Full Transcript:

I’m excited to see everybody. 

This is the best time of year, the campus comes to life and the energy is palpable, and in a very positive way. Let me just say, this is a tumultuous time in the world. There’s a lot of stuff going on. It is quite moving to see how people feel about being in this place and the sense of home that I get from talking to students, to staff, to faculty. I don’t mean just in a physical sense, in the psychological sense that home is a place where you belong. 

I’m going to come back to this idea more than once. This needs to be a place where everyone feels valued, where everyone feels that they can be themselves, and that doesn’t just happen organically. It requires conscious effort. It’s so noticeable when you talk to the students who are enrolled here, and many of the people who have spent decades of their lives working here. 

We have to resolve together to consciously make a commitment to keep cultivating that environment. Never has there been a time when it’s more important. So, let me start by just saying a huge thank you. Thank you for the work that is done. Thank you for the work that is done in service of our students. We had these recognition slides going. We can’t possibly have enough slides, and the word literally is used a lot. I literally don’t have time to thank every person individually, but it is important that we recognize the effort that’s been done. And the effort that’s been done not just starting today, but it was a very busy summer. By the way, I never say welcome back. Don’t say welcome back. There are a lot of people who never left. So, there’s no welcome back. There’s no “How was your summer?” So I’m going to sort of go through quickly a lot of stuff. Let’s jump right in and start off with a metaphor.

Everybody loves a metaphor. And the metaphor is a ship on the ocean. Why? We are increasingly in volatile seas, not necessarily stormy, right? But the waves are getting bigger. So, the question is, what happens when you’re dealing with an environment that’s more volatile when you’re trying to navigate seas where the waves get bigger? By the way, some waves are predictable. That’s good. We’ve known that the demography of this country is going to pose challenges for some time. You’ve heard of the demographic cliff and that the number of students who are graduating of college age is going to be plummeting over the next several years. So, we’ve known that that’s coming. 

Some waves are unpredictable. So, this past spring, I assume most people here are modestly familiar with the FAFSA debacle, where all of a sudden somewhere between 500 and 800,000 people who are eligible to go to college, eligible to apply for financial aid didn’t do so, and that’s a tragedy for them because a significant portion of them will never pursue college. But it also posed a challenge for all institutions of higher education and, indeed, for many smaller institutions, it was the death blow that put them out of business. I’m not exaggerating. Read the Chronicle of Higher Education or Inside Higher Ed, and you can see that was what pushed many institutions over the edge. And some waves are man-made, right? 

We are in an unusual time where higher education itself – is the subject of political debate and the entire conversation of, “Is college worth it?” is a constructed storm. Right? Where the data are not ambiguous, that you’re better off with a college degree than without one, which doesn’t mean that everybody should go to college. Let’s just get that out there. It’s sort of like, not that there’s anything wrong with it, right? It’s the same idea. But there is no doubt that your odds of a more prosperous, healthy life increase with a college degree, but now we have to grapple with that issue. 

Now, in this situation, right, there’s two things you can do. You can pretend that the ocean is the same and nothing needs to change. And there are a certain number of institutions for whom that is fine. Because they’re super rich, because their reputation and investment in elitism and exclusivity makes them basically immune to changes. They don’t have to change. Their ship is solid no matter how crazy the ocean is. And there are another set of institutions like, they’re taking on water. They’re facing life and death. We’re in neither of those situations, which is a good thing. Our boat is solid. We’re doing well, but we recognize that the waves are getting bigger. 

The question is, what do you do? My strong belief is you take advantage of this time to prepare yourselves for a future that you anticipate and for a future that you don’t anticipate. That’s what we’re trying to do is build a university that can withstand the uncertainty, and that means looking at everything we do – our internal systems, how they operate, how they interact with each other, where there are opportunities to do better, what new technologies are coming on the horizon that we can incorporate – AI being the most obvious one – but not limited to that, our ability to use partnerships in the community and in higher education, to strengthen ourselves and be of greater service, both locally and globally. All of these are the questions that we must ask now. 

And so, in a moment, I’m going to go and meet with our students, and I like to lean into our motto of carpe diem, which is an important lesson to seize this opportunity. We shouldn’t be afraid of the future. Carpe futurum. Let’s just lean into the fact that the future is going to be different and be ready for that. Make bold choices. Don’t be afraid. And I always want to make one point, when people question the choices that we might make or the investments we might make. I don’t mind people questioning the things that we choose to do. Just understand that doing nothing – is a choice. Sticking with the status quo is a choice. I would argue, in some ways, the riskiest choice an institution can make. And so, we have made some design choices and will make some design choices in the years ahead, because we don’t want to be swamped by a wave that we know is coming. 

So, the first thing you need to do when you’re rebuilding your ship is to have a really good crew. We’ve got a couple of new leaders. Meredith Gatzke joins us as our Chief Human Resources Officer. By the way, great, great picture. Where is? Meredith’s there. She’s a real person– but, like, Meredith, we’re going to go out and we’re going to kill some whales or something. Argh! 

I think maybe intimidated by Meredith’s picture, we don’t even have a picture of David Chun, who is our new Chief Information Officer. David, wake up so they can see you — leading our IT team. Jessica Murphy also has joined us. A critical position, Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education Success and Academic Innovation. Fred Bonato comes back from St. Peter’s to lead our health college. And last but not least among our new leadership, Theodora Berry. Please stand up, wave. Very excited that Theodora Regina Berry has joined us from the University of Central Florida, where she led initiatives resulting in the highest graduation rates for transfer students and second highest rates for first time students among colleges for two consecutive years. So excited by what she’s going to bring to Bloomfield College, as we refine the model of education that’s going to make Bloomfield a leader nationally. We still have work to do to determine the leadership for the Bloomfield campus. More on that in the weeks ahead. An overall incredible infusion of talent, not the least of which I’m pleased to point out that our deans and our provost dean have added 32 new faculty members joining us this Fall and 33 that will start in the Spring. That is a lot of work to bring on that talent. So, thank you, everybody, for making that happen. 

Let’s jump into a quick state of affairs and talk about enrollment. I’m not going to linger on the budget situation, except to say our budget from the state point of view is stable. Some increases related to the state’s investment in the outcomes-based allocation. That’s very good for us, but it’s a reflection of our performance, that we are educating underserved populations and doing it at a high rate of success. And the state’s investment in success is an investment in ����vlog. I’ll take that seven days a week. 

I’m also pleased that Bloomfield College of ����vlog earned recognition in this budget as a part of the constellation of public institutions in New Jersey. Still work to do, but great progress. It remains the case that we live and die, as contemporary public institutions do, by our enrollment. And our enrollment is particularly strong. We, just to give you the sort of bottom line, ����vlog enrolls today over 24,000 students. So, if your image is of little old Montclair…yeah, that’s not what we are anymore. We saw a 10% increase in the number of freshman applications and a 6% increase in deposits. We are enrolling at present over 4500 new first-year undergraduate students and over 1300 new transfer students. 

That’s an impressive achievement. I see Wendy is smiling. Wendy, our Vice President for Enrollment, appreciation to Wendy and the Enrollment team, and also our Communications team, who are getting the word out about what we are doing at this university. And I feel like I sometimes need to say it to ourselves, right? What we are doing here is rather special. 

People need to embrace the reality of the new Montclair and what we represent. I’m particularly proud that 42% of our incoming freshman identify as first-generation college students. That’s a remarkable achievement. I believe we are probably as a student population overall 50% Pell, if not overall, close to it. Our first-year class last year was 58% Pell. So, I’m pretty confident that we are a majority Pell-eligible institution. Wrap your brain around the significance of that, of what we are trying to pull off here, and I’ll come back to that in many ways. The question, though, for universities, I believe, the central question in terms of that ocean metaphor not to beat it to death is – who are the learners of the future? Right? We know who our current students are. We can see the changes that are happening in the composition of our student body, as we are increasingly the university of choice for, as I say, first-generation, underserved populations. But as universities adapt, we have to be thinking about what that’s going to look like in the years ahead. 

Two ways at least that we are thinking about the future. One is that the learners of the future are not American. That is to say, as the population of people going to college in this country is going down, the population of people who want a university education around the world is exploding. This past spring actually, Wendy and I were in india. You might be aware that Governor Murphy has launched a New Jersey-India Commission. There’s an increasing recognition that India is the dynamic growing country of the future, and there’s a huge opportunity for Montclair to be a part of that nation’s future. Our international enrollment has tripled in just a few years. I expect it will go up further in a geometric fashion, not exclusively relying on students from India, but by reaching out to parts of the world that are underserved where people are yearning for opportunity. So, that includes southeast Asia. It includes sub-saharan Africa. It includes Latin America. 

There’s an opportunity for Montclair to be part of the solution in those places to do the same thing that we’re doing here, partially by attracting students to come to our campus in New Jersey, and the incredible environment that we offer as a cosmopolitan state that is diverse and offers resources for people from all over the world, but also by forming partnerships in those countries to try and create accessible, affordable education for the millions of people, billions, who can’t afford to come to the United States. And lastly by creating a better learning environment for our students, so that they can integrate international experiences into their undergraduate and graduate education and they have the opportunity to interact with students from around the globe on our own campus. This is not just about enrolling students from other countries because it’s good for the bottom line. I want to be clear on that. It is. It is, but it’s about building a richer, better university and meeting our mandate to make high-quality education accessible to people who are hungry for opportunity. Nowhere in that sentence does it say “only people in New Jersey.” Right? Our mission is to make education accessible and to empower people through education to be difference-makers in their own lives and in the communities. 

How else will learners of the future look different than the learners of today? They will not match the traditional model of how we think of a student going to college. They graduate from high school and enroll for four years. That’s not  first of all, that’s not accurate today, but it’s certainly not going to be accurate in the future. There are tens of millions of people who have some college credit, but have not managed to finish their degree. We want to serve them. There are people who want to return to college at a different pace, at a different modality. We have to adapt ourselves. 

In January, we will launch a new academic calendar. You might say, well, “What does a new academic calendar have to do with nontraditional learners?” We want to create a university that offers year-round access. The model that we will move to, where we have a full term in the summer in addition to the traditional fall term and spring term creates a 12-month-a-year university, including the shorter winter term, similar to what we have already, which allows students to complete the degree on the time that they want to, not the time that we’re used to operating and that people did 100 years ago. Who cares what people did 100 years ago? I don’t think our students need the summer to harvest crops or go to the Hamptons. They want to get done. They don’t want to be borrowing for housing in the summer months when they’re not earning credits. They want to be able to complete their degree and move on to careers at their own pace and so we need to adapt to that. Other institutions are doing so. Believe it or not, the state of New Jersey is leading on this with Summer Tag, allowing students to get financial aid in the summer months. So, we adapt to that. Does that require us to change? Yes, it does. Is it going to make us have to do some things differently than we’ve always done? Yes, it will. That’s the point. Right? You can’t change and satisfy the needs, you can’t navigate the future without adapting yourself to some extent. 

The launch of Montclair Unbound will be greatly accelerated as we work with Collegis education to help us offer multimodality degrees, again meeting learners where they want to be met. Having them come to campus once in a while, but being able to engage online in a synchronous and asynchronous fashion. That’s what students want. That’s how they mesh their education with their lives. We need to be leaders in offering education in that way, and I think that’s going to be a huge plus for this university, and we’ll be recognized not only for what we offer, but for the mindset that we demonstrate in so doing. It also means looking at the organization of the university to ask, are we structured internally to maximize our accessibility and the optimization of our programs? So, a few years ago, we decided to separate the College of Education and Engage Learning and College of Community Health to underscore our commitment in those areas. 

The provost announced that Keith Strudler, the Director of School Communications will be Dean of the forthcoming College of something – Communications and Media. We don’t know what the name is exactly, but that will forge its own identity as one of the most dynamic and impactful units of the university and will allow us to underscore the College of the Arts’ incredible national reputation. Again, I don’t sometimes know if people understand the way in which we’re regarded. Our arts programs are viewed as world class. And I meet students in Music, Theater, and Dance who come from around the country to be part of this university because of those programs. We’re starting to earn the same reputation in Media and Communications and by giving each of these units a strong, independent identity, we will be able to underscore that, attract more and increase the value of those degrees for our students and the opportunities for our faculty and staff to do great work. That reorganization will be taking place over the course of the year. I’m very excited about the launch of that. 

These things are not easy. 

You may remember that we have this project around this thing called Bloomfield College. So, I’m very excited about the progress. Now, last Fall we began our inaugural first semester of Bloomfield College of Montclair

State University. On June 28th– before the clock struck midnight, we successfully completed with the U.S. Department of Education the Change in Ownership and Change in Affiliation. Where did Althea go? I saw her a second ago. Althea Broomfield. Not Bloomfield, she probably thinks her name is Bloomfield. Althea Broomfield-Michel. Our university counsel did heroic work to get us across that finish line. So, congratulations to Althea and many others, and many others. And I don’t know is Joanne Cote-Bonanno here? Joanne led the charge to have Middle States recognize this organizational change. It sounds funny to say so, but now the real work begins. Kidding, of course. That was a lot of work. But what Theodora is here to lead, and we’re excited by, is to define what Bloomfield College offers as a distinctive experience to undergraduates, to enhance the opportunities of those students to realize their full potential. 

The organizational work of getting Bloomfield integrated into Montclair was gargantuan, more than it should have been to be honest. If you think about the ways in which we were forced to jump through hoops and do goofy things, it is tragic in a way because other institutions closed because they couldn’t navigate that obstacle course. And opportunities for students will disappear because they couldn’t navigate the obstacle course that accreditation and federal regulations and blah, blah, blah–

People will look at what we’re doing here and understand how is it possible to do this? Because these kinds of combinations where you can critical distinctive pathways within single comprehensive institutions, pathways that are purpose-built to help students find success and leverage their strengths, their identities, their backgrounds as tools to help them get across the finish line, this will be the key for higher education thriving in the years ahead, because if we can’t figure out how to make this work, you’ll end up with a totally homogenized landscape of higher education, which will work for many people, which is fine for those people, but not so good for those who don’t thrive in that environment. 

And so, that’s what we are trying to do to give meaning to the fact that Bloomfield College is New Jersey’s only Predominantly Black Institution, only one, that is a four-year institution – we have no HBCUs in New Jersey – that we can take that status and make it mean something other than a statement about the demographics of the college. But actually use that status, breathe life into it, and make it a resource that helps students find success. I urge, if you haven’t been to the Bloomfield campus. By the way, do we have any Bloomfield folks here? All right! Welcome. If you haven’t been to the Bloomfield campus, go check it out. I was there on Friday to welcome the new students. It is a distinctive environment where students find a place where they can be themselves and navigate that transition to college and professional success more comfortably than maybe some do at Montclair. It’s not better. It’s not worse. It’s different. We thrive in different circumstances. And so, I’m very excited about that and very excited about how the Bloomfield campus will grow. So, terrific work there. 

The discussion of the PBI status is a nice segue to something that’s very relevant here as we try to give fuller force to our status as a Hispanic-serving Institution. And many of you know the discourse nationally is how do you go from being a Hispanic-enrolling institution, again, a demographic observation, to a Hispanic-serving Institution where you take that feature, the identity of your students and turn it into a strength, an asset that can be leveraged. Our leader in this space, Katia Paz Goldfarb, Where is Katia? Katia. Katia has done a fantastic job. 

We host the Hispanic Student College Institute. We did so again, bigger than ever. It underscores what the opportunity is to do great work here, and we will continue as we pursue what’s called the Seal of Excelencia, which is in recognition of what we do. But what frustrates me when people speak of HSIs is it’s immediately a deficit mindset, that you have to provide things to help them succeed. Okay. That’s part of it. If you think that there’s a population that is not as prepared for college, then absolutely you must be attentive to it, but why not also see the possibilities that come from that background as a strength? So, I’m particularly excited that Provost Junius Gonzales and others are working on an oral history project building Spanish Language as an Asset, encouraging programs that link together Spanish-speaking and Spanish cultural knowledge to our academic programs, to treat our students as possessing an advantage, rather than a deficit. That’s what it means to me to be an HSI. It doesn’t mean running away from the deficits, and I’m super proud of the MEGA initiative that Danny Jean and others lead that focus on some of the disparities and outcomes, but you can’t only view things in this glass half empty way. 

It’s particularly impressive that we’re doing this while we continue to accelerate as a research institution. I’ll get to that in a moment, and do great things. It shouldn’t be that those two things don’t go together. Right? That shouldn’t be surprising. It’s not. That’s our strength. But it must go together because you increase social mobility, you increase opportunity by making college more accessible, at a high level of quality. The reality is many people are happy to say that higher education should be accessible to everybody, but they’re not willing to say that everybody should have access to the same opportunities in higher education. And again, to underscore what we’re doing, no doubt you’ve seen headlines about some of the early data on how affirmative action is affecting elite universities. Pretty stunning numbers. Declines of, you know, 5, 6, 7, some state 10% of minority representation at elite institutions. You know how many people we’re talking about? Ten, 20 people at these institutions. I’m not saying that’s not significant. Remember how many people attend Montclair? 24,000.

So, yes, we should pay attention to the consequences of these policy changes at elite institutions, but in terms of altering the fabric of society, what we do matters infinitely more than what happens at MIT or whatever. I’m not saying it doesn’t matter. I’m saying what we do is going to have more profound implications, and our ability to build a high-quality research institution where every student has access to any opportunity imaginable is going to be the key to solving equity gaps in society writ large. That’s just a fact. Okay. So, that makes what has been done, not just little feathers and bells and whistles. It’s fundamental to achieving this mission. Right? Of saying, inclusion and quality go hand-in-hand and must. 

In the last fiscal year, the university set a new record-high for Research and Development expenditures, almost $45 million dollars. That includes our own investments alongside externally sponsored research, which also was at an all-time high in terms of external funding. This, as I think most people know, is measured by the National Science Foundation, and is a major component of the Carnegie classification system – I’ll come back to that in a moment – which designates Montclair as an R2 research institution. It so happens that some alterations in that formula put us on a path in all probability to be an R1 institution in general. People often ask that question. It’s now possible. It gets into the weeds a little bit. 

I like to focus on the substance of what’s getting done, rather than the numbers. Even though, I’ll cite them especially when they’re good. I’ll always do that like everybody else, but the substance is what matters and that’s why those examples from the slides before. Let me just talk about a couple of other things. For example, a $3 million dollar grant from the national science foundation – this links together with where I just was – that focuses on HSI institutional transformation, the effectiveness – it’s got lots of syllables because we can’t help ourselves, the effectiveness of psychoeducational counseling in STEM internship research experiences. Interestingly, this project came out of the terrific Green Teams initiative which many people are familiar with in the PSE&G institute led by Amy Tuininga. I don’t know if Amy’s here. But I know Lora’s here. Where’s Lora? There’s Lora! Good story, though, because the initial application was not supported. They said come back to us with some refinements and we’ll look at it again. This happened 19 times! But the 19th time was the charm. 

And so, the point there is that, first of all, keep at it, but second of all, we can link together our research and our mission to do great things. The project aims to enhance mental health and inclusion in undergraduate research and internships, increasing participation for underrepresented students by providing social and emotional support. And a terrific team effort to bring that in. 

Speaking of Carnegie classification, most people know the research classification. A few years ago, the classification around community engagement was added. Montclair is a community-engaged university, one of a relatively small number of schools that are designated for their achievement in working with the community and creating partnerships. This year, a new designation was created to recognize schools that are committed to cultivating Leadership for Public Purpose. You’ve heard me talk about the foundation we have in public service, and my belief that we need to be leaders in this space. So, I was very excited about this and particularly gratified that we were one of the first 25 schools in the country to earn the designation as a Leadership for Public Purpose university. 

That’s in recognition of a variety of programs across the university. But let me just quickly underscore something, again, to reinforce who we are and how distinctive our profile is. Of those 25 universities that are Leadership for Public Purpose universities, ten are also community-engaged universities. They embrace the idea that we are training our students to be effective in public service, and that we see the university itself as having an obligation to be in the community and serving the public interest. There’s ten of us that are in that category. Of those ten, six are research universities. Right? R1, R2, whatever. They are committed to creating knowledge at the highest level, preparing doctoral students to be researchers. Of those six, two or maybe three are majority-minority institutions. So, just understand the rarity of an institution like ours, that takes the assignment to prepare students for public service to make a difference in the world, to embrace our own obligation, to be an inclusive university that serves the population of the state that we exist to advance, and to not compromise one iota on the quality of the academic work that we do every day. That puts us in a category of two or three institutions in the country. I mean, I think that’s something to be enormously proud of, and I just wish more people knew it. I’m working on it, nationally. But I wish more people knew about it here. I mean, we joked about this in my previous speeches- “I had no idea.” And I said that about people who come to campus, it includes people who work here. So, spread the word. 

A couple of cool things that were in the highlights. I want to mention one. Dr. Jennifer Urban is here. A great project that she developed called Planting the Seeds of Character Growth. I think it typifies what we’re trying to do here. So, the purpose of this project is to develop and evaluate an interdisciplinary character education course that infuses virtual reality experiences into that curriculum and meets the character-focused learning objectives set forth in the new SEEDs general education curriculum. Key elements of the project include a four module character education course. 

Modules will focus on character and the exploration of character virtues. As dr. Urban puts it, “In these particular divisive times, character education, ethical reasoning and a focus on community engagement have never been more important.” I couldn’t agree much more with that statement. 

This is a terrific project. It illustrates the creativity of our faculty, and also the embrace of technology, and the opportunities to alter our pedagogy to be responsive to where our students are at, and I’m so thrilled by this work and the work that it represents. I also want to use this as a moment to celebrate the work between the provost, his team, and AFT to develop a new track for teaching faculty. This is a monumental achievement that is not possible without cooperation, and I’m excited to give the status and career structure to our teaching faculty that they deserve. They’re a critical part of the university. And thank you, thank you for that. And thank you also to the thousands of adjunct faculty, without whom we couldn’t have a university, and who are integral to the learning experiences of our students. I often say, you know, our students don’t know. They just know it’s professor whatever. Like, they don’t know. And so I can tell you that this university is stronger because of the dedicated adjunct faculty that we have. Okay. let me change gears for a second. 

This is usually where we stop. Right? Like, oh, we have students. We have faculty. That’s a university. Turns out there are a lot of other people that work here that make this thing go, and the university operations is a complex ballet. That’s a new metaphor. It’s an aircraft carrier, with all apologies to Shawn. He’s a submarine guy. But there’s so much going on every day, and when people come to this campus, they see the physical infrastructure. They see what’s going on and they’re impressed before they even know what goes on inside the buildings. And I just want to recognize that, and talk a little bit about some of the things that are going on. 

Obviously, when you add thousands of students, you have to figure out how to scale to meet the demand. It’s not just about adding faculty. It’s not just about adding staff. It’s about figuring out how to make the university work in a new way. And yes, I know parking is still difficult. Moving right along. So just a quick note on facilities. I do think it’s important to recognize the physical environment of our campus is a critical ingredient to students’ success. I hear it from every student who’s moving in that when they came to campus, they felt like this was their place. And they just were blown away by how nice it looks. Everybody’s a little surprised at how beautiful it is. It is not easy to make this all work. But I want to highlight something that I think is a really exciting development: that the university, through the hard work of our Facilities team, was recently registered as an apprentice site by the U.S. Department of Labor and will have our first cohort of apprentices starting this fall in University Facilities. 

That’s a real tribute to vice president Shawn Connolly and the team that already is doing ESL and other things. It underscores that we are a community of learning, and that includes our staff and includes every person who works here should have the opportunity to learn. Other ways around the campus, all kinds of things are happening. Seventeen percent more increase at Red Hawk Central. We’ll be adding a Red Hawk Central at our Bloomfield campus. Lots of stuff happening in collaboration with Gourmet Dining. Starbucks is open! We’ve been talking about someday, there will be a Starbucks. So long that it feels weird to say it’s open, but it’s there. And in a month, the pub will be open, what a month? Couple weeks, Dawn says. “1908,” but we’ll all call it the Rathskeller, because – I’m old school that way. But that’s exciting. That’s a great thing. 

Workday, you might have heard this. It’s not an epithet. It’s a product. You say, why Workday Student? We’re going to…And by the way, it’s not a $27 million app. No, it’s not that. The whole point here is to reinvent our student information systems to make us more effective in advancing positive outcomes for our students, to make it easier for our staff to do the hard work of registering students, enrolling them, getting the curriculum to match up, making it more seamless when we interact across units. It is not easy. Nobody ever said it was going to be easy. The goal is not simply to implement a new software package, but to change the way we do things, and ultimately put us in a position to look comprehensively at the progress of each one of our students and intervene as early as possible when there are even hints that he or she is getting off track. That’s ultimately what this is about. Eliminating friction and creating greater capacity to help students. 

That’s also what the Transfer Evaluation System which we’ve implemented is about – to make it easier to bring students in from other universities, give them credit for the courses they have without it being a manual run-around process. Every bit of change, whether it’s technology in facilities or anywhere else, is about amplifying our impact, reducing the barriers to success, and so, sometimes I must say, the one that– it’s written here and I just– that we are implementing optical character recognition to read transcripts. I mean, like, we also have slate. Anyway, we get paper transcripts and we would, like, enter them by hand. So, now we’ve moved up to optical character recognition. Okay? It’s happening. It’s something. 

