Athletics Builds Community

Creating a strong sense of community for students, faculty, staff, alumni and friends is crucial to attaining excellence. There are many avenues through which communities are built, but one that is undeniably powerful for public research universities is intercollegiate athletics.

Members of our community foster and build pride as participants in, and spectators of, intercollegiate competition. Scholarship support provides opportunity for student athletes that might otherwise go unrealized. An intercollegiate athletics program that is well conceived, intelligently led and managed to the best interests of students has great value. Little is more harmful to a university than a poorly run, ill conceived, misdirected athletics program. Thankfully that is not the case at our university.

Similarly, nothing is more important in trumpeting excellence than accomplishments in teaching, research, scholarly, and creative work that garners national attention. Sustained growth in research expenditures, appointments to the national academies, membership of faculty and staff in scholarly and learned societies, attainment of prestigious scholarships, such as the Rhodes, Truman, or Mitchell, and consistent growth in endowment assets all pronounce clearly the aspirations of our university.

Some believe that increasing athletic prowess will have a positive impact on enrollment. It will never hurt, unless central mission is sacrificed to attain distinction in athletics, but it will never be a substitute for academic excellence.

Athletics programs are thought to be income generators for the campus. This is the case for the host communities to the campus, taxing bodies, the restaurants, the hotels, the bookstores, and other service organizations that thrive on campus activity, but not the campus. Athletics programs cannot exist without subsidies in the form of student fees, payroll, infrastructure and state resources.

That is the way it is.

Follow the money carefully. There are only a dozen public research universities that legitimately “make money” on intercollegiate athletics. Interestingly, every one of them is also an academic powerhouse. Michigan may be the best example but the return on investment, even there, is small. Illinois does not do it.

I would never suggest that intercollegiate athletics competition should be anything but the best our university can offer. It builds community. It does not provide revenue for the campus, and it will not increase enrollment. It can build positive pride, unfortunately it can generate hubris, and only in the rarest of cases does it build capital.

Positive pride has value for a university. At General Motors corporate pride, while important, plays second fiddle to quarterly reports and stock value. At our university pride of significant academic accomplishment is our stock. Nothing else.

Institutional pride is the foundation for student and faculty quality, and it must be constructed of many stones, one of them is intercollegiate competition. Subsidized athletics is a good investment if, and only if, it is in service to our academic mission. At some institutions the quest for athletic dominance has come at great cost. It need not be the case. In fact, at our university student athletes carry better grade point averages than the general student population.

The combination of athletics and academics is a powerful one-two punch for pride…but we can give it away if we are not careful.

Properly led, the investment can be a very good one. Our university needs to build community and a well run intercollegiate athletics program helps do just that.

Aspirational Leadership

You may have heard the old adage; the value of real estate is determined by three factors, location, location, and location. Here is a twist as we think about our university; the quality of the university is determined by three factors, leadership, leadership, and leadership. People in universities are cautious to say too much about the importance and power of university leadership as they feel it might undercut the importance of shared governance: the idea that faculty, staff and students have a voice in the direction the ship should go.

Strong leadership does not undervalue participation, but rather makes an organization come to life with communication, conviviality and collaborative decision making, even when it creates challenges by airing tough questions. This works at home, in the office, the classroom, at church – all over town. Strong leadership coupled with communication makes things go.

One of Southern Illinois University’s late presidents, Delyte Morris, arrived on the campus of Southern Illinois University, then Southern Normal University in the late 1940s. He retired in the early 1970s and his widow, Mrs. Dorothy Morris was present in 2005 when the time capsule from the cornerstone of Morris Library, placed during his tenure as president, was opened. In it was his simply articulated vision, from which he never fainted… giving power and life to it.

Morris carried the vision on folded paper in his wallet; a list of things he wanted in place for future generations. It included building residence halls, a student center, classroom buildings, and top-notch faculty. He could see that a small, teacher’s college could become a leading national research university and he convinced others to believe with him. An aspirational leader he was.

Aspirational Leaders in universities see beyond the daily routines and clearly understand where they want to go and what the benefits will be. They live for the sake of progress; they realize that change is powerful and positive.

Leadership of any variety cannot be effective unless the focus on the primary purpose is center stage – that of serving students by challenging them to become something they are not is the work of a university. There is no other purpose. The nature of many students, like all of us most days, is to resist change. Universities always need to be in the process of change – of becoming something they are not. We can get confounded by all the things that we do that support our service to students and miss the point of serving students.

The result of inaction, complacency, or a desire for the status quo will result in flatness in the trajectory of the university and it is aspirational Leadership that can overcome lethargy. Bureaucracy is the villain of progress and it is not open to leadership of any kind. Leadership causes universities to move, to be upwardly projected. Nothing else will.

The lack of leadership will grind a campus to a halt as surely as spring break. But leadership cannot move without focus, and the focus must be built on a vision. Warren Bennis, former president of the University of Cincinnati said it best. The first job of a leader is to define a vision for the organization…. Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.

Our university always needs leadership at every level, and it must be guided by vision.

