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State of the CollegeSpring 2014 President Tom Foley Mount Aloysius College

Welcome to the spring 2014 State of the College address. Let’s begin by asking ourselves why are we here, why do we do this work, who it is we work with and for at this institution right

now?

By the numbers the answer might look like this: 59% percent of Mount Aloysius students are the first generation in their family to go to college. There’s no institu-tion in our region that is higher than 35% now, except for the community college, but all the other four-year institutions are at 35% and below. 94% percent of our students qualify for need-based financial aid and they get it. 82% of our students work at least a part-time job. 41% of our students come from families with income at or below 150% of the federal poverty level. And 100% of our students perform community service. That’s Mount Aloysius by the numbers.

Let’s answer the ongoing question another way—by the stories. I tell people there is a story for every day that Michele and I have been here. Let me tell you two very recent ones that help answer my opening questions.

We have a nursing student by the name of Stacy. Many of you know that Stacy was in a terrible automobile accident. The person who ran into her, who veered into the wrong lane, was killed. Stacy had her two children in the car, young children, they were okay, minor injuries, but Stacy had major injuries: broken bones, shattered limbs, head injuries, etc. When she came out of surgery, the first thing she asked

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her husband Bill was, of course, “how are the kids?” The second question she asked was, “can you get my nursing books? I need to keep up with my studies.”

That’s part of the story. The other part of the story is that she did keep up. She kept up because of the Nursing Student Organization (NSO) and because of our faculty. I overheard a discussion of some of the student members of the NSO as they were decorating the Christmas tree outside of Old Main, not far from my office. They talked about how they had gone out and purchased gifts for the two children and how hard it was to figure out the right size shoes to fit the tiny, little feet, etc. They did all those things to support that family. They dedicated the decorating of the tree and sent all the pictures of the event to the family. And this Monday, a week before classes begin, Bill brought Stacy here, still in a wheelchair, so she could meet with Associate Dean Dr. Zukowski (Becky!) and the faculty to make sure that she continues on course. She’s not going to be able to be back full-time right away, but she will stay on course. That’s why we’re here.

Here’s another quick story that I heard just last week. We hold our Mount Aloysius golf outing in the summer, an event that raises money to pay for scholar-ships. We have four guys on our Buildings and Grounds team who pay their own way to play in that tournament. One of them learned to play golf just so he could play and support the college. Of course, they all bought

raffle tickets on the day. And some of you may know, we always have a Pittsburgh Steeler there at the event and the Steelers give us four tickets to a game and a whole bunch of other stuff. And one of these guys won the raffle for the Steelers tickets and gear. This is an hourly employee, someone whose daughter went to this institution with her tuition paid because he is on staff here. He’s somebody that we can count on. I know him well. He’s one of those people that if we have a building issue, whether it’s ten o’clock in the morning or ten o’clock at night, we know he’ll be there.

A couple of weeks ago, this same guy was at an event in Portage to raise money to build a hockey rink. He started talking with a family there. They have a young son, eight years old, dressed head-to-toe in Steelers’ gear, doesn’t look well. He finds out the little guy needs a heart transplant. And what does our guy do? You know, his own win of a lifetime—four Steelers’ tickets: of course, he gives the tickets to the family. That’s a Mount Aloysius story. Whether it’s a faculty member or a staff person, it’s about going that extra mile for the people that we serve at this institution.

I want to do a three part update for you. Foundational elements, so to speak, these are the very foundations for what we do as staff, what we do as adminis-trators here at the college. Let me give you an update on the Strategic Plan, on the Technology

Plan and lastly on the Campus Master Plan.

I heard some comments yesterday about education as truly a “sub-junctive experience,” not the “subjunctive of regret”: that I could have, should have, or would have, but a “subjunctive of pos-sibility”—where the should, would, and could are applied rather to what is possible. And all of this came from a TED Talk by a Vietnamese-born undergrad whose native language simply does not have this “subjunctive of possibility,” does not have the subjunctive “mood.” And though I don’t think that the fact that our language possesses the subjunc-tive indicates that this hope, this sense of possibility, this sense of the future is culturally unique; I do think that it is fairly unique to Mount Aloysius College. It’s very much a part of what we do.

