2024 State of the University Address Transcript

Good morning! 

I’d like to start by acknowledging that we gather today on the unceded ancestral homelands of the Coast Salish Peoples, who have lived in the Salish Sea basin, all throughout the San Juan Islands, and the North Cascades watershed from time immemorial. 

Thank you for joining me for the 2024 State of the University address. Uzma and I extend our warmest greetings and heartfelt welcome to each and every one of you.  We are grateful to see you here at the start of a new academic year. We have much to be proud of as a university community and I deeply appreciate your dedication to our mission. Thank you for the contributions each of you make to ensure Western continues to be one of the most impactful institutions in the state and in the broader region.

During the past few weeks, I have been in gatherings with alumni and friends in Bellingham and Seattle. I start my comments by telling them that Western continues to be one of the best master’s comprehensive institutions in the nation, committed to advancing inclusive student success and increasing our impact in the region. As I talk with legislators and others across the state, I am humbled by their opinion of Western as a high-performing university that delivers an excellent education while simultaneously focusing on increasing access to students from all backgrounds and walks of life. 

Our faculty are key to driving academic excellence. The teaching enterprise they have created at Western that integrates their research and creative work in the learning experience of our students is the underlying key to Western’s success. To our faculty—thank you for making Western such a valued institution in the state and beyond.

Our work would not be accomplished without the dedication, expertise, and hard work of our staff, who make the university work in big and small—and often unseen—ways every day. Thank you to our incredible staff for your service to the university.

In April 2024, Western’s Board of Trustees reaffirmed its commitment to the 2018-25 Strategic Plan framework, extending the plan through 2028, with increased emphasis on positioning Western as the region’s premiere public comprehensive university dedicated to providing accessible, high-quality post-secondary education to the residents of the state of Washington and the broader Northwest region. I am committed to working with all of you to pursue this vision and advance our aspirations.

Currently, in the state of Washington, about 78,000 students graduate from high school each year, yet only about half of them end up enrolling in any type of post-secondary education or apprenticeship.  Western provides high-quality, affordable education, attractive to many Washington residents, as evidenced by our strong enrollment recovery post-pandemic compared to our peers in the state and across the country.  I believe a thriving Western is essential to the health of post-secondary education and improving the 50% college-continuation rates in the state. 

The question before us today is this: What do we need to do to make sure that Western continues to occupy this special place and is strategically positioned to meet the needs of the state of Washington and beyond? 

To advance this important work requires that Western is financially healthy and can maintain a nurturing community: today, tomorrow, and for years to come. 

To step back, you all were impressive in how you adapted to the global COVID pandemic in 2020 and delivered effectively on the mission of the university. However, the two low first-year enrollment classes of fall 2020 and fall 2021, which are still working through the university’s pipeline, left a tuition revenue gap that continues to significantly impact our operations. And like many other public universities, we were also beginning to face a structural budget deficit before the pandemic as we experienced a growing trend of insufficient state funding to cover our basic operations. Since the pandemic, we have mostly relied on short-term strategies to bridge the university’s budget gap, and we have been disciplined and purposeful in allocating resources. But, unfortunately, for at least the next few years, the university’s two major revenue sources—state funding and tuition—will not rebound quickly enough to sustain our current level of expenditures. The bottom-line is that the university’s current scope of operations is not sustainable. 

Short-term strategies only work if they are implemented for the short term! However, by extending them for too long, the university starts losing key capabilities in unstructured and unintentional ways. And we want to make sure that we are not caught in that situation.

We are going to address this structural budget challenge by taking specific actions this year that remove permanent dollars from the base budget. My goal this year is to put us back on a more stable, long-term financial footing so we can avoid further short-term reductions that are eroding our core assets and begin to reinvest in the people and programs that make Western such an incredible public university. As we proceed with budget realignment, our goal is to implement strategies that maximize our ability to advance our strategic priorities, to preserve our academic strengths that provide Western with such a strong competitive advantage, and to rebuild our reserves to ensure we can make strategic long-term investments in our academic programs and in our services to our students. 