At the other end of the spectrum, another amazing faculty achievement, Dr. Weitan Wang ran in-person workshops for Advanced AI for Teaching in partnership for the Montclair Robotics and AI Seminar series. Dr. Pavlo Lushyn has been engaging students in exploration and critical examination of AI in his courses. There’s many other places in the College for Education and Engaged Learning where they’re doing an AI study hall. Here’s an interesting observation. It’s interesting to think about AI not just as a way that people can cheat, or as a way to create efficiency, but it’s a way to level the playing field here. If you haven’t used AI Tutors who work with you on an assignment and ask you questions, you haven’t realized what the power of this thing is. It’s much more than a way to up your plagiarism game. Right? It’s a way to have customized learning. We have to learn how to use it, and we have to learn how to convince students that there’s an opportunity here, but I’m excited that our faculty are seeing it this way and embracing that opportunity. Okay. I’m actually on a decent pace. 

So, let’s move along. 

Accreditation. People say, my god, could there be something more hellacious than talking about accreditation? And the answer is probably no, but it does create an opportunity. The accreditation process, the heart of that, is a self-study exercise, and we’re well on our way. We have a leadership team. We have a steering committee, people have joined eight working groups, over 100 staff and administration. I’m deeply grateful for them doing the work. It is hard work. It does require a serious examination of self and ask where we can be doing things better and how we are meeting our mission. It also requires that we engage in a strategic planning exercise and I’m excited that we are one of five AASCU institutions, thanks to Junius’ leadership in getting us to this point, that have been chosen by the Gates Foundation to get support to develop our strategic plan. We had our first meeting under the aegis of this initiative on August 12th, and we will be developing a strategic framework through this Gates partnership and as part of our Middle States accreditation self-study process in the months ahead. A terrific opportunity to take a step back and ask those questions about whether we are prepared for the future that is emerging.

Critical and at the center of that will be student success for all the reasons I’ve already said. That involves the partnership of two units, obviously Academic Affairs and Student Development and Campus Life. I’ll come back to that in a second. But the student success action plan that was created by Academic Affairs is already being implemented to deal with recommendations on alignment of services, student experience, and so on. It goes well with several other initiatives that I don’t have time to get into. I mentioned the SEEDs curriculum. I’m very excited that after Junius, how many years, 19 years? Nineteen years of talking, we have updated our general education curriculum. Obviously, work to be done in its implementation. We also have a newly revamped Honors EDGE program that revamps the Honors program, now under the leadership of Professor Jeff Strickland, and it puts creativity at the center of the Honors experience. 

Something that makes a great deal of sense in an age of AI and machine learning. The one thing we can do that the robots can’t do is come up with new thoughts, to be imaginative, and so training students to harness their own creativity capacity is the centerpiece of what university education needs to look like in the years ahead. So, very excited about that. And many other things that, again, I’m going to have to go through quickly, but I’m trying to deal with questions and so, one of the questions was about international experiences. In my perfect world, I could wave a wand and every student at Montclair would have an international experience. 

And a lot of our students went on those this summer. Students in Greece, you can tell that’s Greece. A faculty-led dance trip in India, many other great experiences all over the globe. I would love to see more. It also requires creativity because our students can’t necessarily spend a semester abroad, because they have jobs and they have families that they’re taking care of, they have different needs. So, we have to create experiences that work for our students in lots of different shapes and sizes, and I’m excited about that along with other experiential opportunities that shouldn’t be restricted to only those students who can take an unpaid internship, or forced to leave their jobs where they’ve acquired seniority and so on. We need to figure out how to do those things for our students. 

If you were here over the summer months, you saw that we had a lot of activity, many new pre-college programs that are enrolling hundreds of students, and an expansion of our summer bridge programs that engage local partners like East Side High School in Paterson and Passaic High School. I’m very excited to see those things grow to bring more people to campus. I talked about the critical role that Student Development and Campus Life has in student success. There’s nobody more dedicated to our student well-being than our VP for Student Development and Campus Life, Dawn Meza-Soufleris. Dawn? And our Dean of Students, Margaree Coleman-Carter. I don’t know if Margaree, is Margaree here somewhere? 

They recognize that probably the single greatest challenge we have right now and we saw it even in the first few days on campus is student mental health and well-being. This is not a Montclair problem. This is a national problem. Now, there’s positives. The biggest positive that I see is that students are not only willing to recognize the need for help. They’re eager to. They sign up for “Uwill” which is an online session. They go to get appointments with CAPS. They are recognizing their own frailty, which is amazing, inconceivable from when I was in college. And they’re also coming up with their own ideas to meet the need. 

So, I’m excited that Artem Beliavski is here. Artem? Artem is a student member of our Board of Trustees, but also the leader of the zen den idea to create these spaces on campus where students can go and find a place of quiet and reflection and I’m very excited to see what Artem’s work will yield in terms of those zen dens. There’s a Hope and Healing interdivisional task force that’s working to create multifaceted initiatives again to focus on positive mental health and mindset for our campus. And this doesn’t only come from the places you’d expect. I’m excited that our university police department is engaged in this effort. They created a victim services position to align with the model of continual care for students and community members impacted by negative activity on campus. This work doesn’t stop. Just want to be clear. It never stops. We are a large community with thousands of people who are experiencing all the stuff that’s going on in the world, and it is constant. And so I appreciate particularly the training that was created for mental health first aid providers and we had over 400 people on campus here and Bloomfield who signed up for mental health first aid training coordinated by CAPS. 

Major appreciation for that. A lot of times people say, well, all these new positions, universities are “bloated with staff.” You hear that a lot. “They’re bloated with staff.” By the way, not this university. We’re the most efficient university in New Jersey. Again, just saying. I don’t know if you knew that. Most efficient university in New Jersey in terms of how much money we spend to get a student a degree. It’s a very impressive achievement. Sometimes I’d like to spend a little more money to be honest. We’re working on that, but it’s a tribute to what people are doing. It all starts with the student, and figuring out these obstacles. Mental health is one of them. So, yes, we’ve added staff to think about mental health, to think about well-being. Yes, we’ve added that because that’s the reason why students are not completing a degree. That’s not bloat. That’s recognizing the needs of your students and being responsive. Right? So, just when you hear that bloat point, there’s a little bit of an answer. Okay. I wanted to come back to something again, questions about the organizational culture survey we did.

The biggest outcome was the creation of the Office of Inclusive Excellence and Institutional Equity, IE squared is how you say that. Isn’t it cute? I can’t help it. Is Ashante here? Ashante Conner is leading that effort. The mission of IE2 is to advance Montclair’s inclusive excellence initiatives and promote cultural intelligence and a welcoming environment for all by providing an integrated shared equity approach to structure, policy initiatives, and programming. I’m very excited about this next step. We want to get away from a regulatory mindset and embrace an aspirational mindset. It doesn’t mean that we’re not going to do the regulatory stuff. We still have to make sure that when people feel they’ve been harmed or treated unfairly, that they have a place to go, and we’re making that more robust than ever, but we have to get beyond that and get back to where I started. This aspiration of being a place where everybody feels home and valued and welcomed.

And so, that’s what IE2 is about. Please watch your email. There will be opportunities to participate in these activities. And I really do look forward to seeing how we can continue to drive the campus culture in the right direction. So, I am a strong believer that our obligation does not end at our own campus walls, and that we have to be deeply embedded in the community. That’s what that community engagement classification is about, and we’ve done a great deal of work along these lines. 

I think people are familiar with the efforts that we’ve made in Paterson, which are getting recognized and, in particular, the partnership at Hinchliffe Stadium, which is exciting. I was delighted that this fall or whatever, in the last few months and continuing this fall, we will have a community advisory board that becomes an integral part of our operations. The point of the community advisory board is to have a mechanism by which we can hear from the community. So, the challenge for universities when they are in the community is that typically we go – we, “higher education” – go in the community, and we say, “this is what we’re going to do, and you’re going to be grateful… and we’re going to take pictures of kids looking service-minded.” Yeah, it turns out that that actually can be kind of annoying. And if you really are going to do community engagement right, you have to be a partner and ask questions and listen and that’s what the work in Paterson has been about, and that’s the approach to community engagement that we’re trying to build at ����vlog.

So we’ve created a community advisory board to listen, and we’ve created a community action nexus to serve as an interface between the university and the community, and that is going to be a powerful vehicle. I would again encourage all of those faculty who are doing this work to participate in the Collaboratory platform, because that’s how we capture all the work that you’re doing and how we know what’s going on and how we connect the dots. I’ll highlight in particular I’m excited that on October 26th we will host William Paterson university in a football game at Hinchliffe Stadium, which I think is cool. I’ve decided it’s called the Hinchliffe bowl. I think it’s a neat way for us to be present in the community, and if you haven’t been to the stadium, it’s a good time to come and not just go to a football game, but check out the Charles Muth museum of Hinchliffe Stadium, which is part of ����vlog, and is doing fantastic work engaging the community. 

Okay. so, with the last few minutes, I just want to to close by recognizing where we’re at as a country. This is going to be a tumultuous fall. There’s an election. You might know that. There’s an election. There almost certainly will be more protests, just as we saw last year on campuses across the country. And I think what a lot of universities have done and I’ve written a couple pieces on this, so you may have read this already. I think what a lot of universities are doing is putting their hands over their heads and saying, please, please, please, not us, make it go away, I don’t want to be on TV. Yeah, that’s sort of uninspiring. First of all, you don’t wait for something to happen. You’ve got to be proactive, and so, we’ve tried to be proactive in talking to students and talking to community organizations to try and have lines of dialogue and I think that’s worked well for us. 

We’ll continue to do that. But I think that what we ought to do is embrace our obligation as a learning institution, and try and teach people how to be constructively engaged in a democracy, and so we are part of several initiatives. In fact, in August, we hosted the Citizens and Scholars Faculty Institute which was created by the Institute for Citizens and Scholars with the aim of equipping faculty with skills to foster dialogue in the classroom. We have people who participated in that. I want to recognize some of our own faculty who participated. Jason Williams, Brad van Eeden-Moorefield, Jessica Brater, Tanesha Thomas, Emily Isaacs all were part of this effort. 

Look, this is a process. You don’t build democratic culture and democratic skills overnight, but we have to embrace that if we are truly committed to being a public-serving institution in a democracy then we have to do that. That’s why I also was one of 60 university presidents who signed on to the College Presidents Consortium and committed to creating a campus-wide immersion initiative, which involves the development of an action plan to cultivate democratic engagement, and we’re in the first cohort developing this action plan. We already do a lot of this stuff. We have voting initiatives. We have various civic engagement initiatives, but by creating this plan, we’ll be able to put it together and have a method by which we expect our students to learn to have the ability to understand different points of view, engage in constructive discourse, and create productive solutions, not just conflict. So, I’m very excited by this. Yeah. And let me stop by saying – because there were a couple of questions about this. They said, well, what’s the approach to expressive activity on campus? Because I know that’s something that people care about. And, look, college is a transition. 

It’s the first time for a lot of people to be exposed to people with different backgrounds, sexual orientations, religions. It’s a time when people are figuring stuff out. It’s a time when people are learning to express themselves, and hopefully also to reflect. We have a policy that guides this. You can check it out. It’s an expressive activity policy. So, I’d urge you to look at it. But let me underscore a couple of things, because I think that this gets lost sometimes. Yes, I believe in free speech. We are an institution committed to free speech, both in principle and because we are subject to the first amendment as a state institution. Free speech does not mean, never has meant, that I have the right to say anything I want to anyone at any time in any place. That’s not my opinion. That’s what the constitution has been interpreted to mean. So, we have restrictions on time, place and manner. Right? That is part of how we work. And that is partially because we have legal obligations to create an environment where people can study, where people are not adversely impacted by the activities of others. 

But that’s what free speech means. It also is true that we have to learn and accept the fact that we will hear and see words that we do not like, that make us uncomfortable, maybe even angry. That is also part of our environment. And there are challenges putting all these things together. As part of our commitment to civic discourse and engagement, yes, we’re going to be training, but we will work to protect the rights of all members of our community so that every student can enjoy a sense of belonging, as well as a seamless learning experience devoid of interruptions. That means that there’s going to be conflicts. Right? That we’re going to be balancing, and we’re going to continue to make our best effort to balance those things in the days, weeks and months ahead. That’s what it means to be a democracy embracing institution in 2024. I hope we can lead. I’m sure there will be bumps along the way, but I appreciate the commitment that I’ve seen in my time here to those core values. 

It has never been more important, and it is integral to our mission to embrace them. So  –  thank you. Look, if you knew how much good stuff is on the cutting room floor –  you would be amazed. There’s so much good going on at this institution, so many people working hard to do good things, and so many fantastic, brilliant, creative students that inspire with the things that they do thanks to the support of this institution. If you don’t feel good being part of this institution and what it means, you need to go and see the counseling and psychological services because this is a great thing to be proud of. Thank you, everybody. We now have a barbecue – right? Where is it? In lot 17. So, head up there, get something to eat, enjoy the beautiful day. Have a great semester.

Yes, our graduates are celebrating their achievement during perilous times; war, social division, climate change, and much more face the class of 2024. But their success serves as a glowing reminder that belief in the possibility of tomorrow – belief that things can be better – is a powerful antidote. These students had a vision of walking across that stage with their diploma, and they did not let obstacles (including a global pandemic that deprived many of them of a high school graduation and a normal start to college) deter them from that goal. They didn’t accept the notion that they couldn’t do it because it was daunting in ways they hadn’t imagined.

We can all learn from this incredibly diverse group of students, most of whom worked while pursuing their degrees. Many speak English as a second language and overcame health challenges while in school. The majority are the first in their family to graduate from college. They are united by pride in their accomplishments and hope they carry for their families and communities.

As a nation, we can’t lose confidence in our ability to be more humane, more empathetic, and bigger than the challenges in front of us. This generation will help by bringing to the table new skills, modern values, fresh eyes, and a sense of shared humanity. So I encourage graduates not to lose those traits and, as they embark on the next phase, ask of them two things that we should all strive for:

One, don’t join the naysayers on social media. There are more than enough people who want to criticize and tear others down. In the words of Cicero, criticize by what you create. It takes courage and imagination to find real solutions, and that’s what I want Montclair grads to do. You might get fewer clicks, but you’ll light the path forward. 

Two, resist the urge to hate your opponents. Learn from the likes of leaders like Nelson Mandela and Mohandas Gandhi, and refrain from mobilizing action by stoking division and resentment. Match passion and confidence with humility and empathy. 

Check out my full message to our 2024 graduates below.

Full Transcript:

Good afternoon! 

It’s great to be gathered here today and think about the year. It’s been a big year. A lot of progress. A lot of promise. A lot of partnership. The slides that we showed at the beginning are not intended to be comprehensive.

It’s a display of some of the things that your colleagues and students are doing at ����vlog. It is a sample, a small fraction of the accolades that faculty, staff and students have won, but it gives you something of a flavor, and I think that it’s important because people don’t always know what their peers are doing on an individual basis. We just wanted to demonstrate that individuals are doing great things here every day.

I also don’t want to get started without a brief word to say that it’s also been a year of challenges. And I’ll allude to this throughout my comments, but it’s important to say from the outset, first of all, because there are a lot of people in our community who maybe it doesn’t translate into an award or a recognition, but they’re working hard every day to address those challenges.

And also, I think that it’s been an unusual year – and it was raised in some of the questions that we collected too. It’s been an unusual year and we’re all stressed by the challenges of the year. It creates a challenge on top of the challenges themselves. Not just by things at Montclair. But we live in a world that presents a great deal of challenges. And I think that takes a mental toll and I want to acknowledge that.

I view one of my principal responsibilities in this job – and these are funny jobs, and perhaps because university presidents are on TV, people are more interested (mostly getting pilloried by members of the congress) but people are more interested in this job than I can recall in, like, what actually do you do?

But one of the things that I view as my job is trying to maintain our coherence as a community.

And doing so, in the face of those challenges, is one of the most difficult parts of the job. I want to be clear, that doesn’t mean eliminating disagreement. Communities have disagreements. Families have disagreements. Right? I’m sure you all are familiar with this. And sometimes they’re not just disagreements on, you know, trivial items but on really fundamental issues.

Maintaining a community in the face of that is not always easy, but it is vital, and I’ll talk about that throughout, about why that’s vital, because we only will progress as a community. What that means is articulating what the shared values and commitments are. And it means embracing everyone’s right regardless of those disagreements, and regardless of what you think about people who might disagree with you. It means embracing everyone’s right to be a member of that community. That can’t be negotiable. That’s the point that I’ve tried to stick to, and that’s the responsibility that I’ve tried to live up to over the course of the year, and I’ll try to continue doing it.

Now, we’re not just any community. This isn’t the same as a town or a state or a city. We’re a community with a special purpose. And that’s what we’re here to really talk about because what we are as a community is partners in a mission to deliver transformational opportunities to students from all backgrounds. That’s our assignment. We accepted that assignment. Right?

We can’t complain about that assignment or we can’t say that that assignment is too hard.

I’m 100% committed to that assignment, even though it’s not easy. But I will be the first to tell you, that is not a solo assignment. I cannot do any of that by myself. I am the person at the front, but that doesn’t make it mine. Only as a community and only through working together as partners can we succeed. It’s impossible for ����vlog to be what we want it to be without functioning as a community.

I want to talk about the things that we’ve done together. All of which I think ultimately comes to our students and what we’re trying to do for them now and in the future. I can say personally that is what motivated me to get into the university, because I believe in that power, and I’m not alone, I’m sure, in saying that my favorite thing about being on campus is interacting with our students. Right? That’s what gives me joy. That’s what gives me motivation. When I’m super frustrated, the thing that puts wind in my sails is talking to students, finding out how excited they are, and quite frankly hearing their optimism and their confidence about the future.

What is reassuring to me and, again, gives power to the work that we do every day is our students are sponges in my view. They value what we have to offer in some ways more than students at universities that might have more to offer. So, to the extent we’re all working hard and many of you may question “are the things that I do valuable?”, the answer is, yes. And even though there are sometimes frustrations and some things don’t work seamlessly at times, it’s important. 

Let’s recognize some of the things that are going on. Let’s underscore the spirit of commitment and partnership that make it possible. I’ve asked some of the students that I’m going to refer to, to be here today so we have an opportunity not to treat this as an abstraction. They’re real – live human beings right here! I’m glad they were able to join us and I’ll refer to that throughout.

Let me talk about a few things. I’ll start with a partnership that we just had a nice celebration of in Paterson last week. We launched the Charles J. Muth Museum at Hinchliffe Stadium. For those of you who are not aware of what this is, Hinchliffe Stadium is one of the only existing Negro League Stadiums in the United States, one of two.

Paterson is a community where we’ve embraced a large role trying to advance the overall city and help the city achieve its aspirations for its residents. This is an incredible opportunity thanks to Charles Muth who grew up in Paterson. We’re able to operate it as an engaged learning center for every child to learn the history of not just Hinchliffe and the Negro Leagues and its role in the civil rights movement, but they’ll also understand the role of Hinchliffe as a hub of a diverse community.

This is only part of our work in Paterson, which is one of the most diverse, vibrant, and I think, underappreciated cities in the state. We have launched what is called the One Square Mile project, wherein Eastside High School has become a community school which is a hub for a variety of services. I’ll talk a little bit more about that, but let me take a step back because whenever I talk about this, I know that some people are like, “Why is he talking about Paterson? Why is ����vlog in Paterson? What does this have to do with us?”

The answer is: it underscores our responsibility as a public‑serving institution. How many of you have spent any time in Paterson or even driven through it? Looks pretty much the same as Montclair, right?

It’s a universe apart, and a child growing up in Paterson can’t possibly have the same vision for his or her own future that a child growing up in Montclair does, because the possibilities seem so different from where they sit, 5 miles apart. And so, if we are to sit here as a university between these two worlds and to say, well, it’s not our problem, I think that’s a failure on our part. It’s a failure not only because we could do something and we are doing something, but it’s a failure because our students have an opportunity to learn of their own agency and their own power by being engaged in that work. This is a chance to demonstrate what a public‑serving university can be.

I was thinking about William Carlos Williams’ book, “Paterson” which is a tough read but a worthwhile read. Give it a chance. There’s this line in there which I looked up. He said something to the effect of, “say it not just with ideas but with things.” Which is, I think, another version of something I said in my earliest days which is the Cicero line, “I criticize by creation, not by finding fault.” Don’t just talk about it. Do it!

Our work in Paterson, like our work in Newark and other communities, is an opportunity to do and to show what’s possible when a university embraces this. As part of the One Square Mile initiative in Paterson, Montclair students have been giving life to this idea that we can make a difference. Some of our students are here. Sofia Perez and Nerieda Delgado Garcia, stand up so we can introduce you.

Both Sofia and Nerieda are part of our Bonner Leadership Program. They’ve already shown they’re service-oriented. Sofia has been integral in connecting student organizations to service opportunities, bringing in regular weekly volunteers from our student organizations to participate in one-on-one tutoring sessions as part of bringing ESL to Eastside high school and Nerieda is involved in the Mexican American Student Association, tutored ESL students and has continued to volunteer at the classes that we offer on campus. Congratulations to both of you and thank you for your work.

And Nour Shalash is here also. Nour is also part of our service programs. She’s a member of the Next Generation Service Corps and she’s been instrumental in offering ESL to Arabic speaking folks in Paterson which is a huge part of Paterson, increasing the impact of the program.

All three of these students are showing what Montclair can add to Paterson as a community, and I appreciate what you’re doing in demonstrating the university’s commitment. Thank you to all three of you.

Just one other thing from Paterson because I could go on at some length and people get sick of me talking about Paterson, but we also just announced a partnership with Passaic County Community College. This follows on the heels of similar announcements with Bergen Community College and Union County College, all of which are designed to create smoother pathways for transfer students.

It guarantees admission at Montclair for students who have earned an associate’s degree, hopefully removing unnecessary obstacles that often deter promising students from the opportunities of a four‑year degree. This is a beginning. Our goal is to make the process of transferring from a community college absolutely smooth and to make that seamless transition part of the promise of our relationship with community colleges.

We’re trying to do the same thing across the board at Bloomfield College of ����vlog.  We launched a partnership was launched with Donald M. Payne Senior School of Technology, whereby Essex County high school students will have the opportunity to take coursework that will count towards both their high school diploma and get them six college degree credits in the Game Design program, a program that, in case you didn’t know, is ranked among not only the best in the state but among the best in the country. People don’t often realize that.

These are the kinds of things that we’re doing. It’s to build these partnerships to advance student outcomes. And when I talk about enrollment, I’ll talk about how it’s in everybody’s self‑interest. It’s in the interests of students, and it’s in the interests of the institution which always has to be thinking about where our enrollment will come from. And I want to make an important point, because we could be a lot better at transfers. We’re going to work on this. It’s part of the Workday student project. But that’s going to require us to change. And that’s an important thing. Because all these things require us to change a little bit. We have certain things that we’ve done the Montclair way. The Montclair way is often great. The Montclair way is often slow and bureaucratic. And crazy‑making. So, we need to get rid of those other parts, right?

Transfer is one of those things where we make students run around to individual faculty members and get sign‑off on individual courses. No, no. That’s not how you do this. All of these things require adaptation and change, and means work. I recognize that, but it’s to serve a higher end. Think about what these collaborative partnerships can do.

Some of you may have seen about the Teacher Certification Apprenticeship we announced in November, the first in the state to design a program that tackles the statewide teacher shortage crisis while creating an opportunity for teachers to realize their full potential without having to give up their income, which is an important caveat. The program was created in partnership with the Wayne School District.

It has the potential to have a huge impact on the teacher pipeline in the state which is obviously one of the most critical issues facing New Jersey and beyond. I have heard from multiple school districts eager to be the next partner. This is going to be, I think, a huge way to address the teacher crisis in New Jersey and we’re setting the model.

Again, some of this collaboration is internal to the university, so to deal specifically with the shortage of music teachers, the College for Education and Engaged Learning, working with the Cali School of Music launched the nation’s first alternate route teacher certification program. It targets final-semester Music majors not enrolled in the Music Education program and fast-tracks them into teaching positions in the fall following their graduation. So, solving multiple problems. On the one hand, you’ve got a shortage of music teachers. I happen to believe in music education. I think it’s really important. I think it broadens students and prepares them to grow their mind, not just academically but in other ways. But it also gives an employment option for students from our music program that they wouldn’t necessarily have were it not for our folks collaborating to create that.

There’s so many ways in which we collaborate with the community. I’m going to rapid‑fire, throw out a bunch to go with the pictures that have been neatly created.  The School of Nursing’s Simulation Center has forged a strategic partnership with the maternity unit at Mountainside Hospital, and our partnership with the Liberty Family Success Center in Kearny – a predominantly Spanish serving center – continues to flourish. We are hopeful to expand our services to other centers located in Hudson County.

In the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, the newly introduced challenge‑based impact lab will allow students to identify real‑world problems and engage with community partners and other stakeholders. What’s cool about this is that it infuses into multiple classes, and that can continue to grow. So, already, 19 classes have been started across every college and school and the university is looking to have a scaled‑up CBI Lab be part of the broader suite of projects that we do in terms of community-engaged learning. This includes international experiences and we’ve engaged with the universities in Europe and Mexico to develop that program.

In the College for Community Health, they launched the Collabolutions podcast where guests and people from across the college team up to explore why people experience health challenges and other threats to their well‑being in some communities more than others.

In the College of Science and Mathematics, the STELLA project has been developed with the NASA space flight center, and their work is being described in a scholarly write‑up.

They’ve also been actively educating about the solar eclipse through events on campus and once again in Paterson preparing educational information in both English and Spanish.

This is a small sample. I think some people are like, how come they talk about the same things and they don’t talk about my thing? I’m sure nobody’s saying that. And the answer is because we don’t know. That’s one of the great things – but one of the frustrating things about a university like this – there’s amazing things happening but we need to know.

