January 26, 2001

University President updates Loyola community on various projects at the convocation

The following is a reprint of University President Bernard P. Knoth's August 10 convocation remarks.

There are four projects underway or starting this semester that I want to explain in my remarks this afternoon. Then I will make a number of short announcements about different areas I want you to know about as we begin the second semester. Finally, we will have an open floor for questions and discussion.

The five major areas are the progress made by the Ad Hoc Faculty Salary Committee, the process we will begin this semester in preparation for renovating the central campus area, a process we will pursue this semester regarding fringe benefits, bringing the integrated marketing/ communications project to completion and establishing a new service-learning office and program.

As you may remember, with suggestions from the Deans, I named an Ad Hoc Faculty Salary Committee late last Spring. I worked with the committee members this Fall to locate an external consultant who could study our faculty salary patterns objectively and generate recommendations we could discuss and shape into a three to five year plan. The consultant's primary goal is to investigate salary compression, but the charge includes reporting any other anomalies they might uncover in their analysis. After looking at different possibilities, we have settled on a consultant from Washington, D.C., named the Klemm Analysis Group, Inc. Between now and March, the group will go through several stages in their work plan. They will begin by retrieving and analyzing individual Loyola faculty salary data, using a five-year history of that data, breaking it down into subgroups by schools, departments, years of service and rank and performing a variety of statistical analyses. To further investigate any observed salary differentials, they may need to obtain further information on individual faculty members, for example publication records, changes in status or special service within the university. They will analyze the faculty salary data for our thirty-three reference schools in the same way, unless for some reason it cannot be accessed or made available by rank and department. In their analyses, Klemm will use the separate Law School and Business School reference lists. They will review our documents regarding compensation, evaluation and promotion.

In early February, Klemm will hold confidential small group interviews of faculty members whose names will be selected at random from the school faculty name lists. These interviews will serve as focus groups for Klemm to develop a survey to be administered to all full-time faculty members. The survey will be available over the Internet or in paper form and will be returned directly to Klemm to maintain confidentiality. I will alert you when this stage approaches. If this salary study is to be meaningful, it is imperative that faculty is willing to participate in the focus groups if asked and that all full-time faculty respond with ideas and opinions in the survey. As a last step, Klemm will interview relevant academic managementdepartment chairs, deans, the academic vice presidentregarding hiring, promotion and faculty retention. With the analysis complete, as I said, our final goal is to develop a three to five year faculty salary plan. Klemm will provide recommendations, but we will be responsible for deciding what we can do and the time line we can pursue. Discussion of the recommendations will begin in the Ad Hoc Committee and be submitted to the University Planning Team in March. Again, I encourage you to participate in the focus groups, if invited, and the survey. It is important that everyone's comments be heard.

The second project this semester is more expansive. During the November Board meeting, I explained to the Trustees the general organizational plan I wish to pursue as we design our next generation of initiatives. (I am still looking for a catchy phrase, if anyone has any suggestions, to capture the idea.) In the series of initiatives we launched five years ago, efforts aimed at a wide array of areas ranging from the library, to electronic infrastructure, to residence halls, general campus environment and parking. This series will focus particularly on our educational process, specifically on the spaces and facilities we need to continue to deliver an excellent education in a contemporary environment. As I envision it, it involves the renovation of the old library, the relocation of City College in two newly constructed floors on Monroe Science, the removal of Stallings Hall to be replaced by a larger, certainly taller building on the same footprint. With at least two departments, possibly Physics and Math and Computer Science, moved from Monroe, we will be in a position to begin a floor-by-floor full renovation of Monroe. This month, our architects will begin the conceptual design for the old library renovation. Within the next few weeks, I want to meet with the City College dean and faculty to begin discussing the process. Also, I want to meet with the dean of Arts and Sciences, department chairs and directors who are lodged in Monroe to get them to begin thinking concretely about their departments' needs.

We need to get the planning process started before we can begin to discuss timelines or costs. I have already discussed with Mr. Woodall and Ms. Cartwright where the financing might come from, because in the end it will have to be a combination of sources including fund-raising, property sales, government grants and bond issues. If there are any "nay-sayers" in the crowd, they will certainly have the opportunity to be critical: it is a far-reaching idea, will be expensive and take years before it is done. But otherwise, we continue to walk past Stallings Hall and shrug our shoulders at the small building or roll our eyes when we get lost trying to find an office in Monroe. It will not change unless we do something imaginative and creative about it. The Loyola community got actively involved in the planning for the last set of initiatives; the planning for this project and the finished results will be even more exciting.

