Speeches and statements
TranscriptPresident B. Joseph White MR. DELLIMORE: This month a man with no apparent ties to the state takes the helm at the University of Illinois, what next? We’ll talk about it with the new university president, B. Joseph White. Hello, I'm political editor Craig DELLIMORE and this is “At Issue.” Six months ago, if you would have asked Joseph White what he’d be doing today, he probably would have told you he'd be continuing along a distinguished career at the University of Michigan. But he was hired last November to succeed James Stukel, as U of I president and as of the first of this month, the job is now his, and so are the challenges. He's leading a 70,000 student, three campus-system, with a budget of $3 billion. People who know him say he's the man for the job. B. Joseph White is 57, he was born in Detroit, and raised in Kalamazoo, and we’ll answer the first questions on our listeners’ minds, right off the top. The B. stands for Bernard. He got his bachelor’s degree in international affairs from Georgetown, his MBA from Harvard, and a doctorate in business administration from the University of Michigan. With one notable exception, he has had some position at the University of Michigan, since 1975, and that includes a stint as interim president. He took some time off in 2002 to help a New York investment firm recover after the devastating September 11 attacks. Well, Joe White, welcome. MR. WHITE: Thank you, Craig, its great to be here. MR. DELLIMORE: You have assumed the U of I presidency at a time when the state and education funding are all under pressure. Your predecessor said that higher education was not a high priority, or not as high a priority as it should be, in the Blagojevich administration. And the governor himself has said early education has to be the one of paramount importance. How do you make the case for more state support in this kind of atmosphere? MR. WHITE: Well, I don't think it’s difficult I think that the future of the State of Illinois and the University of Illinois are completely intertwined, as they have been for 138 years. You know for most of the early life of the university, maybe the first 100 years of the university, the funding was a very simple proposition. The people of Illinois created and paid the bills for a great university. They did it because they understood that to build a great state, we needed two things, we needed educated people and we needed the knowledge that would be created in a great university. And it worked like a charm. I think the University of Illinois has made tremendous contributions to the development of the state, in education, in health care, in economic development. We're in a different era now. We expect today that those who most benefit from services will pay an increasing share for those services, thus tuition has been rising quite rapidly, as state support has flattened, and in the last couple of crisis years, even declined. But going forward, what we need, simply stated, is a new compact in which five parties all do their part in order to insure proper funding for this treasure, this dynamic treasure that is the University of Illinois. The state needs to do its part. Tuition payers and their families with proper financial aide need to do their part. Our own faculty, particularly through their great success at funded research, need to do their part. Private donors will do their part. And the leadership of the university is committed to making tough-minded reallocation and reduction decisions, in an ongoing way through good times and bad. When those five parties all do their part, it won't be that difficult to maintain and develop this great state treasure. MR. DELLIMORE: But in some ways, the education system is become kind of balkanized, where you have higher education on the one hand and then elementary and secondary education also vying for what seems to be a single pot of money that is the education budget. Doesn't that leave higher ed., in some ways, fighting against early education and elementary and secondary education for its share or the resources? MR. WHITE: We need to redefine how we think about education in two ways, Craig. One is we need to think about education in the state systemically, from preschool to graduate school and we need to avoid that balkanization because it is a system. There's no point in having much better preschool and elementary and high school if we can't send our students to great universities. At the same time, there's no point in having great universities if our students aren’t well prepared. So first we need to think systemically about it and not in the balkanized way you described. The second thing is that when we think about a great research university, like the University of Illinois, the proper categories to think about, in terms of what's important to the state, are not just higher education. They're also our contributions to education at every level. We graduate teachers and prepare teachers so that they can teach kids. Similarly, we need to think about our contributions in health care. We have a medical science powerhouse at UIC and in Urbana, and we need to think about the contributions they make to insuring that the residents of Illinois have the physicians that they need, the nurses that they need, the advanced medical technologies that they need. Finally, what we see across the country and around the world is that great research universities are engines of economic development for the new economy. Knowledge is the raw material of the new economy. When it’s put to work by educated people, what happens is economic growth and job creation. The whole upper Midwest, including Illinois, is going through a tremendous economic transformation, from what we were to what we're becoming. Much more service-oriented, much more knowledge-based economies and the University of Illinois is an indispensable tool, as a great research university, to enable the people of Illinois to make that transformation successfully. MR. DELLIMORE: But now, and this is from a purely political perspective, a lot of what's going to have to happen is a matter of selling that message