August 25, 2000

University president welcomes faculty and staff at convocation, gives status of university

The following is a reprint of University President Bernard P. Knoth's August 21 convocation remarks.

My congratulations to Professor Christner for his years of dedicated service to Loyola and a sincere welcome to you all. I hope everyone is ready for what will be certainly an exciting year here at Loyola. There are many points I want to review with you this afternoon, mostly informational; following my remarks, we will have an open forum for questions and discussion.

Let me begin by noting two appointments I made over the summer in case any of you did not see the e-mail I sent. First, Charles DiGange will serve as interim vice president for Institutional Advancement until a permanent appointment is made. Second, Michael Cowan will serve as interim director of the Boggs Center until a permanent director is named for that position. I thank Charlie and Michael for their genuine willingness to serve in these positions. I am confident that both Institutional Advancement and the Boggs Center will continue to thrive under their leadership.

I have a very positive report to give on our admissions projections and activities. Dean Stieffel and the undergraduate admissions staff have done extraordinary work in assembling the class of 2004. You may know already that we had an increase in applications this year of 55%. In the end, we expect 870 traditional freshmen to begin the semester, which would be the largest freshman class ever. Their academic quality mirrors the academic quality we have seen in recent years. They have an average GPA of 3.56, an SAT combined score of 1190 which is comfortably above the average score of 1016 for the national college-bound population, and an ACT combined score of 26 compared with a national average of 21. The overall ethnic minority percentage of the new first-year class is 25.5% with African-American and Hispanic American students representing 9.2% and 12.4% respectively. The class of 2004 represents 41 states and 19 countries; 50.6% are from out of state, 49.4% are from Louisiana of which 44% represent metropolitan New Orleans. My congratulations to Dean Stieffel and her staff for their superb work; my congratulations to all of you who participated in the recruitment effort in one way or another through the course of the year.

The Law School began its orientation activities last week with 280 first-year law students. I congratulate Assistant Dean Michele Allison-Davis and all those who participated in recruitment of the Law School first-year class. With classes starting today, the final count and their complete statistics should be available within a few days. Also, the number of returning second and third year students should soon be clear.

With these large new student enrollments, I need to make a cautionary note about revenue expectations and budgets. With a larger than projected freshman class coming in, whatever the exact final number, everyone needs to remember that freshmen tuition is the most highly discounted tuition revenue stream, and the full picture of supplemental expenses associated with the larger class, academic and residential, will not be complete for several weeks. We also need to see what our retention of returning students will be and the particular blend of students who return. The revenues brought by returning students are critical in the budget. The number of undergraduate transfer students stands at 145, but that number will change over the next few days. The Law School funding is governed by an arrangement that has been in place for several years. So we need to wait until the whole picture is visible. Once we have our official enrollment counts in September, I will review them and the associated revenue and expense projections with the Cabinet; we will decide on any appropriate budget adjustments after those discussions.

I want to update you on projects underway on campus. To introduce this update, I return to the explanation I have given before in this forum. "Clearly, our primary goal is to provide an excellent education rooted in the Jesuit, Catholic heritage, fostering scholarly development among faculty and intellectual, spiritual and personal growth among our students." Consider these as notes on our environment.

By now you may have noticed dramatic changes on both the look and the navigation of both our internal and external web sites. With feedback from faculty and staff John Bolles and our web team have worked to incorporate suggestions to make the pages more user friendly and better organized. A horizontal audience navigation bar and a vertical subject navigation bar will make information easier to find and reduce the number of links you have to use. Comments from faculty and staff have been essential in this redesign of our web pages. In the next couple of weeks, an on-line suggestion box will be added: please continue to send your comments and suggestions as we move into the future.

On a different project, the Office of Student Records has worked closely with Information Technology to develop both a web for faculty and a web for students. On the web for faculty, faculty members will be able to submit their course grades on-line and to view their class rosters complete with student telephone numbers and addresses. Faculty advisors will be able to view a listing of their advisees along with their advisees’ academic information. The web for students will allow them to view their grades, schedule, financial aid and address information; students will also be able to register for their courses through this web product.