I go back to that very first number, 59% of our students, just like me, just like many of you, who are the first generation in their family to go to college. How do we make sure that we’re providing you with all the tools you need to guarantee that future “of possibilities” for our students?

»Strategic PlanFirst, from the Strategic Plan. What I want to do in the next three minutes is show you how you, yourselves, can monitor the implementation of the plan that we now have. If you go to our website, you will find the actual Strategic Plan for the college, and you’ll see a page that lists its five

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themes: Academic Futures, The Complete Student Experience, Community Engagement, New Horizons, and Building Our Capacity to Thrive.

Now, those are the big themes. We’ve further broken those down into objectives, into goals, into timelines, into action steps and into owners. Here’s the chart that has all of those categories (top). The next to last category is metrics; how will we measure and prove that we are accom-plishing each particular action step? And this chart is what the President’s Executive Council has been working on over the past six months.

Now, this second chart (left) is an implementation data sheet that you’ll be able to pull up on the website as well. This chart takes every theme, every goal, every tactic and shows us how we’re doing, whether we’ve completed the item, whether it is still in progress, if it hasn’t yet started, or if there’s information missing. And so we have a pretty good

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sense at the President’s Executive Council as to how we are pro-gressing on the Strategic Plan at any time. So I wanted to let you know how you can monitor and engage the process as we go forward with the Strategic Plan over the next two years.

»Technology PlanThe second item I want to update you on is the Technology Plan at the college. This cartoon caption (top-left), “The computer says I need to upgrade my brain to be compatible with the new software.” is almost literally true. I spent an hour yesterday, just one hour, looking at the EDUCAUSE web site and all the different kinds of technology available, and you almost have to catch your breath.

Here’s what I found in one hour of research on technology: four exabytes—an exabyte is four times ten to the 19th power—of unique, new information will be generated in the world this year. That’s more information than was

generated in the past 50 centuries put together.

Here’s something else I found: one week of news stories in The New York Times is more in-formation than a person in the 18th century was likely to come across in an entire lifetime. Here’s another factoid: We’re up to 940,000 words now in the English language. In Shakespeare’s time we had a fifth of that. And some of that language has developed just to keep up with these techno-logical advances.

Another thing I found is that this is all happening at warp speed. I use a chart (top-right) when I talk to the Mercy Scholars about how quickly different communication devices have reached a certain population. It took the radio 38 years to reach a market audience of 50,000,000 people. It took Facebook two years to do that. Here’s a stunner: the number of text messages sent and received each day exceeds the population of the planet. And this is the one that really kills me: The average

21-year-old will have already sent and received 250,000 electronic messages…the average 21-year-old, the age of a traditional Mount Aloysius graduate. Those are e-mails, texts, Instagrams, selfies, whatever—250,000.

It’s all really stunning, which is why this cartoon isn’t too far off. I’m reading a book called; What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains: The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr. Last year, when Michele and I visited the Librarian of Congress, who will be our guest this semester, Michele asked him the best question. She asked, “What’s on your night table? You’re the Librarian of Congress what are you reading right now?” And he named three or four texts and this was one of them. “This book,” he said, “is going to scare you.” And it does a little bit—the idea that all this technology is actually having an effect on our brains. And whether we like it or not, technology is not just part of our lives, it’s part of our “higher” education.

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In the critical thinking conver-sation yesterday, one faculty member opined that “no one thinks it’s important to know things anymore,” if I’m quoting correctly; instead, they “just want to know where to find them.” I think that’s an important part of the discussion, but I think it’s even more complicated than

that. And I want to share with you a paragraph from Thomas Friedman.

Today, because knowledge is available on every Internet-connected device, what you know matters far less than what you can do with what you know. The capacity to innovate—the ability to solve problems creatively or bring new possibilities to life—and skills like critical thinking, communica-tion, and collaboration are far more important than academic knowledge. As one executive told me, we can teach new hires the content, and we will have to because it continues to change, but we can’t teach them how to think — to ask the right questions — and to take initiative.

So there’s critical thinking involved in attaining knowledge; and I think there’s some critical thinking in knowing where to look for it. But I also think there’s a ton of critical thinking involved in being able to evaluate those sources of information once you find them.

