Our University – Completion Rates

A measure of university success in “rankings exercises” such as U.S. News and World Reports, Kiplinger’s, and others has appropriately been the rate at which a student completes college. 

If a student spends a few years at a university and then drops out and never finishes, a two-year investment approaching $20,000 according to the College Board, is squandered.  This does not include the lost opportunity costs that a student incurs while not engaged in full-time employment. 

In addition, a student who starts and does not complete takes up the seat of another student who might start and complete.  These are tough words, as opportunity and risk carry with it the potential for failure.  While we don’t have Debtor’s Prisons, exorbitant debt for failed college attempts may feel a lot like them. 

College completion is a national problem.

Students should be given the chance to succeed in post secondary education.  It is not an inalienable right, but it is a very sensible approach to building a strong nation and a robust economy, as long as the risks incurred in the pursuit of the dream of a college education are considered.

Community college is an excellent way to reduce cost by providing local, low cost opportunities for students to begin study.  For many years these institutions were seen as a poor substitute for a university.  I do not believe that to be the case, and appropriate mission focus for the community colleges becomes a powerful way to increase college completion rates for students, and of almost equal importance, institutions.

In the U. S. only half of the students who start college finish.  This is a wasteful scenario for individuals and institutions.   For students who start and complete an associate’s degree the numbers are better. 

The three best indicators of student propensity to finish college are high school grades, class rank, and standardized test scores.  This trifecta is never a happy equation when access is added into the equation.  Many students who have not done well will not do well.  This trend is denied by many looking for miraculous transformations.   

The University of California Master Plan, hatched in 1960 by Clark Kerr and an informed legislature, has never been equaled in insight or impact.  The Master Plan had community colleges playing a significant role in university excellence and efficiency.  Any high school graduate could enter a community college, and if he or she completed two years of study, at very low cost, would have access to a four-year school in the state.  

Community colleges were access machines that turned into completion machines.  They preened and pruned and opportunity existed for all.    The plan was magnificent, leading to five decades of unchallenged U.S. leadership in higher education on the world stage.

Unfortunately, many community colleges clamor to offer baccalaureate and even master’s degrees, field teams in intercollegiate sports, and take other actions simulating four-year institutions while driving up the costs for two-year attendees.  A focus on getting students started, or providing training for vocational careers, at the lowest possible cost should be the goal.

Our university, and others like it, should not try to be all things to all people.  Rather, focus should address the needs of well prepared students who have demonstrated the interest and capacity for study at the university level.

Our completion rates will soar.

At our university, efficiency and quality indicators will not solve all budget problems to be sure, but excellence and efficiency have never created a single budget problem.

There is no downside to legitimate excellence when increasing completion rates.

Our University – Staff Excellence

Underestimating the value of excellent faculty and students is impossible.  They are the substance of the university and what separates the good institutions from the average ones.  Otherwise what is excellent is ordinary and that is impossible by definition.

Likewise, excellent staff members are rare.

The very best staff members have a different set of qualifications than excellent faculty or students.  Faculty and students can come from anywhere and bring a world view, passion, dedication and ideas that will light fires in a good university. 

Staff members are frequently different.

Ingenuity and vision, as with the best faculty, are required. But a special love of the place accompanied by ability and deep-rooted care for the local community is necessary.  It is common for the very best professional staff to have grown up in the shadow of the university at which they work.  It is less common for the very best faculty to have done so.

Faculty members sustain a campus with teaching and disciplinary excellence and ideas.  Staff members sustain a campus by supporting the development of ideas.  The common denominator to both pursuits is the commitment to building something that is bigger and better than before, and bigger than self.

A vision for progress.

A local girl from a farm family, with an education that started in public schools of our region, continued to community college, and concluded at our university, recently retired.  Throughout her continued commitment to becoming a partner in building our university was alive, as was her sense of purpose to support the intellectual work of the place.

