Quality is Our First Job

Wanting our university to grow in stature and importance, because it will be a better friend to our region, is an appropriate and powerful aspiration. There is only one way to do it. Quality sought, defined and heralded as academic excellence will make Southern a strong force. In all but the most limited definitions this includes softball and football, the symphony, and service to the region. Motive is everything though. We engage ourselves in these ways because if properly attended to they improve the academic mission of Southern. Academic excellence must be the first cause of all action. Not jobs, not economic development, not enrollment numbers, not placation of various political forces. Only quality. It must be job one and all else will follow.

Quality is an elusive construct and appears differently in various settings. It is always the result of passionate work and never the result of an accident. The key to understanding excellence for Southern is dependent on high quality people with vision. That doesn’t differentiate the university from our local car dealer, bank, movie theater, fast food joint, or house of worship. This too is not hard to see. Find the people who love their work, whose labor is born of devotion, and you will always find the best. Mark Twain said, “Who was it who said, “Blessed is the man who has found his work”? Whoever it was he had the right idea in his mind.”

Faculty, students, and staff who love their labor embrace and achieve excellence in one form or another. People driven by principle and purpose, vision, not processors or panderers, are those we want to associate with. They set the highest level of expectation and once achieved immediately create even higher expectations for themselves, and for those around them. This is what powers a university.

Excellence is a demanding target, a difficult roommate, an unloving friend, sometimes it is cruel… a goal that requires sacrifice… and it is always intolerant of a half-hearted effort. If you think you have attained excellence and say to yourself as you read these words, “Wait a minute, I have accomplished something excellent and it was easy and fun,” I will say to you, “You may have performed well, you may have an innate or God given skill that you have exercised with ease, in a common way, but you have not attained anything excellent.” By definition excellence requires sacrifice and hard work.

Excellence grows in soil fertilized by vision, accountability, honesty, loyalty, determination, steadfastness, intolerance for compromise, and other characteristics that if not always, with great frequency, come at a high price. Why is excellence so important from the classroom to the boardroom and everywhere in between? It draws people together and pushes all forward, like a lever atop a fulcrum. Southern should nurture, reward, and recognize excellence for its pervasive impact to draw students here, to draw business here, to draw faculty here, to draw industry here, because they all seek to be associated with excellence. Looking forward through current challenges is the means by which excellence is achieved, and the edge is whetted.

Excellence speaks for itself in almost every facet of university life. By demanding only the best from leadership, students, faculty and staff, we will always stretch beyond our apparent potential and our university will serve all well.

Our University – Our Neighborhood

Universities are thread in a neighborhood fabric. In cities neighborhood is a local concept, a few blocks, but not so with Southern, nestled between two rivers, and twice that many cultures. Our university exists on the northern boundary of the Bible belt and the southern boundary of the great industrial Midwest, between powerful rivers that for centuries provided the means for trade and commerce. We bridge the southern culture of states rights and fierce independence, and the northern culture of federalism; the city culture of trade and manufacture, and the rural culture of agriculture.
Our place makes our university special and consequential if we but listen carefully.
Selling short our position of utility and service at these confluences diminishes our impact on the world. We can affect our nation by service at home. We must celebrate the idea that our region affects who we are and what we do and vice versa. We must befriend and be befriended. It makes Southern better. It unites and blends, rather than divides and isolates.
Traditionally universities existed as extensions of clerical order, and the various churches and denominations of faith, Christian and non-Christian. Universities mirrored monasteries. Set apart so students could focus on learning, uninterrupted. How inappropriate isolation is for a public university in the 21st century. From the inside out, and the outside in, effective universities embrace, and are embraced.
A university must be responsive to the environment in which it exists. Providing educational opportunities to students so they may obtain credentials and develop competencies to be able to perform in the workplace and meaningfully contribute is certainly one of the more important and obvious ones, but only one.

All universities are political organisms; however, public research universities in the United States are specifically chartered as such. The importance of focusing public institutions of higher education on critical state and national problems was institutionalized when governments provided resources, land and funding for this purpose. The public service and outreach functions common to universities are almost uniformly expressed as a fundamental aspect of mission.

Service starts at home, in a neighborhood, in the best universities.

As with all extensions of service, the greatest beneficiary of the service provided is not the individual or the organization served, but the individual or the organization that serves. As Southern Illinois University recognizes the significance of the debt owed to our region, the benefit achieved through serving the people who call Southern Illinois home, the quality of our University will increase in like proportion. Some might believe it will make us parochial, I say it makes us relevant. It is as much a law of the nature of a public university in a free society as the idea that when an apple is cut loose from a tree, it falls to the ground.

Unapplied knowledge is knowledge shorn of its meaning. The careful shielding of a university from the activities of the world around is the best way to chill interest and to defeat progress. Celibacy does not suit a university. It must mate itself with action. –Alfred North Whitehead

Through service we accomplish our academic mission, and improve our neighborhood. When we put our knowledge to work locally, we make our university better nationally and internationally because real need is the best grist for our mill.

Robert Reid – Flagman of Southern

I came to work one morning last week and noticed a policeman raising a flag. For those of you who don’t know our campus, this was a surprise because Robert Reid raised and lowered the campus flags every day. An elderly gentleman who used to ride around on his two wheeler, the flags in the basket on his bike. He got a bit unsteady on that two wheeler so he got a three wheeler. He would not quit.

He is what would commonly be called a good man, but he is much better than that. Good man isn’t even close. It’s trite, and this gentleman is genuine.

Sounds like the beginning of an obituary, but Robert is down, not out. He is no longer able to take care of the flags, and therefore the campus that he loved. The cold weather and the persistence of time, work against his balance, his joints, his muscles, and everything else about a man that gets him around. He had a stroke or two along the way. Never stopped him. Slowed him down a bit but that was all.

With gravity worn body, and speech not as crisp as it used to be, his mind is like a steel trap. So sharp, tightly wound, ever seeking to understand the world around him. The same characteristics that we value in students and ourselves were exhibited every time I saw Robert. I did not call him Bob although many did.

A number of years ago he crusaded to get the clock fixed in Pulliam Tower, and the chimes that punctuate campus life. Silent for years but no longer and they should never be quiet again. Chalk one up for a quiet crusader.

Robert loved our university, his university. He came here day and night to care for the flags, and they too are Southern. Because he did something he loved, he did it with satisfaction in his heart… I need to work at that more everyday. And this avocation put him at ease, both with himself, and those with whom he crossed paths. He is what people in the counseling professions might call “centered”. I would call it being at peace with your self, meek and humble.

He was always patient in his work. He moved with it on his rounds, and was always kind in carrying out his calling. In some ways he represents what is important as we start a new year, a rebirth of sorts. With compassionate Robert went about his self appointed business for no reward other than the joy of its substance. He showed a kind of pride, not the kind that your mother scolded you for, but the righteous kind because of its grace and appropriateness.

As we make the transition from the old year to the new one some reflection on the hope of newness seems a good thing, especially when we see so much of that hope alive in some of the people that we come in contact with everyday at Southern.

The University is, according to the usual designation, an Alma Mater, knowing her children one by one, not a foundry or a mint, or a treadmill. John Henry (Cardinal) Newman. (1801-1890), Rector, Catholic University of Ireland.

Robert represents something very important about our University, something called commitment.