TCAC
List of Appendices
"Good afternoon and welcome to all of you. I appreciate your willingness to join me, at the busiest time of the academic year, for an hour or so of institutional stock-taking, soul-searching, and goal-setting. In the academic world, we tend to make our New Year's resolutions in the fall. The success of your resolutions may depend largely on yourselves, but my resolutions won't go anywhere without you. So I thank you for being here to listen, reflect, and respond to what I have to say.
I will try in my remarks today--and in answering the questions that follow--to draw a clear picture of our outstanding university, of the major challenges it faces, and of the tasks that confront us in the year ahead. Any such picture will show the University's great strengths: the strength of its faculty and staff, the strength of its students, programs, and facilities. but the picture will also reveal certain pressures, deficits, and opportunities that have led me to bring you, today, some proposals for "change at the Core" of the University of Washington. These proposals are the heart of what I want to say, and they will come at the center of my talk...
...Our third core change is to turn ourselves into a true three-campus university.
When UW Tacoma and UW Bothell first opened their doors a few years ago, they scarcely appeared on the radar screens of most faculty and many administrators here in Seattle. They were regarded, when noticed at all, as small, self-contained programs with their own constituencies and agendas and with little potential impact on the Seattle camps.
Today, as we confront major system-wide enrollment growth, and as we seek to educate students whose needs, ages, and life patterns are much more varied than in the past, we have to change our collective way of thinking. UW Bothell and UW Tacoma are vital, innovative, and successful. They are slated to receive almost two-thirds of the UW's enrollment growth over the next 15 years. By the end of that time, they will enroll roughly 25 percent of all the students at the University of Washington.
Becoming a three-campus university does not mean homogenizing the three sites. On the contrary, it means building campuses with complementary strengths and objectives, and making sure that each campus benefits from developments at the others. There will be different core populations on our three campuses, and different programs will be developed at each. But this very distinctiveness requires more interaction, mutual awareness, and joint planning among the three campuses than if we were simply multiplying the Seattle campus by three. All of us need ta broad, well-informed, three-campus view of the University, so that we can draw on each other's resources where appropriate, provide students with programs that best fit their needs, and make sure that the total system provides for a growing and diverse student population. May of these students, by the way, are already creating their own kind of integration by taking courses at more than one UW campus.
Forging a true three-campus system will not be easy, and we have really barely begun. But the rewards can be great. Let me point to a couple of our success stories. Both Seattle and Tacoma have nursing programs; both are excellent, but they are quite different. The region is far better served by these two complementary programs than it would be by two identical programs at different sites. Bothell, last year, began offering a new bachelor's program in computing and software systems--a program designed collaboratively by Bothell and Seattle faculty, working with community colleges and high-tech industry representatives. It woo is distinct from, and complementary to, Seattle programs in computer science and engineering, accommodating students whose backgrounds and interests are different from those on the Seattle campus. The message here is clear: a true three-campus university will enrich and strengthen the individual identity of each campus and will form an education whole that is greater than the sum of its parts..."