The third project this semester will be more contained and deals with the area of fringe benefits. The Fringe Benefits Committee recommended, and after several conversations, Ms. Cartwright and I have agreed to conduct a search for a new health care and benefits consultant who will help us develop plan design and cost management. Rhonda Cartwright, Lois Goldstein and the members of the fringe benefits committee will begin hearing presentations by various consultants tomorrow. Once our new consultant is in place, we will begin a process of focus groups and surveying faculty and staff to determine what our long-term fringe benefits goals should be in order to best address the needs of the Loyola community. Based on the consultant's recommendations, we will be responsible for deciding what we can do and an appropriate time line.

The fourth project is completing our integrated marketing/ communications plan. Substantial progress was made in the research phase of the development of an integrated marketing/ communications plan last semester. A series of 13 focus groups were conducted on campus in September with input from faculty, administrators, staff, current students and prospective students. In October, the project's Advisory Committee met for a workshop with a consultant from Stamats Communications, Inc., to discuss strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats relative to perceptions of various audiences regarding Loyola.

In October and November, telephone surveys were conducted of alumni and prospective students in New Orleans and the key geographic markets of New York, Washington D.C., Houston, Miami, and Atlanta; telephone surveys of donors were also conducted. With limited complications, web-based surveys of faculty, staff, administrators and students were executed in November and telephone surveys of the media and community leaders took place in December.A web-based survey of current law students will be conducted in January. A telephone survey of prospective law students is planned for the spring.

The core team is currently reviewing data from the fall research effort, and it will be shared with the marketing committee in the early part of this semester and later with the university community. Plans are still on target to present a draft of an integrated marketing communications plan to the President's Cabinet and the University Planning Team in April and the Board of Trustees in May.

Again, as a reminder, the purpose of this effort is to determine how Loyola University New Orleans is perceived by key internal and external audiences through the gathering of important baseline data; to develop a comprehensive integrated marketing plan that will bridge any gaps between how we want the university to be perceived and how it actually is perceived; to develop communications and image goals; and to enhance our image to achieve the institution's strategic goal. I would like to thank the large number of you who have participated in this effort through the focus groups and surveys, and as members of the committee.

The fifth project we will get started immediately this semester is connected to a grant we received on December 18, 2000, from the Consortium for the Advancement of Private Higher Education, a unit of the Council of Independent Colleges. This Engaging Communities and Campuses grant for $79,500 to be paid over three years. The purpose of this grant follows on conversations we have had in the past in this forum and other fora on campus. The funding will be used to institutionalize service-learning at Loyola in order to strengthen student learning and address the needs of our community partners. As you will remember, service-learning is the process through which students (a) participate in organized service activity for academic credit that meets identified community needs and (b) reflect on that service so that it furthers their understanding of course material. We have a broad base of service-learning opportunities on campus already: it takes place in Biology, Education, College of Business Administration, Music Education, Music Therapy, Sociology, Psychology and different aspects of the Gillis Long and Pro Bono Centers at the Law School to name a few. The funding will enable us to establish an Office of Experiential Education on campus to support the work of students, faculty and community partners as well as build our own knowledge of what student learning might be facilitated or strengthened through service-learning. I am excited about this development for the Loyola community, and hope all of you will take advantage of the opportunity it presents. The grant is largely the work of Dr. Lydia Voigt, Dr. Laurie Joiner and Dr. Danahar, and I congratulate them for their successful effort.

I have some general announcements as we begin the new semester. There is good news from the Office of Admissions. As of January 8, applications for traditional freshmen for Fall 2001 are 16% ahead of where we were on the same date last year. This translates to 2,344 applications this year, compared to 2,019 last year. The largest increases are from out of state, particularly from Florida, Texas and California. There is still a lot of work ahead in converting these applications into enrolled students, but we are off to an excellent start due to admissions' hard work. I know many of you will be helping in the effort over the coming months through making phone calls, writing letters or having visitors in your classes, and I thank you for your efforts. Be sure and mark your calendar for Saturday, March 31, when we will host the President's Open House. It is a major event in the recruitment process, and also a wonderful celebration of our work together as an educational community.