I’m dating myself when I tell you the first book I ever read on this topic was Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, back in 1975. One of Toffler’s points was that for the average person born then, 97% of all the information that would be available when they died would have accumulated in the course of their lifetime. Today, that percentage would be 99.999%. The new skill, the new kind of critical thinking, will involve how you evaluate all those sources of information. This is one reason

that the reference assignment in the Connections Seminar class is valid, because you start students down that road. Anyway, whether we like it or not, it’s part of what we do every day.

I wanted to tell you about five things that we’ve been trying to do with our technology infra-structure. The technology infra-structure of the College is now up to the challenges that you face. And this work has been led by Suzanne Campbell, Rich Shea, and our technology team.

First, we have integrated four data-systems at the college so that everything works together. It didn’t work together before, which made for extra work and slowed things down. They’re all integrated now.

Second, we significantly expanded our bandwidth, and we did it at no extra cost. That was a really smart idea that Suzanne and Rich came up with, which has resulted in a fourfold increase in our bandwidth.

Third, we completed the network infrastructure replacement, so all the buildings on campus now have those 10Gig connections and I hope you’ve noticed the impact of that.

Fourth, we’re up to 80% on smart classrooms—we were at 60% three years ago—and 80% is where we need to be. We don’t need to have a hundred percent smart classrooms. We don’t need to use the technology in every single class. And we’re at Cycle II now on the laptop replacement.

Tech-Ready: 5 Steps Completed » Completed integration

of four data systems (improving overall system speed and com-patibility of applications across the board)

» Activated Internet 100meg connection (four-fold increase in bandwidth at no extra cost)

» Completed network in-frastructure replacement (10 Gig connections to all buildings)

» Achieved 80% goal on “smart” classrooms; and Cycle 2 of faculty/staff laptop replacement

» Created Digital Grotto (five total work stations, in-house studio and annual equipment upgrades)

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Fifth, and just as important as the other things, we’ve created the Digital Grotto: with five workstations, an in-house studio, equipment upgrades and everything else. Those are some of the technology improvements recently achieved here at the College.

Just how important these changes are was brought home to me by our newest Board member, Anne Wilms. Anne retired as the highest-ranking woman in IT in the tri-state area of Southeastern Pennsylvania, Delaware and New Jersey. Irish-born and educated, she rose to the top. She finished as the COO of one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world.

Upon joining our Board, Anne spent her first day here just looking at all the technology. She did this kind of review for me once before (in a previous life) and Anne’s response that time was, “Wow, we’ve got a lot of work to do.” This time, Anne said, “I’m amazed at all the work you guys have done at this college to make sure that you are staying relevant in terms of technology.” Not that we don’t have more to do, but it was good to hear that message from somebody who is an expert. So those are the five steps completed in terms of technology upgrades.

I also wanted to give you some examples of how we’re trying to use this technology in Admissions, in Academics, and Communications. Those of you who were here for the inauguration heard me say that Mount Aloysius College strives to produce graduates who are “job-ready, community-ready and technology-ready.” It’s not just a slogan. The opening video that you saw today was all done right here. It is the kind of thing Admissions uses all the time. We do seasonal recruiting e-blasts. Let me show the recent one from Christmas in case not all of you saw that? We sent this video to every prospective student, to all of our community partners, all kinds of people. It features Bruce Schettig, a talented musician and alum, who many of you know. (http://youtu.be/nriz6c4HS_4)

Isn’t that beautiful? And that was all done here, in-house. Sam Wagner our Associate Director of Communications really created this video. Every one of those pictures that you saw was taken by a student or graduate assistant at this school. We could enter that video in a contest and win first prize. I mean that, it’s beautiful. That video went out to thousands of people who know Mount Aloysius College, who are thinking about Mount Aloysius College. And I think I sent it to all of you, as well; but it is our Admissions Department that really uses these products all the time.

Now, let me show a bit of the Profiles video that you saw a couple years ago when the

college was featured in a national television program hosted by the actor Lou Gossett Jr. Trust me, we use this at every admissions presentation too. (http://youtu.be/X2g6Ml6SMhk)

We use this video because it’s a completely outside source—a national entity—holding Mount Aloysius up as a model.

“Tech-ready” applies, not just to Admissions, but to Academic departments, too.

We just redid our web site and Sam Wagner will be showing you the capacity that now exists for all the web pages of every department at this institution.

