Higher Aim

Whether a mission statement, vision statement, mantra or memo, a visioning document needs to be something more – a heartfelt answer to the question, “Why does it matter?”

Georgia Southern President Brooks Keel and his leadership team are setting a direction and a vital cultural tone based on the University’s traditional strengths. To raise the academic and athletic bars, words are important, but emotion motivates.

“I’m trying to create more of a ‘passion statement’ than a mission statement,” said Keel.

Keel is mapping an ambitious journey. Success will depend on the support of alumni, faculty, staff and students. External funding — annual giving and support of a planned major capital campaign — is a must-have, and Keel believes the only limitation on Georgia Southern’s dreams is a financial one.

“It starts with the President’s Cabinet,” he said. “Every decision we make, everything we talk about, is focused on some aspect of the strategic vision. The deans have been engaged in this process with their faculty and every time I speak publicly I make a point of mentioning this.”

As the University moves forward, beginning with this fall’s anticipated record 20,000-plus enrollment, Keel’s passionate vision revolves around four strategic themes.

Brains and brawn

Academic excellence is a must, the president said. “We need to make sure we have enough faculty in place, but more importantly, make sure we have the right faculty in place — that we hire outstanding scholars who are going to be engaged in research and creativity.

“We want to help our existing faculty advance their own careers and capabilities as teachers and as scholars,” he said. “And, we want to make sure we have the best curriculum in place to address the issues to make our graduates competitive in the marketplace.”

The process began in 2010 when Keel initiated interdisciplinary “cluster hires” — new faculty specifically chosen to conduct promising cutting-edge research with other professors across departmental and college lines. He wants to see additional hires, but with a careful approach that targets the University’s research strengths and regional needs. “We want to continue the cluster hiring, looking not only at interdisciplinary cluster hiring at Georgia Southern, but at interdisciplinary hiring in cooperation with other universities within the state.” For, example, he said, if Georgia Southern, Georgia State and the Medical College of Georgia identified a problem that could be solved with a multi-disciplinary approach. “We can utilize each other’s resources and influence and it will help in bringing research capabilities to the entire state.

“We hope to initiate new clusters,” he said. “The deans are working on a 5-year plan about where they want to go.”

The University’s new online Bachelor of General Studies degree meets a regional need, said Keel, as does this fall’s inaugural classes in mechanical, electrical and civil engineering. The engineering program bodes well for Georgia Southern’s national visibility, approach to solving problems, service to its region, and ability to attract grants and contracts, Keel said.

“The approval of engineering is a huge opportunity for us to move ahead in a major way. I think that’s changed the way people look at the University.”

The president sees an incremental increase in admission standards in coming years. “We are in the process of looking at higher standards,” he said. “We increased our admission standard from a 1,000 combined SAT score to 1,010 last fall. Our goal is to raise it to 1,050 over a period of time.”

But, he is quick to add that there are limits. “Ten points doesn’t sound like a lot, but it translates probably to 400 students. It makes a heck of a difference in terms of enrollment management and budget. Our goal is to increase the standards as we move along and increase everything that goes along with it such as retention and graduation rates.”

The Augusta native would also like to see a larger percentage of the overall enrollment made up of graduate students — students who are committed to advanced degrees and the accompanying research. That means funding graduate assistantships beyond the 13 percent of the University’s students who are seeking master’s or doctoral-level degrees, and adding assistantships to attract significantly more students.

“I’d like to see us in the higher teens,” Keel said. “I’m not married to an absolute number as much as wanting an upward trend. As we ease into that over the years we will naturally develop a sweet spot for us. I can’t really predict that, but a lot is going to be determined by the other things we put in place to make sure we can support additional graduate students.”

A greater focus on out-of-state recruiting is also under consideration, especially north Florida. “Jacksonville is about the same distance as Atlanta from Statesboro,” said Keel. “It’s a large market with a significant number of academically qualified students, and for someone who wants to leave home for college and yet be somewhat close to home, we are a great choice.”

In athletics, a push is on to fully validate the “Rings and Diplomas” slogan of the Athletic Foundation. “We need to make sure that every athlete has the opportunity to win a championship ring in their respective sport,” he said, “and ‘diplomas’ means that we graduate 100 percent of our student-athletes.”

It also means upgrading or replacing some existing facilities.

While far too early to be firm, the idea of a sports arena is being discussed between the University, Statesboro and Bulloch County. Such a facility would serve as a multi-purpose civic center and would be the new home for Eagles basketball.

Last spring, Keel announced plans for a 50,000-square-foot facility to house football coaches’ offices, meeting rooms, an 11,500-square-foot weight room, and a hall of fame. The building will be erected at a cost of nearly $10 million at the scoreboard end of Paulson Stadium. “If you don’t dream big, it’s never going to happen,” said Keel.

“We’ve needed a football locker room desperately for quite some time.”

A key to athletics success is convincing more ticket-buying fans to become donors. “Our financial support for athletics is not where it needs to be,” Keel said. “Our fan base is unbelievable — I’ve never seen such passionate and loyal fans – but to translate that into dollars we have some work to do. We have one of the lowest athletics budgets in the Southern Conference.” Needed extra funding should come from alumni and fans, he said, because students are already bearing 40 percent of the burden of athletics programs.

Many of the University’s athletics facilities are of high quality, but need additional attention to maximize their utility, he said. “We’ve got a top-notch softball complex, but no batting cage. We’ve got a beautiful track and soccer facility, but no lights. Those are the types of things we need and will be focusing on.”

The importance of athletics as a “picture window” to interest potential students and supporters cannot be overstated, said Keel. Athletics bring national acclaim, and serves as a rallying point for students, faculty, staff and alumni. Success, he said, breeds better recruiting and wider support.

