8
Monday, Sept. 14, 1970
University Daily Kansan
Text of Chancellor's Convocation Speech
Thank you for cancelling the 10:30 class this morning and for taking the time to attend this Convocation. Your presence here is ample testimony to your interest and concern for the University—a concern that transcends your individual courses, programs, schools and colleges. It is a concern that all Kansans should note with satisfaction. Not only have the extraordinary events of the Spring tempered an already distinguished university, they have forged a common bond that contains our one best promise for the future.
Several weeks ago the prophets of gloom expressed doubt that there would be an opening of school that could be observed by a convocation. But we are all here: students, faculty, staff—and we are here in greater numbers than ever before. You did not believe the dire predictions of immediate disruption, and because you did not believe them, they have not occurred.
But we must acknowledge that the apprehensions about us remain in the society at large. They hang on our horizon like tornado-bearing clouds. They become more ominous and more imminent every time the 10 o'clock news reports somewhere across the land that a student on or off a campus is injured or killed, every time a campus building is burned or bombed. Even when such events occur on distant campuses, or are the work of one isolated sociopath, they have a marked effect upon the attitudes and beliefs of Kansas citizens. And, try as we might, that effect casts a cloud over the optimism all of us hold for KU.
THIS SUMMER several of us traveled the length and breadth of Kansas to speak with concerned alumni, with concerned parents, and with concerned citizens about the University of Kansas. In all but a few locations students and faculty members had preceded us, speaking with civic groups and church groups, speaking at high schools and junior colleges, speaking wherever and whenever a group of citizens would find the time to listen. You were immensely effective in your new role, not as apologists for your University, but as concerned students and concerned faculty members addressing yourselves to the thousands of people who continue to believe that public higher education and the University of Kansas are vital to all of society.
Many of you must have sensed what we sensed—that most Kansasans, though greatly concerned about past issues and events at KU, have kept an open mind and sincerely seek reassurance that we can avoid loss of life, destruction and disruption, that we can continue our focus upon the development and acquisition of knowledge, that we can cope with the diversion of purely emotional confrontations, that we can sift through the rhetoric of extremists of every persuasion. Much of that reassurance has been given by noting recent accomplishments, accomplishments that even concerned citizens have often overlooked.
The development and adoption
of the Student Code of Rights, Privileges and Responsibilities, is a notable case in point. Dozens of reprints of a speech by a Professor O'Toole from the University of Montana have been sent to me with suggestions that the writer had put forth an idea worth emulating at KU: a carefully drawn code of student conduct. To each person who sent this suggestion, I was able to reply with a simple statement, "We have done it," and enclose a copy of the Code you had prepared and adopted, several months before Professor O'Toole's speech was given national publicity. That same Code has become a model for several other colleges and universities. Work on a parrallel Faculty Code is progressing rapidly. Once adopted by the faculty of the University, this document will add further stability and strength to the University.
ALTHOUGH WE were able to refer to helpful past actions on our trips this summer, we found that the most immediate concerns of alumni, parents and citizens were not with the events of last year or even the tragic deaths of the summer. Their most immediate concerns were for the future of the University, for your safety and for the continuation of an educational program that has been—for more than a hundred years—a source of pride for Kansans everywhere.
They found their best reassurance in places I could readily suggest to them—in the faculty members they recall with great affection—in the confidence they have in their own offspring and those of friends and neighbors—an affection and confidence that I have been privileged to share for more than a year. In short, they recognize that the future of the State's distinguished University resides primarily in the hands of today's faculty members, today's students and today's staff. This is a basic fact that is not changed by modifications of the calendar or regulations, a fact that cannot be affected by replacing one man for another.
THROUGHOUT KANSAS,
there are citizens who understand
and appreciate this basic fact.
That they do should be as
reassuring to each of you as it has
been to me. It provides us with
great opportunity and an equally
great responsibility; the opportunity to get on with the business of improving the University of Kansas; the responsibility to prevent others from destroying or even deferring that opportunity.
The single greatest challenge within our jurisdiction is to insure that the University of the future will be more responsive to the needs of our students and of our society than the University of the past. This undoubtedly means change, thoughtful, humane, encompassing, significant change, and this is the single most difficult task a university faces in the immediate future—difficult because there are so few sign posts to guide us—difficult because the need and the desire to change, to improve is almost entirely within our institution. In a real sense, we must blaze our
own trails. This must be a place where the educational process is developed and refined by the constant interplay and exchange of ideas, by the development of new knowledge, by the discovery of new methods of learning. These ideas may question the status quo; they may break new ground. And certainly there will be those among us who will act as goads to the public conscience, but the quest for truth dictates that we strive to undo the false, the inhumane the unjust.