We talked to a lot of you about the job description for the Learning Technology Coordina-tor position, in order to make sure we are actually putting the right skills into that position, and to help you to optimize the use of technology in your classes. You’ll also have a session this afternoon with someone from the Library who will underline all of the tools that are coming out of our Library that have to do with training for technology. The bottom line on all this, as regards the academic side, is that technology is not intended to replace the pedagogy but rather to support it. It’s up to all of us to figure out how to do that most effectively.

I came across an article that just came out this week (“What 5 Tech Experts Expect in 2014” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Jan. 6, 2014). I recommend it to anybody who wants to keep up

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to speed on all of this. It presents the ideas of five big thinkers on technology in higher education. And what’s interesting is that they all make comments that are consistent with this notion that technology is designed to support the pedagogy, not to compete with it. And these are people selling the technologies. So, we want to be sure that it is available to you to help facilitate what you do in the classroom.

Technology and communica-tion in the community. We have mega-lists of people that we like to keep informed about the College. It helps us to recruit more students. It helps us to raise money for things that we want to support here at the College and for other purposes. And because of the digital capacity that we’ve generated, we’re sending out tons of digital communications all the time: seasonally-topical videos, links, digital broadcasts of tradi-tional media, etc.

Let’s give one example here. I did a couple of Op-Ed pieces this year. One on the Boston Marathon bombing incident and the other on Constitution Day and the role of higher education in citizenship. We sent those out after they were published locally. We ended up in 10 or so statewide newspapers, including four of the six largest, and also in The Chicago Times, The Times of India, Sky News in the UK. Dozens of topical websites also picked them up and they were further linked on websites run by those entities. One of my sons went through and started looking at all this and counting and stopped at 500,000. That’s how many people we’ve reached because we digitally com-municated those Op-Ed pieces about topics of interest.

And we try to do that. We don’t reach 500,000 all the time, but we try to do that with anything that is happening here that we think has a broader appeal, as a way to get our message out there. And

we’re ready and able to do the same for you.

If we take a look at the Presi-dent’s webpage, you’ll see that we also post all kinds of things that people might be interested in, some of which we communi-cate, some of which we just put there in case you want to look it up. Every report I do to the Board of Trustees can be found on the website, if you want to read it, under the title, President’s Reports to the Community. And those are term papers. They’re 35-page documents with lots of pictures, lots of links for deeper dives. They report on what all of us are doing to fulfill the mission of Mount Aloysius College.

But we also have a News & Events section that shares what is happening at the College and in the community. I recently spoke at the Cresson American Legion’s Veterans’ Day Dinner, so we posted those remarks along with a nice article from the

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local paper. Those are the kind of things we try to share when we think something might be of interest to a wider audience. We put out there as much as we can. We’re trying to connect, to reconnect, and to maintain connections in our own college community, in the larger higher education community, and in our geographic community.

Then the last piece on this is the notion of being tech-ready for purposes of our communications efforts. If you scroll down on the home page of the website, you’ll see at the bottom right corner the icons for Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, among others. We have a very strong social media presence. We’re on all kinds of social media sites. I have a Twitter account, believe it or not, and I use it. Whenever there’s an article about Mount Aloysius, I post the link to the article and a 140-character statement to my Twitter account. Maybe it’s an article about a mission trip, or an article like one last week about two of our female student athletes who play two sports, it’s a great story. I post about them, link to them, and make comments about them. And so we try to use every resource we can.

Here are some numbers on coverage in traditional media. Since August, the last time that we met in this room, there have been

515 stories in traditional media, newspaper stories that mention Mount Aloysius. Of those, 144 were generated by Jack and his team, who came up with ideas and created the press releases that led to those stories being published. 36 of those stories were on academics. A lot of those were about kids on the honor roll, kids winning prizes at graduation, our nurses excelling at state and national testing and things like that. 36 of them were about sports. They’re the easiest thing for us to get stories on. There’s more sports news in our local papers than almost anything else. 20 of them were about mission trips, others on service projects. And when we have a student in, say, Waynesburg who has done something of note, we make sure we send that story to the local newspaper. All of it is designed to broadcast the message of Mount Aloysius.

