UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION


While we focus attention on our graduate and research programs, the Commissions on the Future reminded us, we must not neglect our fundamental role in providing high-quality undergraduate education and a fulfilling campus life for our students. We have much to celebrate in this area, and I will mention a few areas that are indicative of our progress.

• Our honors program continues to grow. We expect to enroll another large class next year, and we will expand the Honors in the Majors program for juniors and seniors.
  
  
• This semester, we have instituted the President’s Seminar program, in which 15 tenured full professors teach small classes of freshmen in courses designed around the faculty members’ unique strengths. We have been very pleased with the success of this first offering and have concluded that we will continue the program next year. It has proven to be an excellent way to increase student/faculty interaction and start our freshman class in a scholarly direction.


• In connection with the excellent enrollment management program put together by Provost Abele, his office has developed a splendid retention program to help students who have difficulty adjusting to university life and we are considering a “University Experience” course for all new students.


• The reopening of historic Bryan Hall as a living/learning center encourages us in our plans to renovate all our historic dorms to provide this kind of residential and education opportunity for our students.


• We continue to expand our ability to provide substantial international exposure to our students --a need of growing importance in an era in which the peoples of the world are increasingly connected through the globalization of commerce and knowledge.
Since 1966, with the creation of our Florence Study Center, FSU has been offering students the opportunity to study at an international location. Our year-round programs there and in London, Spain, and Panama are complemented by many summer programs including those in Paris, Moscow, Switzerland, Costa Rica, and two programs at Oxford. And we are exploring the possibility of new programs in Prague, Vietnam, China, and Africa. In the last five years, we have more than doubled the number of our students in these international programs.

To better prepare our students in an international economy and society, we have established a goal of having 25 percent of our undergraduate students experience an international learning opportunity before graduation. This means we must double again, in the next five years, the number of students enrolled each year in one of our international programs.


• At FSU we recognize the university’s role in character development. I am reminded of the words of one of our Eminent Scholars, Norm Thagard, in his remarks to the Commission on the Future. “Florida State, with its strong liberal arts background, is a civilizing institution,” he said.

We believe that. Teaching students personal and social responsibility is essential for higher education, and we believe we do it better than most. Through our Center for Civic Education and Service, we have created one of the most effective models of community service and service-learning in the nation. And through a variety of ways, we emphasize to our students the value of their being accountable for personal ethical conduct, and to aspire to lives of moral integrity.
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Doak Campbell’s memoirs of his life at FSU is entitled A University in Transition. In fact, institutions are always in transition--and particularly this one, situated in a rapidly growing but still-young state that is still defining a vision for itself.

It is amazing to contemplate the changes that have occurred on this campus just in the decade of the 1990s. In 1990, our enrollment was only 28,327. We graduated 6,414 students, more than 1,100 fewer we did last year. We were classified as a Carnegie Research II institution. We had no National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, no Film School, no University Center, no Leach Center, no Nobel Laureate on campus, and no computers in Finance and Administration. We did not have E-mail or the Internet or access to databases for our students. We did not have a master plan. We had never conducted a capital campaign, and our endowment hardly made the list of public universities. There was no Taxol invention, no FSU Research Foundation, no full time Technology Transfer staff. There was no FSU Card as we now know it. There was no Center for Civic Education, no service transcript. Many of our dormitories were not air-conditioned. Our faculty and students endured horrible crowding in Bellamy. We did not have the University Center, or the Pepper Building, or Sandels, or a renovated Hecht House. We had inadequate facilities for women’s athletic programs and no one had yet connected the term “dynasty” to our football program. In 1990, we did distance learning by having professors drive or fly to other places and teach their courses.

In general, our campus footprint was much more modest in 1990 than it is today, and the campus aesthetic atmosphere was often not pleasing.

Even as we see progress from 1990 until today, we know that we have not finished improving our physical facilities. The Public Safety Building is under construction and will be finished by the end of the year. Other new projects are in the design and planning stage. Soon construction will begin on the Student Life Building, with completion early in the year 2000. The Carraway Building will be renovated by the middle of next year. The co-location of the National Weather Service will begin late in 1999. In conjunction with the City of Tallahassee, the regional stormwater facility south of Gaines Street will be begun next spring. By October of 2001, the Pensacola Street realignment project should be completed. Design work will begin early next year on the project to close Woodward Avenue and transform it into a pedestrian/bicycle mall. And we continue aggressively to identify resources for the construction of the University Concert Hall.

Each of these improvements strengthens our ability to achieve our new vision of The Florida State University.
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How well have we kept faith with Doak Campbell’s dreams and with the spirit and energy of the 49ers? As I assess our progress in this decade, I feel very good. I feel a strong sense of energy and dedication among faculty, staff, and students. And I sense a readiness to move ahead aggressively, to seize the opportunity that is being given us, to earn a new level of distinction.
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This concludes our program. Thank you for coming, and please join us in the Beth Moor Lounge for a reception.