I have seen this kind of commitment in some people, in some places, with various mutations and iterations.  Dedicated, intelligent, thoughtful people who desire to make our university better, leading by helping.  

People like this are invaluable for two reasons. First, they are qualified and have the requisite skills that it takes to make the place go.  Second, and of equal importance, they have a deep affection for the university because they may have watched it grow.  They may have lived with it all of their lives. 

Pride in place drives a deep commitment to excellence. 

The power of such a commitment cannot be overstated.  When a strikingly good scientist comes to a campus, identification with the community and an appreciation for it may occur over time. The community may even become home, but it did not start that way.

Our University will never reach full potential if staff of every stripe don’t own our mission.

This week, our university marks the departure of Susan Ferry, who is central to the present excellence of our campus, and will have an impact on its quality into the distant future. 

You probably do not know her name, but you can see her work. 

As Assistant to the Chancellor, she labored to support the vision and direction of the institution with intelligence, foresight, and a deep appreciation for the organization.  She possessed vision herself, and we are fortunate that she is representative of others who populate offices and administrative subdivisions of the institution, from accountants to zoologists. 

Max DePree, a respected advocate for excellence in leadership, thoughtfully quipped,” The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between, the leader is a servant.” and in so doing defined the contribution of Susan Ferry to our University. 

Thankfully Susan is not alone, but she is a shining example of excellence at work.

And we are in her debt.

Our University – Truth Telling

One of the greatest challenges for leadership is to get people, in all parts of the organization, to tell the truth about how things are.  It is not that they actively lie, but that they never want to be bearers of bad news. Short-sightedness drives the teller to say what he or she thinks will make the hearer happy, at any level of the organizations hierarchy.

This is not a new idea.  In the Greek tragedy Antigone, penned 500 years before Christ by Sophocles, the concept is introduced with this simple phrase, “No one loves the messenger who brings bad news.”

And it rages on today, from Wall Street to Main Street, in banks, in government, and for us, on campuses from the classroom to the board room.

In political organizations wholesale changes of “appointed staff” are part of the patronage culture of American politics, for better or worse.  In public universities, where distinctive relationships between leaders, faculty, and staff, are driven by the noble and powerful idea of shared governance, an even more pronounced scarcity of truth exists for the complexities of making sure that, in revealing the perceived truth about a situation, one is not scapegoated. 

And without the truth forward-progress is nearly impossible.

Of course, only the numb, small-minded believe lies are better than truth, but they are enough to cause people interested in forward-progress to have legitimate concerns.

Reasons to be unwilling to tell the truth about the effectiveness of the organization abound.  Copiers and coffee pots, when not kettles for gossip, are magnets for truth telling but you cannot lead armed with a coffee pot.     

Leadership that reacts negatively to the truth, or wants to blame someone for unsatisfactory answers to questions, gets exactly what it demands…pandering lies and mealymouthedness.  When leadership shoots messengers, active, outright lying proliferates rather than the equally destructive but seemingly less obtrusive, soft-soaping of reality.  It is a matter of survival. 

Leadership without trust is like pie without crust: nothing holds the goods.

I worked for a fellow who, when somebody wanted to know what he thought about a particular issue, people always answered, “Ask the last person he talked to.”  Leadership that demands yes men and women is not leadership at all, but a form of self-amusement.  

Telling the truth about an organization, to quote The Lovin’ Spoonful is “… not often easy and not often kind…” 

If the organization prospers, long-term job security is enhanced. 

In my own experiences, getting people to tell the truth is tough.  There are so many reasons not to.  So many opportunities to lie your way through a difficult situation so you don’t have to be the culprit who shines light on a broken aspect of the organization. 

Nothing will kill progress and make for more meaningless talk – talk that some leaders call leadership – than working to please someone in a leadership position by telling the person what you think he or she wants to hear.

Soon the organization will start to vibrate with meaningless chatter, and nuts and bolts will begin to fall off, vibrations of all types will begin to shake the enterprise and then the whole thing will fall apart. 