So I want to tell you about Collaboratory if you haven’t heard about it already. The Collaboratory tool is a mechanism to catch all the work going on. It’s to keep track of partnerships. It’s a database of collaboration and communication across the university. it gives us a way to measure that impact, so, yes, when we apply for grants and development opportunities, we can point to the kinds of things that we do. And it also gives people ideas of the kinds of things they could do with the university.

I know it seems like an extra task but please look up the website. It’s not a big deal. You’ve already done the actual work. You did the project. We just want to capture it.

Sometimes people wonder about these community‑engaged projects, and they’re like, why should we be so focused on this? Are we going to solve the world’s problems from ����vlog? No. No, we’re not going to solve the world’s problems. We’ll make a difference. Each one of these projects makes a difference, and it makes a difference to the individuals who are touched by these programs. And some of those differences can be profound in terms of the trajectory of an individual or their family.

But are we going to make the problems go away? No. But we’re showing that the problems can be solved. That’s a really important contribution. Think about the pessimism and the negativity in the world today and the idea that it’s hopeless and we’re all doomed and we should crawl under a rock and hope that the armageddon doesn’t reach us.

By showing that these problems can be solved, I think we light a path for others to say, look, if you work at it, they can be solved. It’s not easy but the possibility of progress is still there. That’s why these things are so critical. I don’t think I can say that enough, because I think sometimes people feel like you’re emptying the ocean with a teacup or whatever. Choose your sad metaphor.

But I do think that it makes a profound difference, and I hear that from the community partners who appreciate all the things that you and our colleagues are doing every day. I can’t really underscore that enough.

In order to make all this good stuff happen, we have to work as an organization. I’ll talk a little bit about some really exciting stuff like budget and things like that, but I also want to talk about people in this section. First of all, partnership isn’t just about academic things. It’s not just about being in the community. It’s about making the most of our resources.

Some of you may know that we just spiffed up in a big way Yogi Berra Stadium. Let me be clear about this. This is a really interesting thing. This was a $5 million project that we couldn’t have done ourselves. That’s a lot of money to spend on a baseball stadium, even though my goal is that we use this for much more than baseball. We see this as a facility that has all kinds of possibilities, something that can be used 365 days a year, no exaggeration. Great space. There’s dining facilities there, there’s rooms that we can use as classrooms. The Yogi Berra Museum is an underutilized partner in itself. By the way, astroturf lets us use it for many more things, much more regularly than a grass field. We couldn’t have done it without the partnership of NJIT. This shows something really special about what happens when universities get together. Now two institutions get access to a top‑notch facility that neither of us would have had access to alone. I think that’s an impressive thing.

Does it make life a little more complicated? Yes, thanks to our facilities team for working closely with our partners at NJIT and satisfying their needs and our athletics program for being flexible in how we negotiate practice time and game times. It requires more flexibility. It requires more work but you get something that you otherwise wouldn’t have had.

The same thing I would argue is true of our Bloomfield cCollege endeavor. Now we have moved past the initial stage of our merger. Legally we’re entwined but now we have the hard work of integrating the Bloomfield students into the Montclair community and defining the programs. Great progress has been made thanks to so many efforts. The finances are largely integrated. The hard work of integrating the academic portion – I’m looking at you, Junius, and many of you who work in academic affairs – who think about curriculum and accreditation and, oh, my god, it doesn’t end. Literally, it doesn’t end. All of that’s happening.

The libraries are integrated: ����vlog libraries.

We think that, at the end, we’ll be able to do something that otherwise wouldn’t have been possible, that we’re stronger by virtue of this combination. Is it work? Is it effort? Is it something nobody has ever done before? Yes. And I’m stopping myself from lapsing into my JFK voice, but there’s something true to that line that gets spoken all the time that you do these things not because they’re easy but because they’re hard. There’s something to that. We’re doing this because it’s a difficult thing to do. How do you define the role of a Predominantly Black Institution and build it up within the context of ����vlog?

We saw a nice little illustration of what’s possible where we had Montclair and Bloomfield alumni working together to create Space Hounds Records to help up‑and‑coming artists navigate the music industry. But obviously, that’s a tip of the iceberg in the truest sense. There’s a huge opportunity to do more and I’m excited about it.

Of course, I’m a little sad that one of our colleagues won’t be here to provide guidance on that project. I’m looking at Marcheta Evans who’s taking on the role of President at St. Catherine’s University in St. Paul, Minnesota. Marcheta, stand so we can recognize you.

I’m deeply appreciative for what she has done and the courage that it took to lead this effort to keep Bloomfield from floundering and to give it a chance as part of ����vlog. Her vision for this partnership will always inform what we do. I’m also excited to let you know that Tammy Castro, professor at Bloomfield, will be serving as Interim Dean for Bloomfield College.

The changes in personnel don’t alter our commitment to Bloomfield and our idea that we can define something new for the future of higher education. We’ll be looking at the overall structure of the leadership as part of that ongoing design work and there will be more on that with respect to Bloomfield College and the Bloomfield campus in the coming months ahead.

Other big changes are in progress. A significant one is the end of the 14‑year tenure as AFT local president of Rich Wolfson. Where’s Rich? 42 years on the faculty. Rich, thank you for everything that you have done. I’m excited to work with Laura Fields, right there. Laura has very big white sneakers to fill. Actually, get new white sneakers now that I think about it.

There are also hellos, right? That’s the nature of enterprise. We will be welcoming David Chun as our new Chief Information Officer, who will start on May 1st. I’m also really excited to recognize Benjamin Kalscheur, who’s joined us as the university’s first Director of Sustainability, something that I’ve wanted to do since I got here. Again, if we as a university are going to say we are offering solutions to the world’s problems, I don’t think you can do that without acknowledging that the planet has been treated badly by all of us human beings.

People say, save the planet. Somebody said to me years ago, you don’t need to save the planet. The planet’s going to be here. The question is whether it’s going to be fit for us to live on it. And so, we need to do our part as a university, and I’m excited that Ben is here to lead a top to bottom look at what we do as a university. He’s been the first to say there’s a ton of good stuff going on already, so it’s not if starting from scratch. It’s about capturing what we do and looking for areas where there’s opportunities for improvement. I’m very excited about that.

We also expect to name a new Vice President for Finance in the coming months as that search is ongoing and proceeding well. There are lots of other organizational changes that have been implemented by Ben Durrant, our Chief Operating Officer, focused on day‑to‑day operations. We’re always looking for efficiencies and opportunities for collaboration across divisions and units.  That is the name of the game. I know Ben feels strongly in flattening the organization, a way to empower people who have good ideas and to unleash the talent across the university that can lead to innovation and improvement.

Now, let me turn to enrollment, one of the biggest issues always for this university and all universities facing the future today. As people know, this fall, we welcomed the largest first‑year class in our history, the largest number of new students in our history. That’s a good thing.

It creates challenges, right? I want to be clear. That creates challenges for us to accommodate students, to respond to what many people have pointed out, the very different levels of preparation that our students bring to the university than maybe in years past, and that creates different needs and different programs.

But to be honest, having a large class is a rich man’s problem in the current world. I would be remiss – if you thought of this as a state of the university speech – I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that we are looking at one of the most unusual and challenging enrollment situations probably in the history of higher education for a couple of different reasons.

One you’ve heard a lot about, which is the demographic cliff, which even though it’s less true in New Jersey than other states has a huge impact on us because what’s happening is every university in the country and particularly in our region – where up and down the east coast and in New England in particular, the demographic cliff is a very real thing. The number of students graduating from high school is going down.

And so, they look at New Jersey as a hunting ground for students. You may already know New Jersey is the no. 1 exporter of students in the country. That’s not something you want to lead in. And what universities are doing is discounting their own tuition. Most universities in the country now will match our in‑state tuition. Sometimes they’ll match their own in‑state tuition because they’d rather have some students than no students. We’re in this incredibly competitive environment where universities are, in some cases, willing to lose money in order to fill their seats. That’s one significant challenge.

Then you’re in a cultural environment where, for reasons legitimate and political, social, cultural, people are hammering away at the idea of college education being worth it to students. And I think it’s misguided. Many of you have heard me say I think we need to own some of the pathologies of higher education and get better, but it clearly is the case that students are better off with a college degree than without one, and that in every measure of outcomes, a college degree pays off. But the reluctance of students to take on debt, which is a part of going to college for most people these days, to get a degree that they’re being told isn’t worth anything is a real challenge to overcome.

And then layer on top of that a unique challenge of this year, which is – how many of you have seen about FAFSA? I know this is something that people say, well, I don’t know – FAFSA, what is that? This is federal financial aid form, and the result of the federal bungling of the changes to the FAFSA process, which were not a bad idea, just badly executed, is that students to this day don’t know what their financial aid eligibility is, and it’s very hard for institutions like Montclair to make affirmative statements, what will you get if you come here and what will your net tuition be?

The expectation is that there will be hundreds of thousands of people who will not go to college as a result. That is a personal tragedy for those individuals because once they forgo that, they probably won’t get back on track. 

It also happens to be potentially tragic for many institutions. Because that means hundreds of thousands of people won’t be attending college, and everybody who was counting on those students being enrolled and paying tuition. Now, we are in a stronger position than many because we are an attractive destination and I don’t think we are going to be as devastated as some other institutions.

But we are doubling and quadrupling our efforts to reach students and I would urge everyone to think of this as part of our job because it’s what keeps us in business. I’ve actually seen the emails saying, hey, faculty, you want to be part of recruiting? Hey, we have an admitting students day this weekend. That’s true. Be part of that. Come talk to families. Talk to students.

Tell them why you should come to Montclair, because this is existential for the university, and I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t tell you that I’m concerned about it.

It also means – and this is an important part – that your ability to retain the students that you have and to give them what they need to be successful is way more important. People always think about growth as being about new students. It’s also about keeping the students that you have. So, I’m very excited that the things that have been done in terms of retention have resulted in an increase, again, in the fall to spring retention rate, 92%. We need to get that ever higher. We’re experimenting with things like summer bridge and other interventions that will get us there.

Obviously, the work on student belonging and things looking at student life are intended to add to that, seemingly small things. For example, we’ve made progress in converting undecided students. That is to say, the number of university college students to declare their major in the first year has increased by 40%, which actually helps with retention.

Our fall graduate enrollment has increased 11% year over year, and we’re seeing an increase in spring graduate enrollment. We’re doing things and they are working. But nothing is fixed. That is to say, it’s all very volatile.

We’re excited that we had our winter commencement – our first winter commencement in years – in January, and we expect to have over 3,500 graduates next month, but we don’t take for granted that those things will continue to happen in the future. Moreover, we recognize that the enrollment mix has to change in order for us to achieve financial stability.

I see a huge area for potential growth and for potential enhancement of our university community in international enrollment. Vice President Wendy Lin‑Cook and I were in India in February looking to create collaborative partnerships that would encourage more Indian students to consider Montclair. India is now at a minimum the second largest descender of students to the United States. It’s probably the first from what we heard there. We think this is an amazing opportunity for ����vlog.

Just to tell you how quickly this is changing, our international enrollment since fall of ’21 is up 250%. Now, math people might say, what was the starting number? Yeah, that’s worth applause. Thank you. But I think that’s going to increase in the future.

By the way, that’s not just economically good. It increases the diversity. It makes college more interesting. You’re surrounded by people from different backgrounds, and we benefit from the talent and experience those international students will bring. It also means we have new challenges. I’m coming back to that. We have to adapt, because now, all of a sudden, things like housing and orientation and dietary requirements, we have to be more attentive to a more diverse population and adapt in return.

I always feel like research gets short shrift in this conversation. As we’re doing all these things and focusing on enrollment, we can’t abandon our research aspirations, and we haven’t. We’re continuing to grow there. We’re three‑quarters of the way into the fiscal year. We have 76 new awards representing $18.5 million in new funding. That’s 85% of the way to our annual goal with three months remaining. We’ll probably get there.

Another metric is our research and development dollars reported on the NSF HERD report.

Our research expenditures for FY ’22 were $32 million and $38 million for FY ’23. So, you see that growing.  Now, why do I say that that’s important? Sometimes people say why do we even care about these numbers?

We are one of a very small number of majority‑minority R2 institutions. The reality is many people are happy to say that higher education should be accessible to everybody. But they’re not willing to say that everybody should have access to the same opportunities of higher education.

Some people can be fine at those institutions, which don’t do research, which don’t offer hands-on learning opportunities, which don’t have STEM, and so on. I reject that entirely. We are one of the most important producers of minority STEM graduates in New Jersey; we have one of the best success rates of underrepresented students from a retention and graduation perspective.

If we, as one of a handful of minority and HSI/R2 institutions, don’t embrace that responsibility, then we are consigning a significant portion of the population to an education that is less than. That’s just not okay. And that’s what ����vlog stands for – that we reject that idea. And I think we should be enormously proud of it. That’s not easy.

And when we get into the budget part of the conversation, which I’m going to do now, you understand the challenge. But the stakes, if we were to say, well, we throw up our hands, we’re going to exclude those people, we’re going to lower our aspirations, we’re going to be a humble, obedient serf, then we’re failing. That’s not the assignment we accepted.

So, let’s talk a little bit about the economics.

I’m not going to go too deep into it because many of you may have seen the scintillating, riveting Budget 101 presentation I did a couple weeks ago. That was ironic there, sarcastic, whatever.

But the idea was to say how we think about funding. I’ll talk a little bit more at the Board of Trustees this week, and we’ll know more where we stand in June when the state budget comes out because that’s about 23% of our budget. The lion’s share of our budget, 75% is enrollment driven, tuition. But we do know that the budget is likely to be flat. I don’t think it’s going to go down, so that’s the good news. But it’s not going to go up. Notwithstanding the fact that our labor costs go up. Our operating costs go up. But our state appropriation will not go up, which means that we have to figure out how to make ends meet.

That is largely through tuition and you don’t really have any choice but to raise tuition when your costs go up over $30 million a year and your appropriation does not. I’m a smart guy, but I don’t know how to solve that problem in any other way. What we try to do when we make adjustments in tuition is take a huge portion of that and put it into financial aid so we don’t stop anybody from attending. This year, we offered about $92 million in financial aid to students. The goal being to ensure that financial constraints don’t keep anybody from attending and graduating, and then we try to supplement that by doing things like launching Scholarship Universe, which is a service that makes it easier for students to access external scholarships. And we look for opportunistic ways to grow the university, as I say, in terms of the enrollment mix and get funding for things that are critical to our future.

So, for example, I mentioned in the fall our work on the interdisciplinary science building and the wireless project that are going to be funded by a state bond initiative. That’s the – I hope it’s going to be prettier than that. Like, that does not inspire. I boldly tell you we will do better than that when we build that actual building. 

But it’s really important to understand, so the reason why you build that building is because that’s a sign of our commitment. If we didn’t add capacity, we would max out for the lab space needed to teach students in STEM fields and not just in CSAM, nursing and a variety of other fields, and it would max out our ability to do research. So, you have to do that if you’re going to maintain your aspirations and your commitment to excellence.

And on that point, let me just mention a couple of other things. I’m excited about some of these initiatives and again I’m going to rapid‑fire mention some things.

The Office of Faculty Excellence has launched a Strong Student campaign to help students be more successful through their work habits and other behaviors. CSAM and the School of Business worked with OFE and the Center for Academic Success and Tutoring to figure out ways to improve student performance, including ways to reduce the number of DFWs and those rates have come down in Feliciano 4.6 percentage points and in CSAM down 5.9 percentage points.

In CSAM student success was improved by developing networks for students including recitation sections and foundational courses, replacing lecture only approaches with active learning strategies – something I think we need to be doing across the university – and a supplemental instructional program was introduced, particularly building on the example in chemistry into other courses. That only is possible because faculty buy into it. We’re excited that another set of faculty and CSAM are participating in the teaching innovations program that will allow us to increase those programs for multi‑section first‑year major courses.

So, there’s good things happening.

Another example, and we actually have a guest to show off again: Feliciano has redesigned INFO173, which shifted to a mastery approach where students are required to complete assignments each week prior to advancing to the next model led by an IMBA faculty member who I think is here with us.

Thank you, Rreze. Rreze was brought on to teach this and over 800 students just in the last year have been impacted. The course includes a credentialing opportunity for students which is the goal in the Feliciano strategic plan. By the way, something that is going to be, I think, a big part of higher education is credentialing as students go along so that they get value as they progress through their education. That way you don’t view interruptions in pursuit of the bachelor’s degree as a total disaster because you’re getting credentialed.

In this case, Microsoft’s Excel Certification Program. Emily Perri was in the first group of students to take the course. She had the highest score on the exam in the state, and was invited to participate in the National Championships in June. We had 7 of the 10 highest scores in the state. Emily’s not here, but she is an example of what that looks like.

Also, in terms of excellence, I’m particularly excited about the revamping of our honors program, now dubbed Honors EDGE, which is representative of an innovative experience‑based program. Students will be immersed in transdisciplinary course work, and it will provide tools students need to become transformative leaders, opportunities for funded study abroad, internships, research and a pedagogical framework that emphasizes creativity.

I think creativity is the secret sauce that human beings will retain even when the robots take over, because they won’t be able to make things up out of thin air the way people can, at least for the time being. Helping students develop their creativity tools is important.

Jameson is here. Jameson is one of the students who proposed a student‑driven peer mentoring program to support incoming Honors EDGE students, which I think sounds awesome. According to Laura, who is his professor, Jameson works through the lens of collaboration, accountability and trustworthiness. He is self‑reflective and action oriented and driven by his desire to help create an honors program that is grounded in community and belonging. What a cool thing, contributing to the design of the program for other students that will follow in your footsteps.

The School of Communications and Media has developed an innovative partnership with Telemundo, which offers students opportunities, also helping them on their career pathway.

The good news is – remember I said before the biggest frustration is people hear about things and they said, Montclair, I had no idea? People are starting to get an idea. Thanks to our communications team, we are getting out there in a way that we haven’t seen before. Some of you saw the Blind Injustice production that took place on this stage. It got great coverage. We’ve had hundreds of mentions of Montclair that we weren’t getting before. 

And even praise for the way in which we are communicating – our social media team is really hitting it out of the park. For those of you who are not on Instagram and doing this, this is one of the things that we’re doing at Montclair that’s really become a model for national benchmarks. People are looking at what we’re doing. You can see a recent production of our “Red Hawt” – how do I say it, Ashley? Stand up so I can introduce you. Ashley Petrosine. We recently did an episode – we ate hot wings together, we talked about the university. We’re going to go at it again because I think they were condescending and gave me baby hot wings. I have a high tolerance for spice, but I think I can do more. I think we can do better, but it was a lot of fun. It passed the test. My kids said it wasn’t lame. My daughter actually said, “I was laughing out loud watching it.” So, that is high praise.

Before I close – and I’m apologizing that I’m going to do this quickly because it makes it seem like it’s not important. It is. I don’t want to gloss over the tough times. This has been an extraordinary year. We’ve been at the forefront of a national crisis, which is the mental health crisis that’s particularly affecting our students. I think many of you know – and it was in the questions – many of you know that we’ve had an unprecedented level of tragic consequences to the mental health crisis, students taking their own life and other attempts to do so. And we are very concerned. We’re very concerned about the well‑being of our students. Obviously, every one of those situations has individual contours to it. But we’re very concerned about the general challenge our students are facing, and very concerned about the challenges for those of us on campus who have to be on call and responding to those challenges.

There’s layers to it. I want to recognize Vice President Dawn Soufleris and the SDCL staff in particular who have really been focused on this, and the counseling team. It’s not just being responsive, we want to be ahead of it. We want to deal with the mental well‑being of our community members, not just respond to crises. Of course, responding to crises is critical.

I don’t know if Kieran is here, but our Chief and the whole UPD team has been amazing not just in response to what I’m talking about but also in managing protests and demonstrations and that’s been a real test of our university, something that we’ve, I think, met admirably. This is a team that has really worked extremely hard under difficult circumstances.

Several of you asked questions about what we’re doing. I will jump to that and say, you’re going to get an email in the next couple days where we will lay out in some detail the steps that we’re taking. So, I don’t want to butcher that right now. You’ll get that in a day or two. But know that we take it very seriously.

Over 1,000 students are using the UWILL telehealth services we offer. We have gotten grants from OSHE to offer some additional resources, and we’re always looking to be creative. It may sound goofy that we talk about our puppy – I guess Pebbles isn’t a puppy anymore – but it actually seems to have an effect. We are always going to embrace things that work whether they seem silly or hokey or not. Just know that this is something that we’re concerned about.

And not just for students, because as I say, we know that faculty and staff are also affected by this.

On the screen it says I’ve got 60 seconds left. So, let me say this. And I can stick around for a few minutes if people can, but if people have to get up and leave, I understand. I won’t take it personally. Let me say this. All these things are happening. The goal – somebody said, what’s my goal or what do I want my legacy to be? Which I thought was maybe an invitation to wrap things up.

But our goal is to be a university prepared for the future. Partially, that’s about reshaping what we do, how we do things, and re‑envisioning what this university looks like. I just came from a conference that was basically about AI and education. And we are at the protozoan stage of understanding what AI will do for higher education. But it will be transformative in all kinds of ways. People say, oh, it’s about cheating. It’s much more than that. By the way, all kinds of good things, right? I think it’s an incredible tool to enhance student success. It’s an incredible tool to amplify our effectiveness in dealing with all kinds of issues that stop students from being successful on their pathway to graduation. I think it will change how we teach and how we learn. But it’s going to require a rethinking of everything that we do, and that much is obvious. And it’s going to require a critical examination of all these people who will sell you the next magic elixir that will fix all your problems. So, it represents something significant.

My goal is to have a university that’s nimble, that’s not self‑satisfied, that isn’t committed to doing things the way we’ve always done things but rather the way they need to be done to be successful in the future, and that embraces our assignment, going back to where I started, as being non‑negotiable. We will not fix the university by saying, well, we just have to have fewer of those people who are so high maintenance and needy. That’s not a possible solution. And it can’t be that we retreat from our social mission and our social purpose. That’s not a possibility.

So, the question is, how do we get better at doing that and no possibility is off the table ever, and rethink everything that we do. Including seemingly obscure, functional things like looking at the university calendar and saying, how do we prepare to operate 12 months a year? That’s critical. One of the sessions, somebody said, “why do we have this ridiculous calendar? We take the summer off. Is everybody going to plant crops?” No! Obviously. But we still operate that way. That’s bananas.

Why do we still measure credit hours in this artificial thing? Credit hours were invented as a way to measure faculty performance. That’s where they come from. It was this artificial imposition of credit hours as a way to measure learning as opposed to stuff people learn. Just like, take a step back and think about that. How much did you learn? Well, I sat in class for 120 hours. It wasn’t what I asked you. Right?

So, we need to be part of the process of revisiting everything that we do and that’s what I want our university to stand for. Sometimes that means doing new things and sometimes that means doing things that other people have been doing for years. I’m super excited about our pre-college summer programs which are up to probably over 250 students, Junius, for this summer? Not yet? Well, that’s what it’s going to be.

I’m excited about more programs coming that will be mixed modality where we have low residency programs that meet students where they want to be. That shows that we’re a university capable of adaptation and change and that’s the university I want to be.

The last thing I’ll say in terms of what I want to be is to recognize that I want to be part of the protection of American democracy. We’re headed, obviously, to a significant election in the fall. By the way, not just a presidential election. Everybody focuses on that, but there are elections up and down the ballot, and they matter a great deal too.

I was happy to join the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge and also a few other initiatives that are about universities committing to democracy. I didn’t feel like that was a controversial thing to do because this campus already had a set of programs that were aligned with this objective. I think it’s incredibly important that we embrace this as a community. And we do so, for two reasons.

First of all, because we have to be guardians at the gate of democracy and communicate to our students and every member of our community that participation in American democracy is a responsibility and vital for the future of the country. It’s also vital for the future of ����vlog.

So I want to mention before we leave that on May 2nd, we will have a Trenton Lobbying Day for the university. As I’ve mentioned before, Montclair is not appropriately recognized in the budget. Our students are funded at a level lower than students at basically every other university in the state, when you put it all in. And I don’t think it’s right, not just because you guys are watching. No, I just think it’s appalling. And most people don’t believe me when I say that. They’re like, no, no, there must be a formula where it’s a certain number of dollars per state. I’m like, are you new here? That’s not how New Jersey works.

So, this university, for reasons that – it’s not about one person – it’s over decades on a per‑student basis, we get less than pretty much anybody. Just in terms of the core appropriation, a student who goes to the other research universities is funded at a level twice as high as a student who goes to ����vlog.

I don’t know. These guys seem like they’re worth the same amount of funding as anybody else. So, we need everybody to be part of that effort. Food and transportation will be provided. It’s a great opportunity to have our voices heard. If you can make it, join with your students. There will be a sign‑up sheet in “In The Know” and I hope people can be part of it.

Let me wrap it up. I’m at five minutes past 4:00. I will give people a chance to flee if you need to, and then I’ll try to answer a couple of the questions that I didn’t touch on, although I think I hit most of them in here. So, stopping, pausing. Yes, thank you and I will just give it 30 seconds and then I’ll answer a couple of these questions.

All right. I hit upon most of the things in here. As I said, there were several questions about mental health and I hope to have that email to you within the next few days. There were a couple questions about summer hours. You should have seen an email on that ‑‑ it says last Friday, according to Keith, so – yes? You know that one.

Feedback – oh, yes about the dining. Will there be an opportunity for feedback on dining? Yes. This is a work in progress. This was the first year with a new company. There were a lot of things that went well. But there’s opportunities for enhancement. Let’s put it that way. So, we are eager for feedback.