The Altoona Mirror has one page every week devoted to college athletics. And if you read that page consistently, you’ll see that most of the other schools are writing about wins and losses, not that we don’t write about that on occasion, but that’s not really our focus. Instead, we try to tell stories there. So instead of doing a soccer preseason story on the women’s soccer team, we did a story on the three captains of the team and the summer jobs they had, because they all had really interesting summer jobs. One worked in a hospital; one, a biology student, had a terrific internship at a shellfish research facility on Long Island; and the

last one worked here in Campus Security. It was a nice story.

I’ve tried to show how we apply technology in ways that facilitate the work of the college, in academics, in admissions, and in communications. But in the end, it’s all about the students, which is why we are working on certain technology initiatives relating to how our students learn.

First, we are working to ensure that every student has an online learning experience during their time at Mount Aloysius so that we can teach them how to properly take an online course because they’re going to be learning that way for the rest of their lives.

Secondly, we are working to ensure that every student has a certain percentage of technology-intensive courses. My guess is that’s already happening, but we’re in the process of identifying which classes are technology-intensive. I was in a biology class earlier this year where the students each had to choose a disease and present for their classmates. They’re required to do a PowerPoint presentation. The stuff they’re doing, I can’t do, the way they can transfer very complicated scientific renderings onto a screen. That’s a technolo-gy-intensive course, developing that facility.

Our third commitment is to continue to produce a technolo-gy-rich environment. We have specific objectives, like 80% smart

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ACWC

10.1

10.2 10.3 10.4

classrooms, like completing Cycle II of the replacement of equipment.

And then fourth and lastly, offering three one-credit tech classes, at the beginning, the middle and the end of their experience, in order to ensure that students are acquainted with the technologies that they are going to need after graduation.

When I spoke at the inaugu-ration, I asked people in the audience how many had had a recent hospital experience. And I warned people that if they had not had a recent one, they were in for a surprise—a completely different experience. They’re not going to see somebody at their bedside writing on a chart. Instead, they’re going to see somebody using an iTablet or some other device mounted to the

wall into which they’ll be pro-gramming all the patient infor-mation, so that all of the people involved in their care can access it. There isn’t going to be a chart at the bottom of the bed. That’s news for some people, but that’s how quickly things have changed. And we want to be sure that our students really are “technology-ready.”

»Campus Master PlanThe last update today concerns the Campus Master Plan—past, present and future. Those of you who were here at the beginning of Sister Mary Ann’s tenure, know that she devised a Campus Master Plan that began to be imple-mented in the early part of this century. It really took 15 years to fulfill its 10 major objectives. This

room (Alumni Hall) was number nine; the Athletic Convocation and Wellness Center was number 10. Those were all in that Campus Master Plan which many of you helped to put together. Those additions served to increase the floor space of the college by over 60%.

The plan also transformed the entrance to the college. It grew Cosgrave by 40%, it added Misciagna and McAuley, it created the long walkway from the Library to Main which really unifies the campus, and it restored Alumni Hall. In addition, the Mountie Stables, which were not part of the original plan, were funded by a generous donor so that we now have restrooms and other facilities out by all the athletic fields.

Now, I wanted to show you a couple things so people have

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a real sense of what is in that new Athletic Convocation and Wellness Center. That room (10.3) is as wired as any building we have on this campus. We can do anything we want in there. We had one of the early meetings for the new Campus Master Plan in that room and we brought in people from three different locations in two different states (by video) and everybody was able to simultaneously view the same slides. There is a conference room (10.4) that will be used for classes this semester. There’s also an auxiliary gym, in which you can do just about anything.

And there is the Wellness Center itself (10.2), which wasn’t in the original plans. There are 80-plus pieces of equipment in there, 39 cardio machines, a 14-station circuit training installation, and lots of free weights. This facility is as nice as anything around here and I hope people will be able to take advantage of it.

The ACWC will also host 27 classes in 15 different subjects—Science, Math, Economics, English and Business—this semester. We’ll have offices for the Business Department, Student Affairs, Athletics, and Institutional Advancement. And the new building will be available for intramural, inter-collegiate and PIAA competi-tion.