At our university, at every level, we should be truth-telling about things for two reasons:  First, it moves the university forward.  Second, it is almost a sacred demand of the leadership position of a university, where students are watching role models behave. 

And, the truth will set you free.

Our University – The Three R’s

If B.F. Skinner was a university leader who wanted to foster excellence in teaching, research, and service, as do all intelligent university leaders, he would have come up with a dynamic suggestion, one that many inside and outside of the academic setting would find unnerving, hard to accept, powerful in its simplicity, far reaching in its ramifications, uncontestable in its forthrightness, and nearly impossible to implement at many public universities.

He would have said, and brace yourself, or assume a sitting position, “reward excellence”.

He would be a devotee of the three R’s: recognize, retain, and reward faculty and student excellence. Skinner believed that a desired result should be positively reinforced.  Neither rocket science nor complex psychology.

Maybe it is too simple to work on a university campus.

In any university setting, and most assuredly one where faculty is unionized, rewarding excellence is a challenging task.  There are so many reasons not to do so. The forces of the status quo, the “why not me pleas”, and the strenuous squeeze from card-carrying membership to treat all the same, regardless of performance, conspire to drive organizations to mediocrity. 

When recognizing excellent faculty performance, substandard performance is also illuminated.  We all want to live in Lake Wobegon, where “all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average,” according to Garrison Keillor.

It gets worse. 

When there is great pressure to seek minimum threshold performance, those who excel can be driven away (why bother to pursue excellence when a second- rate effort leads to the same result), or they are punished for preeminence (their standards might be limiting to others and they become unpopular as excellence is a threat to mediocrity as surely as light is a threat to darkness.)

Students want to see excellence, and be around it, and they will take chances, such as applying to universities carrying $50 application fees when acceptance rates are less than 10%, to be around people who are good at what they do. 

Excellence in performance of faculty is the answer to all enrollment and quality challenges. 

All other fixes are elixirs. 

The pressing problem is that most reward systems on university campuses sway towards research over all other activity, including teaching. The three R’s are frequently the result of research.  Until reward systems are more sensitive to excellence in teaching, and faculty and administrators are willing to focus on classroom acuity, many poor teachers will be tenured and receive raises and rewards of the office.

Unfortunately, tied to a lack of precision in measuring teaching is obfuscation with the appearance of accuracy in measuring research productivity: the number of books, journal articles, papers, or conference proceedings by a faculty member.  With the plethora of avenues available for publication there is little quality control in all of this.  If work gets accepted by peers it is excellent, even when no one knows who the peers are or what qualifications they possess.

This leads to a world that overvalues anemic scholarship and undervalues animated teaching.  Both can be measured, observed, and rewarded, and assessing excellence in each is equally difficult, but possible.

After Gordon Gee, president of The Ohio State University, suggested we may be expecting too much research productivity and too little teacher excellence, faculty member Jennifer Higginbotham responded, “The idea of awarding tenure based on teaching makes me anxious.”

Her response “makes me anxious.”

Our University should be committed to recognizing, rewarding and retaining excellence in teaching and research, never one or the other.

Excellence is not the cause of anxiety, but the cure.

Our University – College of Education

There are hundreds of institutions in the United States recognized today as universities that were called “teachers colleges” a half century ago.  As these institutions grew and developed diverse areas of study the title “university” was deemed more appropriate.

No problem here as many organizations evolve and broaden their mission.

It is an oversight for institutions that have a foundation and history as teachers’ colleges to abandon that distinctiveness in search of higher aspirations.

High aspirations are good for the soul.  And powerful.  Aspirational progress is the nature of a university: hopeful organizations striving for positive change in people and communities.

However, in the pursuit of higher aspirations, the genetic code might be lost.    A friend of mine from the deep south used to say, “Ya’ got to dance with who brung ya’.”

