Report to the Board
of Regents
Chancellor William E.
Kirwan
Friday, October 27, 2006
Thank you Mr. Chairman.
First let me express appreciation once again to Charlene
Nunley for leading our discussion on the Spellings' Commission Report. I also
want to mention that Charlene and I joined Jerry Weast, superintendent of the
Montgomery County Public Schools, a week ago to sign an agreement between the USM,
Montgomery College,
and Montgomery County
Public Schools that will give high
school seniors more opportunities for early exposure to college courses and
college life. Through this program, Montgomery
College and USM institutions will
be offering regular college courses to qualified high school seniors in their
local schools. This will enable students
to experience the rigors of college level work and earn college credits while
they are still in high school. To our
knowledge this is the first agreement of this kind between a K-12 school
system, a community college and a university system.
And, of course, I want to thank Stanley Battle for hosting
today's meeting and for that impressive update on Coppin
State University. CSU is clearly making great strides and, Stanley,
your leadership plays an invaluable role in these advances. I note that last month, in honor of National
Historically Black Colleges and Universities Week, Maryland Governor Bob
Ehrlich held a reception at the Governor's Mansion where CSU, the University
of Maryland Eastern Shore, and Bowie
State University
were among the honorees. Congratulations
to you all on this much-deserved recognition.
I'll begin my report with some impressive recognition that
has come to members of our community.
This December in San Antonio,
Joe Bryce, Associate Vice Chancellor for Government
Relations, will receive the 2006 Edwin Crawford Award from the Council for
Advancement and Support of Education.
The Crawford award recognizes one individual in the nation who has made
an extraordinary contribution in state relations on behalf of their institution
or system.
TU President Robert Caret was just elected as president of
the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities (CUMU) at its annual
meeting. Bob will serve a two-year term
as president of this organization that fosters and supports the growth of urban
and metropolitan universities.
UMES President Thelma Thompson
was just named by Career Communication, Inc as one the 100 Most Important
Blacks in Technology for her work in bringing technology to the campus and into
the university's curriculum.
The USM can boast of TWO prestigious "genius grants"
from the MacArthur Foundation:
Kenneth Catania, a comparative neurobiologist who received
his undergraduate degree in zoology from Maryland
in 1989 AND Victoria Hale, a graduate of the University of Maryland School of
Pharmacy have both been selected as McArthur Fellows.
Dr. Natalie Hopson, chair of the Psychology Department at
SU, has been named the 2006 Psychology Teacher of the Year by the Maryland
Psychological Association.
And one last award certainly warrants mention . . . . UMCP
has a connection to another
Nobel Prize winner. NASA researcher John C. Mather, who is also a University
of Maryland adjunct physics
professor, won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for measurements of cosmic
background radiation that provided a clear look at the birth of the universe.
All these achievements and honors-and many others I simply
lack the time to cite-demonstrate the exceptional talent and leadership we have
within the USM.
Several notable events have taken place since the last BOR
meeting.
In two grand celebrations, the UM and UMBC officially
launched their capital campaigns. College
Park's is $1 billion and UMBC's is $100 million. Both of these goals are more than double the
totals raised by these campuses in the last USM campaign, which ended in
2002. These campaigns are announced in
the year UM celebrates its 150th anniversary and UMBC its 40th.
This year marks the 10th Anniversary of the Institute
of Human Virology, a remarkable
enterprise with its combination of world class research, worldwide prevention AND
patient care programs. IHV's 10th
Anniversary Annual International Meeting will take place at the Baltimore Hyatt
Regency in mid-November.
Another important anniversary celebration will take place next
year. In fact, bicentennial plans are
already underway at our founding institution, the University
of Maryland, Baltimore.
Regent Frank Kelly is chair of the group planning the festivities. Not only will downtown Baltimore
be awash with bicentennial signs for the next couple months, major additions to
the campus are underway. The long
awaited, state-of-the-art dental school was opened this week and construction
is under way on the new $49 million Campus
Center, which will serve the entire
west Baltimore community, not just
the students on campus. And UMMS is
about to begin construction on a $300M ambulatory care facility across from
Davidge Hall.
Another timely example of the USM's commitment to community
can be seen at the University of Baltimore,
where the Schaefer Center
for Public Policy and the School of Public
Affairs are leading a large-scale training
program for state election judges in preparation for Maryland's
upcoming election.
In one last example of partnership, the University of Maryland
Center for Environmental Science's Horn Point Lab has partnered with Dorchester
County Public Schools to bring EVERY seventh grade student (all 450 of them) from
throughout the county to the Horn Point Lab to learn firsthand about science
and the local environment.
And speaking of new facilities, the University
of Maryland Biotechnology
Institute's new $60 million CARB II facility was dedicated last month. This center will play a vital role in Maryland's
efforts to establish world wide leadership in the biosciences and their
commercial applications.
I also want to give the board an update on several important
items.
I have very good news to report on Fall 2006
enrollment. Enrollment is up across the
system by about 5%. All three of our
designated growth institutions-UMUC, TU and Salisbury
University-have met or exceeded
their enrollment goals. In addition,
systemwide, the USM has exceeded the enrollment commitment we made to the
legislature and the state. Although some
campuses did not meet their enrollment targets, others exceeded theirs. Overall our strategy of prospective funding
for enrollment growth, supported by the Governor and General Assembly, has been
a great success. We will provide the
Board with a complete campus by campus enrollment report within the next week
or so.