We’ll have our first high-school game there January 22 when Penn Cambria plays Somerset. We want to make this a facility for the community and so we’ve

PAST PRESENT

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been in touch with PIAA and offered to host some competi-tions here, which is good for us in terms of admissions. We already host the Mirror Classic, a big all-star game (both girls and boys) between the two major counties. That brings 2,000 people onto our campus who will now be able to enjoy the event in our new facility.

The only item not yet completed is the artwork. And we hope to have that done by the time we do a real grand opening. We’ll have a mural-type design that tells the story of Mount Aloysius and the Sisters of Mercy. We want to use the area that looks out on the Library for art exhibits by our students and by local

high school students. There are plenty of juried competitions in Blair, Cambria, Somerset and other places for which we could provide a venue

Each of the stairwells will have long murals and each of the murals will have a Mount Aloysius picture, an action shot of the college; and a community picture, something that represents our region and our connection to the community. So people will be getting that messaging as soon as they come into the building.

»Campus Master Plan: Next Steps

We’re now at the beginning of the next stage of our Campus Master Planning. There are some things that we’ll be thinking about. We need to figure out what to do with the current gym. One possibility (12.6) is that it becomes a mul-tipurpose student center. Most other institutions that we have visited have found good uses for their old gyms, so that’s probably the direction that we will take.

We are also thinking through a reconfiguration of the Dining Hall (12.3), so it looks less like a high school cafeteria and more like a higher-education setting—a place that invites people to engage in real conversation. So we’re working on that. This is a design

Strategic Planning

12.2

12.1

12.3

12.4

12.5 12.6

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mockup that, if not exact, will resemble the final plan.

Ihmsen is now about 50-years old but it is really well-built. Our Maintenance team has really helped us figure out how to protect this building, and what we might do in order to get another decade out of it. We’d rather spend the money on a new classroom building than on a new dormitory. So if we can save this one, let’s put the money into a new classroom building.

Next is the idea of creating a quad here on the campus (12.4). One idea would be to place it in an area that already forms a kind of natural quad enclosed by Pierce, Academic Hall and McAuley. There are several alternative approaches, some of which would integrate possible new construction. So, our plans will evolve in accordance with those decisions.

Those are the bigger-ticket items that we’re looking at now for the Campus Master Plan. Some of you are already involved in this work and others may be asked to get involved. Thanks to all of you who have helped or will help move these projects forward.

»Speaker SeriesAnd now, let me present three underviews. First, a word on the College Speaker Series. We had some terrific speakers in the fall on our yearlong College theme of The Common Good—21st Century Citizenship.

And we have an even more exciting spring. Our MLK Day speaker is Tony Ross. He was the President of the United Way of Pennsylvania and is now the National President of the Opportunities Industrializa-tion Centers of America which was founded by the Reverend Leon Sullivan, the author of the Sullivan Principles, which proved so important to human rights in places like South Africa and Northern Ireland. Tony has a moving personal story and he’ll be terrific on our theme.

Dr. James Billington is, of course, the Librarian of Congress, but much more im-portantly he’s a Pennsylvanian! He is the first in his family to go to college, and he has an unbe-lievable résumé, and has had an unbelievable life—he’s 84-years young. Well, Michele and I had a wonderful visit with him last year and as we were leaving, Michele asked, “Will you come to Mount Aloysius?” I hadn’t even thought to ask. He told us, “I have one rule…I don’t go to places I’ve already been.” So, we asked if that meant he might come; and, as it turns out, he’s coming in April.

This 84-year-old man is the nation’s first “digital librarian.” One of his projects right now is having middle-school students interview every single living veteran in America and he’s digitally preserving those interviews. He has a ton of projects like that. He’s a really in-teresting and inspiring man who

will be terrific for us. He’ll be giving the Spring Honors Lecture.

Sister Mary Ann Dillon—everybody knows my predeces-sor Sister Mary Ann—is going to deliver our Moral Choices Lecture. Sister Mary Ann’s academic specialty, is theology—specifically ethics. She’s done major writing on our topic and so will be perfect in that role.

Ambassador Jim Sharkey brings an international perspective to the exploration of our theme The Common Good—21st Century Citizenship. Jim was a four-time ambassador for Ireland in places like Japan and Russia, and was very involved in the resolution of the Troubles in Northern Ireland where the very idea of citizenship and the role of the citizen were at issue.

