Augusta State University is better off than President William A. Bloodworth Jr. has ever seen it, he said during his annual State of the University address today.
The university has seen its share of clouds, but there must be rain before rainbows, Dr. Bloodworth said, taking a line from Dolly Parton.
The president listed a number of accomplishments from the past academic year and said that for the first time in five years there has been a significant increase in state funding.
Reach Greg Gelpi at (706) 828-3851 or greg.gelpi@augustachronicle.com.
Text of the State of the University Address: 2005
Thank you, Jim. Those were stirring remarks. And thank you so much for your leadership, now for a second year, in our A-Day campus campaign.
Gosh, what a place. This university. Such wonderful faculty and staff. A million dollars in donations from our faculty and staff. Such great support from the community. Individuals like Jim Garvey and Ernie Sizemore stepping forward to lead the A-Day campaign. A long line of others who have stepped forward in the past: Larry DeMeyers, Kathy Hamrick, Tim Shelnut, Ron Weber, Nick Greene, Jim and Michelle Benedict, Elaine Clark Smith, Cowboy Mike Searles, and Deke Copenhaver.
And now it is my time to step forward with a few remarks about the state of this university as it begins either its 80th or its 222nd year of existence.
There's much that could be said today. But knowing that, let me begin with a literary reference, to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. You may recall, from some English course taken a long time ago, that the tales are told by pilgrims headed in a group to the cathedral at Canterbury. For entertainment-this was the 14th century-(no iPods) the host of the pilgrimage asks each of the pilgrims to tell a tale.
When the tale-telling gets to the pilgrim who is a "clerk," which means a scholar and a teacher at Oxford (the kind of person who might be qualified to be a college president)-the host becomes worried about what might come out of such a person's mouth.
"You, sir," the host says, in a modern English translation. "This is not time for abstruse meditation. Tell us a lively tale."
"Don't preach," he says. "And don't tell us a tale to send us all to sleep." "And for the present put things plainly, so we can follow all you have to say!"
That sounds like good advice for a state of the university address. No abstruse meditating. No preaching. Plain language. . . . And no going to sleep!
So how's this as a lively and plain description of our "state": The state of ASU is better today than I have ever seen it-and maybe better than anybody has ever seen it at any time before. The state of this university is such-and here I agree with Jim Garvey-that we can actually stand as an example to this community.
We have great support. We have a wonderfully generous and hard-working foundation board, more so than ever before. We have superb new facilities. We look so good.
And partly because we look so good, we're seeing large numbers of students decide to come here-an enrollment increase last year that was more than twice that of the average in the University System of Georgia.
And we actually have a budget increase from the state this year-the first significant increase in five years-and no talk about a budget cut!
I know the past four years have been difficult. We've done without a lot. We've done more with less. We've had more students than ever before. And with more students than ever before, we suffered through four years of budget cuts-including last year, when the university system (including ASU) had to take a larger budget cut than any other state agency in Georgia.
But we got through that-and the future is much brighter.
Dolly Parton, I understand, once said, "If you want to see the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain." And we have put up with a lot of rain.
A rainbow looks pretty good. We've been able to add some additional faculty positions, establish a grants office, and start this year with the state appropriation that we should have had-and it not rained so much-four years ago!
Moreover, looking at the rainbow, we see-for the first time ever-students living in university housing; we can see the new student activities center being built; and we cannot see the six academic buildings that were still standing at this time last year.
It is especially significant of all that we are no longer a "nonresidential" institution.
For the first time ever, we have a fair number of students who have chosen-who have looked at other schools where they could have gone-and have made an active choice to pursue their university studies here, with us, with our faculty, through our curricula-and all because we now have such attractive apartments at University Village. Those students who made that choice now live at 6000 Jaguar Way, ZIP code 30909. What a great address!
And now you know why the Jaguar crossed the road. He-or she, as the case might be-wanted to get out of the way.
So here we are at the beginning of the 2005-2006 academic year, with no talk of state budget cuts, and with what will probably be another record enrollment.
We're a little crowded, of course, and we certainly need a new academic building, and it needs to be on Wrightsboro Road, but we look so good-and we have reason to feel so good!
And we had a year-last year-of many accomplishments. I'd like to mention a few of them.
First, we started the two so-called privatized projects: University Village and the Student Activities Center. And we had known beforehand how difficult it is to do such things, I'm sure that Dr. Kathy Hamrick would have quit, retired, or lost herself in the solution of some quadratic equation.
And if we had known beforehand all of the difficulties in getting a university housing program up and running, Mr. Dan Whitfield would have taken an unpaid sabbatical, and Dr. Joyce Jones would have pursued a professional singing career. But we got all those things done-and much more.
We got a second ICAPP grant for our fast-track nursing program allowing LPNs to become REGISTERED NURSES in a single year-all done with significant support from three local hospitals.
Moreover, speaking of nursing, one hundred percent of our nursing students who took the nursing licensure exam last December passed the test on their first try. One hundred percent. Our students. Shows you what they can do.
We began two new academic majors this past year: social work and management information systems.
In the College of Education, our Born to Read Literacy Center opened two new sites: one in McDuffie County, and one at East Augusta Elementary School.
In the College of Business Administration, our students once again scored exceptionally high on national tests of business knowledge.