The first step in this process is to examine our administrative and support functions to ensure that our operations are as strategically aligned with our core mission as possible, which means minimizing redundancies, reducing overhead, and streamlining across divisions 

and units. Earlier this month, I made the difficult decision to eliminate University Relations and Marketing as a separate administrative unit. We are consolidating the services provided by URM with similar functions elsewhere in the university, with an eye toward improving effectiveness and efficiency. We are working through a similar process to align several other administrative functions with the goal of protecting core services and capturing economies of scale that result from consolidation across divisions, and we will be sharing those changes with you over the next few weeks. 

As we engage in this strategic budgeting process, we have an important opportunity to re-envision existing units—their functions and services—and to ultimately restructure Western in a way that better serves the evolving needs of the state of Washington. As an example, Provost Johnson is leading a process to re-envision Outreach and Continuing Education with a focus on activities that create new opportunities and resources for the university. 

I recognize that to reduce expenses in an educational institution where 80 percent of the budget is tied to people, ultimately requires a reduction in positions. Our approach to this work has been and will continue to be focused on eliminating and consolidating vacant positions across the university to minimize impacts to employees wherever possible. We are also taking a hard look at reducing non-personnel costs, through contract management, focusing on what we can stop doing, partnering on services, and similar strategies.

On the academic side, Provost Johnson, in collaboration with academic deans and faculty, is leading a process to minimize parallel structures—referring to degree concentrations and program pathways, typically accompanied with low enrollment courses—in academic colleges and departments. You will be hearing more from Provost Johnson during the fall term as he leads the process to examine and minimize such parallel structures, while ensuring that the strategic positioning of our programs and degree offerings is not compromised.

Change management, driven by budgetary matters, is necessarily disruptive, particularly at a time when the recovery and growth of our first-year enrollments, post-pandemic, would be of envy to many institutions in the state and across the country. To be fiscally sustainable, we need to manage both ends of the spectrum over the next couple of years, reducing expenses and accommodating demand. We will strive to provide clear and timely communication as the budget work proceeds during the academic year and we will do our best to provide support during this transition process.

I started my comments with the question: What do we need to do to make sure that Western continues to occupy a special place in Washington’s higher education landscape? Financial stability is one key component. The other important element is re-establishing the public trust in higher education at large and supporting an engaged university community that is needed to advance that trust. 

We are going through a time when higher education is confronting a challenging political landscape. There is increasing skepticism about the value of higher education when exactly the opposite is needed if the U.S. is to sustain its position as a leader in innovation, education and research. During the past year, we have seen increasing threats to academic freedom and institutional autonomy, two core principles that have made America’s universities the envy of the world.

Of course, higher education does not operate in a bubble and is not immune from the impacts of major societal events. The horrific conflict in the Middle East is the most recent example of a global event with direct impacts on college campuses, including here at Western. Navigating the complexities of global conflicts and other issues continues to be a significant challenge for institutions of higher education across the country and the world. I know that the last academic year was particularly challenging in this regard, and while it was difficult and complex, I believe that our community as a whole navigated these challenging times in a way that ensured the safety of our community while also upholding freedom of speech. 

The work ahead of us is not going to be simple, but I see some clear needs that I’d like to lay out here. 

• We need to make a more compelling case to the public that universities and higher education are essential to advancing democratic institutions and civic dialogue. 
• We need to speak out to protect the core values and functions of the academy. At the same time—and learning from our recent experiences—we need to remember that, as a public university, our role is to provide a venue where differing philosophies and perspectives can be vigorously debated in a respectful manner. 
• We must ensure that we uphold a fair and respectful environment for all members of our community. I understand why we, and leaders of other institutions, have made statements in the past, to support community members impacted by world events. But there are consequences to these messages, including inadvertent takeaways for groups due to omissions or due to the appearance of taking sides on controversial issues.