This one was maybe put in for my amusement. What plans do you have to improve student access to parking? I feel like people aren’t paying attention if I don’t get a parking and transportation question. I will say I think the long‑term question is, how do you get fewer people here in cars? I mean, it’s just that. I’ve had some conversations about, could we have shuttle services to downtown Montclair that would go to Bay Street? I think that’s the only way that we really solve for that. Part of the changes in schedule are actually about parking, too. So, I say this to students, particularly this mostly comes from students who observe all the parking for faculty and staff, by the way, so yes. I can tell you how to get a parking space. Just come on Wednesday or Friday.

And then the challenge then is if you do what we’re planning to do which is to change the schedule so that classes are spread out, then people are just going to say, you dumb idiot. I liked it when I could make it so I could come twice a week. I’m like, yeah, I understand that. That’s why there’s no parking those days. So, there are trade‑offs on all these things, and there really is no magic. There’s no way to really deal with traffic ultimately. There’s two ways off campus. There’s going to be traffic. But believe it or not, food was part of our answer to traffic, which is if you have better food on campus, you can stay here and have a meal or whatever, and then you don’t have to leave at the exact same time that everybody else is leaving. We are trying to think broadly about these things. But I don’t think ultimately you can solve that without changing the way people get to campus.

There were a couple questions actually which were about the structure of the university and do we see the structure of the university changing to be divided up into more autonomous units? The short answer to that is no. And I just wanted to talk about the thinking. When I think about structural change, structural change is not driven by some formula that says a unit should be “x,” you know, people or whatever. It doesn’t serve a purpose. So, when we were looking at the colleges ‑‑ and this is what the faculty committee that Junius pulled together that looked at the colleges for health and education, that there was a substantive reason to disentangle those two units because we could perform better as a university with a differentiated College for Education and Engaged Learning and a differentiated College for Community Health. And that that focus would enhance their performance. It wasn’t about numbers. It wasn’t that we felt that college was too big. It wasn’t our biggest college. It was about a mission.

And so any changes that we make in structure are not going to be arbitrarily driven by size. They’ll be about achieving a certain mission or purpose as a university. What we are looking at from an organizational point of view is: are there ways in which we become duplicative where we have the same function being performed by different people in different units? We do not want that. So, if the question was implying, do we want to create little hives? No. Exact opposite. We’re trying to coordinate more. That doesn’t necessarily mean you create one large throbbing central brain that controls everything. It does mean you don’t create semi-autonomous thiefdoms because that results in some of the pathologies where we have people doing the same tasks using different systems, different software, different approaches within this university. And we’re not that big. There’s no reason why that should be, and it is inefficient and kind of goofy. So, that’s what we’re looking for moving forward, not to subdivide further.

Other than that, I think I covered the things that are in here. So, I thank you for your time. I’m looking forward to working together in the months ahead and will let you go. I appreciate your forbearance in going a few minutes over. Thank you, all.

Below is a video and transcript of President Koppell’s conversation with Brian Kelly, Editor at Large of U.S. News & World Report.

Additional speakers included James Kvaal, under secretary of the U.S. Department of Education; John B. King Jr., chancellor, The State University of New York, and 10th U.S. secretary of Education; Mildred Garcia, chancellor, California State University; and Ari Berman, president, Yeshiva University. For more about the event, .

Brian Kelly:

Jonathan Koppell, President of ����vlog.

We are not going to get the longest word, but we are going to get the last word. And I will often take that as the better alternative.

We have a lot of things that we want to touch on here. I’m Brian Kelly. I’m not Eric Gertler, as it says on your program. I used to be Eric Gertler but not anymore. But I’m pleased to be here with Jonathan. I grew up in Clifton, New Jersey. First university I ever saw was Montclair State, it was big and it’s always stuck in my heart, so I’m delighted to be able to be here with Jonathan.

Among other things, Montclair State has recently been named one of our highest ranked schools for social mobility. There’s a lot of other things we can talk about. Jonathan’s biography is terrific. He was at Arizona State University which is very innovative, and is doing innovative things at Montclair State.

But let’s get into the quick lightning round here. What did we hear today? Jonathan, what are we taking away from a lot of information?

Jonathan Koppell:

I think we can use this as an opportunity to try and synthesize, in addition to talking about some of the stuff we want to talk about. And I should say just so I have credibility, I went to PS 81 and 141 in the Bronx. So I fit in with the panel today.

So the main thing I take away is that the story of higher education that’s reported in The New York Times, which makes it seem like the world is Harvard and the Ivy League, is just completely wrong. I’m not talking about the hearings and the general craziness of the last week. I’m just saying that the idea that the Ivy League is representative of higher education in America, both the good and the challenges, is just wrong.

The way that Chancellors King and Garcia talked about their mission and what they’re doing, I can tell you – and it reflects on those poll numbers – Chancellors King and Garcia are thinking about a lot of things, but the size of the endowment that they have to manage and whether or not the movement of the S&P 500 is affected, that’s not one of them.

And so I think what we need to take from this session is to reorient the conversation around higher education away from the dynamics of a few small institutions. And by the way, I’m not even just talking about the degree to which those institutions are creating pathways for students who are marginalized from higher education, even some of the logistical things. So you heard President Berman talking about the challenge of growth. Those institutions aren’t talking about the challenge of growth because their business model is to stay the same and to exclude people and not to grow. So an institution like ����vlog, or we were talking about Arizona State University or the SUNY system or the CSU system, we’re trying to grow to create more learning opportunities for more students. That’s our mission. An institution that’s not trying to grow doesn’t have to grapple with some of the same things.

So if we want to have a conversation about the future of higher education and the challenges, we need to stop the fixation with a small number of elite institutions.

Brian Kelly:

Should we just get rid of the Ivy League?

Jonathan Koppell:

No, not at all. They serve a purpose. I’m a graduate, like they serve a purpose. They offer a pathway for a small number of people to a remarkable education.

But fundamentally – and I think this part of the conversation about affirmative action was lost – fundamentally, a marginal change in the composition of the student body of a tiny number of institutions that serves a tiny percentage of students is not going to alter the landscape of leadership in the country.

So if the survey data says people look at the leaders of businesses and government and they say we want to see more diversity, what the Ivy League does to change the percent composition of their enrollment is not going to affect that. It’s just not going to affect that.

There was a study that I’m sure many of the people here know. Raj Chetty, who’s a well known economist, wrote an article talking about how because the leadership of institutions is so dominated by people from the Ivy League, and I think it was four other private institutions, the leadership of those institutions won’t become more diverse unless the Ivy League institutions are more diverse and so on.

I almost laughed out loud when I read this, because it didn’t even occur to them that maybe the problem is that the leadership of those institutions is dominated by the graduates of 12 colleges. Like that’s the problem. It turns out there are a lot of really smart, really talented people who didn’t go to those schools.

And so maybe we need to figure out how to diversify the pipeline so that we’re not leaving, you know, acres and acres of human potential left uncultivated.

Brian Kelly:

I think folks here probably are aware of the U.S. News rankings. We do rank 1500 schools. We’ve always said it’s not just about the Ivy League, but obviously, there’s a tremendous focus on the Ivy League, and then we’ve had some really good conversations about data here. And we have expanded our capacity to look more deeply at institutions and want to do more of it.

What would you – at Montclair State – what would you like to be ranked on? What data would you like to surface that would allow you to showcase more of what you’re doing and show consumers and students what it is that they could get from Montclair.

Jonathan Koppell:

Well, I really appreciate what U.S. News was trying to do in revising the way you were doing the rankings because I think what you shifted the focus to – and this is what we at ����vlog would be particularly interested in having people look at is – what’s the delta for the student who attends the university? Right? So if the main value add of a university is that I filter out 97% of the people that I add, the question of what the gain is for the student who attended that university is fairly hard to answer.

Because I could tell you that that student, the marginal effect on that student’s life of going to institution ranked number one versus institution ranked number two, the marginal effect is close to zero. But the marginal effect on a student’s life of going to ����vlog is enormous.

So it turns out that if I wanted to predict whether a student graduates from college, the most useful thing to know is not their high school GPA, it’s actually their family income. And the demographics of the student population gives you a predicted graduation rate.

����vlog’s predicted graduation rate is 20 percentage points lower than our actual graduation rate. And so that’s what puts us number seven for social mobility in the U.S. News ranking on that score.

I want people to know what difference it’s going to make in their life to go to our institution. I want to be clear, that’s not exclusive to ����vlog. We take great pride in that. But that’s, I think, the question that people should be asking when they’re looking at colleges: how is this experience going to alter my trajectory? Right? That should be the substantive judgment of the value of a college education.

And yes, it matters whether you have letters after your name, and what the income implications are of that, and we can get into all that. But I don’t think that question is asked enough.

I was talking to another university leader who said quite honestly, their institution, it’s a selective private institution – not Ivy League – but they said a kid who goes to my school is going to be fine whether they go to my school or not. They’re going to be fine.

I don’t think that’s necessarily true for a student who attends ����vlog. Not every student, but many students. And it’s certainly not true for every student who attends a CUNY or SUNY institution or a Cal State institution.

We take a great deal of pride in that and we’ve built our institution to ensure, to the extent possible, that we’re capable of having that effect on a student’s life.

Brian Kelly:

I mean, that doesn’t happen by itself as we know. The schools that don’t do well on our list, we look at and say they’re taking kids in and they’re not fulfilling the mission. What are some specific things that you’re doing to get these kids to that level?

Jonathan Koppell:

Well, and Chancellor Garcia alluded to it, so I don’t want to repeat the previous things. So part of it is providing the mentorship and the wraparound services, being cognizant of the needs of a student.

Chancellor King mentioned the idea of giving hands-on learning opportunities to prepare people for the workforce. We’re trying to get more intentional about preparing a student, not only for success in college but beyond. A few years ago, somebody made a really good point to me. They said, you know, you talk all the time about first generation college students, but those are first generation professionals. So they don’t know anything about schmoozing at a cocktail party or preparing for an interview or dressing the right way for a professional interaction. So to the extent you can build that into the process, I think it’s more useful to the student.

A second thing, just to put specificity. There’s been a lot of discussion about data and I will mention that in any gathering of higher ed leaders, one of the main topics which – actually, it’s interesting to me, the phrase hasn’t even been said until I’m about to say it – the main topic is artificial intelligence. And what does that mean for the future of higher education? What does that mean for the future of work? And one of the opportunities is to deploy artificial intelligence to better understand our students.

So data, in and of itself, doesn’t do anything. The question is, how do you use that data? So, our hope is to build a 360 degree picture of a student. Yes, how they’re doing in classes. But are they getting their meals regularly? Are they exercising? How much time are they spending on their homework?

The way we’re tracked these days, we can have a remarkably thorough picture of a human being while they’re in college. And what if we then deploy artificial intelligence to predict when a student might be on a pathway to bad outcomes and intervene sooner? That’s what universities need to be doing.

And I will say, universities that have a population like ours or SUNY or Cal State, we’re thinking that way. We’re thinking how do we increase the outcomes, because that’s how we ultimately deal with the dissatisfaction people feel towards higher education – by increasing the success rate as Under Secretary Kvaal talked about.

Brian Kelly:

It’s interesting, I majored in schmoozing at cocktail parties in college. So, a different experience. It was valuable. 

Jonathan Koppell:

Look where it got you.

Brian Kelly:

Yeah, you know, not everyone goes that path.

But one of the things that I know you’ve talked about, and Montclair State has done, is engaging in the community, specifically hands-on in the community. And then simultaneously, related to that, is the broader sense of public service, and sort of imbuing that in the curriculum. Talk a little bit about that – does that have an effect particularly maybe on disadvantaged students? Is that an appeal?

Jonathan Koppell:

That’s fundamental to who we are. And I think it’s important on a lot of levels. Let’s get back to the beginning of the dissatisfaction people feel with higher education. I think some of these are people who sort of diffuse frustration that takes the form of answers about endowment.

So here’s how I would translate that endowment answer, which is that universities seem to care only about themselves, right? And as long as the university is doing well, the university is satisfied, and they have beautiful campuses sometimes surrounded by communities that are not so beautiful.

So at Montclair, we don’t view that as an acceptable attitude. The success of the institution is defined in part by the success of the communities that we’re serving. And so we are deeply engaged in Newark. Since I’ve arrived, we’ve become super involved in Paterson, which as a Clifton guy, you know, is a nearby community. I’m a big Paterson booster, a really interesting, underappreciated city in New Jersey. Key to our country’s history. In fact, the birthplace of the American industrial revolution, but tough, economically stressed, high levels of crime, unemployment, lack of opportunity.

How do we as a university, sit next to Paterson, New Jersey and say, well, it’s not my problem? And that, to me, that’s unacceptable. And so we’re engaged there in multiple interesting ways. We’re part of the resurrection of Hinchliffe Stadium, one of the only standing Negro League facilities. We’ve taken responsibility for creating a museum at the stadium and we’re going to create a curriculum with the Paterson school district.

We’re turning East Side High School – which people might know from the Morgan Freeman movie about Joe Clark – we’re making that a community school to create a full service center. In each of these things, we create learning opportunities for students.

So this is the key to answering your question. The students now are applying the lessons that they’re learning in the classroom to advance the communities, many of which they come from, they’re from Paterson and that has a lot of value.

First of all, it underscores their civic responsibility. But it also gives them the opportunity to apply the knowledge that they’re acquiring in the classroom. And it gives them a sense of efficacy.

If there’s one thing that I strongly agree with about the characterization of Gen Z, they want to do stuff now. They’re impatient to take action now. And the idea that you’re going to tell them well, study this for five or 10 years and then someday you’ll get to apply it, is unacceptable. They’re just not interested.

I talk to students – they’re starting businesses. I’m not talking about side hustles, like consulting firms with clients across the country. They’re doing it now. And so if we’re going to reach students and show them that what we’re doing matters, we have to create those opportunities.

And so by meeting our responsibility to create pipelines for teachers, to address social inequity, to deal with hunger and homelessness, we are also serving our students by giving them what they demand from an education in the 21st century.

Brian Kelly:

How are your students doing?

Jonathan Koppell:

I think my students are in a lot of the same places that the previous speakers talked about. I think that they’re reacting to the world around them and they are distressed. I think everything that was said before – COVID consequences. I think one of the things that wasn’t alluded to directly, but we’re seeing and is related to the reaction to Israel – Gaza, one of the consequences of students being cloistered for a year and a half, two years, is they didn’t develop the conflict resolution skills that are so critical.

And so – see this sounds funny – but we’re actually seeing more irresolvable fights between roommates and you know, the roommate doesn’t behave the way they want. They’re like, I want a new roommate and it’s like, no, work it out and they’re like, no, I demand to be moved and it’s like, well, there’s nowhere to move you too.

But those skills, of how do you deal with disagreement? Yes, it deals with international affairs but it deals with interpersonal relations as well. The one pushback and I guess it didn’t get captured in the poll or maybe I just am lucky to be with students who don’t conform to that. But it’s true in my ASU experience as well as Montclair. I actually think that there is a higher level of optimism among younger students than among – than in my brain – but also than among my peers, and that the students are not deterred by the world.

I do think that they’re like, all right, get out of the way because you’re not making things better and we’ll deal with it. But they’re not throwing up their hands and saying, oh, we’re doomed, and what’s the point? They’re saying I need to get at it and I need to get skills.

The thing that I’m most impressed with by students at Montclair is they’re like sponges. They are so appreciative of the resources that are available to them. I think more so than at institutions that frankly have more resources if I can be so bold.

I don’t have everything to offer that the Ivy League institutions do, but my students are so eager to use everything that’s available to them to make themselves better and to prepare to be change agents. I’m inspired by it. I would be much more depressed if I didn’t get to hang around with Montclair students. That’s the truth.

Brian Kelly:

That’s because they’re from Jersey. They figure it out.

Jonathan Koppell:

That’s part of it.

Brian Kelly:

People from Jersey get that. People who aren’t from Jersey don’t even know what I’m talking about. So, don’t worry.

Dig a little deeper on this whole speech issue, how are you dealing with that? Is there a speech code? How are you trying to draw the line?

Jonathan Koppell:

Every institution is different and by the way I could go on at some length on – I’ll call it the clumsiness – of some of the institutions, and the leaders and how they’ve handled this. There are many more institutions that are handling it quite well, by the way. We don’t talk about them because that’s not a very good story and they didn’t get invited to testify. Gee, I wonder why.

So Montclair is interesting. President Berman and I had a really interesting discussion about this. Turns out ����vlog probably has one of the largest, if not the largest, populations of Palestinian students of any school in the country. Probably maybe a little different than the Clifton you grew up in. Clifton and Paterson has the second largest Palestinian community in the United States after Chicago. A lot of those students come to Montclair.

So we have a very large Palestinian student population that’s been very active and expressing themselves. And we have a Jewish population that’s very concerned about what’s going on in the world. I think that the key, and I’ll tie it to the theme of the session, is the way I’ve thought about my role in this as a leader is to not talk about foreign policy. ����vlog doesn’t have a foreign policy, it turns out.  But I’m the leader of a community, and my job is to maintain that community as a place where everybody feels safe, heard, and respected.

And so in the messaging that I’ve done, it’s been trying to underscore what the values of our community are and what expectations we have for each other in terms of how we interact. And it’s more about that than a discussion of the overall situation.

I have a lot I could say about that and I’ve watched people commenting as, again, the previous speakers made reference to, hard to comprehend things that are being said. And it’s frustrating for me as somebody who cares about public affairs to not jump in and say, but that’s just a fundamental misreading of history. But that’s not the goal from my current position. And maybe there’ll be a time when we get to that. But my current position is to try and establish an expectation of what discourse should look like.

And by the way, that should make it obvious that calling for the extermination of one set of students is not an acceptable form of discourse. But I think the key is, and actually this gets to the “what are we for”? The key is establishing the values of the community and what we want to be as a university community. And I think that’s been missing, right? There’s been no affirmative statement. It’s all negative. Thou shalt not, thou shalt not, thou shalt not. But not, what do we aspire to be? 

And I think part of being a leader is laying out that aspiration. And that has not been forthcoming for many people.

Brian Kelly:

As a scholar and a professor, you have studied institutional behavior, right? And now you’re in an institution and trying to figure out how it behaves. One of the arguments is that university presidents actually have a surprisingly little amount of power, that I’ve heard. Has that been your experience? And how do you move the needle when you’ve got these, as everyone has talked about today, these incredibly complex issues, vast constituencies.

Jonathan Koppell:

Look, it depends on what your expectations are. I mean, these are not dictatorships, right? So you can’t just by fiat change things. But I actually think if you can lay out a vision as to what you’re trying to accomplish, you can do things.

Probably the biggest, I think, shortcoming of higher education in response to those poll results, is that many people see leadership as being a cheerleader or a booster in response.

So, what most university presidents I think tend to do, by the way, not our speakers, but what most university presidents say – “No, these people who are critical of higher education, they got it wrong. We’re fabulous. We’re terrific. Everything’s great.” Or they’ll say, “yeah, yeah, yeah, but not my institution.”

And so I actually think what we ought to be doing is owning it and saying yeah, there’s a reason why people are frustrated with higher education. The majority of people who went to college in this country don’t have a degree. I mean, just think about that for a second. The majority of expenditures under the Pell program, people are familiar with that. The majority of expenditures on the Pell program did not result in a degree. It’s like, does anybody want to defend that? I don’t know. I mean, so the question is how are we going to change, to address that?

And more often, the emphasis is on “how does the student adapt to the university”. Enough with that! How do we adapt to make ourselves better able to accommodate students? And so when you lay it out that way, then I think people are willing to change. I’m not saying that it’s easy. I don’t snap my fingers – several members of my team are here and they’re like, oh yeah, it’s totally easy! But we’ve actually been able to do some interesting things.

One of the things that we’ve been able to do is integrate Bloomfield College. Bloomfield College is the only Predominantly Black Institution in New Jersey. We don’t have any HBCUs in New Jersey. It was on the verge of collapsing. Basically because the business model was unsustainable. And that seemed simply wrong, inconsistent with our mission to let the only institution dedicated to serving African Americans in New Jersey to fail.

So we said, well, could we design a structure where it became part of Montclair? But retain its distinctive mission, right? That has a differentiated pathway, within a large public university. And you would say, well, how on earth would a public university do that? And the answer is because we had a purpose.

I’m looking at my board chair. So I’m happy to say that the board of trustees said, yeah, we should do that. That’s the right thing to do. And that’s going to require some adaptation. But it’s for a reason, it’s not change for change’s sake. And so I think universities are willing to change.

You’re familiar with ASU. ASU is known nationally for sort of saying, let’s blow it up a little bit and see how we can do things differently. I think people are OK with that if there’s a substantive goal in mind.

Brian Kelly:

Last question, given everything I’ve heard today, why did you take this job?

Jonathan Koppell:

My joke is that I’m an average of my parents. My mother was a college professor, administrator. And my father, who’s sitting over there, was a lifelong public servant. 20 plus years in the state legislature and New York State Attorney General. And so I became a political science professor because I just merged politics and academia.

But the longer answer is because I think universities are capable of being incredibly powerful instruments of social transformation. And quite frankly, they are underutilized to that end. And I saw that. I’m a super geek. I took a class in college on higher education leadership. So presidents like to say, I never thought I’d be a university president. Like no, I had this in mind a long time ago because yes, it’s frustrating to deal with some of this stuff. But there’s an opportunity, think about what we’re empowered to do. First of all, to create pathways for individuals to change their lives.

But I actually think, and I’ll throw this out there as a closing thought. I actually think part of the reason that we’ve lost track of the value of higher education is because we’ve – nerd alert –  is because we only talk about it as a private good. So that as if we’re churning out educations, people get a college degree and it’s economically valuable to them. And thus the ROI on higher education is “how much did your salary go up because you got a Bachelor’s degree from Acme University?”

Higher education, and education generally, we shouldn’t forget, should be thought of as a public good. Society is better because more people are educated. Even people who don’t have a college degree benefit from the prosperity of having a highly educated society.

The explosion of the American economy in the 1950s was driven in part by the GI Bill which broadened access to college education and created a dramatically educated workforce. Indeed, in New Jersey, one of the problems we have is we don’t have enough educated workers to fill the jobs that are available.

At the same time, we have a remarkably high unemployment rate, just wrap your brain around that for a second. And so we need to embrace the idea that higher education when properly oriented and performing at a high level is one of the greatest drivers we’ve ever invented as a species to drive social prosperity.

And so I think the assignment to say, ok, make that work in the 21st century with a different level of public investment and a different set of expectations and a different set of complexity –  that’s a pretty good assignment. I’ll take it.

Brian Kelly:

Ok. Good job, Jonathan.

Jonathan Koppell:

Thank you.

And I couldn’t be more proud to work here with all of you. The purpose of this gathering is to give you an update on some of the things that have been happening, some of the plans we have for the coming year, and I’m going to try and jam as much into this as possible and be aware of the time. So, if I speak too quickly, reading prepared words, it’s because I’m eager to get to your questions, and we’ve got so, so much that we want to talk about.

So, it’s conventional in universities to say welcome back as the fall semester begins, which is fine, for those who have been away. But not everybody was away! We were very much present during the last three months, and it’s been busy. A few things have happened. There was the small matter of getting a complicated merger of two higher education institutions done. That involved passing legislation in Trenton. It involved regulatory approval. It involved financial arrangements. We are not done yet, but an incredible amount was accomplished.

We finalized budgets. We hosted our first ever pre-college sessions for high school students. Major work on facilities on campus underway – a lot more to come, we’ll hear about that. Preparing to welcome 22,000 students, the most students ever enrolled at the university. That takes some preparation.

And part of what happens is capturing everything that has gone on in the year before. And I want to call out something that usually gets, I think, improperly put towards the end of remarks, and I want to call it out early, which is to capture just how much has been achieved in terms of our growth as a research institution.

So, I think everybody knows that we became an R2 designated institution in 2019, which was nice recognition of where we’ve come. But that momentum has increased dramatically. In fiscal year ’23, just in terms of external funding, which is only one measure of research performance – and I always hesitate to lean into it even though it’s something that people do – because it’s imperfect. But the university recognized 92 new awards representing $21.6 million in external new external funding and an annual expenditures in excess of $30 million. Those are both much higher numbers than we’ve ever recorded before. So, first of all, shout out to our Vice Provost, Stefanie Brachfeld, who’s done a great job in that area. Partially doing a great job capturing just how much activity we have, which we weren’t doing as much as we could have. But most importantly, just a huge, huge appreciation for the faculty who are out there doing incredible work, applying for grants, involving students in this research. That’s what makes the qualitative experience of being a student at a research university different, not necessarily better, but certainly different than being at an institution that is not actively engaged in the process of inquiry. So, I didn’t want to leave this to the end. This is an increasingly important part of our activity on campus. We’ll talk about how we’re investing in that moving forward. But the proof is in the accomplishment that we are more than capable and more than achieving as a research university right alongside our goals as an accessible, inclusive public serving institution.

So even though everybody was working hard, I hope that at least over the summer, there was an opportunity to be with family and friends, to recharge the batteries before we jump into a busy fall semester. I would be remiss if I didn’t welcome a few new faces in the room. First of all, we’ve got lots of new faculty and leaders. Obviously we will recognize them in a moment.

But we also have our friends, colleagues, the faculty and staff of Bloomfield College of ����vlog who are with us today. Let’s give a big welcome.

And a welcome to those watching at the Bloomfield campus, from the Montclair campus – not the main campus, the Montclair campus.

We are excited. It’s always great to start the year with the sense of possibility that the new students bring to the campus. But I’d be obviously dishonest if I didn’t also say that we gather at a time of trepidation. Higher education is getting more attention in a negative way or certainly in a more controversial way than I certainly can recall in my life. In addition to the sort of political questions, there are questions around the value of a college degree. There are questions around the role we play in society. And just yesterday, we saw, again, that our campuses are not oases, protected from the same dysfunction and dangers that afflict society. Our hearts are broken by what occurred at Chapel Hill and a few days earlier at Edward Waters University in Jacksonville, Florida.