Students in science, history, and sociology presented the results of their scholarship at regional conferences, and student scholarship in public administration was published in a national journal.
Our faculty members were active around the world, making presentations in Canada, Ireland, Germany, Greece, Australia, Switzerland, China, Russia, England, Mexico, Egypt, and the Bahamas. (But only our men's golf team went to Hawaii.)
Dr. Bridgette Ziobrowski won an award as author of the best article of the year published in the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis.
Dr. Bill Wellnitz became the Georgia state director for the Science Olympiad-and he also convinced the National Science Olympiad to host its 2009 National Olympiad right here at Augusta State University. Previous hosts include Ohio State, Indiana, Georgia Tech, and the University of Chicago. How's that for company!
Dr. Allen Scarboro spent the year teaching at the American University in Cairo, Egypt.
Dr. Bruce Saul's marine biology class was awarded one of only eight slots aboard a research vessel-that is, a ship-at the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography.
We were able to help more students study abroad than ever before, thanks in part to generous contributions for that purpose from Mr. J. B. Fuqua.
And for a second year in a row, an Augusta State Student-this time, Ms. Nadia Jilani-won a Fulbright award.
Speaking of Fulbright awards, last year was also the year when Dr. Igo Kuzmin, from Russia, was our visiting Fulbright Scholar-thanks to the good work of Dr. Wally Evans.
In student journalism, the Phoenix magazine won first place, as best student magazine, in a regional competition.
In Jaguar sports, baseball coach Skip Fite recorded his 600th career win-and senior catcher (also past president of the Student Government Association) Sam Barth set an NCAA record by hitting safely in 47 consecutive games.
Our women's golf team won its first tournament and finished in the top five in four other tournaments-all in NCAA Division I and in only the team's fourth year of competition.
Our men's team won four titles, including the NCAA regional at Notre Dame, and finished the season ranked fifth in the nation. Four of our golfers earned All-America awards.
Related to golf, and thanks primarily to the efforts of Mr. Fleming Norvell, we raised several hundred thousand dollars from brand-new friends of the university from around the nation and in Korea. Mr. Phil Mickelson, for instance, is now one of our major donors and-along with many of you-a member of our President's Club.
In men's basketball we have become a chief supplier of talent for the Australian National Basketball Association.
In the place where we play basketball, the ASU Pep Band won first place in the Peach Belt pep band competition.
Not to be outdone by the Pep Band, the ASU Jazz Combo received a superior rating at the Down Home Jazz Festival in Dothan, Alabama. (We are all over the world.)
And this past summer, Dr. Roslyn Floyd, piano professor extraordinaire, won the Artist of the Year award from the Greater Augusta Arts Council. That makes two such awards in recent years, following Jim Garvey's three years ago, and it is in addition to an award this year to faculty member emeritus Mr. Bill Toole-all of which is quite remarkable, for our faculty, in a thriving, vibrant arts community.
So it has been a banner year. And the best thing of all, as is always the case, is that our presence, our hard work, our way of conducting our business has made a difference in the lives of thousands of students. Yes, Jim Garvey, we are a kind of Ellis Island of education-a door of opportunity, a portal of success, a gateway to a better life for so many people who, without us, without this institution, here in Augusta, would not have that opportunity for success and a better life.
For many, some who have had much rain in their lives, we are a rainbow.
And we shouldn't forget how much we are needed.
Earlier in these remarks-when I quoted Dolly Parton about a rainbow (following Geoffrey Chaucer about not putting people to sleep)-I thought that I should also say, in describing how much better the state of the university is today than it has been in the past, that now the skies are not cloudy all day. (It might be that only a native Texan or Cowboy Mike could get away with such a reference.)
But the truth is, in spite of the metaphorical rainbow we see, that the skies are not not cloudy all day. There are some clouds. Some have to do with funding, some with politics, some with the state of the nation and the world today. Iraq is a cloud.
But the cloud that we should pay the most attention to, because we have some power to make it go away, is the general difficulty that our kind of students have in achieving academic success.
I think that most of you know the academic advantage held by students who come from families who have done well financially and who have considerable family experience with the business of going to college. Many of our students, of course, do not have such an advantage-and across the nation, more and more students are coming to college without such an advantage. Now, many students whose families lack both money and college experience actually do well for themselves in college. But too many do not.
And the failure not to do well in college shows up, for public view and in the lives of individuals, in graduation rates.
It is important, therefore, that we consider-more than ever before-what we might be able to do that we not now doing, or what we're not now doing enough of, to help our students seize the opportunity we offer them. This year you'll hear me talk about this matter more than ever before-and on this subject you'll see me seek from our faculty more advice than ever before. It will be important to do so. And as a result, I think, the skies here indeed will not be cloudy all day.
This is a wonderful place-with absolutely wonderful people who work here, as faculty members and staff members, and equally wonderful people who support us. And great students, too. For what we have accomplished, people-and the local newspaper-try to give me the credit. But I know who really gets things done here. It's all of you. I'm honored to be your president, and your colleague, and your supporter.
Thanks for all that you have done and continue to do. Thanks for making this the wonderful university that it is. Thank you, in particular, for the way you care about our students. And let's have another banner year!
And, for the record, I think it really will be our 222nd year!
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