I believe it is important that the university and its leaders refrain from interfering with the crucial process of academic freedom and civic dialogue, and along these lines, Western will be joining universities from across the state and country in refraining from taking positions on political or social issues that do not play a central role in our core operations or educational mission. Instead, at Western, we will demonstrate how disagreements can be debated in a respectful and civic manner. And we will stay true to our commitment to scholarly excellence and inclusivity as essential to that work. 

Not unlike many other educational institutions, events from the last academic year have left us with divisions to heal. The problems we inherit are also problems of our larger society and there are no shortcuts to building trust among communities with diverse perspectives. However, being a special place requires special attention to institutional culture that advances wellbeing and belonging for all members of our university. 

The work that Dr. Jacqueline Hughes, our Chief Diversity Officer, has initiated on building a community with a greater sense of belonging is even more important and urgent. At the same time, we will review and address several processes and policies that were identified in the work with the WWU Divest Apartheid Coalition, as well as in dialogue with other student and faculty groups during the past academic year. 

Along these lines, the Centers for Student Access, Community, and Intercultural Engagement in the Division of Enrollment and Student Services and the Munro Institute for Civic Education will host a series of panel discussions starting October first to critically analyze and consider differing perspectives about key political and societal issues facing our local and global communities. The Centers will also host robust heritage and cultural awareness programs focused on student development that are open to all members of our Western community. 

I don’t want to leave you with the impression that our work is all about resolving issues!

Yes, we have work to do—on disciplined budgeting and nurturing our community.

And—as I said at the start—we have a great institution and so much to be grateful and proud of. 

Despite the many disruptions with the revamped Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, we expect a strong new first-year cohort this fall that follows two record incoming classes, each of about 3,200 students. Given the challenges of universities in the state and across the country on enrollments, our strong first-year enrollments are a tremendous success story.

Last year, we also started a WWU College in the High School program to expand Western’s reach into high schools across the region, as well as targeted outreach programs with local school districts such as Mount Vernon and Ferndale to increase access for student populations historically under-represented in higher education. We anticipate that these efforts and initiatives will help the institution build upon some of our most recent gains in new first-year enrollment.

Another bright spot is our ongoing attention to improving student retention rates. In mid-July 2024, we had 4.6% more continuing students registered for fall 2024 classes than we did at the same time last year, a positive sign for the success of our retention efforts. This follows an increase in first-year retention from about 77 percent to about 80 percent in fall 2023. The final enrollment and retention numbers will be available in the next few weeks, and we will be sure to share the census numbers with you. We also continue to graduate impressively-sized classes, with over 3,300 students graduating from Western during 2023-24.

Our new physical infrastructure projects, the Kaiser Borsari Hall, the House of Healing Longhouse, and the Student Development Center, all remain on schedule.  In fact, this winter we will be celebrating the grand-opening of Kaiser Borsari Hall, our new, net zero-energy facility for Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, and the Institute of Energy Studies. 

In the next legislative session, our state operating budget request will be focused entirely on increasing Western’s base budget. Historically, Western’s state funding per full-time equivalent student has long been the lowest among the public four-year institutions in the state and has not aligned with Western’s consistent enrollment growth and educational quality. In addition to the per student funding request, we will also pursue increasing the 70:30 fund split on employee compensation (i.e., 70% funded by state) with the goal of securing full funding from the state for future employee cost-of-living increases. I am appreciative that all of Western’s governance groups and labor partners are supporting Western’s requests and are united in “growing Western’s share of the pie” when it comes to state funding. I look forward to working with all of you to advance these important priorities in Olympia.

We have a lot of positives working for Western. As I said earlier, our challenge is to sustain our strengths and momentum while ensuring that we bring expenditures in sync with the revenue base. Creating this balance is not straightforward. But, we will keep our academic enterprise at the center in all our work, and we will be transparent about our efforts and outcomes and engage you in the appropriate processes.

Western is a special place, thanks to all of you. Your dedication to the mission of the university and to the success of our students is truly inspiring. I am grateful for all you do for Western. 

Thank you.