 today, but thinking about how we do our job, thinking about who we do our job, why we are here to start with and who we do our jobs for, is part of what this institute should be a tone setter for the year. If you think about it, and the video by the way is by Sal Khan, he's the instigator of the Khan Institute, an institute that helps work with students to become successful at levels that others might have thought they were not capable of. That, the name of the video, if you go to, if you put in Khan in your search engine, put in KAHN, TED Talk, a couple of TED Talks will pop up. The one that I want you to take a look at is one that says teaching for mastery instead of test scores. And the reason I want you to take a look at that, it was to make a point that a couple of things are happening that we need to be aware of as an institution. We look back at the last couple of years and we've had a lot of issues that we've had to deal with, but that had very little to do with the core mission of the institution. It had very little to do with the teaching and learning mission of the institution. It had very little to do with who we are at our core. It's time for us now to start focusing on who we are at our core and start looking at how we do that job more effectively. Higher education is changing, has changed. And as those changes have taken place and will continue to take place, what we now are challenged with is how will Elizabeth City State University find relevance in this new education market? Get the picture. And this is what you'll find when you look at the TED Talk, when you look at what writers are saying about and pundits are saying about education today. We've moved to a point in a knowledge-based society where people are starting to ask questions about the sorting tendencies that higher education has sustained over the course of the last couple of centuries. What has happened is there's been this kind of sorting process that takes place. When we start it, when you look at the growth of the American University, what you see is also the growth of a selection process that takes place. There are institutions that claim themselves to be highly selective institutions. There are institutions that claim themselves to be moderately selective institutions. And there are institutions which move all the way toward the open institution kind of model. Well, in the highly selective or in the process of developing that selectivity model or that sorting model, what has happened is we've created an environment where high school students and their parents that are thinking about what colleges and universities they're going to study at are all very nervous and upset about which institutions are going to accept them. And not only which institutions are going to accept them, what then will be the outcomes of their having participated at those institutions? Three books that I had a chance to kind of get absorbed in over the course of the holidays. The first one was The End of Average by Todd Rose. And Todd Rose kind of identifies, goes through the history of how we got into this averaging process, the development of the Averagarian societies and how that got involved in the development of both corporate and educational entities and how what we have gotten into the model of is this typing and staging process that puts people in a position of you've got to be average but better than average. You've got to be just like everybody else but better. That's kind of the theme. How do you in a world where we need access to all of the talent possible move from this idea where we only select or we weed, if you will, for those students that are capable of understanding what we teach toward an institution, toward an educational entity that values every student that sets foot on the campus and looks for a way to allow every student to master the subjects that we teach? How do we get there? And there are ways of doing it. There are institutions that are doing this. And I'm going to invite you to looking at the future for not only American higher education but a very bright future for Elizabeth City State University because I would argue to you that this institution, because of where we are right now in history, because of our focus on we're going to grow, because we're going to grow our student body, we're going to grow our faculty, we're going to grow our programs, we're going to grow our need for services. If we grow in all of those areas strategically rather than haphazardly, not only can we have a much brighter future but we can teach other institutions how to do this and how to do this well. One of the things that I have said this before from this podium, I'll say it again, and I reflected on it a lot over the course of the break. I can't save Elizabeth City State University. I can't even make Elizabeth City State University better. But we can. If we buy into, as was talked about, this idea that we believe in governance, both with the faculty and with the staff, if we talk about what the realistic and positive career development opportunities, our roles, our investments are for our faculty and for our staff, in an environment like Northeastern North Carolina where there is a tremendous need for an institution like this, if we weren't here, there would be an effort underway to develop an institution like this. Our challenge is to meet the need. Our challenge is to meet the need with 21st century concepts. Our challenge is not to return to some days of bygone glory for an institution. This institution does have a very rich tradition. It has a tradition of resilience. It has a tradition of excellence. But the past should inform us the future is our challenge. And that's what we have to start thinking about as an institution, as a group. There's another book that I'm going to, and I'm throwing these titles out, and I hope some of them will catch and that some of you will read these. The first one was The End of Average by Todd Rose. The second one was Where You Go is Not Who You Will Become. Now this was one that was a little bit challenging for me because I tend to believe the opposite. I tend to believe that every institution has an operating ethos and every student that attends the institution gets marked with that ethos. And it doesn't matter where you did your undergraduate work, it had an indelible mark on you. And you have reacted for the rest of your career as part of that ethos at that institution that you attended. That may have continued at your graduate institutions. For those of you that are members of the staff and are still working on degrees, are considering degrees here, your working here is having and has had an indelible mark on you. There is an ethos that the institution has, and we have a challenge to understand what that ethos is, and we have the opportunity to shape that ethos with an eye on 21st century education. The argument made in the book, and this one is by Frank Bruni, Where You Go is Not Who You'll Become, he argues that all of the nervousness that goes into the wars that families and their students fight about which institutions they go to, there's a set of institutions they target, there's a set of institutions that students worry about getting accepted to and suffer when they don't get accepted to them, and then when they have to make other choices, they wonder whether or not they will get as good a deal. But the evidence shows that very strong state institutions like Elizabeth City State University and others provide an opening that allows individuals to come in, get a high quality education, a value laden education, and go out and do very well in their selected fields of endeavor. One of the things that you'll hear the Thurgood Marshall group talking about now, because they're doing a lot of research around the evidence that HBCUs have impact, and one of the things that has come out in the data is that literally when you go in and you look at, the way impact is measured now in terms of careerism is when our students graduate, there are efforts to get a read on when they graduate within six months, what kind of job do they have, and what are their salaries. And what the Thurgood Marshall group saw in study after study on this is that with HBCUs, in many cases, students in that first three months out may have started at a lower salary, may have started in a job