Football might be the “big dog,” Keel concluded, but given the commitment of time and effort by all student-athletes, they deserve an equal opportunity to play for championships. Full funding of all allowable scholarships is a goal.

Maximum achievement

“We want to do everything we can to make sure our students are successful,” Keel said. “Our retention and the progression to graduation rates are two of the main things on which we are focused. We need to make sure we get our students from the freshman to the sophomore year. Then we need to ensure that they progress through their second and third years and that we graduate as many as we possibly can.”

Nationally, the length of time it takes for students to complete their college degrees has grown beyond what was once a norm of four years. Keel wants to see that trend reversed at the University. “We’re beginning to shrink the six-year graduation rate to a four-year graduation rate,” he said. “We’re using the motto of ‘Out the Door in Four.’ We want to get our students on track and help them stay on track so that they can get the courses they need in the order they need them so they can be successful.”

The globalization of commerce is only going to increase, Keel said. “We need to help students be competitive in the 21st-century marketplace.” That means students staying abreast of new technology – regardless of the planned career – but also being offered global learning opportunities. “That’s important, whether giving students the chance to study abroad or trying to make our campus as diverse as we possibly can in the true sense of the word,” he said. Keel stressed that diversity should go beyond ethnicity and race — which are very important — and should include diversity of birthplace, religion, language, food, music and culture. “Our students are going to be in an increasing globally competitive marketplace, not just regional,” he explained.

An imperative Keel sees is for more student financial support. “We are desperately in need of scholarships and internship opportunities,” he said. “We can’t really move forward unless we have more scholarships for students across the board. In order for us to go after the highest quality students we can – students who can go anywhere they want to – we’ve got to have a scholarship pool to attract them to Georgia Southern rather than somewhere else in the state or outside of the state.”

Georgia Southern is also interested in students who are not only academically qualified, but have a true financial need. “You’re not attracting the student strictly because of their academics, but you’re trying to help them be successful because they come from a low-income environment,” Keel said.

Georgia’s General Assembly acted this year to keep the state’s HOPE Scholarship solvent by tightening academic requirements and reducing coverage from 100 percent of tuition to 90 percent. It does not fund fees, books, meals or housing. “With HOPE being cut to 90 percent of tuition for most students and all fees being eliminated, a ‘HOPE-Full’ scholarship is something we want to take a look at,” he said of a proposed University scholarship fund that would help make up the shortfall for top students.

Attracting the best possible professors is another key to increasing quality. “As we push a research agenda, we’ve got to have more resources to provide the type of startup packages, especially for the sciences, when we recruit research-intensive individuals,” said Keel. “You’ve also got to have the facilities for them to work in.”

Scholarly pursuits

Georgia Southern is classified as a Carnegie Foundation Doctoral/Research University — but further strengthening its research credentials is important, Keel said. Research, he added, is not limited to the sciences. It extends to creative scholarly activity in the arts and humanities. “We’ve really got to push the research agenda heavily,” he said. “It improves our ability to help the economy of the region by attracting business in major ways. More research faculty lure business and industry to the community.

“It’s not just research in the sciences and engineering,” Keel said. “We have outstanding visual and performing arts and outstanding language and humanities programs that add to the economic development role the University plays. Industry wants to come to a place where their employees can have an outstanding quality of life – and all of those aspects contribute to that. You can’t get that in many major cities.

“Research also goes hand in hand with an increase in graduate students,” the president said. “We’re going to be changing the graduate/undergraduate mix to a larger percentage of graduate students. I think we also have a unique opportunity to increase research for undergraduate students and to do it in a meaningful and significant way here. I think that’s going to help maintain the student-centered approach that has made us famous.

“Some people are concerned that as we move toward placing more emphasis on research, we are going to lose our focus on the individual student and become just another big research university,” said Keel. “That rightly scares people, but I try to remind them that we don’t have to be anything we don’t want to be. The flip side to that is we can be anything we do want to be. If we go into this research agenda initiative keeping in mind the importance of the undergraduate students and teaching, we can have something very unique and important here.”

The cost of progress

Keel is, indeed, passionate about where he wants to take Georgia Southern, and there is but one truly large hurdle – revenue.

Increased giving is one key, and one that the pending capital campaign can help address, but Keel sees other avenues as well. “We need to be efficient with the limited resources we have and think entrepreneurially about how we do things,” he said. He added that the University needs to raise scholarships, advance philanthropy, engage public-private partnerships, pursue corporate grants and contracts as well as federal grants and contracts. “That brings resources to the University and to our students.”

Keel is hopeful Gov. Nathan Deal will approve funding in this year’s budget for a new biology building. But, he said, “It is probably the last publicly funded building in our lifetimes. There simply aren’t enough tax dollars to meet the building needs across a growing university system.

“That means we’ve got to be more entrepreneurial thinking,” he said, and consider public-private partnerships and philanthropy. “Can we find someone who wants to invest in constructing a building that has the sort of resources we need, lease them the land for a dollar a year for 30 years and then we lease some of that space from that company? That company could bring in other smaller companies, and then you have an incubator of business and research. That works together and provides a hotbed of activity for our students to learn and to work.”

Full circle

“Everything we do falls into one of these spheres,” said Keel, “and is all part of this vision. I think what is being crafted is something that everyone, regardless of what they like or dislike or what they do or don’t do, can support and play a major role.

“All of these things revolve around the students. We have to always keep in mind that we are student-centered and do everything we can to maintain that large-scale small-feel attitude and stamp of Georgia Southern.”