Two things. First of all, obviously, this is not normal, not acceptable for a society to experience catastrophic violence on a day to day basis, and we shouldn’t be inured to it. We shouldn’t grow used to it. We have to be angry. We have to be outraged even as we are distressed.

And second, I want to make sure that folks who are here today recognize that we are doing everything in our power to prepare for this. Chief Barrett and others led an exercise in the spring to practice, unfortunately, for such instances. We will do more of that in the coming year, and we are looking at every aspect of campus operations to think about how we can ensure that this is a safe campus.

The reality is, however, we are part of a world. The world doesn’t stop at the entrance to this campus, and so what is out there affects us. If you want to understand why iI believe it’s our responsibility to be a force for change in the world, one of the reasons is because we are not immune to the world. So, if we want to take responsibility for our own safety, that means taking responsibility for what’s going on in the world.

And so, the stakes have never been higher to show what this university is capable of.
We simply have no choice, in my view, no choice but to demonstrate that ����vlog, as a diverse, public serving institution, dedicated to the twin ideals of inclusion and excellence, can and must serve as an engine of a more just, more prosperous, society. That is our assignment. And we are doing it, but it’s not a matter of maybe we’ll do it. We simply must succeed.

A year ago, I talked about creating the university of our imagination, and so much of the things that we’ve talked about are coming to fruition. That’s some of the highlights I want to talk about, and I want to talk about some of the ways that we’re going to implement the initiatives that we’ve undertaken to deliver transformational opportunities while we’re doing those things.

Now, there’s a lot of this that’s not so sexy, not so inspirational, but the reality is, if you have big audacious projects and big audacious ideas, you need to have a high performing organization.
You simply have to operate at a rapid clock speed and you have to be capable of implementing change in a rapid fashion. And to do that, first of all, you need a great team. I’m excited to welcome a lot of new faces to campus. I’ll introduce some new members of the leadership in a moment. You may have noticed that we’ve had a lot of different engagements with consultants over the last three months. We’re going to do more of that. Basically, what we want to do is bring in outside eyes and ears to look at how we do things, ask questions, basically say, could we do things better? Could we do things in a way that other people are doing them that seems to work?
And that’s not a criticism. It’s simply saying are there opportunities to improve? Some people ask questions, what are they saying? We don’t know how to do our job? No. We’re saying maybe there’s a way to empower people to be more effective. Maybe there’s a way to give more resources, more tools or to remove the impediments that keep people from being effective. That’s what we’re trying to do.

And we need to have the right people to lead that process. I told you when I started here not that long ago that hiring a provost would be the most important thing I did in my early days, and I certainly am pleased that Junius Gonzales, now a year into his position, has done great things at Montclair. I want to acknowledge what Junius has done. And so many things from looking at the general education curriculum to looking at the way that we structure our faculty engagement, I mean, the whole structure of the academic programs and probably most importantly leading a terrific group of deans, who are doing a terrific job of injecting energy and enthusiasm, and creativity into their respective colleges. I should mention that Junius was asked to join the board of directors of the American Association of University Administrators so obviously we’re not the only ones who think he knows something about leadership in the university context. Congratulations, Junius.

Hopefully, some of you have met, by now, Ben Durant. Ben joins us as our interim Chief Operating Officer and Senior Vice President for Finance and Administration. But I think of Ben as our city manager. We are basically a big complex municipality in our own right, and we have to be organized to be effective and that means coordinating across all areas. So Ben’s charge is to bring consistency, efficiency and coordination across the key administrative areas including HR, IT, facilities, business services, finance, to make us work as one organization. It’s a big assignment, but I’m delighted that Ben has come to us.
Another critical addition to the team is Rita Walters, who joined us, I think it’s about four weeks ago, as our new Vice President for Development and Alumni Engagement. This is an absolutely critical position. I believe that we have an enormous opportunity to increase philanthropic investment in this university. We are an example of what is right and what works. People say that they want to invest in those things. Okay. So, we need to put out the opportunity to invest in Montclair and invest in our students, faculty and staff, and I know Rita believes that there is a huge opportunity for us to further that investment. Nothing could be more critical.

James Solodar also comes to us to provide strategic leadership for the university’s budget. We’ll be talking about the budget. Our project is not only to use money wisely but to create a budget structure which empowers people to be entrepreneurial and creative and to take the university to a level where we are successful beyond the external investment that comes from this state. I’ll come back to that in a moment.

Finally let me recognize Aylin Solu Brandon, our university registrar. So not everybody knows what the registrar does, but the idea is that we should have systems that eliminate barriers to student success. Right? So we often talk about preparing people for college and teaching students how to navigate us. Well, how about if we made us easier to navigate? Wouldn’t that make sense? So that is our goal in so many areas.

It’s important to recognize in the academic affairs space we are welcoming 42 – that’s a big number – 42 new full time tenure track faculty, as well as two new post docs. Any new faculty members in the room right with us? Welcome! Everybody give them a hug when this is done.
For those fletch fans out there. Nobody? Come on! You’re old like me. You should get that! Thank you.

And two new deans to lead our new colleges, Dr. Rashid Ahmed is our inaugural dean for the College of Community Health and Dr. Vincent Alfonso is our inaugural interim dean for our College of Education and Engaged Learning. Welcome to both of them.

Let’s talk about these two new colleges. Very exciting. Dividing the College of Education and Human Services into two entities was an interesting thing, by the way, the opposite of what most places are doing. We have to consolidate! We have to mush things together to be more efficient! Efficiency is part of the goal here, and we’ll talk about that. But quite frankly, substantive impact is a bigger goal. And i think that we can create more than enough economic efficiency while creating two new dynamic colleges, first a College for Community Health that will bring together multiple departments on campus to address the urgent challenge posed by health inequity in New Jersey and beyond. We can and should be a leader in the health space, and I’m very excited by what that college will become and what it will stand for.

Meanwhile, the College for Education and Engaged Learning has to represent everything that is the DNA of Montclair state University. I still believe that in our hearts, we are Montclair Normal College or Normal School, and that’s what we need to be, and there is no greater need in the world than to figure out what engaged learning looks like in the 21st century. So, I’m extremely excited about what these two new colleges will become, how the faculty will use their creativity and the opportunity to design a college from scratch; how we’ll put that into practice. What a great moment for the university.

We also have the new School of Computing launching within the College of Science and Mathematics. Like the College for Health and Education, it speaks to one of the most in demand occupational areas in the coming years. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that employment in that area will be four times that of any other area. So, if we are going to be preparing people to be employed in the years ahead, having that be an ingredient in their education is obviously critical to be responsive.

And finally, there’s one new college under the heading of ����vlog – not exactly new, of course, except the name is new, and that’s the aforementioned Bloomfield college of ����vlog. I can’t stress how much work went into this, and I really want to express appreciation for so many people, the legal, the HR, the financial…the aspects of this were quite complicated. A little more complicated than I realized. Full disclosure. But I want to express my appreciation to our new Chancellor, Marcheta Evans, who is with us here.

She did an incredibly bold thing in pursuing the merger for Bloomfield, knowing that it represented a change to Bloomfield status, to her status, to a lot of people’s status. But it was necessary to advance the mission of Bloomfield college to serve students who were not otherwise being served. And let me express a particular part that’s overlooked. This is a very good deal for us because we also get Marcheta as a member of the senior leadership of this university. She’s an extraordinary leader, an extraordinary advocate for students, and an extraordinary dance instructor. She will be teaching everybody the Bloomfield shuffle, which is going to become a new job requirement at Montclair state University. The President is exempt.

Anyway, as I said, we knew this was going to be a challenge to merge Bloomfield into Montclair, but it was critical. As i’ve discussed in other venues, Bloomfield is the only Predominantly Black Institution in New Jersey, and it was simply unacceptable given everything I said about our role in society, simply unacceptable to say, oh, well, that’s too bad that students who are now finding pathways to higher education simply won’t have that path available. That would be a contradiction to everything I said before.

But this is uncharted territory to put together a public and a private university and we got it all done from a legal point of view and a transactional point of view, but now the – in some ways, the more interesting part and in some ways, the harder part – starts, which is the design phase. How do you have a liberal arts college that offers an intimate student-centric, differentiated experience embedded within a large comprehensive public research university where the students get the best of both worlds, where there is something that is particular to the Bloomfield experience but our Bloomfield colleagues and our Bloomfield students feel like and very much are part of the whole?
I am confident that we will figure this out, and it will be a model that others will look to. As you open up the pages of – pages, I know that’s dated, right? – of the Chronicle of Higher Ed or Inside Higher Ed literally every week there’s a new college closing. And by the way, some colleges should probably go out of business. Not the end of the world. Right?

But some institutions serve a distinctive role. Right? They offer a learning environment that is distinctively suited to particular students. And when they go away, those students are excluded.
So you look around and see what kinds of institutions are closing, for the most part, it’s rural, it’s religious, it’s minority serving. And students do well in those environments for different reasons, and so when they disappear, they, first of all, leave communities shattered, but they also leave students without a place where they’ll thrive.

So, what we’re doing here is incredibly important, and we simply will work through it until we have a design that I think we’re all proud of. I can’t wait to see what the Bloomfield faculty and staff come up with in conjunction with folks here at Montclair. I think we can do something quite spectacular.

Okay. People want to hear about budget. They say they do but then I see their eyes glazing over. So let me talk about the budget for a minute. A couple of things that I want to emphasize: the good news is, first of all, the investment in higher education in New Jersey was solid and actually went up some. The place where it went up, not as much as we would have liked, let’s be honest, right. The place where it went up was in the outcomes based allocation of funding for higher education.

I will not get into all the different streams of funds that go into higher education. It’s arcane and complicated. But the outcomes based allocation is a relatively small but growing piece of the pie which rewards institutions based on their performance, hence the name. Clever, huh? And particularly their performance of serving underrepresented students and having positive educational outcomes for minorities that are not conventionally well served in higher education.

We should be really proud of this. That’s really good for us, right? It’s really good for us because we do better at that than anybody in this state. That should be an applause line. That really should. And by the way, not an applause line for me, an applause line for you.

So just let me underscore this, and you can say, this is going to be my glass half full way of saying this. There’s a half empty way of saying it too. If you take all the money that’s appropriated to the universities and that’s a lot of politics, it’s a lot of who do you know, and it’s a lot of accumulation over time. We get 6% of that. If you take the money that’s dispensed based on performance, the outcomes based allocation, we get 13% of that. So that’s pretty good.

The state also increased funding for the Garden State Guarantee, which for those of you who don’t know, there’s funding for students to cover their cost of tuition. The state increased the income level of eligibility for that to $100,000 of family income, so that’s going to help a lot of our students as well. That’s a huge win.

We would have liked to have seen adjustments to the base appropriations for universities. Montclair, partially because we’ve just grown so much in the last 20 years, is underfunded on a per student basis relative to other universities. So an outcomes based competition for funds is interesting because it treats the competition as if the playing field were level, but some institutions are coming from a historic position of disadvantage. Is this sounding familiar to anybody, by the way?

So we would like to level that starting point, but we shouldn’t, like, curl up in a ball and say, woe is us. There’s lots of investment in Montclair, probably the most exciting news over the summer from a budget point of view was that the state made awards under a $400 million debt offering to invest in infrastructure in higher education. Right? Here’s where you get into stuff.

There’s operating budget, and there’s capital budget. $400 million was allocated to build stuff that higher education institutions need. And we, like every other institution, had to compete for a share of that $400 million. I’m pleased to tell you that, of the $400 million, $69 million was allocated to ����vlog.

I’m doing percentages. So any math people? Oh, that’s lame. 17%. 17%. Not bad. So higher than 13%.

Two things that that’s going to do. First, we will be constructing a significant – I don’t know exactly how significant because we’re trying to figure out how many pieces of funding we can put together – but a significant interdisciplinary sciences building that will allow us to increase the number of students we serve through our STEM programs.

The boundary constraint right now is on how many students we can enroll in STEM programs and, quite frankly, on the ability to bring in new research projects is our lab space. And so, we expect that, through the new interdisciplinary science building that will be constructed, we will have capacity for at least a thousand more students. It’s extremely important that we do so as an HSI, majority-minority institution, that we have opportunities for those students to enter STEM fields.

The other $9.2 million will pay for technology and wireless upgrades that dramatically improve both the Montclair and Bloomfield campuses. These things will get underway immediately and you will see the impact hopefully in the very new future.

Investments like these – and it’s really important – investments like these are critical to upholding our mission of excellence and our achievement as a research university. And they’re not optional. Right?
This is really important. People are like, well, why would we spend millions of dollars a year? In order to get that money, we have to spend a bunch of money. That’s how it works. Why would we do that when the operating budget is so tight? I’ll talk about that because it is tight.
And the answer is because the minute you compromise on your aspirations as a research university, the minute you say, well, we can’t afford that level of excellence, given the population of students that we serve, it immediately says, the aspirations for one set of people in society need to be lower than the aspirations for another set of people in society. And that is simply unacceptable.

Access and inclusion can’t come with a sacrifice on expectations, standards or aspirations. And so, we have to do both.

Not doing both, in my opinion, and not trying to do both is a failure from the starting point. So these are critical investments for what we are doing. There’s been a lot of conversation, as you all know, a lot of conversation about affirmative action and the Supreme Court’s rulings that affect Harvard and so on and so on. That’s important. I don’t dismiss that at all, but if all of our attention is on how we give out a small number of – I say – golden tickets to a very small number of elite institutions and we don’t ask the question, what are we doing to create parallel opportunities of excellence for the vast, vast majority of people who aren’t going to those institutions, then we’ve completely missed the ball.
Right? That’s what our mission is. Nothing wrong with focusing on that question. It’s an important question, But I believe that what we are doing is fundamentally more important.

By the way, I should mention, very appropriately, in a few weeks, we will formally rename Science Hall Irvin D. Reid Hall in honor of our former President Dr. Reid. The reason why that’s appropriate is – and some of you are here – it was Dr. Reid who led the charge to make Montclair State College into ����vlog. Keep that thought in mind when I come to a topic about how we talk about ourselves later in my remarks.

Now, I want to be transparent about these investments because as I say, some people say, well, I don’t understand. How can you be spending millions of dollars on a science building when we’re facing increasing expenses? Which we are. Right?

We think we’re going to have higher labor costs, based on the negotiations that are taking place, higher health care expenses and of course, higher inflation. I already got done telling you that our state appropriation is flat. And so we’ve got higher expenses coming in all ways, shapes and forms. By the way, I want to make an important shout out. We’ve got a whole lot of folks working every day without a contract, until we have a contract. So I appreciate everybody’s leap of faith to say, we’re going to do this, do it right. Major appreciation to all of our employees who are working without a contract.

By the way, it’s not one side that’s responsible for the contract being done. I want to be clear about that. But I think I speak for everybody here when I say, it would be a good idea to get that done and have a little bit more certainty about the terms that we’re working under for the next four years.

All this would be challenging enough were it not for the fact that people are expecting universities to do more. The most obvious expression of that is mental health, which 30 years ago nobody would have expected the university to be responsible for mental health services for all students, let alone to provide it at scale. But if we’re serious about student success and we’re serious about the welfare of our students, it’s simply unacceptable to ignore that. So that’s a huge increase in cost even as we’re struggling to deliver in an economic way everything that we already have to do.

This is the balancing act that we have, to spend enough to provide exceptional services to take care of our students, but not spending one nickel more than we need to which drives up the costs.
So we’re trying to find that balance. We’re taking some measures to strike it. Earlier this summer, the board approved a significant increase in tuition for instate full time undergraduates, which is about $500 a semester more, a total annual cost of $14,767, which is really high for us but still puts us in the bottom third of institutions in the state.

Clearly, the model of how we balance tuition and financial aid is going to have to evolve as we evolve as a university. We will be spending at least 22 million, probably more than that, on financial institutional aid. That is coming out of our budget. We are doing everything in our power including launching a platform called ScholarshipUniverse to increase our students’ access to funds. The philanthropic work that Rita will be leading is aimed at helping students succeed. That’s the key.

But at the same time we’re also trying to be smart. There will be lots of chatter about, oh, there’s a hiring freeze. It’s not a hiring freeze. No hiring freeze. By the way, if you hear a rumor and it sounds kind of sketchy, it probably is. Send me an email. I’ve learned amazing things when people tell me the rumors about all the things I’m planning to do.

What we’re doing, we’re being kind of critical. We’re looking at every position that we’re adding and we’re trying to be smart. And we’re going to have more clarity in the months ahead. So we’re just trying to be conservative for the next few months until we know where things stand.

Let me be clear. We’re in a really good place. You’ve seen some of our peer institutions struggling. You’ve seen them hemorrhaging students. We’re not in any remotely close place to those institutions, because we’re trying to be smart. Right? That’s the key.

And we’re trying to diversify our revenue and think intelligently about how we’re going to look in the future and so I want you to feel good about where we are but I also want you to understand why we’re doing the things that we’re doing.

And we have the results to show for it. Let’s talk about student success and enrollment for a minute. Every area of the university has things to be proud of, extensive research projects, every area from art to addiction to child advocacy, national recognition, groundbreaking programs, all kinds of amazing things. Again, I want to emphasize: excellence, not at the expense of exclusion.
That’s the key.

We have renowned scholars on our campus. Our chemistry student, Marisa Messina was named a Goldwater Scholar this year. Jason Strother, an instructor in our School of Communications and Media, was a 2023 Fulbright scholar.
We could list all of these achievements. The linkage between the two, the excellence and accessibility, that’s what’s fueling our growth. Students and families who understand the value that we provide are coming to us in record numbers. For the third year in a row, we have the largest incoming class in our history, well over 23,000 students when you account for both Montclair and Bloomfield. We don’t know exactly until Census Day.

Notably, we have an increase in the number of international graduate students, and I think we will see more international students in the years ahead as our partnership with INTO, a global organization, comes into fruition. I talked to our Vice President for Enrollment last night on the phone from India. She’s probably going to come back with a couple plane loads of students, knowing Wendy. But she said that the interest in Montclair was exceptional and that the organization said they’ve never seen another university with the same level of interest entering markets for the first time. I think we’re going to be in a very strong position.

We also have an opportunity to reach students who are not being served by other universities.
Again, don’t get fooled by the headlines that say we’re all going to die. We have the largest rate of growth in New Jersey, second only to NJIT, our partner. We’ll come to that in a moment.

I also want to point out something that doesn’t get talked about enough, which is – we often talk about new students, but I’m, in some ways, more excited about our returning student numbers. Last year, our fall to spring retention was 92%. That’s a huge achievement, a big gain.

And let me just tell you something. It’s so exciting. This is the largest returning undergraduate class that we’ve ever had at the university. And we graduate a little over two thirds of our students, which is among the top in the state. And I’m very proud of that. But it still means that a third of the students who start with us don’t finish. So, when we think about the metrics of success, continuing to drive that higher, that the students who come to Montclair stay here and succeed, that’s extraordinary. And then not just graduate but do great things and take full advantage of all the opportunities that are being presented to them.

One of my favorite parts in the Red Chair Video is when Professor Laura Nicosia says, you can be rigorous and warm, you can be rigorous and caring. That needs to be our mantra. And I think it is. Right? The students all reflect that.

And we’re constantly thinking about how to do it better. Last year, the academic excellence coaching program was launched, which saw some adjunct faculty becoming coaches, including many male, black and latino students, that have a lower rates of success. Through active listening and a willingness to understand their challenges, these coaches were empowering students to address anxiety, time management issues and the difficult balancing of responsibilities that so many of our students are dealing with. And we already saw an impact with increased GPAs and better use of Montclair resources in areas of counseling and tutoring and so on and so forth.
It’s just a really great example of how we can be better. We want to do a better job of capturing data on our students, to fully understand what the experience is. Yes, we can better use tools like Navigator, but the Workday Student project that you’ve heard so much about, which is a multi-year project, that idea is ultimately about student success, to see abnormalities in student behavior, to find when people are getting off track and intervene immediately.

We are 1 of 20 schools implementing the entire suite of Workday programs. This is a campus-wide transformation project.

I mentioned mental health. So much happening there. Academic research says about 60% of students are experiencing some mental health challenge. So, we don’t have a choice, in my opinion, of intervening. I was really excited about the work of our SDCL team. We received a grant of $850,000 from the office of higher education to expand mental health resources. Yes. And we’re taking advantage of an interesting telehealth initiative called “Uwill” which is increasing access to our students. By the way, the funding also includes Pebbles. So, just in case you were worried about pebbles getting enough kibble. The state is kicking in for Pebbles apparently.

This is why we did the Campus Climate Survey, to understand what is the nature of the campus where are things working well, where are things working less well? How can we intervene? You will hear in the weeks ahead some of the steps we’re taking based on the Campus Climate Survey. We’re going to have meetings on a college by college basis and doing much more.

The last major area I want to talk about is community service. As you know, something that I feel very strongly about is that the university must be designed to engage and serve the community. We’ve had a lot of history doing that, so this is not something that’s new since I came to ����vlog. But we’re trying to organize it in new ways and with new projects that highlight everything that we’re capable of.

One initiative is in Paterson, the One Square Mile program, which is supported through a significant million dollar investment from The Dodge Foundation, and we think there will be more.
The idea of one square mile is that you can work together with community partners to identify challenges and identify opportunities, draw upon the full capacity of the university and coordinate activities to make a bigger difference. We’ve already seen the beginning of an ESL program at East Side High School and, indeed, East Side is going to become a full blown community school in partnership with ����vlog.

I’m sure most of you have heard something about the coming opening of the Charles J. Muth Museum at Hinchliffe Stadium which is one of the only negro league stadiums in the country and we’re getting amazing recognition everywhere from “The New York Times” to “GQ.” How about that? And it’s supported by Chuck Muth, an alum who grew up in Paterson, went to school No. 5 right next to Hinchliffe Stadium. It’s an amazing opportunity, an incredible opportunity for all students of all majors who will work at the museum, to have business opportunities there, learning outreach opportunities there. It’s fantastic.
By the way, while we’re talking about baseball and stadiums, you might not know that we are undertaking a renovation of Yogi Berra Stadium on our own campus, and one thing that’s cool about this, we’re doing it in partnership with NJIT. NJIT is investing half of the capital needed to renovate the stadium.

I think that’s a tremendous model for higher education. And we are super excited because we don’t view this as a baseball stadium. The Vice President and I were just talking about how we can do student events there, how we can engage the community there. We think that the stadium is going to become a huge asset for the university. Maybe not 365 days a year but a lot. We’re very excited about what that’s going to mean. The fact we’re doing it in partnership with another university is fantastic.

One other thing that happened over the summer, we hosted two national gatherings of public service initiatives. First, the Bonner Summer Leadership Institute gathered hundreds of students here from across the country, engaged in service and leadership, and literally days later, the Next Generation Service Corps, a public service program launched with the Volcker Alliance, something I worked on at my previous institution, both brought hundreds of students passionate about public service. We are going to be, I think, widely recognized as thee public service university.

It’s important that all of your work is captured both in terms of community engagement and service.
That’s why I urge you to participate in the launch of a tool called Collaboratory which is intended to capture all of your great work. It’s a database that makes it easier to connect with each other and easier to connect with the community.

We will have an internal university council and an external council to reach our partners in the community to make it easy both to talk to each other and to talk to people on the outside. We want to be one of the most permeable institutions of higher education that ever existed.

I think we’re already well on our way. We’re seen as an asset. People feel comfortable with us.
They reach out to us. I think that we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of what’s possible there.
And so, it’s really important that when we do that, people know what to call us and what we look like from an identity point of view.

So, you may have seen this starting to show up. This is our logo. I know if you walked around campus, you’ve got like 17 different logos. Even students have said to me, what’s the actual logo?
Pick a ling! This is it. And people say, well, why this? Why ����vlog? Why is Montclair big and the State University this?

First of all, I think Dr. Reid was right that it was right to become a university and not a college.
And it meant something. I’ve already talked about that. So it’s sort of funny that, after all the fighting and all the politics and all of the drama to become ����vlog and everything it stands for, we’re like, yeah, just drop the university part, call us Montclair State.
No! That’s important!

But also, I think there’s an opportunity to be more efficient, more distinctive and the name Montclair speaks very well for us. And here’s the way I think about it. If it’s good enough for Harvard, Stanford and Oxford to go by one name, it’s good enough for Montclair.

So, we will use this brand, this visual identity, ����vlog and over the next few months, hopefully, all the different variations of our logo will slowly disappear, and we will frequently refer to ourselves just as Montclair. And we’re also going to save a lot of money on ink because of those words.

Okay. So i’m going to wrap up, take a couple of questions. There’s going to be a lot of food outside. One of the new exciting things that happened over the summer was Gourmet Dining came to campus. Our new food vendor. There’s a Starbucks coming. That’s what everybody wants to know. So, that’s big.

And now, it’s in my notes so i’m going to do it. Like the most inspiring thing ever to close on.
Here it is. We’ve had a lot of phishing attacks, so if an email looks suspicious, please do not
open it. Report it to IT. But we have had some breaches. So this is not a small thing. It’s not just us. It’s all over higher education. We’re all being attacked by these nefarious rogues.

So, let me stop there. So much going on. So much to be excited about. It’s all about the students we serve and the difference we can make in society. And so, I just ask that the energy level, the enthusiasm, just keep it going, because together we can do amazing things, and I’m 100% certain that when we gather again on this day next year, we will have an even longer list for me to drone on about. And so, that’s both a threat and a promise. But thank you very much.