The flagship colleges on many university campuses could be, and sometimes should be, colleges of education.  Yet, these colleges are often relegated to second class citizenship.  Some bench scientists don’t believe there is serious research in these academic units – no “big boy science”.  Some social philosophers see too much politics in educational leadership and too much political correctness in teaching strategies and ideas, or not enough. Some humanists see a departure from what a university education is all about, and how school and the results of schooling should make a society better.  Some applied scientists in professional schools see education schools as having little to do with new ideas that create new markets for new products.

And then there is work product, the research, the scholarship.

Someone once said that when you go to a convention of sociologists they talk about sociological method, but when you go to a convention of physicists they talk about physics. 

For some in the human and social sciences there is a flawed notion, born in simplistic modern thought, that in order to be serious disciplines one type of science is needed, and it must conform to the scientific methods of the 20^th century.

Really? And empiricism has no value?

“Physics envy” drives some colleges of education to abandon the historic essence of who they are.  Ideas of why, how, when and what to teach are inadvertently left behind.  State and federal bureaucracies don’t help by funding educational study that looks like flimsy microbiology married to funky psychology rather than forums to foster enriched teaching and learning.

This inevitably leads to poor imitations of an idealized and limited view of science potentially detrimental to the art of teaching and learning, yet simultaneously vital for students from kindergarteners to post-doctoral researchers. 

The power of excellent teaching is transformative.  I heard a mathematician say, “I need to be good at differential equations, and the quality of my teaching is not something I can have much impact on.”

What a tragedy for an educator to hold such a limited view. 

And further, how unfortunate that people who understand teaching excellence and its impact on leaning cannot find a way to make that insight accessible to a good mathematician.  I can hear Harlow, “You can lead a horse to water but…” And further still, and most unfortunately, how sad that the forces at work in universities might lead to professors assuming that whether or not you are a good teacher is a roll-of-the-dice.

No science here, of any stripe.

At our university and every other that has teachers’ college roots, a college of education should be openly and highly valued for sustaining the masterwork of the ageless craft rather than imitating social, physical, or life scientists.

What’s to apologize for?  How is that second class?

Our University – 51/49 Percent

Faculty members should spend 51 percent of their time serving the state and students, and 49 percent of their time serving themselves in personal intellectual development.

Faculty work is unique. Imagine any employment setting where leadership says split your time nearly 50-50 between our mission and your personal mission.

Faculty members serve two masters. They are state employees, but they are not like prison guards, officers of public safety, bureaucrats who manage the important and complex processes of human welfare, the State Highways, and other necessary arms of state government.

Excellent faculty members are cottage industries – mom and pop operations – that churn out insight and ideas and put them in the intellectual marketplace for students and the greater social good.

First, faculty serve the state.  Serving the state means being committed to helping students achieve aspirations and become productive members of society.  As a public university this is our mandate, and it is held in such high regard that private universities likewise place focus on this measure above all else.

Selflessness focused on students needs above even personal, professional aspirations.

Second, faculty serve self.  That means building expertise, credence in the disciplinary world, knowledge and insight.  Many times work that creates value for the university is solitary, inward-focused and not immediately shared with the student.  It is selfish rather than selfless.  For a faculty member to have high value to the university, he or she must contribute in a meaningful way to the body of knowledge enabling excellence at professing what is personally important.

The professor must own ideas.  This is what makes excellent teaching.

A great teacher can never teach what he or she doesn’t believe to be important, or true.

No exceptions.

To teach something not believed is a form of lying and counter to the essence of our university in seeking truth.

How does someone balance intellectual life, the outward idea of helping others grow and the inward idea of developing a strong, informed, tested professional perspective so that distinction is brought to the university and excitement to the classroom?  This is the magic formula.

I have known faculty members who were dedicated to self-development 90 percent of the time, and the needs of the state, i.e. the student, 10 percent of the time.

Ninety percent selfish – 10 percent selfless.

These are the self-centered professors whom many find it difficult to like but everyone tolerates for the prestige they bring the university.

These may or may not be the best teachers as the object of their work slants towards the selfish rather than the selfless.