You will remember that we launched our web pages four years ago with a fairly skeletal content, aimed primarily at our admissions effort. I am pleased with the subsequent developments that have taken place. Four years ago, we were very excited when the first outsider "clicked in" to our web. Last semester, web "hits" averaged 250,000 per week, with about 100,000 of those coming from off campus weekly. In this year’s admissions, 36% of our applications were received over the web. While I am pleased with what we have done in this arena, I am anxious that we continue to develop the web and our electronic technology in a way that makes it a useful tool for all community members. There are different sorts of workshops and sessions available through a number of campus services. Please take the time to learn how to use and appropriately incorporate this technology in your work, your research and courses. In the end, it is only of value if we know how to use it.

Other current projects include Biever Hall where we have completed our renovation and upgrade in time for the students to move in this week. The Hall now has a level of conveniences equal to the New Residence Hall. Our timetable to complete this project was quite ambitious, and I thank the Student Affairs staff and the Physical Plant staff for the cooperation and dedication they showed throughout the project. I will ask the residential life office to arrange a time for a tour or open house sometime next month so you will have an opportunity to see the hall once the semester gets started.

The firm of Lee Ledbetter Architects worked with the members of the Visual Arts Department and the Drama and Speech Department to develop a conceptual plan for the renovation of the old library. You may remember that the building will be renovated to accommodate new quarters for the Visual Arts Department and a new black box theater and support area for the Drama and Speech Department. The conceptual plan is now finished and will be delivered this week. We will move to the next stage, developing schematic design, starting this Fall semester. This is a key project in that doing this renovation will empty St. Mary’s Hall on the Broadway Campus and open the way for us to focus on the spatial needs of the Law School and Twomey Center.

In the Danna Center, the new fire alarm system and upgraded exit doors mandated by the State Fire Marshall are almost all in place. Unfortunately an electrician stepped through the ceiling in Octavia I last Tuesday, dislodging a section of the ceiling. It will take a few more days before that room will be back in use. You will see Marriott funded a new reconfiguration of the Orleans Room serving area, which should enhance your dining experience.

You may have noticed the hole in the planter area outside the Danna Center. Tomorrow pilings will be installed there as the base for a pedestal and life-sized bronze statue of St. Ignatius of Loyola. The project is a gift of the Jesuit Community at Thomas Hall and Mr. and Mrs. John LaBorde. The statue should arrive next month and be unveiled in early October as part of our Loyola Day celebration. If you have been behind the Danna Center, you may have noticed some scaffolding around the New Residence Hall. The project behind it is some punch list repairs to masonry that should be completed soon.

There are a number of other projects I want to touch on briefly this afternoon, mostly projects that will get underway seriously this semester. The first project is the new integrated marketing initiative we announced last Spring. The Integrated Marketing Advisory Committee met several times over the summer for planning and to review proposals that had been submitted by several national firms. The Advisory Committee recommended Stamats Communication, a national firm specializing in higher education integrated marketing research and communications, and we have subsequently signed a contract with Stamats for their services.

As I explained last Spring, this will be a very participatory process. The research phase will begin next month with a series of focus groups on campus, facilitated by Stamats personnel. There will be four faculty groups, two staff groups, two administrator groups, four student groups and one or two prospective student groups. Many of you will be invited to participate in these groups, and I urge you to do so. These focus groups will be an opportunity for you to express your opinions and concerns—your perceptions—about Loyola. Following the focus groups, there will be extensive surveys of our various audiences including alumni, parents, benefactors, potential employers of our graduates and prospective students. The research phase should be completed by the end of the Fall semester and will give us important baseline data.

The planning phase of the process will begin during the Spring semester. It will focus on developing a communications plan to bridge any gaps between how we want the university to be perceived and how it actually is perceived by others. This plan is a critical element in reaching our institutional strategic goal of being recognized as one of the leading comprehensive universities in the nation. The plan will be reported to the University Planning Team in April for review. Because it is so important to our students and to you as the members of the permanent community, I urge you to be part of this process.

Another project we will start this semester is a review of faculty salaries. I appointed a Faculty Salary Study Committee at the end of the Fall semester. The goal of this committee’s work is to develop recommendations for faculty salaries, particularly how to deal with compression and any other anomalies we uncover. I have been trying to reach the authors of a successful study that was done at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis last year to learn how they developed their analytical model. Once I have some information in hand, I will hold a meeting of our committee. Eventually the University Planning Team, the Faculty Senate and the University Budget Committee will review the committee’s recommendations before any decisions are made. So while the Salary Study Committee is doing the groundwork, there will be many opportunities for comments and suggestions before decisions are made.