In Information Technology, we have generated a "request for proposal" for the lease of a replacement mainframe, which we plan to have installed over the summer. The system we have in place now is operating at full capacity, which you can sometimes see as slowness in getting the system to respond. The new mainframe is akin to putting a larger pump in the system; we will have the same systems but more speed.

IT also completed a number of upgrades by the end of December. There was a software upgrade to the campus-wide network, so we now have the latest network software available. The number of dial-in phone ports was increased from 46 to 69 lines in December. This will help a great deal in allowing off-campus users to connect to our system. The Express Card System hardware was upgraded, replacing hardware that was approaching 10 years in age and required extensive maintenance. Finally, LORA (Loyola Online Records Access) was made fully available to the campus. As a matter of fact, many professors used LORA to submit their final semester grades. As the LORA system becomes more familiar, it should be a great help to all the members of the campus community.

We have received proposals for installing a new boiler to replace the current 35 year old boiler now in place. This will be a major infrastructure update, costing about $1 million, when all the pipes and connections are finally in place. The new boiler will be built in place, although the disruption should be minimal. Paul Fleming will send out an explanation when the timeline is available.

There were three developments in the fund-raising area during the first semester that I wanted to highlight for you. Early in the Fall semester, we received matching funds in the amount of $1 million from the State of Louisiana Board of Regents for two endowed chairs in the College of Business. $400,000 was granted for the Hilton/Baldrige Chair in Music Industry Studies, which will complement the Conrad N. Hilton Chair in the College of Music, and an unprecedented $600,000 match was designated for the Harold E. Wirth Chair in Economics.

Through the combined efforts of a number of peopleDarla Rushing, associate professor in Monroe Library, and David Estes, associate professor in English, Dean Mary Lee Sweat and Gary TalarchekLoyola received a $500,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to establish the Center for the Study of Catholics in the South. The Center will promote the study of the role played by Catholic individuals and by ethnic groups that are historically Catholic within Southern history and culture. This Center, the only one of its kind in the nation, will be housed in the Monroe Library and in time will sponsor a variety of programming and make archives available for scholarly research. The NEH grant is a 3 to 1 challenge grant; Institutional Advancement is designing plans to secure the additional $1.5 million over the next four years to meet the challenge.

In a third note, the Edward G. Schlieder Educational Foundation accelerated payment on their $230,000 pledge to the Chemistry Department renovation. We received their concluding payment of $115,000 at the close of the calendar year. I am planning that we review the design for the second phase of the Chemistry renovations and begin construction after graduation.

The Heartlands-Delta Group will sponsor another Faculty Conversations session at Xavier University in Cincinnati in April. We have had about three dozen faculty members participate in these conversations to date, and all have found it a worthwhile experience. Sr. Annie Ramagos will contact faculty members about going after the semester gets started. If anyone would like to volunteer to attend the session, please let her know.

A usual topic at this convocation is the budget area. First, regarding the current fiscal year, we seem to be on track. The one exception is utility costs: in that area, while our forecast consumption of gas and electricity has been on target, the approximate 30% increase in rates is causing a $900,000 problem. Many of you will be aware of the utility rate increases from your own recent bills. We will try to implement as many energy-saving efforts as practicable over the coming weeks.

I have already communicated to you by e-mail regarding the 2001-2002 budget. The University Budget Committee recommended and the Board of Trustees approved a tuition increase of 8%, an increase to salary pool of 6%, a fringe benefit budget of $9.58 million, and a financial aid budget of $23.6 million. I realize that the 8% tuition increase is a sensitive matter, and this step was taken only after pointed deliberation in the UBC and the Board of Trustees. If you have the opportunity, and some of you have done this already, to talk to students about the tuition increase in a positive and constructive manner, I would appreciate it.

In conclusion, I believe we had an excellent Fall semester. Enthusiasm ran high on campus, and morale seemed to be strong. We have worked together, and closely at that, to bring Loyola nearer to its tremendous potential as a Jesuit, Catholic University. I am proud of what we have accomplished working together and pray that we will continue with strong resolve. If we do, I am confident we will achieve the vision of greatness to which we all aspire.