-: Welcome again to our All Hands meeting
for this spring semester for 2016
for the Institute of Ag and Natural Resources.
Glad to see so many of you here this afternoon.
I was kidding Ron Yoder
just as we were getting ready to start,
10 minutes ago this room was completely empty.
(laughter)
So either people are figuring out my schedule
and the way I work it,
expecting it to start about 10 minutes late or what,
but glad to see you all here in the East Union,
and I know we have a number of our colleagues
joining us online, as we always do,
to livestream these presentations,
and folks from across the state,
we know are joining us as well.
Thank you for being here
and for participating in the dialogue.
Now what I have a goal of doing this afternoon,
and I'm watching the clock directly in front of me,
Jill Brown has a bet with me,
whether I can get this done or not,
and I'm gonna win this bet,
that I hope to be done in less than an hour,
so that we have the opportunity
to have some dialogue and some questions
at the end of the time this afternoon.
I am going to take a little different approach
to the All Hands presentation
that we've been using for the last several.
You'll recall that when we started these,
now some I guess 11 times ago,
this is our 11th one, first one in January of 2011,
that we were at the very front end
of what we then termed IANR to 2025.
This idea and this concept,
and this kind of big goal thinking
of where the Institute of Ag and Natural Resources
should be for the University of Nebraska,
and a little bit about how we
would go about getting there.
That was a 15 year plan.
So as you see on the slide in front of you today,
what I'm gonna try to do in the next 45 minutes
is to first capture for you where I think
we've been in the last five years.
What's magical about this is
I went through my five year review
as part of the normal administrative process
for the university this past fall.
So I did a lot of thinking about that
during that five year review time.
And it also gave me a chance
to think about where we really were in this
15 year journey of 2025, of IANR to 2025.
So there's two distinct sections we'll cover this afternoon.
That past five year period what the big picture has told us,
where we've come in that last five year period.
And then more importantly,
I wanna peer into to the next five.
And I wanna think about what the next
five years of this journey will need to look like
for us to achieve that IANR to 2025 plan
that we laid out five years ago.
So that's where we're headed this afternoon.
And again, we hope to have time
for a lot of dialogue at the end.
I'm boiling down about an hour of slides into this slide.
Because you've all kind of heard us talk a lot
about what this slide says
and why it's so important that our mission be
that at this point in time,
at this point in time in the university's history,
this point in time of the way you look at the globe,
you look at the world around us,
both present and into the future,
that there has never been a time
that what we do is more important.
Whether you think of whatever cut of that
you fall into, whether it's the agricultural
sciences side, the food sciences side,
the environmental sciences side,
the natural resources side,
the human sciences side,
what we do has never been more important
in our history certainly.
And I predict it will be that way
for some decades to come
when we look at what's out ahead of us.
And there's a new piece of that
that I added to this slide that you see in red.
It's particularly important for Nebraska.
And it's particularly important for where we are
as an institution and where our state is,
tied to the future and the longevity
and the sustainability of these systems
that we're so a key and a part of.
So that's the big picture that we started from,
in 2025 if you will, we changed a word or two
here and there along the way.
But that's still the journey that we're on,
is framed by that big important, all-encompassing statement.
Now what have we done in the last five years?
Now I'm obviously cherry-picking here,
so it's not meant to be all-inclusive,
but hopefully to give you the big picture
of where we find ourselves in 2016,
five years into this journey.
First thing I will tell you is that we have
an immensely talented group of people.
There are almost 2,000 people,
this number fluctuates up and down a bit,
but there are almost 2,000 people
that are engaged in this institute.
Not all of those full time.
About 1650 or 60 of those are full time employees.
The rest are part time, in some way shape or form,
employees that make up our work force.
And I'm very proud of the fact
of how they're distributed, where they are in the state.
How many of them are on the campus,
how many of them are faculty,
how many of them are non-faculty.
The distribution, if you will,
of that workforce that makes up who we are at IANR.
And as you know, that number's been growing,
continues to grow and you will see a lot of the detail
behind what that growth has been over that last five years.
As I have done in the last,
probably majority of these All Hands sessions,
I'm going to frame where we've been in the last five years
within the context of the university's goals.
These are the long term goals,
if you think of five years kinda being a long term
time horizon of the goals
of the University Nebraska-Lincoln.
As a campus, they continue to be our goals.
I will say, as I've been saying,
I'll still say it for some time to come,
that I think that the Institute of Ag and Natural Resources
has led the university and led the campus
in all of these goals.
In every single one of them
as you go down through the picture.
So you know the goals well.
I've showed you these data in the fall,
beginning of the fall semester,
where our enrollment goal has certainly
clipped along at the stage
that we would like to see it clip along.
I'm going to give you some greater challenges
associated with that when we look out
at the next five years.
But we can't not be very happy
about the fact that in CASNR we've seen
now 12 years of growth in our student population.
And that growth's been very widespread
across the college.
It's not been in one spot or two spots.
It's been pretty universally widespread across the college.
We saw during that same time period of 12 years,
significant growth in our partner in CEHS,
in their undergraduate and graduate programs as well.
So this enrollment growth has been a big deal for us.
I'm often asked by a lot of folks,
on the external side of the university in particular,
how we've been able to finance, if you will,
much of the growth that we've experienced in faculty.
I will tell you that the biggest,
single driver of that is this slide,
is the enrollment growth piece of that picture.
Because we're able to capitalize
on that enrollment growth,
and put it back into more people and more programs.
I've showed you these data in the fall
that showed that our current student population
in CASNR is about 75% resident Nebraska students,
about 25% roughly non-resident students,
broken out into international and domestic,
as you see there on the slide.
