowledge and our ability to innovate, our  political system seems unable to cope with the transformational and multi-generational changes that are required.

To finish the quote, “…to really make a difference on things like global warming. Why were you so slow to do the right things?” They are going to say, “Gosh, what were you doing.”

It isn’t all about what we consume and what we discard, it is also a question of how many of us there are.

Friedman points out that part of the issue today, and in the future, is global population growth. These are the United Nations’ population forecasts. Currently, there are 1.3 billion people in China alone. In 2020 there will be 1.5 billion.

If you visit Brazil, China, Indonesia, countries that we used to think of as developing nations, you cannot help but notice that the people of those countries want to live like us. Like Americans – with our conveniences, our technology and our comforts. You cannot blame them. These conveniences, associated with prosperity, devour energy, natural resources, land, and water and emit waste. Friedman claims that the reality is that the planet cannot support a world full of people living like Americans – at least the way we live now.

Each month we are adding 7-8 million people to the planet. Our own Dr. Chris Bachman described this magnitude of population growth to me in a way that was easy for me to visualize.

New York city has 8 million residents. The Commonwealth of Virginia has 8 million residents. We are adding the equivalent of the Commonwealth of Virginia, with all of its people, its infrastructure, its consumption and its waste to this planet each month!

Population expansion and enhanced quality of life (defined in American terms), has a huge impact on energy consumption and ultimately on what we put into the air unless we adopt atmosphere friendly energy sources.

So what does this mean for JMU – for each of us?

Sustainability is not one more initiative in a string of initiatives. It is not one more ingredient in our stew pot. Instead it is an approach to life. It transforms how we live and therefore everything about us is redefined.

A focus on sustainability requires us to innovate and to be resourceful. It drives us to imagine. It leads us to opportunity. We can begin now and it will be fun, or we can wait and then the fun will yield to fear and desperation.

“Authentic” stewardship is about undertaking this because it makes life good – not because it makes us look good. As with our efforts to enhance diversity, there is no desire to get on board, join the bandwagon or like the red fox in the image, blend in with the crowd.

Sure there will be tag lines and logos, catchy phrases and inspiring images. If effective, they will cause people to first become aware, to think and then, finally, to take action. But tag lines, logos, catchy phrases don’t save energy, reduce consumption, recycle waste or make healthy choices – people do.

The Institute has proposed that a new defining characteristic be added to those that are the basis of our institutional planning. It is: “The university will be an environmentally literate community whose members think critically and act, individually and collectively, as model stewards of the natural world.”

This whole effort will be about what people do, not what people say. I believe if we live in a manner that respects our natural world, and that ensures a high quality of life for future generations, then faculty and staff will be drawn to us, students will select us, and donors will want to support us.

Some authors have suggested that we use a sustainability commitment to make us distinctive. I want no part of that. In fact, if by being good stewards of the natural world, we differentiate ourselves from others we have a problem of immense proportion, because our action alone is insufficient to right this world.

We must undertake this journey to model the way, to cut a path, to make it easier for others to elect the same course. This is about sharing everything we learn and know. After all, we are educators!

The beauty of discovering fire or the wheel is not in the initial euphoria of discovery, it is in the sharing of these wonders to improve the human condition. So to must it be with building a new way of living as part of nature, rather than aiming to be its master.

In the beginning of the last decade, noted educational leader Ernest Boyer coined a phrase The New American University. His definition of that enterprise was an institution in which liberal and professional learning were married and then joined with civic engagement.

Certainly our mission statement, “We are a community committed to preparing students to be educated and enlightened citizens who lead productive and meaningful lives” is exemplary of the university Boyer described.

Don’t you agree that preparing students to lead lives that are respectful and protective of the world in which we live is beautifully synchronous with our mission? One could argue that the very relevance of a college degree may depend on what we now aspire to do.

We have a number of talented faculty who have infused sustainability into their courses and research, and we need to further support their efforts. We have staff working to design environmentally friendly buildings and landscapes. Others of you may have had a desire to do so, but for one reason or another have not pursued how issues of sustainability might be incorporated into your interactions with our students or fellow staff.

To reinforce the need to address this topic in our educational experience, I have proposed to Dr. Brown, and he has accepted, that we create the Arboretum Collaborative.

This project will bring together at the Arboretum Education Center 10-15 competitively selected faculty once a week during the spring semester to learn and share with one another.

Participants will receive a $750 stipend for the semester with the expectation that each would develop a summer grant prospectus for the summer of 2010. The summer grant will provide a $3,000 stipend to support recipients who would use the summer grant experience to extensively modify or develop a new general education, discipline-specific or multi-disciplinary course.

The Arboretum Collaborative will be administered by Dr. Karen Santos, the executive director of the center for faculty innovation with consultation from Dr. C. J. Hartman, executive director of the Institute for the stewardship of the natural world. Because this is an effort to bring the subject of sustainability into the classroom where it might not typically be found, faculty from the STEM programs will not be eligible for these grants. More details will be available from Dr. Santos.

On the administrative side, our Impact 3 leadership training program which among other things, undertakes year long projects to study real university issues and make recommendations for change, will examine at least one sustainability project.

While our internal resources are going to be stretched if our budgets are once again cut, federal and state funds for energy-related research have increased substantially.

Dr. Brown and Dr. Noftsinger will be committing targeted attention in support of our faculty conducting research in alternative energies. We have considerable talent in place and we want to assist you wherever we are able.