to members of the legislature. But at budget time, what tends to happen in Springfield, and for that matter, what tends to happen across the country, is that every constituency, and I'm using that in quotes, makes pretty much the same case. If you don't give X, this amount of funding, eventually you will pay more. Whether its drug treatment programs or early childhood education, or mass transportation, we will pay in the end, we have to have this. It creates kind of a fund raising din, and how do you rise above that? Let me piggy back on that, because also, as a new president of the university, coming in without the perhaps political baggage of having been from Illinois. But do you also come in without the kind of contacts and clout that you would necessarily need to make sure that U of I’s voice is heard above that din? MR. WHITE: Well, let me answer the second question first. I introduced myself to the governor last Friday evening. On Tuesday, I had a very good meeting with Speaker Madigan in Springfield; I had a very good meeting with Senator Jones; and I met the Republican leadership. And I understand the importance of personal relationships. I was thrilled a month ago to meet Mayor Daley in his office here. I found his support and enthusiasm for UIC is tremendous. So I'm building those personal relationships from the very beginning, because they are so important. With regard to the first question, and it actually flows from the relationship matter. I found that making the case for the University of Illinois and our vital role in the state’s future is not a matter of pushing a rock uphill. People are smart, they can look at the evidence of 138 years and see what having a great research university that provides educated people and vital knowledge has done for the State of Illinois. What we need to do, I think, at the University of Illinois is of course, make our case. I'm a realist about the political process you described, and we’ll be in there pitching and pitching effectively. But the point I really want to make is not that the University of Illinois is a supplicant in Springfield, seeking the most money possible. The point I want to make is that the state has a vital role, but not an exclusive role, in insuring that we maintain and develop this great treasure, which is the University of Illinois. That’s why I began by saying I like to think in terms of five parties all doing their part. Now I can tell you what I know from that sort of collaborative funding. If everybody does their part, its not really that difficult. But if any party is perceived not to be stepping up to the bar, it gets much harder to get everybody else to do their part, and each remaining party’s part becomes much harder. A perfect example is the state’s budget cutting of the last couple of years, which I understand, I've been through financial crises. If that were to continue to be imposed on the University of Illinois, then the burden on students in the form of tuition becomes egregious and onerous and unacceptable. On the other hand, if the state will do its part, then I think we can keep tuition increases moderate, we can make education affordable. And the same is true for all of the other parties in what I'm calling the new compact, to insure the support for the University of Illinois. So this is not a matter of being supplicants, demanding and making threats about getting the most money possible or terrible things are going to happen. This is asking the state to do its part in collaborative funding for the future of the University of Illinois. MR. DELLIMORE: Because the university is in a position to raise money from private donations as well, do some law makers and political leaders make the assumption that well, you guys are just going to have to work harder at getting the private donations, because we haven't got it here? MR. WHITE: I'm really glad you raised that question, Craig. You know private giving is the fourth element of that compact of five parties I was talking about, and I want to give you a very direct answer. I'm an accomplished fund raiser. When I began as the dean of the University of Michigan Business School, we had a $30 million endowment. When I was done in a decade, we had a $270 million endowment. I know donors. No donor is interested in a compensatory model of funding the University of Illinois. What donors want to know, first and foremost, is are you committed at the university to what you're doing and are you making the hard decisions that reflect that and putting your own money into initiatives and efforts. Then they want to know is the state committed to maintaining and developing the University of Illinois? And are you going to be a winning organization in the years ahead. You know, I'm very happy about the Illini basketball team this year, because you know it says to the world, athletically, we're winners and by the way, so are we academically. We cannot be successful fundraisers if others shirk their duties to fund our university properly, because donors want to bet on winners, donors want to see that others are doing their part. And I can guarantee you this, if all of the other parties will do their part, we can have tremendous success at private fund raising, from individuals, from corporations and from foundations. Private fund raising will play a tremendously important role in the future funding of the University of Illinois, but if and only if all of the other parties, including the state, do their part. MR. DELLIMORE: You mentioned earlier donors also want to make sure that their money is being spent wisely. Let’s face it, the headlines have been there before, and this is before you got here, and problems that have been addressed, even before you got here. Trustees were going to lavishly fund meetings and the like, and that I suspect hurt some of the efforts to bring in money and you have to keep assuring people that that kind of stuff is not going on anymore. MR. WHITE: You know private giving is all about trust. I'll never forget meeting a major donor at the University of Michigan, who said to me, he was a very successful person financially. He said, you know what I