Acknowledging Montclair as a “university on the move,” Koppell opened the Town Hall, which is , by reflecting on his nearly two years at the University along with celebrating staff, faculty and students’ awards and accomplishments. During the question and answer portion of the session Koppel shared his thoughts on topics such as having a constructive partnership with the University labor unions, changes to the upcoming Commencement exercises, and the University’s new food service vendor, which will provide better options and affordability for dining on campus.

“I could not be more thrilled to play some small role in advancing the work of the faculty, staff and students of this university,” Koppell told the audience in Kasser Theater and on a livestream. “I’m enormously proud to be a part of this university and really don’t see any ceiling as to what we can do.”

So you might ask a question about today’s festivities: Why exactly do we need to do all this?

The symbolism of this marker of office, I think, speaks to the purpose of this gathering, and it’s been alluded to already, because nobody can miss out on a good metaphor. I am a link in a chain of leaders who served as stewards for ����vlog and being represented today by past presidents Susan A. Cole and Irvin D. Reid, who, as we have heard, have played defining roles in the evolution of the New Jersey State Normal School at Montclair into something that would have been inconceivable 114 years ago. Thank you both for welcoming me to this very exclusive club.

Both of them would tell you that the real star of the show today is ����vlog.

This ceremony is a celebration of a vital institution that has been ambitious and pugnacious, confident and sometimes underestimated, but always focused on its public purpose. Today is a celebration of our power to do great things when we work collectively, ennobling the transformative power of education and remembering that our destinies are intertwined.

So really all of us, all of us are links in the chain, a chain that connects the people who for generations have made this university great.

But most of all I see today as a celebration of imagination.

This extraordinary human ability to form mental images of things that do not exist, that have never existed, is unique in the animal kingdom. It is our key advantage and the root of all progress.

We can describe these visions, share them with others and then draw upon knowledge and understanding accumulated across generations to make real that which has never been. To take something as ethereal as an idea and transform it into something as concrete as this building.

Wizard of Oz author L. Frank Baum, who knew something about imagination, said, “Dreams, dreams with your eyes wide open and your brain machinery whizzing, are likely to lead to the betterment of the world. The imaginative child,” he said, “will become the imaginative man or woman most apt to create, to invent and therefore to foster civilization.”

Ah, but how do you cultivate the creativity of the child and empower her to take a conjured vision and mold it into something buildable, replicable, usable? At their best, universities are places where people answer this question, where people learn to harness the power of their imagination. Progress in every discipline is ultimately driven by applied imagination.

Fueling the Imagination

Long before we possessed microscopes with the power to see bacteria, scientists imagined that there must be something not visible to the naked eye transmitting disease, and their successors surmised that cells contain the information that guides physiology leading ultimately to discovery of DNA, RNA and the building blocks of genetics. Fortunately, this audacious imaginativeness was cultivated at universities for it ultimately led to the incredibly rapid development of the COVID-19 vaccines that allow us to be here today together.

Yes, universities are living, breathing monuments to the limitless potential of human imagination. Even as we work to fill curricula with essential information and introduce students to problem-solving tools, we must remain true to this ideal. Ultimately, we are charged with empowering the creative spirit of everyone who joins this community of learners so that they might be the entrepreneurs, artists, discoverers, iconoclasts that we need to advance as a nation and species. Now, if that sounds funny to hear an academic downplay the importance of knowing stuff, take the word of an adopted Jersey boy with street cred as a scholar: “Imagination,” Albert Einstein concluded, “is more important than knowledge.”

Indeed this very institution is a product of vivid imaginations that said universities can be quite different from the old-world academies from which they descend, but that reinvention is not complete. It’s never complete. Today the need to marshal our creativity for the ongoing project is greater than ever.

We’re gathered at a time of great uncertainty. There’s no reason to avoid that truth. Humanity faces an existential threat in climate change, amidst a host of other challenges. And our ability to respond is hampered by a serious breakdown in American democracy that rightly has a significant portion of the population worried about the future of our republic. More immediate to this proceeding, the value of higher education is being questioned in an unprecedented fashion.

Now it’s natural to push back at this sometimes uninformed criticism that is as unfair as it is scathing. But today let’s do something different. Let’s own it.

The truth is college has failed far too many people. The majority of Americans who have attended college do not actually possess a degree, and about 40% of those struggling with student debt that we’ve heard so much about lately, 40% have nothing to show for it. They’re arguably worse off than if they hadn’t started to begin with. So it’s small wonder that some, even many, are cynical about higher ed.

There’s two ways to respond to this. We can criticize the arguments. We can point out where people are wrong, or we can take the advice of Cicero and criticize by what we create. This is a powerful idea. Don’t respond with words, respond with action. Indeed, I imagine ����vlog confronting all these challenges head on.

I can see it so vividly in my mind. Together, we can build ����vlog as an exemplar of a public-serving university, a solutions engine firing on all cylinders to create the world we wish to inhabit.

Now I do realize that using an internal combustion engine as a metaphor, when I just talked about climate change, is a bit off. Please bear with me – the electric vehicle just doesn’t offer the same dynamic imagery. Bruce Springsteen is not singing about strapping anybody’s hands around his battery!

So let’s picture the powerful pistons of our solutions engine, an unstoppable social-mobility slingshot, a research-driven innovation generator, an energetic-force multiplier, a steadfast and responsive community partner and a sustaining pillar for democracy and public service.

Let’s start with social mobility. The accessible, public university became a flywheel of the “American Dream,” but that was not always the case.

Social Mobility Slingshot

The proposition that college education should be available to any person, regardless of wealth, status or privilege was truly radical, an enormous leap of imagination.

Having Félix V. Matos Rodríguez, Chancellor of The City University of New York (CUNY) – leader of the ur-access institution – embracing ����vlog as CUNY’s spiritual partner is so gratifying. It is why I feel privileged to be here. And as proud as I am of his description of Montclair – a majority-minority, Hispanic-Serving Institution that’s becoming more inclusive while growing to record levels – the success of our students is most gratifying.

Recently, we were recognized as one of the best universities in the country as measured by the extent to which our graduation rate exceeds expectations. Now, Montclair has thrived because we devote a lot of energy to helping students prepare to succeed In college. We have one of the most robust Education Opportunity Fund (EOF) programs in this state with hundreds of students every year receiving the support they need to realize their potential. We’ve created and expanded programs to reach students before college even begins and we will try to reach future Red Hawks and their families even earlier if we can.

This is deeply personal. The trajectory of my family, like so many others, was forever altered by access to high-quality college education, and the nation was transformed in turn.

The point, however, is this: To build a real social-mobility slingshot in the 21st century, we have to get beyond the minimum question of who is allowed to enter the hallowed halls of our great institutions of learning. We have to even get beyond teaching others how to overcome the challenges in succeeding in college.

Why not push ourselves to remove the obstacles? Let’s get rid of the hidden prerequisites that emerge as stumbling blocks. Let’s reevaluate everything: how we operate, how we offer degrees, how we organize ourselves – everything – with an eye toward creating a better environment for student success. That includes launching this year an Office of Student Belonging and doing a comprehensive campus climate survey as a step toward building a more equitable community for students, staff and faculty.

It means leveling the playing field of student experience so that life-altering opportunities like Study Abroad or internships are not off limits to anyone. That is a matter of money and we have put more resources into these areas and welcome more, but it’s structural as well. Consider that the typical semester-long program for an international experience is just not viable for those who are caregivers or primary breadwinners. So we’re shaking up the conventional approaches, and we will continue to do so.

But this is really just the beginning. How do we reinvent higher education to take full advantage of the changes in technology and the ways people learn and interact? Our “Montclair Unbound” initiative will answer this question. Through Montclair Unbound we will offer degrees in ways that combine modalities – in-person, asynchronous online, real-time distance interaction – to meet students where they want to learn. This will require significant adaptation on our part. I don’t want to downplay that, but I’m confident in the staff and faculty of ����vlog and their devotion to our purpose. We will invest in their growth and development so that they have the tools to succeed, and have the opportunities to advance as well. That is our mission. It is not exclusive to students, it’s to everyone who’s part of this community.

But Montclair Unbound is not just a platform, it’s really a mindset.

Our embrace of Bloomfield College is reflective of that mindset. I cannot say enough about my friend and partner, Bloomfield president, Dr. Marcheta Evans. I feel so fortunate that our paths intersected at the right moment.

Bloomfield College will emerge as a critical integrated part of ����vlog offering a differentiated learning experience yet drawing strength from a robust research community. This is a critical step in the evolution of higher education, a new model that is student-centric, that is designed to overcome the structural impediments to success that have thwarted true access for so long.

So let’s talk about research and scholarship for a moment.

Research-driven Solutions Generator

Even after the doors of some colleges opened to an increasingly diverse population of students, it was not considered plausible that such institutions might do research on a level that rivals highly-selective universities. One could be excellent or accessible, not both.

Public universities that have excelled as research leaders, frankly have often done so while evolving away from an access orientation. That is not to say these institutions are not serving a critical public purpose or that they are not profoundly more accessible than higher education was for most of human history. But It took a leap of imagination to say that an institution can be a driver of research, excellence and innovation on par with the most elite institutions in the world, while retaining a commitment to inclusivity that leaves no one capable of college work on the outside looking in. That is what Arizona State University stands for and I feel privileged to have been a part of it for 11 years.

And that is why I feel so fortunate to find myself here at ����vlog which shares that access/excellence DNA. From its earliest days, Montclair was known as a national leader: “Harvard on Valley Road” it was apparently called. But it still took some imagination to envision Montclair State Teachers College joining the ranks of “high-research activity” doctoral universities. And yet here we are with an outstanding faculty, securing more external funding every year. Indeed one of our biggest boundary constraints is the limited space to accommodate the many projects our entrepreneurial professors are creating.

But true to our public purpose we must look beyond the conventional measure – dollars spent on research – to gauge our success. ����vlog must be a research-driven solutions generator. This is already happening. Our Center for Water Science and Technology is ensuring New Jerseyans have access to clean and healthy drinking water. Our Center for Autism and Early Childhood Mental Health is giving school districts evidence-based tools to empower neurodiverse learners. Our Center for Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology is providing access to assessments and therapies. I could go on. New music, new insights, new enzymes, new ways to restore a healthy planet. This is what a research university can create.

It must be fully intertwined with the educational mission. Our fantastic, dynamic, awesome new provost, Junius J. Gonzales, made launching a university-wide undergraduate research program one of his highest priorities, and we are making this happen this year. We will support that with more than 30 faculty searches, the largest number in years as we continue to raise the bar for what this university can be.

Let me say quickly what we won’t do. Some colleges boost their prestige and improve their “ranking” by becoming more exclusive. That is, they get better by turning away more people, (often by ginning up more applications for expressly that purpose). We categorically reject this approach and we always will.

Force Multiplier

Making hands-on learning part of every Montclair student’s education has myriad benefits. Students learn to apply classroom lessons in real time, they feel the satisfaction of making an impact and they deliver on our promise to be a force multiplier for social progress. This is our original purpose. Montclair was created as an academy to train teachers and blossomed in a multitude of directions, but we never lost that orientation. The newer parts of our university, like our still young School of Nursing, embody the same leap of imagination that says a liberal arts education can be fused with career preparation. The bias that says otherwise was elitist and exclusionary in effect, if not intent. We are committed to continually redesign our university to put our students in a position to both thrive professionally and grow intellectually. The two can go together.

To that end, I’m excited to announce that following the recommendation of a faculty committee charged by Provost Gonzales, we will launch a new college focused on the health professions and contributing to community well-being that draws on strengths across the University. At the same time, we will recommit to our core historical mission and create a college laser-focused on education reimagined.

These will be two new powerhouses. Future educators and health professionals will engage with our talented faculty in an environment of inquiry and innovation. They will have practical learning opportunities to reinforce and contextualize classroom instruction. This approach will yield problem solvers and adaptive learners ready to take on all challenges, and it requires deep collaborative partnerships in the communities we serve.

Steadfast and Responsive Community Partner

To achieve our purpose, we must erase the lines that separate campus from community. One hundred and sixty years ago, the Morrill Act imagined this possibility with the creation of land grant universities. President Lincoln signed this law in the middle of the Civil War because he knew the extension of the university into the community would drive the agricultural and industrial development of a growing nation.

Now, we must forge a new model of an engaged university that advances community aspirations, rather than merely tests theories.

It’s truly gratifying to have Paterson Mayor André Sayegh with us. I’m so excited by what is taking shape in this important, dynamic city. We have embarked on a series of initiatives that involve us partnering with local nonprofits, government agencies, businesses, community groups and philanthropies to build a stronger community. In fact, when I was doing research for my interview, as one does scanning Google maps, I came across this really cool looking old stadium, near a beautiful waterfall. You heard about it already – Hinchliffe Stadium and Great Falls National Park. In the coming weeks, we will announce a significant role for the University and the revival of Hinchliffe Stadium that uses the incredible history of Paterson as a teaching tool to advance K-12 students.

This is just the beginning. All of this is fantastic and an extension of the work that the talented and committed faculty of ����vlog have accomplished all over New Jersey. We need to support, amplify and empower all of those efforts. That is why we will build a first-of-its-kind Community Action Nexus that will serve as a hub for faculty, staff and students seeking to connect, and a front door for those communities that see the University as a potential partner.

Finally, none of this will be sustainable if we do not reinforce the democracy and commitment to public service that has undergirded our country.

Pillar for American Democracy

One of the most impressive demonstrations of imagination’s power is the birth of this nation as a functioning constitutional democracy. The founders imagined a country governed through elections with representation and participation, defined by rules that established and limited authority. Now it was deeply flawed in many ways. Our country’s origins were rooted in the twin evils of slavery and the dispossession in genocide of Native Americans. Many of the prejudices and inequities of that time were hardwired into the system that was created. Still the democracy that was born under the Constitution proved capable of adapting, improving, addressing some flaws through amendment and evolution.

Frederick Douglass is one of the greatest Americans ever, precisely because this remarkable individual, born into slavery without even his personhood recognized by the laws of the land, somehow saw the possibility, somehow possessed the incredible imagination to envision an America where he and his descendants would have the rights and responsibilities … if we make it so.

We should have the imagination to see beyond the flaws in our democracy today. It’s still a young experiment that we’re trying to get right. We will have that democracy if we have the imagination and the doggedness that Frederick Douglass possessed and we have an obligation to do nothing less. This democracy will not be sustained without us reinforcing a spirit of public service. Universities must lead the way. This university must lead the way.

The strong embrace of public service and civic engagement at Montclair with a vibrant Bonner Leader Program and multiple AmeriCorps programs is a big part of what drew me here. My goal is ultimately that every ����vlog student will have a public service experience as part of their education and we will become New Jersey’s premier public service university.

As an important step toward achieving that aspiration, I am pleased to announce that we have launched the Next Generation Service Corps at ����vlog. This program builds on an initiative that I led at Arizona State University to establish the first four-year comprehensive public service leadership program for students across the University. We then worked with our partners at the Volcker Alliance, founded by another great New Jerseyan, Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, to set up a national network with the goal of reaching all 50 states by 2030.

����vlog’s first NextGen Service Corps cohort is launching right now and I’m extremely confident that with all of your help Montclair students will be leaders in growing a national movement, a national movement of universities that already includes schools like Penn State, University of Washington, Indiana, Georgia State and CUNY.

Our turn to answer the bell

This is the ����vlog of my imagination. It is a prototype of a public-serving university that we need today. One that expands opportunity, invents solutions, empowers problem solvers, engages our communities and reinvigorates our democracy. We can make it come into being as surely as inventors, artists and scientists have brought their ideas to life for millennia.

I know we can do it because the stories that our students, alumni, faculty and staff have shared prove it. The journeys they have taken to Montclair – and from Montclair – are filled with challenges, setbacks, denials, defeats and disappointment. And yet they are inspiring and hopeful. They underscore the undeniable power of dogged determination, grit and short memory because they end in triumph, success and a reinforced sense of purpose. They illustrate the inability of naysaying doubters to quash unbending will and the sustaining power of support from loved ones.

We must do this. The stakes are high, but I believe that universities – universities committed to advancing the public good – are essential to conquering every problem that confronts us, and I know ����vlog will be among those leading the way.

Now does all this sound outlandish? Perhaps. But we gather today at a beautiful Spanish mission campus improbably situated on a former quarry in northern New Jersey. Who could have imagined that instead of extracting calcite and other minerals from the basalt bedrock we would be mining human potential and transformative ideas?

You know who? Our forebears, the architects of the New Jersey State Normal School at Montclair and every successive generation that made this remarkable institution what it is today. They imagined the university for which the moment called, and they built it.

Now, it is our turn to answer the bell.

Carpe Diem.

I’m very excited to start another school term. I always think it’s funny when we say welcome back or something like that. It’s not welcome back. Well, for some of us it’s welcome back, but there have been a lot of people who’ve been here all summer long. So for those of you who were off doing exciting adventures elsewhere, welcome back to you. For those of you who have been working through the summer to get the campus ready for welcome back, welcome to the fall semester – the beginning of another exciting term.

Welcome to the New School Year

I don’t know about you, but the return of the students always just fills me with energy. It’s an exciting time of the year.

So obviously, for me it’s a bit of a moment of reflection having finished one year here. And now I get to count in years, no longer in months that I’ve been here.

And I will say, I knew something about the quality of the institution. I knew something about how good the programs were and the things that you all do, and the things that our students do.

One of the things that’s really impressed me and now I come to appreciate as the distinctive quality of ����vlog is just the level of commitment, the level of passion for the university, which comes through not just to me, but to anybody who steps foot on campus. And I was reminded of this once again just a few days ago when I got to meet some of our new students and their families dropping them off.

While they’re bringing their mini fridges and toaster ovens and comforters and stuff into their dorm rooms, they get bothered by the president of the university, which I think they like. And they’re also like, “Who is this guy talking to me? And do you have your pillow?” But to a person, the families all comment on the climate of the campus and how it feels and how nice everybody is and how welcoming everybody is. And a lot of credit goes to our student development team and the housing team, and the great job that they collaborating with facilities do to pull off the logistics. Many people said, :You know, this is way better than when I moved my other kid into I won’t name schools, but other New Jersey institutions, like you guys, really have it down.” And my favorite one was like, “And you have a tent, there’s a tent for us.”

They were blown away by the tent. But every person that comes to this campus is impressed by the nature of the community that we have and the feeling that they get talking to staff, faculty, other students, and I’ve had many visiting students who look, who say, “You know what caused me to come here? I looked around and everybody, they were smiling and they were friendly and they seemed happy to be here.”

That enthusiasm, obviously I couldn’t have guessed that from afar, and now I think of that as being sort of an essential quality of our institution. And it’s funny, right? Because the refrain that I often get from people is, “Montclair. I had no idea.” Joe Brennan says that should be our slogan.
“Montclair. I had no idea.” It’s not a terrible slogan, except it would be better if they did have some idea.

So we’re going to work on that too, but in the interim, it’s a good working slogan.

Reflecting on World Events

Anyway, here we are, gathered together. Yes, it’s the start of another year. It’s also September 2022, and it is a moment for us in the world.

I said it to the students this morning and I say the same thing to you. I think it’s foolhardy – even as we celebrate all the great things that we’re doing here, and as we are happy about being part of this community – it’s foolhardy, not to also recognize that we’re in a moment of tumult and uncertainty.

Happily, we are to some degree, and I don’t want to exaggerate this, but to some degree post COVID (we’ll come back to that in a moment), but certainly we’re able to have a conversation where the first question out of our mouths, isn’t “COVID what’s next?”

So that’s good. But our country is still fraught, right? We’ve got a lot of division. We’ve got uncertainty. I’m not, I don’t think, being melodramatic when I say a lot of us have questions about the state of American democracy and what our future is.

We have a whole lot of public policy challenges, including just in the last couple weeks, a question which centers on the efficacy of our institution, right? And the debt relief that was adopted by the Biden administration. Again, I’ll talk about this in a second. And from my point of view, amazingly a topic which doesn’t get enough attention because there’s so many other things that rear up on a daily basis, the small matter of whether or not our planet will be able to sustain human life in the years ahead.

That’s the stakes. People always say, “Save the planet.” Somebody made this point to me a few years ago. People always say, “Save the planet.” I was like, you know what, the planet’s going to be here. The planet will be here. The question is whether we’ll be able to live on it, you don’t have to save the planet, save humanity, right. Save the other species that share this planet with us.

So, yeah, that’s sort of out there, too. And so you say, “Well, that’s great. That’s a real feel-good way to start the talk.” But the reason I say that is I am concerned about those things. I do think we have to be attentive to them.

I really do think that part of the animating rationale for this institution and what we’re doing has to be the response to those realities. It has to be, and for us to not be cognizant of, and indeed thinking about our response to those circumstances that would be irresponsible, and it would be inconsistent with our mission as a public serving institution.

Responding to the Big Issues

I want to talk about a couple of ways or a few ways in which I think we are being responsive to those circumstances.

I won’t be able to touch upon everything and I don’t want to. I want to try and be more succinct than I sometimes am, um, and create an opportunity for a conversation. So I’ll be as brief as I hope I can be.

So a couple things. Let me start with the issue of debt. I could spend the next half hour enumerating the ways in which I think the discourse around the debt relief is incredibly stupid. I won’t do that. I think it’s mistaken. I think it’s mistaken in the sense of the assumptions about the profile of people who have borrowed money. I think it’s mistaken in terms of the arguments made about what the economic implications will be of that debt relief. So I think there are a whole bunch of mistakes. But my biggest objections: I think it misses the point. It misses the point in the sense that it’s not fully grappling with the challenge that students face when trying to embrace the possibilities of achieving a college degree.

Part of that challenge is financial. There’s no doubt about it and trying to make college affordable. And that’s much more than the sort of standard responses like, “oh, it’s bloated administration. Oh, it’s bloated salaries.”

All these things are sort of dumb mischaracterizations. But to my mind, the biggest issue is that students don’t have a clear pathway, a predictable pathway to getting a degree. And the reality is that the vast majority of students, even students who graduate with some debt, have no problem repaying that debt, if they are able to get a degree.

And so the part of the conversation that is most misguided is the emphasis on, “Oh, you know, of course, Jimmy is now getting his loan really because he got a poetry degree and he’s a barista, right?”

That’s a myth. The vast majority of outstanding debt is possessed by people who don’t have a degree. That’s the issue, right? And the vast and or, and the majority of PE expenditures in the history of the program have gone to people who do not now have a degree. That’s the issue.

Now, there are some questions about expense and so on. I’m not saying they’re irrelevant. I’m saying, where should the focus be? We are the case for an institution that takes that problem seriously, and so are a lot of institutions.

Largest Freshman Class

Let me take a step back. So this would be our largest for those of you who are not math majors, that would make this now our largest first-year class ever joined by approximately 1,200 new transfer students. Also our largest number in that category ever, which wouldn’t necessarily be the case, but it does result in us having the largest student population in the history or the university closing in on 22,000 students.

A good part of the credit goes to our incredible admissions and enrollment team led by Wendy Lynn Cook. Fantastic job really being creative, coming up with new ways of giving financial aid that really meets students’ needs and our Communications and Marketing team getting the message out there. So it’s more, “Yeah, Montclair is really great.” Not “I had no idea.”

So that’s part of it, but the really essential part of it is that our students are succeeding, that they’re graduating at a rate that exceeds other New Jersey institutions, and even in some ways more pivotally, they’re graduating and succeeding at a rate that far exceeds what expectations might be based on a demographic profile, which of course is a big ingredient in predicting student success.

They’re doing so because they’re getting support in every direction that they turn to on this campus. We have staff that are committed to their success. We have a fantastic EOF program. We have a fantastic set of summer bridge programs. We’re meeting students sooner. I got to meet high school students, part of the Hispanic Institute who are excited about going to college and they’re getting ready now. So we’re doing all those things. We have a faculty that I hear from our students are encouraging and supportive and stimulating, and always ready to answer a question when our students come. I am deeply appreciative of that. And the reason why those families and those students are willing to invest in sending themselves or sending their loved ones here is because they have a level of confidence that students will succeed here.

People are being more and more discriminating about how they want to invest their resources. So what you’re starting to see in higher education is sort of a tale of two cities. You’ve got some institutions that are growing like ours, and there are a couple of others in New Jersey that are in the same instance. And then you’ve got others that are going in the other direction because there’s not a level of confidence.

So we can’t just say this is a foregone conclusion and people are going to keep coming here, actually having, you know, 400 additional students. I’ve said this in every meeting I have with the team, that actually increases the challenge of us continuing to succeed in the same way.

I’m very excited by some of the things that are some of the things that are going on.

Student Success as Montclair Mission

I think I said here last year that I knew it’s weird to know in advance that the most important decision I’m going to have to make in the first year would be getting a new provost. I couldn’t be more pleased with how that one turned out.

Provost Gonzales has embraced, because he knows very well this as a central part of his mission, which is to up our game. And so we’re looking at everything, how we teach, how we advise, how we coach students to push even further. And I can tell you, we had an approximately 82% retention rate; that’s what most people look at. It’s kind of funny. The first to second year retention rate is sort of the standard metric by which people judge student success. We’re about 82%, not bad, not bad. And I am generally a glass half full kind of guy. So I’ll say that, but it does mean that 20% of our students didn’t return who started last year.

That’s not so good. We’re going to get it to 85%. And then I’ll say we had to get 88%. Then I’ll say, we need to get to 90%. We’re going to keep working at that. And we’re going to think of it in the whole way. So I’m very excited looking at, as students say, Dr. S, and we’re looking at everything we do in SDCL to figure out how can we be supportive of students, reconfiguring the set of programs to create an Office of Student Belonging, so that there’s a level of comfort and place that our students enjoy, which is just as vital to the success as their performance in the classroom. That will be a central focus for us. It is our response, and this is what I mean by “criticize what we create.” It is our response to the idea that colleges are indifferent to the outcomes for their students.

