Michigan Difference - Campaign Weekend

Thank you Mike. I’m glad to see you all here this afternoon. We have a good deal of work ahead of us in the campaign and it’s wonderful to have your enthusiastic involvement. And it is affirming. Your work reminds us that what we do really makes a difference in the most important place, the lives of good people.

One of the things I have learned in my 31 years as a Michigan faculty member is that students are not satisfied with simple answers. They want to know the reasons behind the simple answers, even the reasons behind the complex answers. By extension, I figure that alumni and friends of the university are also interested in knowing “why”, in exploring beyond the short answer. So my remarks are intended to provide you with some insight into the complexity that lies behind the campaign we are undertaking.

I want to begin with the question of what makes Michigan Michigan. What is this Michigan difference we keep talking about? Descriptively, it is the difference between being a very good state university and being one of the great universities of the world. How did this come to be? What does it take?

Michigan’s distinctiveness is found first in its mission of making excellence in liberal education accessible to “all comers whose intellectual gifts entitle them to admission to the goodly fellowship of cultivated minds”, to quote President Angell writing in 1879. Let me extend his point just a bit. By liberal education, I mean, as did he, the learning that leads to breadth and flexibility of mind. This is at the root of the education the university provides, for undergraduates, for graduate students, and for students in professional schools. Our goal is to help all students develop the breadth of mind and openness to ideas that will make them active and engaged citizens and effective problem solvers. And we are committed, as was President Angell, to “hold wide open the gates of this University to all our sons and daughters, rich or poor, to whom God, by gifts of intellect and by kindly providence, has called to seek for a liberal education.”

While our mission is not unique - Harvard might make a claim to do this too - our approach is distinctive. We combine excellence and collaboration. These apply in all of university life. We seek the best faculty, the brightest students, state of the art facilities, and innovative programs. And we have them. In addition, we encourage and reward collaboration and this is less usual. This has been a Michigan hallmark for many years and it is essential now in a world of constant and rapid change. Our approach allows us to bring deep knowledge to bear on big questions –whether it is how to understand and treat an illness like depression or exploring issues of religion and democratization in nations around the world. Our scope, scale, and style of work make us a problem-defining and problem-solving machine of unparalleled strength and reach, from the creative arts to the nano-sciences, which turn out to have a lot to do with each other.

In a few paragraphs, that is the Michigan Difference: excellence, access, and collaboration. Excellence, access, and collaboration do not come easily – they are expensive and require continuing hard work.

We have been blessed because throughout its history, Michigan has had strong support from the state and from friends and alumni. In roughly the first 150 years of the university’s life, state funding covered the basics, while private support enabled the university to grow beyond its core mission, to strive for more than what is possible at many public colleges and universities. It let Michigan develop new research programs, build facilities to support research and teaching, expand the faculty in new and exciting fields, and assist students in need. There are many examples – let me remind you of a few.

Horace and Mary Rackham made a gift that built the wonderful building across the street and endowed fellowship programs for students. William Cook’s gift built the Law Quad, a space not just beautiful, but designed to support the educational programs of the law school at least then. When I first came to the university, LSA had a program called the Vital Margin Fund. Its purpose was to give the college flexible funding to keep Michigan ahead of the curve, to let us be innovators, a university pushing forward ahead of others. Without this kind of support over the past 187 years, Michigan would not be the institution it is today.

Let me mention two more recent gifts that continue this tradition and raise it to a new level. Rich and Susan Rogel made a campaign gift of $22 million to support student scholarships that will help us recruit out of state students. And these students are critical to our success. We need students of great variety, with different experiences and backgrounds. Everyone benefits from the rich mix of students on campus. The Rogel scholarships will make it possible for us to bring those students here, as do the gifts of hundreds of others who provide scholarships for students one, two, and a few at a time. And wouldn’t it be wonderful if every student who could benefit from a University of Michigan education could afford to come here?

Steve Ross’ gift of $100 million to the Business School will enable the school to recruit and retain outstanding faculty and students and to develop a state-of-the-art facility for teaching and research. It is because of private giving like Steve’s that the Business School is the only public university business school in the top ten of the recent Wall Street Journal rankings. And, we are not just in the top ten, but also in the top one – a tribute to the excellence that has always been encouraged and supported here.

For Rich, Steve, and so many others, their gifts are given to insure that the opportunities they had will be even better for coming generations – so that this university and all who benefit from it can realize President Angell’s ambition. But there is more to understanding why this university has been sustained so well for so long. Let me share with you the story of the Detroit Observatory. The observatory is not in Detroit; it’s here in Ann Arbor, on the hill at the east end of Ann Street, near the hospital and the “hill” dorms. Henry Tappan, who became president of the University of Michigan in 1852, had a vision of higher education as a leading force in human progress – he sure got that right! This vision led to the creation of the modern research university and the inclusion of science as a standard part of any university’s curriculum.

