Added to the enrichment from our capital campaign and contract and grant activity is the benefit to the university through licensing, particularly from Dr. Robert Holton’s invention of Taxol. Thanks to that income to our still young FSU Research Foundation, this institution is moving up the ranks of the top ten in the nation in royalties received. We are now able to take initiatives which were not possible before we increased our contract and grant funding, our return on intellectual property, and our private support.

So we are blessed with new resources; with the intellectual capital that resides in the faculty of this university; many programs of national distinction; a student body that grows more diverse and brilliant each year; new financial strength, contracts and grants, gifts, and royalties; and a tradition of innovation and performance.
How then should we deploy these resources to reach the common vision articulated by the internal and external Commissions on the Future and the Board of Regents?

Let me outline three initial steps which focus on the recruitment of faculty.

• First: The Commission on the Future recommended that I appoint a blue-ribbon commission to examine ways to use our resources to achieve a new level of excellence in graduate and research programs. This is an excellent recommendation. It will provide us an ongoing method of evaluating how we match our resources to our ambitions.
  

In the next few days, I will appoint a Futures Advisory Committee to follow up on the work of the Commissions on the Future. This new standing committee will advise the President and Provost on ways to advance the academic excellence of the university.


• Secondly, we will embark on an ambitious effort to attract a new generation of outstanding faculty to equal the “49ers” in their long-term impact on FSU. We must fill the vacant Eminent Scholar Chairs, and make decisions about permanent appointments to visiting chairs, with the most talented faculty we can find: people who understand the culture of FSU, who appreciate our liberal arts heritage, and who join in our common vision. We will seek scholars who have the energy, vision, and passion that distinguished the 49ers. And, we will expect of this new group of outstanding faculty the same kind of extraordinary results achieved by those who found their way to Tallahassee in the wake of World War II.


But we must not stop with filling vacancies.
• The third step in the process of matching our resources to our common vision is the creation of new chairs. We can do so in part because the FSU Research Foundation has agreed to use one-third of its endowment income for new eminent scholar support. These additional resources will help us make profound advances in many academic programs in the years ahead, including programs which, despite the energies of the deans, have not attracted private support.


Dr. Frank Rhodes, the elegant former President of Cornell University, who gave our Futures project such important help, suggested that we call these new scholars “Jubilee Professors.” When my wife, Patsy Palmer, heard Dr. Rhodes, she thought he had recommended that we recruit “jubilant” professors.

The term “jubilee,” reflecting a 50-year celebration, commemorates not our transition in 1947 from Florida State College for Women to FSU, (a great moment celebrated last year) but, instead, the celebration of the half-century of outstanding contributions of the 49ers. We should commemorate them in 1999 with a new effort to recruit the best faculty possible to fill new positions created by new resources.
Let’s see what this whole program will look like.


From 1990 to 1993, we had 21 and then 22 eminent scholar chairs. Our capital campaign from 1994-1998 allowed us to increase this to 32, almost a 50 percent increase.

By combining our institutional resources, including departmental resources such as chemistry, I am in the position today to announce that FSU will add a minimum of 10 additional eminent scholar positions in the next two years.

The result of our emphasis on these eminent scholars is that we will more than triple the number of these outstanding faculty on our campus. If we continue our fundraising at our current level and if we continue to build our Research Foundation, we can imagine having fifty eminent scholars on this campus by the year 2001.