have discovered, I found that it was a lot easier to make money in my career than to give it away wisely. And I said, why? He said, because it’s hard to find people you can really trust to do what they say they’ll do and to use money wisely. So the point you raise is right. We have to be sure that our donors believe in us, they believe in our mission and they have trust and confidence that we're using their money wisely. And running the whole institution well, and that there's not waste. We have 550,000 alumni, and they haven't been hard to find and meet. I've met a lot of them. I think there's a great deal of trust in the University of Illinois. I don't think there is any significant erosion in trust. Our alums understand that they got a great education, it was a great value, it accounts for some amount of their own success, and most of them feel if they can help our institution because they believe in us, they know that education transforms lives. They know the importance of knowledge in the new economy, they want to help us. So, I think our job is actually more one of maintaining and enhancing trust than rebuilding trust. I don't think we have a trust erosion problem. MR. DELLIMORE: You are listening to “At Issue,” on News Radio 780, WBBM. I'm Craig Dellimore and my guest is B. Joseph White, the new president of the University of Illinois. Let’s move on from money to what's happening in the classrooms a bit. I'm going to ask this question more as a general question, not saying that people are saying this about the University of Illinois. But when we talk to people in the corporate world, they say some of the time when people are graduating college, they're not coming out as good writers, they're not coming out with the kind of skills that perhaps in the old days we took for granted. And not as prepared for the real work a day world as they used to be. Are our colleges and universities, in general, failing to keep up with that, or is some of the basics slipping by as we try to make sure that they're technologically, that they can work the computers, but losing out on the old skills? MR. WHITE: I think we're doing a great job on that front, Craig. That message about the ability to write, the ability to communicate clearly came strongly from the corporations in the 1980’s and the early 1990’s. We got the message and I think today we're doing our very best to insure that at the point of admission, we're insuring that applicants have a developed mastery of writing, that they can communicate clearly. I'm talking about basics. I went to Catholic school, I was taught by nuns. I'm talking about punctuation and capitalization and no run-on sentences. So at the point of admission, I think we're looking very closely to see whether those communications and other skills are satisfactory. Then we enhance them when our students are in our programs. By the way, one important point to make is that communications today, in the business world, or the professional world, is about a lot more that writing. You know writing well is necessary, but not sufficient condition for being a good communicator. So I think you'd see that in our undergraduate programs, students are not only writing papers, students are also making a lot of presentations, they're making a lot of impromptu speeches, they become very proficient at selling and persuading. And it may be ideas, it may be a product, it may be themselves. I think the answer is that was an important message that we got in higher education. We received it, we accepted it, we acted on it, and I think today we're turning out students who really hit the ground running in their first jobs. MR. DELLIMORE: Feel free to answer this next question, a related one, with some of your experiences at the University of Michigan, as well as U of I. Are the high schools and the elementary schools doing enough to prepare kids for schools at the level of U of I? MR. WHITE: Some are doing a tremendous job, others are not doing it nearly well enough. I actually want to comment and say on that point that from my point of view, the greatest unfairness in American society is the uneven playing field in primary and secondary school, in elementary school and high school. You know we've chosen, as a society, to fund schools primarily through property taxes. That means that accidents of birth determine the quality of your local school. Certainly some schools with inadequate funding do a heroic job, and there are rich schools that to some degree waste money. But fundamentally we have great unevenness in elementary and secondary education. The result is that young people come forward for college admission with very uneven preparation. You know there are students in this country on whom we spend $4,000 a year in elementary and high school and there are students on whom we spend $10,000.00 a year. That’s in the public school system, that’s setting aside the students who have the advantage of private schools. I think it’s really important that at a great university, like the University of Illinois, we remember that when it comes to admission, our goal is to forecast future achievement. In doing so, it’s not enough simply to look at test scores and grades to date, because some of those differences are the result of what I call these accidents of birth. You know, where did you happen to go to school? We need to look at the whole person, we need to cast a very wide net. You know from rural kids through suburban kids through inner city kids – all ethnic groups, young men and young women. Identify the people who show evidence of achievement and the ability, in many cases, to over come adversity, and then bring them in and help them get a great education. To me that’s fair admission. But fair admission takes into account the fact that the elementary and high school picture in America is not fair. MR. DELLIMORE: You're speaking from experience here, as far as diversifying the student population, because the University of Michigan was ground zero for the Supreme Court’s most recent decisions on affirmative action. For listeners who don't remember this off the top of their heads, the Supreme Court upheld