TCAC Background Information--Appendix 7

Excerts From President Richard L. McCormick's Annual Address to the Campus Community, October 6, 1998

"...For the 1999 legislative session our goals are: First and foremost, raise faculty and staff salaries. We are asking for a 4.5 percent annual increase from the state, plus the authority to provide additional increases from UW funds. This will not erase the salary gap in one biennium. But it is the crucial first step in a multi-year strategy to resore competitive salaries at the UW. We will also ask for a special recruitment and retention fund, to help us hire and keep key faculty until our base salaries become competitive. Without a comparable fund voted by the 1997 legislature, our loss of faculty to outside offers would be far worse than it has been.

Besides salaries, our budget request includes:

Increased enrollment on all three campuses, in response to the state's growing demand for higher education;
Enhancements to programs to move the UW into an education future marked by experiential learning and educational technology;
Building the capital facilities needed to accomplish all this, most notably the new law school building, the renovation of Suzzallo Library, and construction of our new campuses at Bothell and Tacoma.

Historically, state investment in higher education has followed economic cycles--down in the early 70's and early 80's, and up again when better times returned at the end of thoses decades. But in this current period of prosperity and state budget surpluses, higher education has still lost ground. In 1990, the UW's state funding per student was slightly above the average of the public universities we consider our peers--universities like Michigan, North Carolina, and UCAL. Today we are more than 13 percent behind that average.

All of us are engaged in the work of renewing and reinventing this University, of making the splendid achievements of our past a springboard for the excellence of our future. That is our job. But we cannot do it alone. Without greater public investment, change at the University of Washington will be a much sadder kind than the change I have described today. It will mean decline instead of progress.

The essence of our case is this: public higher education is a public good. Its purpose is to advance our nation's and the world's most cherished goals--opportunity for all, wise and wide-spread participation in public life, economic and social progress, better and more humane lives for everybody. Educated citizens are a public good. New knowledge is a public good. New knowledge is a public good. Health and prosperity are public goods. Intellectual capital in the service of issues and problems is a public good. Whatever private goods the University promotes--and they are many--it is on this larger social good that our appeal for public support must stand or fall. And the UW's appeal is strong.

When the new faculty I toured the state in our bus last June, we saw all this in action. We saw the University's footprints everywhere. We found all kinds of people who understand and appreciate our role. Somehow we must turn their good feelings into the new resources we desperately need.

If we continue to do our work very, very well; if we seize the right opportunities for change and renewal; if we communicate effectively what we're doing--then we will have done all we can. That's a tall order for the year ahead, but we must embrace it. And we will.

TCAC List of Appendices