I have also come across faculty members who split their energy in the opposite way.  They devote 90 percent of their energy to students and service to the organization, but do not develop new insights and ideas.  They can even be good teachers as long as they teach the same thing over and over again.

The 10 or less percent they devote to their own intellectual development does not serve the organization or the state when only lip service is paid to understanding the complexities of their own discipline, their own intellect, and their relationships to the larger world.

A really powerful faculty member should seek a 51/49 percent split of time and energy – a near balance of the selfless and selfish life – because it will make our university better in service to students, and simultaneously serve the individual knowledge worker and the state well.

Our university should be composed of hundreds of faculty who are cottage industries and, simultaneously, public servants.

Everyone profits.  Mission accomplished.   51/49.

Our University – A Vision and a Plan

In order to achieve excellence in such aspects of university life as teaching, scholarly and creative work and service to the professions and community, a vision and plan are essential. 

Accrediting agencies seek to understand the university’s vision and plan.  New and current faculty are interested in how the university sees itself in the future.  Students and families want to know about aspirations.  Elected and appointed leaders, the good ones, are interested in the long-term perspective of the university, its relationship to the state and its citizens. 

Accomplishments not measured against a specific set of targets and goals mean little.  A friend used to say, “A blind hog will pick up an acorn every now and again.”  Even without a vision and a plan something positive might happen.  With a vision, and the direction a sound plan provides, the probability of positive movement increases dramatically.

A vision that sees only a few months out, or that is crisis driven, or set up to address a single perspective, or that counts expenditures only in terms of immediate costs rather than long-term benefits, is not a vision at all.  It is not a plan either.  It is reactionary leadership that will not sustain a university. 

Universities, colleges, and community colleges all need a strong vision. The graduation of students who are successful professionally, powerful critical thinkers, and ultimately effective citizens in a free society is difficult to measure in the short term and must be looked at over spans of generations. The true measure of a university’s vision and plan comes in the long term success of the student.

If we were producing automobiles, and the machine looked good off the line, had the right price point, fuel efficiency and appeal in the showroom, but were nightmares to maintain, operate, or fell apart after little use, what is gained?

Yugo tried.  Yugo failed.

 The “Yugoization” of any enterprise leads to failure.  Can you imagine the “Yugoization” of a good university, and the long term impact?  

Only a vision keeps quality up, serves purpose well, and ultimately benefits the student for life.  Like a marriage, the university investment is for life, and a good university instills a bi-directional lifetime commitment: from the institution to the student, and vice versa.

Philanthropy at public and private universities is directly proportional to real and perceived quality.

Our university has an excellent plan, Southern at 150:  Building Excellence though Commitment.  It is configured to meet the needs of our students, state, region, faculty and staff.  It is like no plan for any other university except that it states clearly goals and targets valued by almost all universities but tailors them to the specific opportunities, strengths and characteristics of Southern Illinois University Carbondale.  This is what any vision and plan should do.

The vision and plan for a university should be developed with diverse inputs, published for all to see, spread widely, endorsed by its board and serve as a measuring stick and mast for guidance, direction and discussion.  It should look out a generation.

That provides transparency in shared aspirations rather than a willy-nilly dance with issues of the day.  Issues of the day are critical but must be addressed with foresight focused on mission.

The best universities have the best plans because the university is a “futures machine”. 

Leadership is the substance of vision and the cause of a plan.

A university without a vision and a plan will wander and founder.

Our University – The Center

At our University, over a thousand times a day, a teacher walks into a lecture hall with 500 students or a classroom with 50 students, or a laboratory, studio or practice room with five students, or a research laboratory or artists’ studio, with one student, and begins the process that is the center of university life.

Teaching.

If a university values great teaching, many things will follow: resources for creative and scholarly work, the generation of new ideas about the world around us, informed relationships between cultures, and a host of other things fueling learning. But teaching comes first because it is the center of a university. 

