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| Office of the President > State of the University 2000 | |
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A Future We Would
Welcome - How We Measure Up |
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| I. | Move FSU into the top tier of public university national rankings and develop indicators to measure our progress toward quality with efficient use of resources. |
Recommendation I |
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 I
confess that national rankings, including AAU membership, do not move me
much, but there should be ways for us to keep score and to assess ourselves.
With all their faults, these rankings are one of the ways to figure out
where we are. |
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| The
Provost is helping develop new ranking criteria with the National Research
Panel of the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges.
His involvement increases awareness of Florida State as a major research
university, and it gives us a voice in assuring that realistic criteria
will be adapted. |
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| Our
work to achieve higher national rankings involves building our departments,
building our faculty, and building our student body. |
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| The
Provost has identified those academic units showing promise for achieving
top-tier status, and is adding resources to give them the needed push. I
am also very pleased with the work being done by the deans and department
chairs to review all faculty members’ work, since the talents and energy
of all faculty are important to the quality of this university. I particularly
urge our faculty to take seriously the task of post-tenure review, because
it is only with a sincere devotion to our processes that we will be able
to defend tenure. |
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| An
allocation of $1 million in expense funding has gone to schools and colleges
this year. This is a 15 per cent increase in expense expenditures. These
funds have just one stipulation: They should create an identifiable impact
on the academic lives of our faculty members. |
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| Our
faculty numbers are going to grow dramatically.
We expect that 100 new faculty members will be joining us next fall and
similar large numbers in the following years. That’s more new faculty than
we recruited for our legendary ‘49ers, who transformed this university a
little over 50 years ago. |
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| Of
course, our faculty growth responds to higher enrollments, but we now have
the opportunity to add faculty at a rate greater than enrollment growth,
and this fact is due to special new programs. |
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| The
quality of this faculty is our best ever. I believe that we are creating
the top-tier university that our Commissions envisioned. As you are aware,
we have created the Eppes Professorships
and we are adding Eminent Scholar Chairs as a result of our success at private
fund raising. Today, we have a total of 38 Eminent Scholar Chairs and seven
Eppes professors, for a total of 45 Eppes Professors and Eminent Scholars. |
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| In
addition, an Eminent Scholar Chair is being established through our new
Center for the Advancement of Human Rights, and that 46th chair will be
filled in the near future. |
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| We
are so proud that these people have chosen to join us at Florida State and
add their national reputations to an already great faculty. Indeed, the
Eppes program has been so successful that we decided to double our original
goal of 10 Eppes professors to a new goal of 20, and add 13 in the coming
year. We are attempting to identify talented faculty around the country
and recruit them to FSU, but we cannot ignore the talent of our long-time
faculty. |
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| Last
year, we established 21 named professorships above those provided from private
funding, and this year we will add 40 additional named professorships. |
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| Of
course, to build and retain a great faculty requires competitive
salaries. |
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| For
the years between 1997 and 2000, more than $8.6 million has been added to
faculty pay, including special pay increases like PEP, TIP and last year’s
tuition-funded increase. |
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| Much
of this was from the legislative funding for TIP and PEP, but when that
funding ceased in 1999-2000, we worked with a student/faculty committee
and created a merit pay plan funded by about $660,000 in tuition dollars.
About 45 per cent of the faculty has received at least one TIP or PEP award
since 1993-94, and 674 faculty and staff have received salary raises from
the tuition money. |
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| We
plan another salary increase following the same procedures used last year
with tuition-increase funds. The amount of raise dollars available from
these funds this year is nearly three times as much as last year. Raises
will become effective in November and December and will be for staff as
well as faculty. |
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| We
are, of course, working to build the quality of our student body, both graduate
and undergraduate. Certainly we’ve been growing in terms of quantity. |
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| This
fall we welcomed more students to this campus than ever before. We now have
an enrollment of about 34,500, with
over 5,800 first-time-in-college students. Next year we expect to enroll
between 5,900 and 6,200 FTIC students and to cap undergraduate enrollment
for first-year students at 6,200. |
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| Since
I became president in 1994, we have grown more than the total enrollment
of the university in 1950. |
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| Our
entering students are better prepared for college
work than ever. They had an average SAT of 1188, the third year in a
row that we’ve had double-digit increases in average SAT. |
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| This
university owes thanks to the Provost and his enrollment management team,
and I would like to ask that this group stand. |
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| The
one disappointment I want to report is the fall-off in the recruitment of
National Merit, Achievement and Hispanic Scholars. After several years
in the top tier of American universities, we slipped this year, bringing
in only half the number from last year. This will be corrected, and I have
received a recommendation from John Barnhill that I like very much, which
involves the direct participation of our faculty in the recruitment and
mentoring process, and I will discuss this with the faculty Senate. |
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| So...we’ve
made great strides to improve our departments, our faculty and our students.
The commissions told us that we should also: |
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| Recommendation II | Back to Introduction | ||
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