I think it is our response to the idea that college isn’t worth it, that the degrees don’t matter, that it’s a waste. That’s not what our alumni tell me. And I don’t know what your, I don’t know what your experience is.

It’s a sense of community, a sense of public good, a sense that we can’t only be concerned with self-interest, that we have to think holistically. There’s an irony, right? Because there is, there’s a way in which the culture of individualism and liberty like that. We think of that as being essential to this country’s politics and political philosophy, but what’s gotten lost is the other essential part, which is the ability to act collectively and collaboratively. And so I think we can be a counter argument that says, yes, individualism matters. Yes, the individual spirit must be cultivated and supported.

Individual abilities must be celebrated and rewarded. But if we’re going to achieve anything, even individually, we have to have a strong community. So that starts internally to our own community.

Addressing the Pandemic

I will say a word about COVID because I think it’s important to note the reason why we got through the last year without going remote and the reason why we had relatively modest challenges on our campus was because we were able to behave as a community. We didn’t have a lot of fighting about masks and so on. We had very good compliance with our vaccinations. We had cooperation between management and labor to come up with agreements that worked for everybody. It was really a powerful illustration of what collective action yields.

And of course we know that in other parts of the country and other parts of the world, we didn’t have collective action and we had very different outcomes. So here we are today. I’m cautiously optimistic that the policies that we have in place are going to work. But we are carefully paying attention to the variables that I said we would pay attention to. What are the hospitalization rates in the county? What is our ability to deal with a wave if it comes about? What are the transmission patterns on campus? And we will continue to do so.

I think that the key is: let’s try to remain wary and ready to act as a community if we do. Because we saw the results of that and I think we should all be pleased that the results have us here today. Now acting as a community means building a place where everybody feels comfortable and appreciated and has opportunities. I think that there’s a moment we have now, with some of the normalcy being achieved, to look carefully at how we function as a community.

Campus Climate Survey

I’m excited that we are launching a campus climate survey to look at issues around diversity, equity, inclusion, to get a sense of how the campus works. You’ll be hearing more about that. We want that to be very inclusive, as one would hope, to get a lot of different voices about how this is working. I’m very pleased that Dr. Ashante Connor is going to provide leadership for this survey. And we’re going to be doing that over the next several months. There will be a quantitative component, but I’m particularly interested in a qualitative component where people have a chance to articulate what their experiences have been, good, bad, somewhere in the middle.

So we get a sense of how this campus works and whether or not everybody feels like they have a voice and their presence here is appreciated. And just to be clear, that doesn’t mean that everything’s on pause for a year and we’re not going to do anything. I think there are opportunities, there are opportunities to address issues, and to take action even before we get the final report from the consultant that’s working with us, which is called SOVA. So we have to start with our own campus community and we’re going to be attentive to that, see how we can make it more inclusive. But I actually think part of what we can do that has impact beyond our own little beautiful community is being more engaged in the community at large. And you know, that’s something that I feel very strongly about.

Programs Gain National Attention

I’m so excited about the things that already happened. I mean, I started making a list of the things that I’ve learned about, which when I was with you last year, it’s sort of a funny thing, like I don’t know, like see a couple of things on the website, but I don’t really really know. But now I’ve become more familiar with the University and I just get so excited when I get to talk about it. And what a thrill to see some of the programs that we do gaining national attention. So many of you probably read about the Red Hawks Rising program in Newark that the Secretary of Education was lauding. For those of you who don’t know, this is a partnership with the Newark Schools and the American Federation of Teachers to encourage and support high school students to go to college, to study to be teachers and put them on a trajectory to go back and teach in their own neighborhoods. Fantastic program. I particularly like it.

But I particularly like that because it gets back to our roots, right? We are still Montclair Normal School and ultimately, our origins lie in a vision that a university could make a difference by preparing teachers. But of course it doesn’t stop there. We’ve got programs from Nursing that are out in the community all the time. I got to be on the Today Show with our first-year nursing grads. That was different. By the way, I had no idea. I show up at Rockefeller Center and I thought we were just going to be sitting in this studio and I’m, I can’t like, I date myself. I’m like, where’s Bryant Gumble?

And they’re like, yeah, Jane Pauly and Bryant Gumble aren’t here anymore. I’m like, Oh. Sort of disappointing. But I get there. It’s funny. I’m like, I think we’re just gonna go and sit on a couch and there’s a whole graduation set up in the middle of Rockefeller Plaza with, you know, stage and anyway, and it was funny cause the producers are like, “How do we do this? Do they walk up?” And I’m like, “Chill out. I know how to run a graduation.” I got this. But no, that really actually was true.

We’ve got our Center for Autism and Early Childhood Mental Health doing fantastic work. Again, some of these things that not everybody gets to see, a Center for Audiology and Speech Pathology, which is an incredible resource for the community. Those are services that are often not covered by insurance or are not readily accessible. Even if people can pay for it with insurance or Medicaid, there are no providers that will accept those things. And so they can’t get it. The Center for Water Science is doing important work, students getting hands-on learning opportunities as they address the critical issue of water safety.

I could go on at great length. The cool thing, from my point of view is that when I’m out in Paterson, where as I’ve talked about, we’ve spent a lot of time in Paterson and I think there’s a huge opportunity for us to be difference makers, real difference makers in a city that has a lot of energy that has a lot of possibility, but has a lot of challenges. They lack what is usually called an anchor institution. But beyond that, they lack somebody who’s trying to pull all those things together and to really make the different initiatives because this is not a dead city. This is not a place where people don’t care. There’s actually a ton of activity in Paterson, all kinds of nonprofits, all kinds of civic groups, people who are passionate about improving the city, people who are passionate about improving their own lives, but there’s nobody who’s taken responsibility for knitting those things together.

Building Community Partnerships

That’s an opportunity for us, for us to show what a university can do, if we bring our own activities to bear, and if we try to pull together the things that are already going on. So there’s going to be more announcements in the weeks ahead, but I couldn’t be more excited by what’s going on there. I have to give a shout out to Bryan Murdoch who I think many people know. Bryan’s done a phenomenal job for many years leading the charge on communicating. So Bryan’s done a fantastic job and I’m really excited that we’re able to elevate that work. I’m delighted to announce that Bryan is now going to be Associate Vice President for Community Partnerships.

We will be launching what we’re calling the Community Action Nexus, the purpose of which is to be an interface, an interface between the community and the University where we have one, basically one central place where folks from the outside can come in, say, “Here’s what we would like to accomplish. Can the University help us?” And where people inside the University can be aware of what each other is doing and have a resource to help you all connect with the community. Because that’s not always such an easy thing to do if we are going to be serious about serving the community.

And that’s what this is about. It’s not using the community as a laboratory. It’s not a test bed. It’s not a data set, right? It’s us serving the interest of the community, using our capabilities to do so. If we’re going to be serious about that, you actually have to build some infrastructure to support it.

You have to teach people how to do it right respectfully. And you, you have to cultivate relationships with the community, build the trust that makes real partnership possible. So that will be a central part of what the University is.

Great things happening in Paterson. Some of the things that are already already happening, you know, Dr. Reid and Garcia-Reid have done interventions in Paterson. There’s a lot of different programs. We’ve done educational programs in Paterson. We will become a central player in the revitalization, resurrection really, of Hinchliffe Stadium. And the museum at Hinchliffe Stadium will essentially become part of ����vlog. There will be much more to say about what happens in that community. But it’s not like we’re only going to be in Paterson, right?

This notion that we will support healthy communities. This will be a hallmark of this university. And we will show that communities can be stronger, can be brought together. They don’t have to be divided if you are focused on that as your goal. And of course, a big project, that’s an expression of that commitment is our relationship with Bloomfield College. Again, we are closing in, so we’ll be able to do announcements, so I can’t make any big whizbang announcements right now except to say this: the futures of Bloomfield and Montclair are intertwined. And it would’ve been highly irresponsible for an institution with the mission that we’ve articulated to serve the public interest, to see Bloomfield College founder, an institution that is the only predominantly black institution in New Jersey that has a tradition and a legacy of serving the public interest. We just couldn’t let that happen. And we have fantastic partners at the college, very willing, very creative, very committed to figuring out how to make this integrated notion work. The president of Bloomfield, Marcheta Evans, has become a very close co-conspirator for me and is going to be a huge asset to the University. We will be able to do that in a way that not only maintains the legacy of Bloomfield, but the important part is it makes us an even stronger institution innovating, in the higher ed space, showing that there are different ways to have educational impact, different ways to maintain alternative models under one umbrella university. So I’m very excited, very excited about that. And I feel confident in that and the State of New Jersey feels confident in that.

So there, for those of you who are not big state budget followers, you’ll note that the state invested $12.5 million, technically in Bloomfield College, but what it was, was an investment in our partnership. It was an investment in us. It was a belief that we have a path forward for Bloomfield and the students that Bloomfield College serves. So, I think this is going to be an exciting next chapter, as I say, there will be more to come on that front.

Finally, when it comes to addressing the breakdown of community in society, I think part of what’s been lost is a commitment to public service and a commitment to, frankly, democratic institutions. And so we have to, we have to be a bulwark, and this sounds melodramatic, I realize this, but we have to be a bulwark for democracy.

Leader in Public Service

It’s as simple as that. And so part of the reason why I want us to be a leader in public service is because cultivating a generation of young people who believe public service is an indispensable part of their lives is about building a cadre of people who are the backbone of a healthy American democracy. And by the way, I didn’t make that up. That’s what George Washington said when he argued for there being, basically, a public service university. And so I’m excited that we’ll be launching our own cohort of the Next Generation Service Corps. This makes us a partner in a now 13-university network of institutions. This is something that comes out of work that I did at Arizona State University, where we launched the first public service academy in the country, actually delivering on this idea that George Washington articulated and then worked with the Volcker Alliance, a nonprofit started by, New Jersey boy, former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, who recently passed away.

So we are now part of an alliance of universities that includes, obviously, ASU, Georgia State, Indiana, Penn State, I could go on with the list, all committed to building public service. We are going to be leaders of that initiative, which in my mind, will reach all 50 states by 2030. And we’re doing so building on a legacy of public service that we have here, not only this new program, but we are one of the leading programs in the Bonner program. We have multiple AmeriCorps programs. And I really do think, again, it traces back to our history as a normal school that is preparing people for serving as public educators. And so in this, in this set of ways, we are asserting what it means to be committed to community, what it means to be committed to the collective good, what it means to be committed to public service and at its core, what it means to be committed to democracy.

Strengthening the Institution

I do feel that in this way, we are responding to the challenging moment in a very palpable fashion. We can’t do any of this if we’re not attending to the strength of the institution. I recognize that. And all of this is exciting and we’ve got a lot of wheels turning and plates spinning, and choose the metaphor that works for you. That’s good. And adding hundreds of new students is good, but if this institution isn’t strong enough to withstand it, then you ultimately are self defeating. So we have to be attentive to the strength of the institution. We’re trying to make some changes on an organizational level, look at everything we do, every process, every procedure, strip it down, see how we can do things better, more efficiently, more effectively.

We are currently searching for a reconfigured leader of our administrative services. We have taken the position of the vice president for finance, and we’ve created a senior vice president for finance and administration. We’re searching right now, somebody who has the overarching responsibility to make the University work as efficiently and effectively as possible to support all of you in the work that you do. Whatever you do, however, from a structural point of view – and it pains me to say this because intellectually, I’m a public administration guy, political science, I believe in structure and process – but ultimately the people are more important than the structures. And the way that you support people is more important. So we want to be really attentive to supporting people and adding the talent.

We run a lean – I said this, when we were talking about the budget – we run a lean organization here. That’s important, right? That’s important. Because it goes back to what I first said, how do you make student success possible? Well, you keep it affordable even as you drive quality up, all right, there is such a thing as too lean right? You can’t run people to the point where they’re no longer effective because it’s self-defeating. And so we have to make sure that we are in the right spot. We were very pleased that actually with an intellectual argument – I really think that mattered, I know that sounds Pollyanna-ish as a political person – but with an intellectual argument paired with good old political activism, we were able to secure an investment from the state legislature that works out to $3,750 per student, which is more than we were getting before.

So that resulted in a $12 million increase from what the budget said. We did OK. We did OK. But it’s going to have to change if we are going to achieve all the things that I’ve been waxing rhapsodic about, it’s gonna have to change further and here’s the great part: we can address those needs and be innovative in who we serve simultaneously. The thing that I think is greatest from somebody who is responsible for the success of the University, is that our goals align. So yes, we want to be economically viable. We want to have the money to pay people. We want to be able to do those things. How do we do those things? We do those things by supporting student success.

Because if we retain students and graduate them, they’re paying and then I can pay all you. So that’s fantastic. And so all the things that we need to do in order to serve people, actually align with our mission. And so just some of the things that we are, some of the things that we are doing, I think are going to put us in a strong position, both as a university, but also economically. So we often talk about student success and how do you prepare students to be successful at the University? But we don’t talk enough critically about how we change ourselves to meet students where they are. It’s always about the students evolving. It’s never about us evolving, which I always think is funny. People talk about all the barriers, well, maybe we should eliminate the barriers instead of teaching people how to jump over them.

Montclair Unbound

So the initiative that we call Montclair Unbound is about changing the way we deliver educational programs to our students to meet them where they want to be. So maybe not every student wants to come to campus every day for class and maybe not every student wants to study exclusively online. Well, why can’t we mix those things together? I don’t see any reason. Well, we’re not set up to do that, which is true. Well then where you’re going to need to change. So that’s what that initiative is about. Are we organized intellectually to answer the questions and offer the programs that our students want to see and our community partners want to see? Do we have it right? Maybe not. That’s why I’m so gratified that the provost organized a committee to look at our education and health offers and then say, maybe we should restructure that a little bit.

And you know, I think we are going to make some changes based on the findings in that committee. And we’re going to look at whether we’re organized properly to maximize our impact and to meet students where they need to be and to support faculty where they want to be. Maybe we could be more attractive to international students. I think this is a fantastic destination for international students and yet we don’t have many. And that would be really important to building not only a financially stronger model, but also a more diverse campus community, which gives opportunities to learn from students from different backgrounds. So we’re going to figure out how to do that. We’re already engaging partners to help us identify international students.

Welcome New Faculty, Leaders

So these are the kinds of things that we’re going to do. And in order to meet those aspirations, we’re constantly adding new talent, new voices. The slides that you saw playing at the beginning, give you some sense of that. I asked just for some examples. So I got an example and I don’t know if he’s here. Is Christos Suriano here by any chance. I don’t know how he got stuck on my sheet, like a tough break for him, but Dr. Suriano joins us in neurobiology, just came from a post-doc at Princeton, a decent school down the road. He’s investigating the immune response. I’m going to read it because if I try and paraphrase, I’ll get it wrong. How the immune response to Adino-associated virus can disrupt neuronal structure and function. OK. That sounds good. But the other part that’s interesting is talking about RNA, the effect of RNA viruses. And what’s interesting is, you know this, this seemingly obscure intellectual stuff, that seemingly obscure stuff, that’s what led to the COVID vaccine. It seemed obscure 20 years ago. It doesn’t seem so obscure now.

So when we talk about community-engaged research and research that leads to solutions, I don’t want for a minute people to think, oh, well, there’s a lack of interest in basic research, there’s a lack of interest in the kind of work that I do. There are different ways that we arrive at solutions, and I’m excited about the growth of our research across the board in every area. And we’re going to continue that.

I also wanted to take a moment to welcome Dr. Pavel Lushyn to the campus. Dr. Lushyn is a former chair of the psychology department at the University for Education Management and the Academy for Educational Studies in Kyiv, a widely published author, a recipient of many medals from the Ukrainian government, a member of the National Academy of the Sciences in Ukraine, and unfortunately joins us because of the horrors going on in his country and the really shameful crimes against humanity that are being perpetrated on this nation. It is a very, in some ways, a very small voice that we raise by being able to welcome Dr. Lushyn to ����vlog, but we are delighted that we are able to do that and thrilled to have you here, and obviously hope that in the future, you can return to your home in a different state. So welcome, welcome very much to the University.

Finally, we do have a great group of leaders, and I want to introduce one new leader that we welcome to the campus, Althea Broomfield-Michel. Althea joined us as our new University Counsel. She comes to us from Columbia University, actually Teachers College appropriately enough, and has a history before that working in New York City government. So she will not be impressed by our bureaucracy. We’re very excited to have Althea here and she’s embraced the challenge of making us more entrepreneurial, more responsive, more creative, more risk-taking, and you don’t get lawyers who like to take risks for anyone. So we couldn’t be more thrilled to have her as part of this team.

Privilege to Partner in Making Difference in World

I’m going to stop there and simply say I am so thrilled by what we’ve gotten in motion over the last year. Really what it’s done is to whet my appetite for the possibilities of working together. It’s a real privilege to be your partner, but more importantly, it’s a real privilege to be part of an institution that I think is poised to make a real difference in the world and show not just in New Jersey, but beyond what a university can be.

I started last year and I’ll finish this year by noting that this university is situated on the ancestral homeland of the Lenape people. And one of the things that I felt was important when I came to appreciate native American history in Arizona, was to connect what we were doing to that heritage and part of the way we honor that heritage and to appreciate the values and culture of those people is to embrace them in what we do.

And the emphasis on community, the care for our planet, the thought regarding the generations that come after us, these are all values that come through from those communities. And so we honor our history and we honor the challenges of that history by taking the strongest elements from them and manifesting them in what we do. And so, this is a start, but we’re going to continue to do great things together. And I can’t wait. I can’t wait to see what the future holds.

Thank you.

It’s a tremendous honor for me to be with you today. As you know, I’ve been on campus a little under a month now. I can find my way around. I had a nice little boost yesterday when I was walking with a dean and the provost and somebody asked for directions and they didn’t know the answer, but I did. Just saying! I’m not identifying them. ‘Cause I don’t want to shame anybody.

This is my first opportunity to address you as a group. So before I get into it, what I’m going to do is I’m going to walk. I’m a walker and talker. So I’m going to keep my mask on. I may occasionally go over to the podium and unmask for a moment just so I can be heard and speak. And I think that’s distant enough to maintain safety. So I want to be cognizant of that.

Obviously the safety of the campus is on everybody’s minds. And we’ll talk about that in a bit, but before I go any further and we celebrate on this soggy day, I do want to acknowledge where we are. We’re on the ancestral homeland of the Lenape people. I want to recognize that and I also want to honor the history and culture by working together to repair the damage of our country’s dark legacies of genocide, dehumanization and oppression.

We will get about that business of repair by drawing upon the aspirational, enlightening and ennobling aspects that are also part of our shared history of this young, evolving, complex democracy. This is the commitment we make together. And I appreciate your enthusiasm for it.

Now, we at ����vlog, in my opinion, have a critical role to play in this ongoing process of evolution. That includes self-examination and improvement. In fact, that’s what this community is all about. We are committed to learning, inquiry and discovery, but that is not enough. That is not enough. And that’s what people think universities are. They are places where ideas are, where there’s talking and writing, bloviating you might say – that’s part of it too, but we must also be committed to action. And we must ask the question: How might we harness the power of more than 20,000 souls so that we can be a powerful force for good in the world?

That to me is what this community is about. And my goal as your president is to lead that effort, to create a dynamic, innovative institution that is capable of adaptation, of redesign. One that is able to empower faculty, staff, and students to make a positive impact in the world.

I truly love universities.

This question has come up over the last couple of months: why do you want to do this? And why is this something that you aspire to do personally? And the big part of the answer is I love universities. I love what they represent. I love their energy. I love the way they bring people together. They are collections of smart, curious people with varied interests, assembling to help others learn, to pursue ideas, to create new stuff. That’s literally stuff coming out of this place.

I’ve already had the opportunity to meet some of you, to visit some schools and centers.

I love it. I’m going to do more. I’ve already said to folks making my calendar to move that stuff up. I want to do it. I want to intensify the effort. To my mind, it’s fun. This is fun. It’s supposed to be fun and you’re supposed to enjoy it. And I hope you share my feeling that we are truly privileged. We are privileged to inhabit this citadel of learning and be given the opportunity to let our imagination run free. And I don’t think we should ever forget the privilege that we enjoy, today, every day, to be part of ����vlog, to be part of this community, to have the luxury to think and let our imagination run free and feel like we’re part of something special. I feel privileged. I feel privileged to be here with you now.

Now, let’s not kid ourselves. We’re gathering at a tough, tough moment in history.

Obviously we’re still grappling with COVID after we thought we’d be done with it. We live in a country that’s riven, not just by partisan political division, but profound schisms of value and even dramatically different perceptions of what constitutes reality.

That’s a pretty profound division right there.

And it truly does make it hard to engage constructively the many problems that plague our society, including inequality, racism, lack of opportunity, and more. And quite frankly, in my mind, moving over it all is the fact that we inhabit a planet that’s in deep, deep ecological distress, a planet that is issuing daily demands for our attention that are still not being met.

Now, it’s easy in the face of these challenges to react with despair. It’s easy to castigate others for their failures. These are understandable human reactions. Of course, they’ve been my reactions. Like, I assume, everybody in this room who occasionally clicks on The New York Times or whatever, and you just want to curl up in a ball after reading. One story seems to be worse than the next.

So that’s an understandable reaction, but I believe we can do something else and we should seek to answer a far more challenging call. The loudest most persuasive critique that can emanate from this campus, uniquely from this campus, is what we build here together, what we create together. And I, over the last couple of years, a quotation, a sentiment that keeps coming back into my head, it’s most commonly attributed to Marcus Cicero, Roman statesmen philosopher – is there a classics professor in the house by any chance? Okay, It’s pronounced kick-a-row. You happy, you feel good? Hopefully I get my street cred there.

Cicero said, “I criticize by what I create.”

“Criticize by what I create” – I feel like that should be our guidestar. Interestingly, this is a quotation, like most good quotations, that gets attributed to lots of people. The second most famous attribution of this idea is to another Italian: Michelangelo said, “Criticize by creating.” And I actually think it’s interesting that you have a political leader and an artist who are coming to the same place, offering the same wisdom that you can best use actions to respond to the critic, rather than just words. And this mandate to criticize by what we create, I believe, applies to everything we do. Everything.

And let’s start with the subject that’s on everybody’s minds – our campus approach to safety in the face of COVID-19.

It’s very easy to be critical of how this has been handled by various municipalities, various states, various elected officials, various institutions. And so rather than go there, I’d rather talk about how we will criticize by what we create here and reflect on what is going on right now.

We’re together in this room. Over the last week, the students have been coming back to campus. I never, never fully realized the sense of joy I could get by watching students schlep their dorm furniture from their car into their room. This elation at seeing crap being brought in. It was really important to you once: “I have to have a mini fridge!”

The reality is, over the last 18 months, we’ve learned the value of in-person learning and human interaction. It is true: We pivoted to online learning. It was an impressive feat on this campus, on so many others. It was a Herculean effort on the part of staff, faculty and students to pivot in this way. And so I honor it.

But let’s not for a minute pretend or forget that some people were left behind in his transition and not everyone had the same access to technology. Not everyone even had the same access to a quiet space where they could be in an online class.

And so this approach, while functional, doubled down on some of the inequities and unfairness in our society and fell short of what we aspire to in our classrooms. And so we shouldn’t discount what is lost when we sacrifice the interaction and understanding achieved face to face, not just in the classroom, but on campus.That’s part of college learning. That’s part of research.

And so we need to take the steps, in my opinion, we need to take the steps that allow us to keep people on campus in a safe and secure way. That’s why we’re moving to expand the vaccination mandate that was put in place for students to include faculty, librarians, professional staff and managers on our way to full coverage of the campus as mandated recently in the announcement by the governor.

And now is not the moment to get into the details. We’ll have that for you shortly.

But I think this is the most important part: I’ve been deeply gratified by the cooperative spirit in which we’ve approached this. I had the opportunity to sit down with our campus labor leaders, where they were able to raise concerns, identify solutions, so we could develop and implement a policy that is fair, thoughtful and well-designed.

And of course, we will continue to follow a masking policy as long as it is recommended by circumstances and the CDC. And we are committed to maintaining a testing infrastructure that, along with Vax Check, will now be mandatory, and allows us to monitor and maintain a safe campus.

What we’re trying to find here is a balance, right? A balance between individual preference and comfort and the safety of the community.

We will criticize others by creating a community that is safe, but respectful of differences. But let’s be clear about this. Communities are not monolithic and they’re rarely if ever unanimous.

Now we’re lucky this community is less divided by the response to COVID than many others. And we can be thankful for that, but it’s not unanimous. And we can criticize in another way by maintaining compassion for others, even in an environment – talking about a big environment now – even in an environment that grows toxic, more toxic, seemingly by the minute.

I hope that that’s our approach, right? That we take the steps necessary. We embrace them, but we try not to let any division we have over the reaction and the rightness, the wrongness, the steps that people have taken, to tear us apart in the way that it is tearing apart our country in a very real way.

So we’ve got to extend this “criticized by what I create” logic to every part of this University. We can criticize, for example, the zero sum social discourse around race and identity by creating a community that goes far beyond tolerance as a value and objective, and truly embraces diversity, equity and inclusion as non-negotiable essential qualities that will make ����vlog great.

I’ll tell you. I’m so energized by the incredible heterogeneity of this community. So let’s start by reviewing every aspect of how we do things to ensure that we’re working to build a positive anti-racist institution, for which every person on this campus feels a strong sense of ownership and belonging.

Anything less than that and we’re not achieving our goals.

And let’s build a University leadership and faculty that is reflective of the diversity of the students, workforce and communities that we serve. That needs to be our goal.