the University of Michigan’s Law School policies on affirmative action but struck down the undergraduate policies, because the court said that it was unfair, it was too rigid and relied on giving points, assigning points to students because of their race. Given the goal of making sure that you do have a diverse student population, how do you go forward with that, and still stay within the kind of parameters and moving parameters that the court seems to be setting? MR. WHITE: I first want to say, Craig, that I align myself with the views expressed by Supreme Court Judge Sandra Day O’Connor at the time of the decision. She said that we still need affirmative action in America, in admissions, because it’s not a level playing field in elementary and high school, and that’s what I just talked about. She also expressed the view that she hoped within a quarter of a century we wouldn't need affirmative action. I share that hope and I think it’s possible that we won't. I think great progress is being made in that regard in America. With regard to how we manage admissions, to directly answer your question, I think the answer is two-fold. A, we want to reach out to every community: rural, suburban, urban, different ethnic groups, young men and young women. And make sure that they know at the University of Illinois what we're seeing the most talented people, with the greatest prospects for high achievement in their lifetime, whatever their starting point on the track of life. So the first answer is outreach. The second part of the answer is that we're going to use a lot of judgment in looking at all of the factors that can help us forecast future achievement. Part of that is the traditional grade point averages in high school, standardized test scores. But it goes far beyond that. We're very interested in evidence of achievement beyond academic life. You know we aggressively compete to get the best musicians and the best artists and the best athletes to come to the University of Illinois, and we should, because those are scarce talents and people who have them are valuable. We also look for evidence of leadership, early evidence of leadership. You can go to the most disadvantaged place in the country, whether its rural or inner city, and if you spend a few days there, you'll find stand outs. You'll find young people who are admired by their friends, who are influential with others. That’s a sign of probable future high achievement, and so yes, we're interested in those people’s test scores and their grade point averages, but not as a litmus test and not to draw a line and say that’s it; if you have it, you're in. We're going to use our judgment; after we've identified those people through outreach because that’s the sort of class we want. When people talk about diversity, they almost always seem to think it means ethnic diversity, exclusively. That’s not what it means. What it means is recognizing that great talent exists in every corner of every community in the world and that’s what we're seeking to bring to the University of Illinois, and that will benefit everybody. MR. DELLIMORE: Before we run out of time, I want to go back to the issue of the uneven playing field, because it has been addressed more than once here in Illinois. There is a shelf of studies that have talked about what we need to do with school funding that’s gathering dust in Springfield. Governor Edgar tried to create a different funding system. Are you going to be one of the champions, I mean are you going to be out in front in advocating for funding reform in Illinois? Because it’s usually been a couple of lonely voices out there, usually a governor and a couple of lawmakers, and you know silence or opposition from the rest. MR. WHITE: I'm going to be an advocate of Illinois providing a great education for our kids and young people, at every level, from preschool through graduate school. I think there are two things that are required to do that. One is leadership. You know, there is nothing more amazing that an underfunded school that’s doing just a fabulous job educating young people. And when that happens, the reason is always leadership: outstanding teachers, a great principal, or in my world, a great dean and a terrific faculty who in the face of adversity say the heck with it, we're going to do a great job anyway. So I never lead with money, because money, which is the second requirement, is a necessary but not sufficient condition for excellence. So my advocacy is going to be to think systemically about education, from preschool through graduate school, and then for this state to do what's required to insure a wonderful education for all of our kids and young people. MR. DELLIMORE: But would you encourage the legislature to take another stab at changing the funding so that we're going away from the property tax? MR. WHITE: Yes. MR. DELLIMORE: And last thing, and I know it will be a brief answer, so I can leave it until the end. There is no debating that there is a debate about Chief Illiniwek on the campus and among the alumni of the University of Illinois. I know that you have talked about this with the trustees, and I also know you haven't really been wanting to go public with that. Are you trying to stay out of that particular debate, on Chief Illiniwek? MR. WHITE: No, I'm focusing my work on that matter with the board of trustees. The board of trustees owns that issue, it’s a policy issue for the university, and I'll share my views with the board of trustees. They have a good process underway; they're striving to seek a consensus resolution on the matter. But I would also say, Craig, that Chief Illiniwek is by far not the most important challenge facing the University of Illinois. If that matter were not a controversy tomorrow morning, all of the other challenges we're facing to insure both access and excellence at the University of Illinois, would be right in front of us. MR. DELLIMORE: Joe, I thank you very much for joining us this weekend and good luck to you as well. I will be back next week with another edition of At Issue, and I hope you will be listening. Until then, I'm Craig Dellimore, News Radio 780 WBBM. |