Tappan’s linking of higher education and progress had very concrete results. He gave a speech in which he talked about the need for an observatory and telescopes for instructional purposes. A prominent Detroit businessman, Henry Walker, saw the potential practical uses of such a facility. In addition to training young scientists, it could provide an important public service – accurate timekeeping – in the expanding commercial world of the Midwest. It was, as we like to say today, a win-win situation.

This is a fascinating bit of history. In the 1850s, it was critical to know the exact time if you were on a ship because in order to infer longitude from astronomical observations, you had to have the exact time. This was really important. If you didn’t know the exact time you could not figure longitude precisely and then you could get yourself – or your ship – in real trouble. Indeed, until the recent advent of LORAN and then global positioning systems, accurate time-keeping was essential to determining longitude.

The Detroit businessmen (and they were all men in those days) that Henry Walker recruited helped the University to buy two telescopes, one for research and the other, a meridian telescope, for telling time. The astronomer, a university faculty member, would lie on a couch in the observatory and look through the meridian telescope which was perfectly aligned north-south. Knowing exact location, one can infer time from the transit of an astronomical body - the sun for example, although that’s not usually available in Ann Arbor - across the cross-hairs (made of spider silk) in the telescope. The astronomer would push a button that would send a signal to the railroad station, which would then telegraph across the Midwest, “Detroit Observatory Time”. A jeweler with a shop on the banks of the Detroit River, on receiving the signal, would drop a shape from a flagpole so that the ships on the river would know it was exactly noon. In its day, this was high-bandwidth technology.

The Detroit businessmen knew they wanted to tell time and they knew that only an astronomer could do it. And they were persuaded that a good astronomer would not be content to simply tell time, but would want to push the boundaries of his field. They were willing to support the pure work for the applied, but also for itself. They liked to come by and look through the observational telescope and talk with the astronomer about science. This alliance of academy and business is uniquely American and it has persisted over the last century and a half to produce a set of institutions of learning and research that are quite extraordinary and among which Michigan was the inventor and continues to be a leader. The Michigan difference was already evident in 1852.

The Detroit Observatory has been restored and stands today as a museum that demonstrates the value of connecting academic research with practical applications. It is also a testament to the role that private support has in making academic research possible.

Today the university faces challenges that were unimaginable to President Tappan and the businessmen who bought the telescopes for the observatory. The state appropriation that supports the regular business of the university no longer covers even our core services, let alone the contemporary versions of the Detroit Observatory. The state appropriation now makes up less than 1/3 of our general fund revenue. The number has fallen from about 65% in 1970, about 80% in 1960. In good times it is flat, in bad times it goes down. In just the past three years, it has gone from 35% to 28%. We will not likely see 35% again.

As the figures indicate, we need private support to preserve and enhance the things that have made Michigan great. We need to raise the funds that will enable us to compete with our peers for students and for faculty. College is an expensive proposition (it’s also a terrific investment, but that’s another talk) and many families don’t have the resources it requires. We want the leaders and best to come here as students and we need to make it affordable for them. (And I’ll note too that while our tuition for non-resident students is on par with private institutions, we use a good deal of tuition income to fund scholarships.)

In an important symbiotic way, good students flock to where there are talented faculty and the best faculty members are attracted to institutions with strong students. But the faculty is the linchpin. Many of you can recall the faculty member here who helped you to awaken and grow intellectually. Maybe it was Sidney Fine teaching American history or David Kuhl helping you understand the clinical applications of nuclear medicine. Those are the kinds of people we want on the faculty here. We work very hard to get them and to keep them.

Here’s what we’re up against: Harvard has an endowment of about $22 billion dollars. It covers almost all of their faculty salaries. That means they don’t have to draw on their tuition revenues for salary, giving them considerable flexibility to use those funds for new opportunities – their versions of the Detroit Observatory. Now, it is true that most institutions don’t have the resources that Harvard has. But what we see, all too often, is a university that decides to build its program in a particular field by hiring away our faculty in that field. NYU has just announced that they are increasing the size of their faculty by 125 and Harvard and Yale are making plans to grow. They are going to come shopping here – because this is where the talent is. This is very flattering; if they didn’t come here it would be a sign of weakness. On the other hand, if they thought it too easy to shop here, that would be weakness of another kind, and we could not survive it.

To retain our best faculty, we must be able to offer them colleagues, students, and facilities that will enable them to do their best work. With your support, we will provide that environment and Michigan can always represent the very best in higher education. And we will do so in the distinctive Michigan way that makes a difference in the world.