And we can criticize the cloistering of universities seemingly indifferent – and I know this is not this university, but it’s the reality that we see in other places – seemingly indifferent to the fate of neighbors and those who are not directly engaged in the work of the campus. We can criticize that by building an unrivaled engine of social innovation and solution creation.

This is already the profile and history of Montclair. We are after all the Montclair Normal School in our DNA, created to educate teachers who would lead to social progress. And we are continuing that legacy today, both immediately and dramatically expanded. There’s so much good stuff going on here already. I discover new things every day. I’ve come to appreciate what we do already. And I know we can and will do more in the surrounding towns, in Newark, in the Oranges, in Paterson, and beyond.

We will criticize by creating something that nobody has seen yet in New Jersey and beyond, and becoming an example.

We can criticize educational institutions that have accepted low graduation and success rates as a de facto reality by focusing on student success like no one else does.

Here’s the reality – and you all know this – higher education is not popular in this country.

I don’t know why; we’re all so nice!

But look, Americans distrust higher education. They are suspicious of it and they have good reason to be frustrated. The majority of Americans – this is a profound thing and I’ve said it many times because I sort of can’t believe it, so I keep saying it to remind myself – the majority of Americans who have attended college do not have a degree, right? So most people who went to college left feeling like it was a failure, maybe they feel like they were a failure, but it was not a good experience. And then, think of this from a public policy point of view: the majority of educational debt outstanding in this country is owed by people who did not earn a degree.

Right? So these are, this is a whole bunch of people who feel that they are now paying off loans and saddled by debt, and for that they got not nothing. Nothing.

The majority of Pell dollars expended in the history of what I consider to be an important signature program that speaks to the ethic of this country, right? I believe strongly in it. The majority of Pell dollars expended did not result in the earning of a degree. That’s a public policy failure. And we in higher education, not ����vlog, must own it. The things that I just said are an embarrassment. They’re an embarrassment and we should be embarrassed by them. And we have an opportunity to criticize institutions that are far more responsible.

Let me be clear. I’m not saying that Montclair State hasn’t risen far above the average, no doubt about it. I’m super excited by what we’ve seen at this institution, the achievements in terms of graduation, retention and student success. They are indeed something to be proud of.

But we need to push ever higher to show those who accept mediocrity as the inevitable outcome of this system to be wrong. We will criticize by creating something entirely different and be proud that we have shown this is possible.

We can criticize those who say it is simply not possible to build a diverse, inclusive university and also be excellent. Be excellent in every sense. Hold our students to the highest standards, do research that is excellent. That notion, that access and excellence cannot go together is a false dichotomy.

And let me be pretty blunt. It’s a racist one.

So we will show that Montclair State is giving an educational experience that’s every bit as good as any other university in this country, and we are doing so for a broad swath of the population that is representative of the full diversity and richness of this society. That is what we will do here.

And I’m trying really hard not to – when I’m talking about campus and my experience, that I came from this school in Arizona. You may know that. I don’t want to, I don’t want to keep bringing that up, but I will say that my passion for this was sort of carved into stone based on my experience at ASU, where I saw what it means to have that commitment and to be dissatisfied with anything less. And I know what this institution is capable of because I’ve been part of an institution that’s been driven by this. And I am so excited to work on this together here at Montclair with you.

Here’s the thing. These are big ideas. These are challenges. I’m not saying any of these things are easy. They are not easy. They are not easy, right? And so whenever I say, they’re not easy, I can’t help invoking President Kennedy who talked about going to the moon and said, “We do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

And it’s catchy, but it’s catchy because it’s true, right? That’s why we need to do it because it’s hard, but we need to show that it can be done because if we don’t show that it can be done, then all those other institutions who say we didn’t do it because it’s impossible can live in that lie.

So we’re going to do it precisely because it is difficult and show that if you task yourself with solving the problems, you can get it done. And I know we can. And here’s the thing. This is the exact right time, the exact right time to take on these challenges, perhaps the best time in decades, perhaps the best time ever.

Higher education is in transition. There’s no doubt about that. Partly this is an unintended consequence of the pandemic. So be it. Let’s embrace it. All of a sudden there is a new acceptance of alternative ways of learning and engaging. We now have tools to reach learners that were otherwise stymied, kept away from campus, inhibited by costs. But it goes more than just the technological adaptation. Because of the tumult, there’s an impetus and an openness to questioning everything, every way in which we do things, how we organize ourselves, how we understand our purpose. And there’s an openness that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before, an openness to different answers to those questions. Here’s the reality. The vast, vast majority of will run away from those opportunities. I’m not kidding. They’ll flee. They’ll pretend it’s not happening. They’ll try as hard as they can to maintain the status quo. Right? To not change because change is difficult, because change upsets routines, right?

And so most institutions, most institutions will look at the possibilities that this moment affords and they will demur.

And they will do more than just demur. They will resist kicking and screaming. “We will not change. We will do this the same way we have done this for 400 years, by gum. We know how to teach a class and it looks the same as it did today as it did for my great-grandfather.”

That’s what most places will do, but it shouldn’t be this institution, for goodness sake. Our motto is carpe diem – seize the day, right? Seize this moment of opportunity. By the way, interestingly, Susan left her desk, I guess my desk, a little stone thing that says [now I’m going to lose my credibility with the classic People]: quam minimum credula postero. I know that’s terrible. But it means basically, “for no one knows what tomorrow will bring.” It’s a funny phrase actually, because it’s kind of like, “Just go crazy because you could get run over by a bus tomorrow morning.”

That’s not necessarily what you want to put on the building where you’ve got a bunch of 18 and 19 year olds gathered away from home for the first time. You’ve got to finesse that with them a little bit, something different, in the context that I’m raising it: “We don’t know that the opportunity will be there for us tomorrow that is there for us to today right?” First of all, because the world is evolving so quickly, and the opportunities may change and the windows may close.

But second of all, because there is something to be said for being first movers and defining who we are and to plant a flag in the ground and say, “This is what a modern public serving research university looks like for the 21st century.” And to claim that as our identity. A lot of people say, “You know, I didn’t know that much about ����vlog, but once I started reading, wow, all kinds of good stuff going on. I had no idea, right?” That’s the most reaction you get when you say, when you say, and I’m sure many of you have had this experience.

And I think that part of the reason for that is we haven’t defined ourselves. Now is the opportunity to define ourselves around our response to these challenges about our ability to seize this moment and define what we’re going to be now, before I reach the end, which is coming.

I do want to talk about that other group, those 18, 19 year old and other students, our students, who are also gathering today and who I will have the fun opportunity to welcome to our campus in a short while. They’re here to seize the day also. And of course they couldn’t be more excited because they’re finally back on campus and back in school. And I view our responsibility first and foremost to ensure their success. That’s after all, what we’re here to do. The university is here for students. We exist by virtue of their willingness to dedicate their time and resources to earn an education and set themselves up for a future. Were it not for the students, we wouldn’t exist. Sometimes people forget that – that it’s them that make us have this opportunity. That’s the reality. And so, uh, we are here to cultivate their capacity and prepare them to make contributions long after they leave Montclair.

Just so you know, boy, we have a lot of students. So this is the largest freshman class in the history of ����vlog, more than more than 3,600 students representing 12 states, and 11 other countries. It’s an impressive group. The richness of their profiles speaks to the student body. More generally, I asked for just a couple of examples, because I just think students are this sort of big amorphous blob when you don’t talk about them as individuals.

So just to just a couple that were provided as exemplars to me:

• Miles Schroeder, as a presidential scholar. He comes from Camden and he’s majoring in TV production, minoring in paralegal studies. He was very active as a high school student, a member of the youth community advisory board for the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. He worked particularly with health care professionals who are active in the LGBTQ community. He presented at the Philadelphia HIV Prevention Educational Conference on LGBTQ litigation and hopes to take his work here to further efforts on behalf of LGBT communities. In the context, I can’t help but assume that Miles is attracted in part to Montclair because of the reputation of this campus as being a place that is LGBTQ friendly. And so somebody who’s passionate about that cause felt like this would be a place where he would be at home. And to me that underscores the power of building an inclusive and welcoming community, that it becomes a magnet for students. And that’s what this should become: a place that is known as somewhere you want to go, where you’re appreciated and you’re allowed to thrive as an individual and your identity is not an exclusionary characteristic, but actually a basis of warmth and embrace. You should go to ����vlog.
• Iliana Mendoza Cobos, I’m particularly excited about sharing her with you, a 39-year-old transfer student who’s coming to the Department of Family Science and Human Development. She wants to become a special ed teacher. She comes from Sussex County Community College. So not only is she a first-generation student herself – this is cool – she and her daughter earned their associates degrees together. I like highlighting Iliana because nearly 10% of undergrads at Montclair are transfer students like her, and I think it’s something that we often forget – that there’s a substantial number of people who don’t have the same experience, the four years, what we saw in our whole life, right? That’s not the college experience for a lot of our students, let alone the majority of students in this country. It’s also worth noting that Iliana is a first-generation or will be a first-generation college graduate, similar to 30% of our undergraduate population, which is something to be enormously, enormously proud of. I’m very excited by that. She did all kinds of work as well as student government, president, student ambassador, a scribe for students with disabilities, a volunteer school reader. Very similar to the third student I’ll describe.
• Tess Coffey, also like Miles, a presidential scholar coming to us from Moorestown to major in Psychology, volunteered extensively in Appalachia building and repairing houses in Kentucky and Virginia. Also an athlete, in crew and field hockey, volunteered a lot of service, as you can tell, to promote sports inclusion, working to reach out to students with intellectual disabilities, to get them involved in games. Just generally trying to serve by promoting inclusion.

And what strikes me about Tess, and actually this relates to the two other students and to our students writ large, is that she is representative of the deep, deep commitment to public service among our students. And this is something that I think the University has – an incredible richness in programs, whether it’s multiple AmeriCorps programs, the Bonner leader program, and I could go on. I was in this auditorium a couple weeks ago for the Green Teams presentation. That was fantastic.

I believe that this public service theme should be and can be the animating feature of this University. Indeed I think public services is a sentiment that’s gotten kind of dragged down into the mud a little bit, and our young people are unfairly chastised for being narcissistic, self obsessed, only interested in their phones and Tik Tok and so on. Okay, that last part is fair, but not the narcissistic part. Because I actually think that the service mentality of young people is stronger than in many others. Now they’re not super interested in government and politics. That’s an issue we’ve got to work on because they need to be. It’s so important. But they are deeply interested in public service and they’re deeply interested in crafting a life that makes a difference in the world.

My vision is that ����vlog is defined by that public service impulse that our students demonstrate. And when we talk about a university making a difference in the community. And when we talk about a university that is accessible and inclusive and provides pathways for all members of society to find an education and to realize the full extent of their potential. When we talk about those things, we’re talking about a university committed to and built around the idea of public service. That’s to me what it is. So people talk about public universities and people say, well, what makes a public university, a public university? And, probably the reflexive answer is, “Well, they’re funded by the state.” That is the dominant answer, by the way, as you know, less and less is that true.

The state of New Jersey continues to be our largest investor, that’s one way to put it, and we wouldn’t exist the way we exist now, were it not for that investment. But it’s no longer, I think, appropriate to say what makes us a public university is the fact that a predominant source of our revenue is taxpayer dollars.

To my mind, what makes us a public university, regardless of the level of funding that comes from the state government, what makes us a public university is that we are animated by public purpose and that we exist to serve the public interest. That’s not some happy, positive externality. Let me be clear about that. Like, oh, isn’t that great? Because we have students that they’re doing this cool little project in Newark. Isn’t that awesome?

No, it’s more than that. We exist to do that. We exist to advance the public good. And if we don’t accept that responsibility, then we are not a public university.

That is what we are. It is what we must be. And it’s what the world requires us to be. And by criticizing through our creation, I don’t pretend for a minute that ����vlog can solve all the world’s problems. We can do a lot, but we can’t solve all the world’s problems. But the greatest service we can do to the public, the greatest way we can serve the public interest is to create solutions and to show that those problems can be solved. That despair and hopelessness is not the right reaction. It’s using the tools that we are giving to our students and that we have cultivated in ourselves to come up with better answers, to achieve the aspirations we have for society.

My fervent commitment is to do everything in my power as president to lead in that direction. I’m so excited to work with all of you to achieve those goals. Thank you so much. I can’t wait to get started.

Jonathan GS Koppell, President, ����vlog

Good afternoon to those who are here in person in our beautiful Amphitheater, and to all those many more who are joining us electronically. I would have loved to be able to be together with all of you on campus, but we must take satisfaction in the fact that we are at least, one way or another, here and making the best of the circumstances we have been given.

I’ll start with Chaucer today from The Legend of Good Women, because I think the 14th century often provides a useful perspective when thinking things through:

In the original Middle English, almost certainly badly mispronounced:

Whan that the month of May
Is comen, and that I here the foules synge,
And that the floures gynnen for to sprynge,
Farewel my bok, and my devocioun!

Or, roughly translated to modern English:

When the month of May
Has come, and I hear the birds sing,
And the flowers have begun to bloom,
Farewell to my books and to my devotions!

After 22 years of gathering with you each spring to celebrate the cyclical renewal of the earth and the approaching end of another year of accomplishment at the University, this year, my 23rd, I bid this academic year and this academic community farewell more permanently. I put down, not for a bit of summer rest but forever, my books and my devotions, that is, my work as president of ����vlog.

When I was inaugurated as president of the University, the provost from Metropolitan State University, where I had before been president, spoke at my inaugural ceremony here. Some of you were there and may recall that she said, “You will find that Susan will speak about her students, her faculty, her buildings, her university. Don’t worry about that,” she said. “Susan takes very good care of her things, and, when she leaves, she gives them all back.” Well today, after 23 years, I am formally giving them all back. Which raises the questions: to whom am I giving them, and what exactly is it that I am giving back. The first question is easily answered; the second is more complicated.

To whom am I giving it all back? I am, of course, giving it all back to you – you who do the work to enrich, sustain and realize the mission of the University, and I am giving it back to the people of New Jersey, who bear the responsibility to support the University so that it may serve their needs: their need to educate the rising generations, their need to push forward the creation of new knowledge, and their need for the intellectual resources to address important societal issues.

This giving back is, of course, symbolic, because, as we know, the University was never really mine. It is true that in moments of pride and affection I would speak about my students. It is true that, from time to time, when deans would be tussling over who had the right of first access to certain facilities, I liked to remind them that all the facilities were not theirs but mine. I confess that there may have been a little something in my personality that conveyed a sense of ownership of the enterprise. But the truth is that I was, as any real leader should be, always sensible of the fact that I was a mere short-term steward of a very long-term asset. And, in giving this university back to you who sustain it and to the people of the state who support it, I would remind you that you, too, are short-term stewards of this immensely important long-term asset.

So that brings us to the second question, that is, what exactly is it that I am giving back. I would say that much more than the University’s people, its land and buildings, or its programs, what I am giving back is an idea or conviction, specifically the idea that the preservation of culture, history, and knowledge, the creation of new knowledge, and the education of people is necessary to the salvation of the world, and all that is implied by the word salvation. To the extent that the University has value, that value is embodied in that central idea and all that flows from that idea, as made manifest by the work that we have done and the work that you will continue to do.

Over the past two decades, based on that idea, our work has been substantially to expand public higher education opportunities for the state we serve, and the manifestation of that work can be very briefly summarized in four major categories.

First and foremost, we have grown enrollments from approximately 12,000 to over 21,000 students, and those students now fully reflect the racial, ethnic, economic and social diversity of the population of this highly diverse state. More than half of our incoming students are students of color, and we are now a federally designated Hispanic-Serving Institution. And we are not just admitting students; we are retaining them and graduating them at percentages significantly higher than national averages in comparable institutions. The number of degrees granted each year has grown from approximately 2,200 to 5,200. That is not just good; that is remarkable. Much of that success is attributable to the very significant growth in student advising and support services, initiatives that resulted in the recent creation of University College, designed to provide guidance to thousands of students and to assist them in finding the degree program that best aligns with their abilities and aspirations.

Second, expanding the enrollment base has enabled the faculty in all of our colleges and schools to create a multitude of new and redesigned academic programs at the baccalaureate, master’s, and doctoral levels. These programs have been in traditional academic disciplines, in professional fields, and in emerging and cross-disciplinary areas of study, and have been informed by the knowledge and workforce needs of a rapidly evolving world. Along with this programmatic development has come the breaking down of disciplinary silos, the reshaping of intellectual partnerships, and the transformation of existing academic units into larger, more comprehensive entities. A few examples among so many include the incredible growth we have seen in the Feliciano School of Business, the evolution of a strong Department of Music into the outstanding John J. Cali School of Music, the creation of the rapidly growing and future-focused School of Communication and Media, a new School of Nursing, and new programs in fields such as Medical Humanities, Data Science, Public Health, and Business Analytics. All of that work gives our larger student population access to a far more comprehensive range of educational opportunities.

Third, building on the solid foundation of an existing strong faculty, the recruitment of hundreds of new, highly qualified faculty has enabled the expansion of the University’s engagement in research, scholarship, and graduate and professional education. Graduate student enrollments continue to rise, and the faculty each year is attracting ever increasing external research funding from major federal agencies. As a Carnegie-designated Doctoral Research University, we are no longer focused solely on imparting knowledge; we are increasingly deeply engaged in creating knowledge and in applying knowledge.

And fourth, to support the increases in enrollment, faculty and staff, academic programs, research, and campus activities, we have added millions of new and renovated square feet to a campus that was desperately underbuilt. Just a brief list of some of the major facilities projects include: the Center for Environmental and Life Sciences, the Feliciano School of Business, the Center for Computing and Information Science, the John J.Cali School of Music, the School of Communication and Media, Conrad Schmitt Hall, College Hall, University Hall, the School of Nursing and The Graduate School, thousands of beds for residential life, new dining venues, a train station, beautiful new studios and performance venues for the arts, a completely new energy infrastructure for the campus, including the campus’ own microgrid, improvement of athletic facilities and a new Recreation Center, and improved campus grounds, roadways, and the University’s first three truly elegant parking decks.

So that is the thumbnail sketch of what we have done. What’s next? What will the future require of you? When I arrived in 1998, Montclair State had very recently been designated a university, continuing its historical transition from Normal School to Teachers College, to State College, and then State University, but it still functioned in most ways like the small college it had been. Over the past two decades, because of your willingness to change, it has evolved, incrementally but inexorably, into the large, highly complex research university that stands today. There is no doubt, that the future will require you to continue to be willing and ready to let Montclair State go further in that process of evolution, in its structures, relationships, policies and ways of functioning to meet the needs of the university of tomorrow.

The future will not be found in nostalgia for the past. The future will require an intensely forward-oriented perspective, and it will require largeness of mind. It will require embracing the idea that no piece of the institution can be competent to define the whole. Wasting time over trivia, clinging to process instead of purpose, and stifling creativity, differentiation and useful ambiguity can yield only mediocrity, and mediocrity would be the cost that would be paid if one desires an institution that is, first and foremost, a safe and familiar refuge. Progress toward the fulfillment of purpose, creativity, discovery and accomplishment, requires giving up the safe haven of the familiar, giving up rigid or bureaucratic controls, and it requires, most importantly, giving up the impulse to over-regulate, whether by individuals, committees, units, departments, representative bodies or groups.

To be a successfully creative and achieving organism, the University community needs to trust itself. It needs to let the Chemistry Department experiment with new programs, let the Music School use facilities and time differently, let the Facilities engineers rip up the old pipes and create our own microgrid, let the School of Nursing grow their differentiated culture. The way forward requires us to cheer each other on and help each other on our way, not to slow each other down, not to worry and pester each other about the little stuff, but, rather, to keep thinking about how, working together, we realize the big goals. Not that you have asked me, but, if I were to leave you with one critical piece of advice, it would be to not let yourselves be divided into us and them, and I would say don’t be negative. There is always, every day and every minute of every day, much more going on to excite, to support and to celebrate than to worry about. As I have said many times, the best thing I have ever had to give you is each other. Each of us, as individuals, is limited in what we can achieve. Working together, sharing effort and talent and knowledge, the limits disappear. We have achieved what we have because we have allowed each other and our collective self to do the work.

A new president will be arriving soon, and I am certain that the new president will be deeply committed to leading the University toward the fulfillment of our mission. That person should find a university community that is ready and waiting and wholly focused on achieving big and important future goals, a university community that is united around a mission, accepting and trusting of each other. You are that community. Believe it; you are. There is so much important work yet to be done, and this University is strong enough and you who sustain it are strong enough to do that work.

One Friday evening a couple of weeks ago in April, after grueling days of state budget advocacy, campus budget planning, pandemic logistics, testing and vaccinating, a massive agenda of personnel, legal, program, contract and infrastructure issues, I headed off from my office, weighed down by two briefcases for the weekend, and already mentally reviewing the issues awaiting in the week ahead, and then, on the lawn outside the Cali School of Music, I chance upon Robert Levin, a Music instructor, with a group of students in a circle learning about West African drumming. It was April, so despite the evening hour, the sun was still high in the sky, and I stopped to listen to the drums. The class noticed me, and turned to see who was listening in. “It’s the president,” one of the students called out. And that brought everything to a complete halt. The instructor turned to me and explained, “We’re studying West African drumming, we’re focusing on Burkina Faso. Who knows the capital of Burkina Faso,” he asked the class. “Do you know?” he asked me. “Ouagadougou,” I respond immediately, surprising both the class and myself with the right answer. The students cheered and beat their drums. “That’s why I’m the president,” I said in triumph.

In a matter of five minutes, all the weariness of the week disappears. The students are smiling and engaged, back to practicing West African drumming under an April evening sun in New Jersey, and that’s actually why I’m the president. Not because I know the capital of Burkina Faso, not because I competently plow through the massive work of the week, but because my heart turns over when I see a valuable piece of human history and culture, in this case West African drumming, being preserved and expertly passed on to a new generation, whose lives will be changed by the experience.

There have been countless moments like that: hearing two nursing students, sitting on a bench in their red scrubs, explaining chemistry to each other; a student government leader carefully taking a meeting of fellow students through a decision-making process; an English major proudly sharing a binder of student poems; a graduate student carefully explaining her work in the laboratory on new techniques for quantifying cyanotoxins in lake water; walking across the campus at 10 p.m. at night and seeing the light from room after room, filled with students.

Last week, I spent an hour with a dozen of our student leaders, and it was heartening to listen to their hopes and dreams, both for the University and for their lives. To a person, they spoke with passion and intensity about what Montclair State meant for them, and with more wisdom and thoughtfulness than we sometimes see displayed in the larger world, they spoke about the importance of our campus culture, about its unity, its sense of community, its nurturing qualities. With sense beyond their years, they recognized that people are not perfect, that we will all make mistakes, but that it is important not to define either ourselves by our mistakes or others by theirs. In the various degrees of isolation our students have experienced as a result of the pandemic, they long for a campus accessible and present for them and at peace with itself. They are deeply troubled by the divisiveness they see in the world beyond the campus. They don’t like the pointing of fingers. They want to grow up to be really good superintendents of school districts and teacher role models; they want to be caring social workers; they want to be great scientists, and they want to get graduate degrees in business, medicine and law, and to be good at their chosen professions. They want a world that is gracious, forgiving, supportive and constructive, not one that is judgmental, angry, self-referential, self-righteous or accusatory. And so they should. They have names and faces these students: Ashon Lanada, Karla Farfan, Guillermo Estrada, Christie Rosales, Faith Victor, Ernst Lozin, Andrew Moya, Andrew Lyons, Paulette Gando-Duenas and Fathia Balgahoom. They are not a fabrication of my imagination, and there are tens of thousands more just like them. I have always felt that we need to work hard to live up to the expectations of our students, and to work hard to be the role models they deserve in regard to how we treat each other and how we treat them.

What we have to offer our students and the state, nation and world that we serve, and ourselves, is something of extraordinary importance. I have always believed that, I believed it when I came, and I will leave believing it, and I want to thank all of you who walked by my side on this 23-year journey: the Board of Trustees, the Foundation Board, the elected officials, the donors, the alumni, my colleagues in the state and national higher education community, and with genuinely deep gratitude the amazingly talented, committed and hardworking people who built this University – the faculty, full-time and part-time, the administrators and staff, and those who worked most closely with me, the vice presidents and the deans. I have been surrounded by gloriously intelligent and caring people, and it has been my honor to work with you over the years. And I also want to thank those who came before, the two predecessors in my role as president who I had the privilege of meeting, Dr. David Dickson and Dr. Irvin Reid, and the generations of people who played a part in the history of this institution and who left it for us strong and ready to grow, as we will leave it to those who come next, strong and ready to continue that growth.

We have been part of the creation of an always evolving community here. It is not perfect, but it is very good and within its core there is alive the desire to be better and the knowledge that there is more to be done. I give this idea about the meaning of the University back to you today, and, in doing so, I remind you that the University’s well-being and its future is now, and always has been, in your collective hands.

These days, my mind turns more often than might be expected to the Scottish Highlands because my older granddaughter Sonia will be completing her degree at the University of St. Andrews next year, and so my closing words will be by the poet Robert Burns. But, as I say these last words, when I say Highlands, I would like you to think, not of Scotland, but of this high land on which our University is built. And I want you to think not just about the geological high land that has been so good to build on, that keeps us above the floods, and that gives us magnificent views, but think also of the moral high ground that we have strived for in our work, think of our efforts to lift up our eyes to see and to be unafraid to embrace the big panorama of our world and the people we serve. And, so, I say today:

Farewell to the Highlands, farewell to the North,
The birthplace of valor, the country of worth!
Wherever I wander, wherever I rove,
The hills of the Highlands for ever I love.

Thank you, and, to each of you, fare thee well.