And lastly, our Commencement speaker is going to be a team, as they were when they spoke here last year. David Shribman is the editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Ga-zette and a Pulitzer Prize winner, and his wife, Cindy is a regulatory correspondent for Bloomberg News, who spent 18 years in the same role for The Washington Post. She is also now an award-winning teacher of writing. And together they are going to deliver the commencement address on The Common Good—21st Century Citizenship. So it should be an exciting semester in terms of those outside speakers.

We always told our sons when they went off to school that you learn three ways in college. You learn from your faculty members

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both inside and outside the classroom. Secondly, you learn from your fellow students and their life experiences. That’s very present on this campus; I’ve experienced it myself in a class that I took where I watched mature students interacting with more traditionally-aged recent high school graduates. There was a lot of knowledge being shared there and a lot of life-experience. And the third way that we encouraged our sons to learn was by taking advantage of whatever comes to your campus, whoever is visiting there to speak. And hopefully we’re providing this opportunity for our students here at Mount Aloysius.

»AdmissionsThe second underview...Admissions and our outstand-ing team. Go right to the chart (next page) of admissions concerns. You won’t believe the data. This chart looks at Admissions over the last 10 years at Mount Aloysius College. In 10 years, we’ve seen a 44% increase in the number of tradi-tional-aged students coming to this campus. That’s why there are two new dorms out there. That’s why 40% of our students are now residential, because we had such a dramatic increase in traditional-aged students.

We’ve had, in the same 10 years, a 22% increase in our “full-time

equivalent” (FTE) number. That means, we take every kind of student (part-time, on-line, etc) and translate them into a “full-time equivalent” number. So it might take three part-time students to make one full-time equivalent, but you count your full-time, your part-time, your online, your graduates, and your off-sites. And that’s a 22% increase. Our day students—the kids that we see every day as full-time students, not part-time, increased 13% in 10 years. That’s 1.3% a year. That’s in a time-frame where in the last six years the pool of available students has declined dramati-cally, anywhere from 15% to 18%. And we’ve continued to have a nice upward slope there.

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We had a 4% increase this year in our FTE, our full-time equivalent students, and another 4% increase in the percentage of students who are traditional, recent high school graduates.

Let me say thank you to all of you. The reason that we are successful in Admissions is because we understand that it takes a village. It takes the entire campus to make that work. So when our Building and Grounds team makes sure that everything looks good when we have those big open houses, when so many of our faculty members turn up on Saturday or Sunday afternoons to meet with these prospective students, trust me, that makes a huge difference.

I often ask students, what brought you here? I can’t tell you how many times kids say, “Well, I realized when I came for my visit that I wasn’t going to be a number here,” or, “I felt like people saw me as a person.” And the atmosphere we are in now, with increasing competition for a declining pool of students, that personal attention which you have always given is critical for the health and the success of this college.

Now, let me share a final underview with you, which is a personnel item. I know almost everyone here knows by now that Paul Farcus is going to retire. Paul has been here for more than four decades. And in that time— I’ll read from this sheet, which is a partial résumé of Paul’s activity— Paul has done, I’m not kidding, 20 different jobs here. He’s done everything from starting off as an instructor, all the way up to a full

professor and he did that in two different fields! Paul also chaired six different departments at this institution. He was the Acting Academic Dean of the College on one occasion. He was the Acting Associate Dean for online education on another. He was the Coordinator of Program Develop-ment. He was the Professional Studies Chair. There are literally 20 different roles that Paul has fulfilled on this campus.

Paul, when we come to our end-of-year luncheon, before we send everybody off for the summer, and we bring up the folks who are going to leave, we’ll ask you to reprise what I think is just an extraordinarily diverse career here at Mount Aloysius. Some suggested topics for you, Paul, might be the Mark Twain line that “few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a

good example.” You may prefer another thesis statement, Paul, a line that I especially like, which is that “time has a wonderful way of weeding out the trivial.” At the end of the day, Paul, we hope that you’ll take the time to tell us what happened over those 40 years, what you understood to be so important about your work, and what kept you here in service to the College all those many years.

I wanted to end this session by thanking Paul for all those years and all those different assign-ments handled so well. Paul, we thank you for your service. And thanks to all of you, in service for another semester at Mount Aloysius College. §

As delivered, January 10, 2014, Alumni Hall.