After three decades of teaching, and through personal relationships with a thousand university faculty members – from a diverse range of disciplines – who have taught in every setting imaginable, I have found that when students believe they are being taught well I usually agree with them.

I believe the best teachers are ones that students identify over and over again as the best teachers. 

This determination of excellence in teaching is not as mysterious as many make it out to be.

If you have attended college classes, do you remember the forms that each faculty member would give out at the end of the semester asking for your opinion of his or her ability to teach?

Responses from students over a period of time will give a good indication of teaching ability.  One semester’s work is not reliable; 10 years’: you can go to the bank with it.  The students don’t lie and the research literature and multiple studies confirm this. 

Students are good judges of teaching ability and they cut through the fog.

Faculty who are rated poorly by students have reasons: arguments about the time of day the class meets, the number of students in the class, race, creed, national origin, required or elective course, union membership, the requirements for research and scholarly productivity, the color of the rooms, whether or not a class is technically demanding or “soft,” may have a modicum of validity, but only in the smallest measure.

Good teaching is fueled by the passion of faculty members towards two things. 

First, their own disciplinary interests: this is why peer-reviewed research and creative activity, recognized by professional counterparts, is a critical part of faculty life.  Second is the commitment of faculty members to share knowledge and wisdom for the very particular purpose of improving the abilities and insights of the student.

Students sense both of these commitments.  They know when a teacher is full of baloney, and they have a honed ability to discern whether or not the faculty member cares.

Some faculty rationalize their low scores on the students’ perception of their teaching ability citing the above excuses.  The simple explanation is that the students see through the fluff and know the answers to the following two questions.

Does this person know something about what they are teaching?

Does this teacher care whether or not I get it?

And both are of equal importance.

At our university student quality will increase, research expenditures will grow, creative work will flourish, and students will get high scores on the Graduate Record Examination and be well placed for employment possibilities when the students answer the two questions affirmatively. 

And for the faculty at our university, “While we teach, we learn”.  Seneca

Our University: Vision and Dollars

If you pay any attention to anything regarding higher education, things are getting tough.  No news here. They have been since nearly the turn of this century when the state stopped increasing support of higher education. 

Oh, there are increases for pork laden programs, economic development activities and special legislative activities and initiatives, but general increases that nurture faculty quality and student excellence are non-existent, and anyone thinking that will change has his or her head in the sand.

Meanwhile, tuition, fees, and the costs of auxiliary services for all university support, food, housing, athletics, and other aspects of higher education are increasing.

The answer to the problem is gritty and simple. 

Get a vision, a plan, which looks out into the future for 15 or 20 years, and recognizes that states are withdrawing taxpayer support for higher education and shifting it to those who actually gain the greatest direct benefit:  the students who earn degrees.  That is why tuition and fees are escalating and student grant and loan support will increase, but direct state support to universities will decrease.

Public resources for higher education will play a diminishing role in the funding picture.  In the last five decades the state share of the budget decreased from 70% of our budget to around 30%. Some of the best public universities post budgets with less than 10% from state coffers.  The trend will not reverse itself.  It is a cultural shift that university leaders must accept, even welcome, as it will separate the grain from the chaff. 

A form of voucherism or state supported Darwinism and earned excellence will inexorably follow.

One aspect of any vision for higher education calls for universities to tighten their belts.  That is why Stanley Ikenberry, Interim President of the University of Illinois is implementing furloughs.

It is one aspect of a long range view.  Who knows, he may even have a plan. 

The idea that a furlough is only a short term solution and presents little long term relief has some truth in it.  But such a posture might, as in the case of the University of Illinois, create a refreshed cultural view of the university both internally and externally.  This could be powerful. 

The university has a real job to do.  The future of the state and the nation depends on it being well done.  Trim the sails and sharpen the target.  Here lie the seedlings of a plan and vision.    This view paints the university as a free-standing agency for the public good that recognizes decreasing state support and increasing private support.  Private giving, research, grants, fees and other exchanges of value that do not require hat-in-hand tit-for-tat at a politically broken, personality-driven, state house.   