I met a few weeks ago with Dr. Cecelia Sun and Ms. Priscilla Williams who are the co-chairs of a new multicultural/intercultural task force formed under the aegis of Student Affairs. This task force will work during the coming year to develop recommendations on how we might incorporate, in a meaningful and appropriate way, the curricular, co-curricular and structural changes we need to maintain a high level of understanding of cultural diversity in our campus fabric. The unfortunate incident at the very end of the Spring semester made it clear that we are not where we need to be in this area. I look forward to the task force’s recommendations and thank the members in advance for their service.

We will start an open consultation on a plan to renovate the Peace Quad within the next ten days or so. Unlike the consultation on the new university logo or the campus master plan, we will try to do this one electronically. I will send out an e-mail to let you know when the pictures, drawings and explanation are posted on the web. I hope you will take the time to make comments and suggestions.

We also need to step back this year, look at the big picture and begin to work on what I am calling the "next threshold" for lack of a better name. With the completion of the Biever Hall renovation, and a few smaller projects, we have realized most of the initiatives contained in the plan we launched four years ago. We need now to focus concretely on the next phase, the next wave of initiatives that will take us forward. We have done a series of building and infrastructure audits over the last three years to pinpoint the code and mechanical improvements we need. With some of the proceeds from a pending property sale in Kenner, we plan to make a down payment on a new boiler which, given the age of our current boiler and backup system, is a top priority. Certainly the old library renovation will be a part of this new phase. We have talked in general terms about classroom updates and now need to plan concretely what we want our learning spaces to be. The Monroe Science Building needs a thorough review of the use of space and a major renovation. Cabra Hall still has to be renovated as part of our residence hall program. St. Mary’s Hall and a major addition to the Law School have to be concretely addressed. The endowments for the library and student scholarships have to be completed. Through a significant refinancing of an outstanding bond issue, we have started to position ourselves financially; this positioning should continue through some major property sales this coming year. But we need to begin hard-nosed planning now so we can develop reasonably accurate projections of the expenses involved, a realistic sequencing timeline and a plan to gather the financial resources we will need. The challenge here will be to gather the necessary financial resources without compromising our bond rating; this will necessitate developing a plan that relies on multiple financial sources. We have accomplished an incredible amount as an educational community in the last five years, and now it is time to press ahead again through the next threshold.

Let me segue from that topic into a report on last year’s fund raising. I am pleased to report that gifts to Loyola last year set a record for total giving. Almost $8.6 million was received in cash or cash equivalents for all purposes which, from everything we can tell, was a university record. To put the number in perspective, the same category in 1997-98 was around $6 million. As importantly, we had a record number of 6,610 donors contributing. Highlights include $500,000 raised for the second phase of the Chemistry laboratory renovations—which puts us very close to our goal—and nearly $600,000 raised for student scholarship support. I congratulate the Institutional Advancement staff, the deans who played an important role and the many members of the faculty and staff who participated in this accomplishment.

Regarding the search for a new vice president for Institutional Advancement, I have tendered an offer to one of the candidates and am waiting for a response. I am pleased with the process we followed. The executive search consultant provided a field of ten qualified, interested candidates. On paper, the consultant and I reduced the field to four candidates. I interviewed the four and chose two candidates to bring to campus. The two finalist candidates met with the other vice presidents, the deans, a group of five faculty members, staff members from Institutional Advancement and a group of four trustees plus the chair of the Board. Everyone involved in these meetings sent me their comments and observations. While I am guardedly optimistic that our first choice candidate will accept the position, if he does not accept, I will reopen the search.

So we have time for questions and discussion, let me say that I am excited about the coming academic year. Over the past five years, working together—sometimes unanimously, other times not—we have accomplished an incredible number of positive, forward looking changes which clearly have made Loyola a stronger institution. I doubt any institution of our size and complexity could have done what we have done. I take great pride in our accomplishment and hope you do also. I pray that we keep the spirit and the momentum we have generated going.

We have a great year ahead of us. We have a very full house of bright students, new faculty and staff members in place. We have the finest educational library in the South, a main campus that reflects the high quality liberal arts education we give and a Law School with a great future ahead. I hope and pray this will be a grace-filled, propitious and blest year for us all.

The floor is open for questions.

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