Faculty – Foundation for Excellence

Many important characteristics of a research university contribute quality at Southern; none compete with faculty for first place. To be sure without students there is no university. Our raison d’état are students, but after that, we are faced with the centrality of excellent faculty. The university is the faculty.

Faculty who care, faculty who contribute to the body of knowledge in their various fields, faculty who can stand in front of a lecture hall full of students and inspire, and return to their study, studio, or laboratory to create and share insight with the broader community: After sharing it locally, they share it nationally and internationally, these are the people who power the boat. Our leaders know this. Look at how some leaders worked diligently to bring and/or develop household names. People like Buckminster Fuller, John Gardner, Richard Russo, Rodney Jones and many others, some still here, some lured away by success, maybe we did not fight hard enough to keep them. We always should. Their names inspire a commitment to excellence for those that knew or know them – and there are many – thankfully too many to name.

Recruited like quarterbacks, paid like coaches. In six years I have heard the name Bucky, Fuller, or Buckminster Fuller an average of once a day… nearly two thousand times. Someone with insight hired a person of vision. I wonder if a hiring committee participated in the process, or was it just raw leadership going after raw excellence. This is backward looking though. We need to look forward. Our future is at stake.

Academic boldness is difficult to find and a challenge to implement, with standards of hiring, labor contracts, fixed raises with little or no flexibility for excellence. Yet, excellent faculty members set a standard, and build reputation. They are two legged marketers. Excellence on feet. Everywhere promoting SIUC for its quality, not because of an excellent contract, not because of excellent students, not because of excellent facilities, not because of an excellent location, simply because faculty members, the best of the best, strident minds, productive intellectual lives, nothing status quo, but ground braking thinkers and doers, were and are right here at Southern. And excellence begets excellence. Academic courage and boldness are required to build this kind of faculty. And people frequently are afraid of local excellence. Forces work against excellence all the time. I am not sure why excellence incites fear, but it does, especially in those of average capability or drive, insight or talent.

And universities are not the only places where this occurs. It takes a special organization to allow excellence to flourish. This is not to say that excellence in civil service employees or administrative and professional staff is not required, but they are not typically recruited in the national or international market place, and they rarely draw except from on campus. People will read about our sparkling buildings, and precision in our financial sheets, if and only if excellent faculty members are building the reputation of Southern in the four corners of the world, one idea or accomplishment, one piece or performance, at a time. Other necessary and important characteristics fall into place. Faculty must be first, and they are not always easy to love.

Sometimes good faculty members are persnickety, want things their way, demand much from the organization, and expect to be treated with deference. Right or wrong, it is the way of the academic marketplace and good universities tolerate it, excellent universities seek out people of excellent intellect, sometimes in spite of the challenges they present. There are too many examples, locally and around the world, where exuberant faculties help to make the reputation of the university simply because they are the university. This is not magic, but calculus. However, the prickliness of some great faculty members sometimes makes us long for the merely competent workmen, rather than the intellectual engineer. The literature on faculty work life suggests that the best teachers are frequently strong researchers, scholars, artists, and servants to their professions and the extended public. Faculty excellence at the core of a research university is not new or radical. Leaders understood it 150 years ago.

Governments cannot make universities by enactments of laws: Nor corporations by erections of edifices: The church cannot create them under the authority of heaven: The flattering eulogies of orators cannot adorn them with learning: Newspapers cannot puff them into being. Learned men-scholars- these are the only workmen who can build up universities. Provide charters and endowments- the necessary protection and capital – provide books and apparatus- the necessary tools: Then seek out sufficient scholars, and leave them to their work, as the intellectual engineers who alone are competent to do it.

–Henry P. Tappan (1805-1881) President, University of Michigan 1858, lecture, Christian Library Association 22 June, quoted in Richard Hofstadter and William Smith (eds.) American Higher Education: A Documentary History Volume II 1961, p. 519

Excellent faculty will make Southern excellent. Nothing else will make a first rate research university for our region.

Our Library, Our Heart of Hearts

I was walking the campus the other day and had the opportunity to meander through Morris Library. What a mark of excellence; what a powerful testimony to the import of knowledge and insight in our lives, and what a common occurrence in all of the best public research universities in America: they all have a library like Morris at their center. Bancroft at Berkeley, Perry-Castaneda at Texas, Sterling C. Evans at Texas A&M, Middleton at LSU, and Morris at SIUC. These are a few that I have had the pleasure to use. On the perimeter, football stadiums and basketball arenas, parking lots – always too few – facilities for physical plant, all in their own way are supporting academic excellence – at the edge of the campus. But the library, it has to be near the center, it is the heart that pumps the knowledge that fuels the academic enterprise.

The greater the university, the greater the library. There is an uncanny relationship between the quality of the library and the quality of the university. We have an excellent library; it ranks 75th in the nation based on assessments by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). I believe the heart of Southern Illinois is SIUC and, the heart of SIUC is Morris. And it is not the property of the university, but of Southern Illinois. Everyone can have access to an intellectual resource viewed to be one of the best research libraries in the nation.

I have a friend from Harrisburg. He remembers coming to the campus when he was a child, a state of being he left a long, long time ago. He remembers the great hall at the entry of Morris, the portraits of presidents, and chancellors. The sound of his footsteps on those hard floors, making noise, but encouraging quietness for the awe the experience inspired. He remembers the size of the building; riding in the elevator to get to one of the upper floors; there were not many elevators in Harrisburg and not many edifices as fine and grand as Morris. And it will be so much better in a few months than ever before. But the way he tells the story this is not what was really important about his first trip to Morris. He remembers the books, and the smell of the paste in the bindings, the paper, and the seemingly endless selection of things to read. He had never seen anything like it. I will bet many of you share a similar memory.

This early taste of knowledge and insight had a life changing impact on him. He still loves books. He could have been from Vienna, or Cairo, or El Dorado. More importantly – and this is the way we need to think about Our University – he could have been from Chicago, or San Francisco, or New York. Morris is that good, its impact is that great, its power that profound. It will impress people from any geographic origin, no matter their life experience, for its quality.

Now you say, he was a kid from Harrisburg, what did he know?

A few books on a shelf would have done the trick. Maybe.

But I have talked with faculty and deans, provosts and chancellors about our campus, when they visit one of the first things they ask about is Morris. They are usually not from Harrisburg, they have been in and out of innumerable university libraries, some of the best in the world, but they want to know, “How is the library?” Soon, we will have an excellent building in the center of the university, and we will be able to say with justifiable pride, the Association of Research Libraries places Morris 75th in the nation, ahead of MIT and Purdue. An excellent building, a resourceful staff, and strong collections. We attain the hat trick that determines the quality of the library and, I would argue, the quality of the campus. Faculty members appreciate this – the library can never be good enough. And we don’t have the market cornered. The people at Harvard, Yale and Columbia, the three best research libraries in the United States say the same thing, and together possess nearly a millennium of experience and more money than the next two dozen universities combined. The best libraries need constant attention and energy.

You know why? They know what the kid from Harrisburg knew.

The Library is the heart of the University. And if the University is the heart of the region Morris Library is our heart of hearts.