Let me turn next to the status of the IHV relocation to the
medical school at UMB.
You will recall that at the May 10, 2006 Board Meeting, I
recommended to the Board that reassignment of IHV to UMB take place, with UMBI
retaining control of the Medical Research Facility. This decision was based on recognition that
while both IHV and MBC are successful institutions with bright futures, IHV is
growing in a direction that is more in line with the clinical research mission
of UMB than UMBI. The Board agreed with my recommendation.
Following
the Board's endorsement of my recommendation, I put together 3 workgroups this
past summer, each tasked with working a specific set of problems related to the
financial, academic, and legal issues involved with the transfer. Key issues identified for resolution by the
workgroups were -
- Financial
issues associated with the disposition of the space with the MRF and the
equitable distribution of state resources and direct and indirect costs.
This included how to reimburse UMBI for use of space by IHV researchers
who as a result of this transfer will become UMB faculty.
- Issues
associated with the disposition of the intellectual property and
commercialization agreements developed by IHV faculty. This included the
issue of who holds membership within IHV.
- Finally,
issues associated with the reporting structure for IHV faculty and staff
and the location of the Institute within the UMB School of Medicine. This
included issues related to tenure and the future opportunities to carry
out cross-disciplinary and even cross-institutional research.
Each
group was charged with developing agreements to be presented to me this fall,
with the ultimate goal of completing the transfer by July 1 of 2007. I am pleased to be able to report that
significant progress on each of the issues has been made.
- Dr.
Ramsay, Dr. Gallo, and Dean Reece have reached agreement on how the IHV
will be incorporated into the School
of Medicine, including the
reporting line and tenure homes for the IHV primaries. This agreement
will, I believe, make IHV the School
of Medicine's first designated
"institute," and it could serve as a model for cross-disciplinary growth
in the future.
- Representatives
from UMB, IHV, and UMBI have been able to resolve the legal issues
associated with the Institute's commercialization agreements, including
the somewhat tricky issue of defining who has membership status with IHV.
As the institute expands in the future and more intra-disciplinary and
intra-institutional work is done this definition will be a major benefit.
- Finally,
with regard to the complex issues of facilities and financing, we have a
draft MOU that equitably lays out a plan for the distribution of space and
resources.
I anticipate that the MOU will be complete by the time of
the December board meeting.
Next, I want to mention a recent report issued by the
Maryland Higher Education Commission addressing financial aid issues, which had
two major conclusions: First, few
Maryland college students (particularly those with the greatest need) are
receiving aid packages large enough to cover their financial need. While loans alleviate the level of unmet
need, they are insufficient. Second, the
accumulation of debt has fallen most heavily on student from low-income
backgrounds.
I raise this to reinforce our earlier discussion on the
Spellings Commission. While the issue of
college affordability is an ongoing challenge, Maryland
and the USM have clearly taken the lead in addressing these concerns head-on;
through innovative alternatives, our new systemwide debt policy, and a renewed
commitment to need-based financial aid.
Nevertheless, it is obvious that we must continue to aggressively
address this concern going forward. This
fact is further bolstered by the recent College Board report that-looking at
federal assistance-both the total
amount of Pell Grants awarded and the average
Pell Grant per recipient were lower in 2005-06 than they had been in 2004-05.
I'd also want to give a quick update on the Maryland Course
Redesign Initiative. As you know, Nancy
Shapiro and Don Spicer-Associate Vice Chancellors from
Academic Affairs and Administrative Affairs-visited all 13 USM institutions and
held informational meetings with institutional provosts and faculty members
this past summer. Earlier this month,
USM hosted a day-long workshop where Dr. Carol Twigg, Executive Director of the
National Center
for Academic Transformation, and her colleague conducted an interactive set of
exercises designed to launch the course redesign initiative on all the
campuses. This is a major redesign
project that will take three years to implement completely. Next month, each
institution will identify one pilot course to redesign between now and January
in consultation from NCAT and the System office. Courses will be chosen by each institution,
but the redesign is faculty driven. The
System Office will provide opportunities for knowledge sharing across redesign
projects, and will facilitate inter-institutional collaboration when common
courses or disciplines are chosen. I
stress that this is a System effort-not a collection of individual
efforts-which makes it a unique national model.
Finally, I want to thank those of you who have taken part in
our statewide "Listening Tour." We are about halfway through our schedule of
meetings between the business community and higher education focused on the
state's workforce and economic development needs and higher education's
capacity to meet those needs. I hope
those of you who are able will take part in the remaining sessions:
October 30th at Anne
Arundel Community College
in the morning and the College of Southern
Maryland in the afternoon.
October 31st at the College of Notre Dame in the morning and
at the HEAT Center
in the afternoon.
And our final meeting on November 3rd at FSU in the
afternoon.
These dialogues have already proven to be extremely
productive, providing higher education with a more comprehensive picture of the
state's economic and workforce development needs, and providing business
leaders with a better understanding of and appreciation for higher education's
role in these areas.
Mr. Chairman . . . . this completes my report.