To help draw our faculty and students together, I propose that we build an eco-friendly smart house as a living laboratory for a small group of students who will live in the building. This is an image of Duke University’s Home Depot “Smart House” that opened last year.

The facility will also house the Institute for Stewardship of the Natural World. We will seek sponsors to cover the bulk of the costs associated with the project and we will incorporate the latest technologies and concepts to ensure LEED Platinum status. Work will begin on this project immediately. This house won’t just be smart, it will be “Madison Smart.” As with all of our buildings, it is not the building itself that is so important. It is what occurs in the building that is of significance. In this case the whole purpose is to establish a paradigm for “smart living.”

As many of you may know we are committed to regional leadership with the National 25 x 25 Initiative that by 2025 calls for 25 percent of the energy consumed in the Valley being acquired from alternative sources. We just received a $750,000 federal grant to support the initiative. This is a major undertaking that will require broad engagement and “buy-in” from local governments and the regional population.

I will propose to city and county officials that we establish a Community Sustainability Partnership to formalize our commitment to working together to advance the many good things that are happening already and build upon them for a greener future. Why not lead Virginia in this effort?

As many of you may also know, almost two years ago I signed the American College and University President’s Climate Commitment to move us to a position of climate neutrality. The first step in fulfilling that commitment was to complete a carbon study to determine our emissions baseline.

We have now completed that report and have estimated that in 2005 (our baseline year) we released 77,593 metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere. That represents 4.92 metric tons per FTE student, somewhat below the national average for reporting institutions. We have already implemented a number of mitigation measures, including use of B5 biodiesel (5% biofuel),
purchasing steam from the city’s resource recovery facility, aggressive recycling of solid waste, and
transit bus access for JMU commuters.

We are now in the process of developing our Environmental Action Plan that will lay out the steps we must follow to be where we want to be for the future.

There are other exciting prospects on the horizon. Various people and offices around the university are currently developing policies that will help to define how we will operate in the future. For example, henceforth we will only buy hybrid, electric or biodiesel vehicles with the intention to convert the fleet of vehicles operated by the university to a combination of hybrid, electric or biodiesel over a five-year period.

We will move to all energy star appliances.

We will convert the bulk of our large print jobs from paper to electronic. Advances in document software have enabled a very user-friendly method of distributing electronic publications.

We will explore the creation of a local biodiesel production facility to supply our needs and perhaps that of our neighbors.

We are also seriously exploring electric co-generation, and non-petroleum based fuel sources for our steam and chilled water.

We will develop plans to move parking and vehicular traffic off of internal roads and parking lots with a targeted implementation date of August 2011. A few years off, as this will require the ownership of the RMH parking decks and the construction of more parking facilities on our periphery. This new policy will also incorporate where the president currently parks!

Last year we installed dashboard technology in nine of our residence halls so that students could monitor on a real-time basis their consumption of water and electricity. This year we will expand that technology to UREC and the dining halls.

Some of you might be quietly saying to yourself, “well, what he is describing has merit, it is moving in the right direction, but why should he spend so much time on this and why should I be invested in it? After all, we are a University not an energy agency.

Well, I have seen the light and the light is green! If I have not convinced you that you need to care about this for your children and grandchildren then let me be more direct. I will do so without talking about melting ice caps and glaciers, rising sea levels, or strange weather.

We currently spend $14.5 million dollars a year on the various forms of energy we consume. We can improve things by switching to fluorescent bulbs, but if energy prices go up by 30 percent, which I think is not only possible but likely, that $14.5 million becomes $19 million. If they go up by 50 percent, which is easily imaginable, then the $14.5 million grows to almost $22 million. If I told you we had to absorb a $7 million dollar budget cut you would be very concerned about the impact on our budget, on our ability to carry out our mission, on our ability to serve our students. That is essentially what will happen if we have to divert funds from other programs to energy.

Some have observed that after the fuel crisis in the seventies when we witnessed sky rocketing prices and rationed fuel, or even after what happened to gas prices 18 months ago that prices dropped back to what we might call “reasonable” levels. 

One might ask, “won’t that happen again?” The answer is “no” because of those 8 million more people a month and because of the tremendous energy needs of China and India. Oh, there will be ups and downs, peaks and valleys, but the trajectory will be up – higher and higher.

The answers to this dilemma are conservation and innovation. We can do both at JMU.

We will never forget that our principal functions are to educate, to transfer and to develop knowledge – to enlighten. That is WHAT we do. We have the power to choose HOW we will do it.

Some have likened altering the direction of a university to turning a battleship. That is, it can be a slow process. What slows us down is miscommunication, judging others, lack of action, and misunderstanding; but, if we communicate, respect each other, collaborate, analyze and act, we have a chance to make a difference.

We are a university, and in many respects we are like a small city. I think we have the ideas and the will to be a model university for others. Whatever your discipline or role as a member of this university community, whether faculty, administrator or staff: You can choose to make a contribution to this effort.

You can help as Carl Sagan has said, “…to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we have ever known,” and you can teach and show our students to do the same. The Institute web site includes a “Guide for Stewards.” It gives you a list of things that we can do as individuals to take better care of our planet.

As Sagan said, “Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

But, it is our mote of dust – let’s take care of it!

Oh, and C. J. Hartman needs your help. I have told her she has to save the world and she has to do it soon!

I hope you have a great year!

Sources:
Friedman, Thomas L. Hot, Flat and Crowded. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2008.

Bardaglio, Peter and Andrea Putman. Boldly Sustainable. Washington, DC: NACUBO, 2009.