Ikenberry’s furloughs provide $17 million from a $436 million backlog at the flagship. 

Peanuts they say.

Some argue this is a cash flow problem and not a budget problem, and assume when the dam breaks and the money flows that the problem is solved. 

This is short-sighted and naïve. 

Higher education in Illinois and the nation will survive by thinking ahead, tightening its belt and becoming more entrepreneurial than ever before. 

Vision and planning.  Not simply reacting. 

A university is a public good, but a unique one that requires leadership and vision that look long-term; and really good ones will never again be seen as state agencies, job banks, or patronage machines.

When a university becomes only a state agency it will fail in achieving its mission.  It must be more than that.  It must demonstrate value by its ability to attract resources. 

Our University must provide life changing opportunity to students and the greater community…anything less is abject neglect.   It requires vision in decades, and dollars from many sources, not terms of office and the public trough.

Our University: Toleration and Conviction

Third in a series of thoughts regarding the intersection of faith and reason in university life.

Knife edges are the places where greatness lives in organizations.  The sides of a knife don’t cut, but the well whetted edge of a knife is where the action is.  Faith has been placed on the flat side of the knife at universities.  For sharpness there must be two sides to the knife on campus – faith and reason.  Truth lives on the deliberately honed edge of faith and reason. 

The idea that faith expressed in relation to reason must pollute either or both is wrong-headed.  So too is the opposite.

For intellectual acuity to flourish on our campus an open mind is needed – and a willingness to listen and civilly deliberate perspectives of faith and reason. 

There are not many new issues to address regarding faith matters at my church.  Nearly all members agree on the most important considerations of the human condition.  The omnipotence of God, original sin, the deity of Christ, salvation through grace, and human beings as agents of free will created in God’s image: on these points there are few disagreements.  But the university is a crucible that refines me and my faith.  But it can only function in the presence of other faiths, and no faith at all is a form of faith in self, or nature, or process, or something.

Only a machine can be faithless. 

Many people, more studied than I, have deliberated the nexus of tolerance and conviction.  Tolerance has become a synonym for thoughtlessness.  It is maligned by misuse, misunderstanding, and moral relativism precisely because matters of faith are not part of public dialog:  important anywhere, but essential to a university.  Tolerance without a “second perspective” to tolerate is meaningless. 

The very purpose and nature of a good university is lost in a theater without faith written into the play. 

If ideas are treated as detached, or detachable in modern discourse, everyone is happy.  It is possible to have dispassionate discussion about events of history, absent any personal connection to them.  It is passion and conviction about ideas that cause problems.  And by definition, matters of faith require conviction.  The scientific method, based as it is on replicability, needs no conviction except allegiance to it. Some would argue this, in itself, to be a manifestation of faith.

Current events around global warming show the degree to which matters of ideology, sometimes confused with faith, are masqueraded as science.  Only reveal that which supports your perspective.

Where is truth, scientific or divine, in this equation?

The faith that I hold is strong and a matter of personal conviction.  I will not allow myself to demand that anyone believes as I do:  That is a matter of free will.  For example, a person who believes that human life begins at conception is deemed to be intolerant of those who believe life begins at any other time.  If asked, I will explain my position relative to my faith, just as assuredly as if asked the rate of decent of a falling apple at sea level I will respond: 32 feet per second squared; a position explained not by my faith, but by physics. 

The idea that these perspectives cannot co-habit is limited.   If science appears to disprove a faith view, so be it.  And if a deep faith conviction supports that which science cannot, so be it.

A cure for cancer will be a product of science, a miraculous healing of the same dreaded disease, a product of faith. 

Toleration requires that each listens respectfully to all.   Conviction demands that personal perspective is valued by you and others through belief, faith.  These perspectives can live side by side in a thinking human being in search of truth.

Is our university, or any other, for anything else?

Merry Christmas.