"I decided, living in the Ozarks, if old things and old ways are meant to be
discarded (which I don't doubt for a minute) the least we can do is remember
what we put behind us and record its passing, sort of like stamping a coin.
That way we'll always be able to compare new values to old ones."
Mitch Jayne,
Home Grown Stories & Home Fried Lies
When then-Southwest Missouri State University received its statewide mission
in "public affairs" in 1995, the institution already was 90 years old. It
did not become a new institution on that occasion any more than Missouri State
University sprung directly from the head of Governor Blunt when he signed our
new name into law in 2005. I have a sense that at each pivotal point of
evolution -- most of them marked by a name change -- the institution experienced
feelings of both "we already are" and "we are striving to become."
Many of you will remember the "contents and the can" analogy that President John
Keiser used during our campaign for the change to MSU. The analogy was
true to a point, but obviously we still are working to live up to it; and, in
fact, we continue to have conversations about what the contents of the can are
supposed to be.
This is going to be a year of intense conversation about the identity and
character of the university. Much of this will center around what we mean
-- and would like to mean -- by "public affairs." We also need to continue
discussions of what it means to be a comprehensive university, and about what it
means to fulfill our role as a public institution in Missouri. This week
in her Fall semester letter to the campus Provost McCarthy will speak to the
issue of refining and reinvigorating the public affairs mission. In three
town hall meetings this fall President Nietzel will engage us in conversations
about issues facing higher education, our mission, and student success.
Faculty Senate soon will appoint an ad hoc committee to review the general
education curriculum with particular attention to how public affairs is or is
not integrated there. Deans and department heads are being asked to
inventory, with their faculties, how public affairs is and can be integrated
into the learning experiences of students in all of our majors.
In a recent
discussion thread on the
COALESCENCE site a few
faculty have suggested holding a series of brown bag symposia in which
colleagues could discuss "a text/author relevant to his/her research/teaching
and its implications for our public affairs mission." I am excited to see
COAL faculty energized to initiate discussions like this, and I encourage all of
you to join this online discussion. However, I also urge all of us to make
the subject of our mission and what makes MSU distinctive a topic for all sorts
of discussions. For example,
- At this time each year departments review their personnel and merit
evaluation documents. What do your department policies communicate
about the impact of the university's mission on how faculty are hired,
evaluated, and rewarded?
- This also is the season for curricular proposals. Are our programs
any different from those at other institutions because of our mission?
- Several of our departments are preparing to search for new faculty this
year. When candidates ask, "So, what's special about this public
affairs mission?" do we have an answer for them?
These are important discussions, but I recognize that we can make "public
affairs" nothing more than a catch phrase, the campus equivalent of
campaign-speak terms like "change" and "country first." It might be more
useful to begin with the notion of what makes our university distinctive.
The public affairs mission is one distinctive feature, but it is not the only
one. What makes us more than just the second-largest university in the
state?
These are important discussions, with important outcomes. Higher
education is an increasingly competitive environment, perhaps especially so for
state-supported comprehensive universities like ours. Even if we could
depend on a steady stream of students simply because we are the second-largest
university in the state, we will not be satisfied only with numbrers. We
want to recruit the best students. In addition to the quality of our
specific programs, what can we tell them is different about our
university?
This is not a rhetorical question, nor is it a simply a discussion to mollify
legislators or the Board of Governors. This is fundamentally a question of
who we are, and who we want to be. I hope you will take every
opportunity to raise these issues and push the conversation forward.