UNLIKE GOVERNMENT in a democratic society, there is no voter mandate to seek change. Unlike business and industry in a system of free enterprise, there is no profit motive to seek change. Yet change we must or face the reality of obsolescence and the risk of disintegration.
Much has been written and said about the need to improve higher education, but what are the areas, the ways, and the substance of change? What are we doing now that we can do better? What are we neglecting that we can no longer afford to neglect? It is far easier to ask questions than it is to pose final answers. In most instances the challenge to find the best answers lies with the faculty of the University, with the men and women who determine our excellence as a university, with the men and women who can move KU into a position of greater educational leadership. Students are often effective in identifying our strengths and our weaknesses but they properly look to the faculty for alternatives based upon a greater variety of educational backgrounds and experiences.
FIRST AMONG the questions we must ask ourselves are those of institutional values and purposes. These are questions that must be asked and answered within every area of the University as well as for the total institution. They cannot be answered by asserting that our single value is academic freedom and our single purpose is to provide quality education. We adhere to other values as well as academic freedom, "quality education" requires greater definition concerning the diverse number of ways it may be provided.
WE MUST REEXAMINE our efforts to assess learning and to record the results of such assessments. Letter grades, grade point averages and credit/no credit options need to be reexamined against our primary function to provide for optimum learning—optimum in the sense that students learn more, not less, as a result of our efforts to assess learning. In short, we must reexamine our academic procedures. If our purpose is to provide educational opportunity—in the fullest sense of that term—then we must not be satisfied merely with the conferring or the acquisition of credentials, but we must seek out those optimum learning environments and processes that enable us truly to educate ourselves and each other.
At still another level of inquiry, does our academic organization help learning or does it impede it? Organizational structures have a way of outliving their purposes. Are there parts of our structure that have outlived the needs for them? Are we clear in our minds about the proper balance between undergraduate and graduate education, between liberal arts and professional schooling? Yesterday's balance may still be tolerable today; will it be best for tomorrow?
WE ARE COMMITTED to the proposition that research is indispensible to quality education. But federal funds and foundation grants for research are obviously in a decline, while the demands of the classroom continue to increase, and the facilities and the resources do not keep pace. Should our approach to faculty research reflect these changed conditions? We would be remiss if we did not explore each of these questions and seek answers better suited to the decade ahead.
We are in a better position than ever before to ask questions about ourselves and to push for constructive answers. Beginning this semester we have adopted a new and innovative procedure that should facilitate meaningful, orderly change throughout the University. Faculty members and students working together on every policy making committee will provide mechanisms for joint efforts at every level of University organization.
This does not guarantee success. It will not insure meaningful results unless it is employed in the cooperative and mutually beneficial sense in which it was proposed. It will not insure meaningful results if it is avoided, or if it is used for confrontation rhetoric. But, I am confident and optimistic about its use by students and faculty alike. I am confident that there will be cooperation and I am optimistic
BUT I AM NOT deceiving myself, and I would not wish to deceive you about the difficulties that lie ahead. The task we face is enormous. It will not be done over night. It is made no easier by the fact—which we cannot ignore—that there are some, both on and off the campus, who do not want us to succeed.
Among our own faculty members and students there are a few who have said that all deliberated orderly change is only a snare and a delusion intended to beguile you into believing that significant improvement is possible when, in fact, the "establishment" never willingly undergoes change unless it is forced to it. Among the students and faculty members there are also some who are dismayed by changes in the past and by the prospect of any future change. They crave for the security of traditional procedures and distrust anything new.
about the results.
Both such opponents to orderly evolution ignore the fact that any social institution, like any biological organism, adapts at optimum rate or it dies. Whether death results from a traumatic accident or senility, it is equally final. For those of us who are concerned about the vitality of KU, there is little to distinguish the two camps in their opposition to orderly change.
THE EFFORT to change in a rational, orderly and humane manner is also challenged by critics beyond our jurisdiction, by traditionalists who cannot understand why KU isn't precisely as they think it was ten, twenty or more years ago, and by revolutionaries who seek our total destruction not because of our role in society, but because the university is the vulnerable soft
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