that was out of their field, but over time, if you look at that five years out and ten years out, the experiences, the leadership experiences, the personal interactions that we are able to provide because of our size, our scope, and our methodologies provides these students with the tools that they need, the soft skills if you will, to excel in their disciplines, and five and ten years out you see them passing their colleagues into more prestigious institutions. We have a very valuable role to play in American higher education. Every student we teach, every student that comes to this campus, every student we interact with has the potential for success. If we can set aside the old model of that sort and teach those who are worthy and accept the notion that every student has the capacity to learn and our challenge is going to be how do we present the information to them in a way that they can learn it, then we become a different kind of institution. We become the kind of institution that the 21st century world is looking for. We become the kind of institution that rather than focusing on the system alone starts to focus on the value of the individual. The third book, and I'm going to mention this briefly, was the Band With Recovery. This is one, I'm going to blame the provost for this one. Band With Recovery was written by Vaia van Schelden, and I'm going to blame the provost for this one because when we went on visits to the Office of Education, the Department of Agriculture and other places in D.C., we went to the Institute for the National Endowment for the Humanities. And one of the books that the person we spoke to was reading at the time, she had on the desk was this book, Band With Recovery. And what it talks about is it explains in many ways, for those of you in psychology and human sciences, there's been a lot of work looking at how does, how do disruptions in life, how does oppression, how does being part of the outgroup, if you will, affect your capacity for success. And so this book pulls together a lot of the research around that and argues the point, and this may show up in your classroom in some instances that if students are thinking about themselves from the concept of a minority status, if students are thinking about themselves from the standpoint of a poverty status, if students are thinking about themselves from the standpoint of any set of worries that they might bring with them to the classroom, then that eats up Band With, if you will, and slows down their capacity to process the knowledge and skills that you are trying to give to them. Now I'm going to argue, and I'm going to point out my colleagues in the Education Department, and I'm going to say they study this all the time. If you want to dig deeper in this, these are the kinds of conversations that across faculties might be worthwhile in terms of trying to understand what from other disciplines can inform me in the way I do the teaching in my discipline that will allow me to become a better teacher and consequently this institution to become a better institution. If my job is a service role at the institution, what is it about the way I do my job? What is it about the way I interact with the students we serve? What is it about the way I interact with my colleagues that feeds into disruptions or feeds into eating up Band With and making it very difficult for others to understand what the essential goals are, what our essential roles are, how we can move forward. So I'm going to argue that we stand at a point of opportunity as a university. We stand at a point of opportunity where we have a lot of strong assets. We've got an education program that's looking very deeply into problem-based learning, experiential-based learning and looking at how that can be a broader conversation across the institution. We're looking at our business and finance area where we've already started to do practical things like develop economic impact studies in-house and those are services that we can start to talk about. And I've talked to some people in other places around the community and they're very much interested in the idea of the university helping them out with some of those kinds of things. We're standing at a point where there's been a lot of conversation over years about niche programs. We have an opportunity if we can take a program like aviation science and the areas that are associated with it and people's willingness to invest in those areas. What you're going to see is that a program like that is built very strongly on the traditional disciplines, the chemistry, the physics, the mathematics, the computer science. And those programs will become stronger because of an investment in aviation science. It's also because the program bridges over to the management side that management and communications and all of those other program areas can also become stronger as we look at investments in those areas. We need to look at ourselves and at our institution as a whole, but it has to be a week. One of the things that I will tell you just point blank. Is that we keep hurting ourselves because instead of talking to one another in mass and getting to a conversation about the institutional ethos, what it ought to be, what it can be, what we wind up doing is getting together in our little enclaves around campus. Then we get together in our social enclaves away from campus and what happens is we walk away from it with a distorted picture of the opportunity. I propose to you that if we focus on what our opportunities are at this point, if we focus on what our assets are at this point, if we focus on moving forward, not only will we see rapid and sustainable growth, but we will see the kind of reputation evolved around this institution that it deserves, the kind of high reputation. Just a point. One of the things that all of you have heard, every conference you go to, every conversation about education that you've heard on the news, everybody that talks about education talks about the high cost of education. Talks about the out of control cost of education. Yet here we stand as an institution in northeastern North Carolina that for years has been the best value for the lowest cost in the University of North Carolina system. And that's been a point that we have had for years, but we've not sold that point very well. Yet now, starting this fall with the NC Promise legislation kicking in, the institution that was already the best value becomes an even better value. How is it we don't see that as an asset? How is it we don't see and understand that making that work will attract new and additional investment? We have opportunities. We have assets. We've got you. And we can do this. I'm going to end with a commercialism, but to extend the invitation and to set the platform, I'm going to say this, you're going to have the opportunity to hear from a couple of speakers today that are part of the Gardner Institute that focuses on student success and how that student success can be affected and how that student success can be measured. We as an institution committed about six months ago to the idea of focusing on the foundations of excellence review for the University. Some of us have taken that to heart. Some of us have hardly taken it. What we need to do is understand that if we do this very serious reflection on who we are and how we do business as an institution, as faculty, as staff, as an institution delivering, while at the same time we're going to be taking a critical look at what our students are saying about what they need in order to learn effectively, then we have an opportunity to set a path that is informed by the customers we intend to serve, that is informed by the service deliverers that will be part of that process. We can, Elizabeth City State University can become a magnet for talent, a magnet for progress, and in terms of the 21st century, the kind of institutions that others will vie to be. Thank you for your time this morning. By the way, everything that happens here today, all of the sessions are designed both for the faculty and for the staff. The more you know about what's under the hood at the institution, the better you're going to be able to critically inform the people in your clicks and the people in your social sets. Thank you so very much, and we're going to get you out of here before it snows.