Our University Stock Certificates

Stock certificates are possessed by people to prove partial ownership of a corporation, shares. A bearer’s stock certificate entitles the holder to exercise all legal rights associated with the stock.

Holders of stock certificates want the value of the stock to increase thereby creating positive benefit. It is very simple and the basis for the power of our national economy.

So too it is with a diploma from our university.

The sheepskin, punched ticket, parchment, wall paper, and all of the other handles we attach to the university diploma miss the mark. It is, and forever will be, a stock certificate.

When a company, through strong employees, excellent leadership, a passion for its mission, a commitment to quality, a sense of vision, and an aspiration vigorously pursued succeeds, the value of the stock goes up.

Scholars of tomorrow should not be treated like customers. Students do not buy a product, they buy an opportunity. There is little that has fundamentally confused public higher education at research universities more than the notion that students are customers.

Students own stock.

Some say students are customers in the bookstore, the dining-hall, and at the arena. I would suggest that even when they eat, buy books, or watch an athletic event, they are not really customers at all but something much different.

Students are more akin to parishioners at a church or members of a temple, mosque, or synagogue, but they should not be considered customers. They are more like participants in a play, not necessarily the actors but an engaged audience at the theater, rather than customers. A hotel has guests, and I will assure you that the best hoteliers see visitors as guests and never as customers. A doctor has patients but rarely would they see their patients as customers, although patients pay for advice, service, and counsel regarding their health.

Customers buy a predetermined item at a preset price that meets certain specifications, spelled out in advance in a reasonable level of detail; in short, a product. Almost all customers are given a money back guarantee for the product or service purchased if expectations are not met. The idea of buying something which you know might fail to deliver – given that a specific outcome was promised – is unfathomable in any customer setting.

It happens with stock purchases all the time.

Students hold us in their hands through the quality of work they generate and thereby perpetuate excellence at our university. They are not customers. They are stock holders.

The challenge of contemporary higher education is the concept that the degree, and the educational change that it purportedly represents, is a property right both before and after the tuition and fees are paid, i.e., at the point of purchase. The student does not buy a product but rather an opportunity.

That opportunity is represented in the stock certificate that says “Graduate of Southern Illinois University Carbondale”.

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) was Lord Rector of St. Andrews University from 1865-1868. In his inaugural address, Mill claimed that the purpose of the university was for “laying open to each succeeding generation the ideas and characteristics important to personal development and social progress.”

He nailed it, as we must. And when we do, the value of our university stock skyrockets.

Private Giving – Public Learning

The greatest example of a beneficial public-private partnership in our nation is public higher education.  Any student of history knows the key to glory in our republic is the balance between the private lives of citizens and their support of the public good.   Intellectual and fiscal resources, ingenuity and taxes, power the nation, hopefully more the former than the latter. University achievement will likewise be propelled, but boosted significantly by donors who love and support their alma mater.

Tax dollars alone won’t work.

This makes universities unique in the constellation of state agencies, and a public university is a state agency.  The six thousand employees of Southern know they work for the State of Illinois. But here is another truth…Universities in the 21st century will be built on the foundation of private giving, and this was not the case in the fifties and sixties when, to quote Dorothy Morris, “The money grew on trees – it just grew on trees.”

The four resource streams for funding public higher education are: 1) state appropriations, 2) tuition and fees, 3) grants, gifts and contracts, and 4) auxiliary operations.  In every public university in the United States an inexorable shift has been occurring over the past forty years.  State appropriations relative to total expenditures have been steadily becoming a smaller part of the resource pie.  At the University of Virginia state appropriations make up less that 10% of total expenditures.  The trend is similar everywhere.

At our University we rely too heavily on the state, over 30% of our budget comes from state appropriations, down from nearly 70% just 4 decades ago.  A simple rule applies to all public research universities:  The better the institution the smaller the contribution of state resources for operating the organization. That doesn’t mean that state funds are unimportant or unappreciated.

States resources are seed corn, not harvest.

Effective development of extramural support for academic excellence is critical as tuition and other resource streams are pulled and pressed more thinly.  Philanthropy, research support, and other public/private ventures must all continue to grow as reliable funding streams.

The just desire to keep tuition and fees within reach persists, with recognition that little change in trend of state appropriations will increase the importance of private funding, and entrepreneurial public-private partnerships.  Intelligently coupled cost effective management principles and giving provide a margin of excellence in educational opportunity for students.  The challenge over the next decade is for resource generation and allocation that is attentive to the strength, need and mission of every part of our University.  There must be a partnership of public and private funding.

The opportunity and the demand for innovation are greater now than at any time in history as a result of the increased pressure on the resources of the State.  An impossible task to make the resource equation work, and simultaneously build quality?  I would argue that out of such circumstances institutional character and quality are defined, honed and enhanced.  Logan Wilson, president of the American Council of Education said it clearly, “Higher education will be financed adequately only when costs are regarded as investments rather than expenditures…”

In order to make our university work, we must have private giving, and for that our university must be worthy.  Quality and giving drive each other as surely as inhaling and exhaling.