And remember these numbers because
I'll come back to them in the next five years
and talk about where I see that growth needing to be
out in the five years ahead of us.
I also showed you this slide that reflects
over that longer time horizon, going back to 2003,
the percentage of the student body at UNL,
made up of students studying in CASNR,
all inclusive, undergrad and graduate student,
professional students collectively
that increased from between eight and 9%
13 years ago up to this past fall
where we were now bumping 14%
of the student population at UNL.
So that tells the story in and of itself
relative to that growth continuing
to be a bigger part of the university.
And I will tell you, give you a little glimpse
into this next five year period,
I think that we need to hold that number
potentially at 15%.
So to be where we should be five years from now,
whatever the university's enrollment is,
that our programs should represent
a minimum of 15% of that enrollment.
So there's some continued growth that we'll expect to see.
NCTA is seeing significant growth.
I also showed this number to you,
our colleagues out in Curtis,
in the western part of the state in the two year program.
Much of that growth occurring not
in resident students on the campus,
but occurring in terms of dual credit enrollment students,
in high schools spread throughout the state.
So continued enrollment there in the two year program.
That second goal in terms of graduation rates
and what we would like to see in graduation rates.
Our current cohort at about 75% of the students
who start as first time freshman here at the university
graduated in six years from the university, from UNL.
So we would continue to like to see that rate go up.
The more important number there to me
is the placement rate of our students,
which continually exceeds over 90% at the day of graduation.
Which is true largely nationally.
You will hear that same statistic across a lot of programs
agriculturally across the country in an area
that I think we really excel in and very proud of.
On the research side, big growth in research.
This just reflects three years of data,
from 12 through 14, the 15 year numbers
are not closed, the books aren't closed on FY 15 yet,
but I can tell you roughly what they are.
This I showed you in the fall.
If you add 15 numbers to that,
sponsored activity in the institute
was a little under 55 million dollars in external support.
And proportionally the research expenditures
we expect to be in the 135 to 137 million
range when they're closed.
Putting that on a per faculty FTE basis,
you can see the progression there
between 13 and 14 in particular.
We will see another big jump between 14 and 15.
When we look at current fiscal year data,
we're now six months into FY 16,
we're tracking to be above FY 15 again,
in terms of sponsored research in particular,
and we'll expect to see those numbers continue to go up.
I showed you this graphic in the fall,
and I think it tells the story very well.
When you invest in people,
you begin to see the results of that investment.
And I think we've only just begun
to see the results of that investment.
So on the left-hand side is the institute,
followed by the colleges and arts and sciences,
engineering, education, and human sciences,
and then kind of a smattering of the rest of the campus,
through the right-hand side of the graphic.
Then you can see over that last five years of time,
the collective growth in research funding for IANR,
which we're very proud of.
And you'll also see that a big increased part of that
is the red portion of that bar that is foundational support,
philanthropic and foundational support.
So the bottom baseline is federal,
followed by foundation, followed by other support
including industry support, followed by some state
dollars in the top part of that graphic.
So that trend is very good.
We expect to continue to see that trend go up
and we're very proud of that.
You all know about the faculty growth
that we've experienced and the number of new people
that we've been able to bring on board.
This is in tenure track faculty.
I'll show you some data on non-tenure track faculty
here in a few minutes.
But from a tenure track faculty side,
we've been very, very blessed
to be able to bring on the number of people
that we have been able to add to our faculty ranks.
We showed you these data in the fall.
They haven't changed significantly since then.
But when we're done with this fiscal year
and the searches that we have underway currently
or are starting at the present,
we should be up by just over 27%
in our tenure track faculty numbers
by the end of that hiring process.
Trust me, when I go and I visit
with my colleagues at other institutions,
I just was in a meeting last week
in Tucson, Arizona, the Farm Foundation,
several of my colleagues from around the country
and other land grants were there,
and one of them, I won't say where he's from
except it's a state that Chicago's in.
(laughter)
One of them said to me,
"There's this giant sucking sound
"of everything going to Nebraska."
I'm very happy, I don't mean that to sound bad.
I mean that to be a really positive statement,
in that we've been very fortunate
to hire the people that we've been able to hire.
We're not gonna be able to continue to do that at that rate.
I think we all recognize that.
But we've been very, very fortunate
to be able to bring this talent on board.
And I want to just put an underline under another part
of this that is equally important to number.
Quality is certainly a word that is somewhat subjective,
but we have paid a lot of attention to quality
in this process of the kind of people that we've hired,
the kind of backgrounds that they bring to our institute,
where they bring that background from.
And we've also, not intentionally so,
but we've been able to manage to increase
the diversity of our faculty in that process.
And I'm very pleased about that.
Here's some data that reflect that.
You've not seen these numbers before.
With some data that reflect both for tenure-line faculty,
so this growth piece that I just showed you,
this 27% increase in tenure track faculty
that we'll be through when we're done.
You see about 2/3, 3/4 of that there
in the bottom of the 17.4% increase since 11.
And as well as non-tenure track faculty on the right.
So professors of practice, research professors
on non-tenure positions.
And I wanna draw your attention
to just a couple of statistics here.
So if you look on the left-hand side of the slide,
at the gender ratio and at the diversity of faculty,
you will see gains in both of those
over that period of time.
In tenure track faculty, this number is
the percentages of each category.
And this number is the percentage increase
in the overall number in magnitude,
if you will, for that category.
And I'm very pleased to see
that we're increasing the number
of women faculty in our scientific ranks,
and we're increasing the diversity of our faculty
in a way that I think is very important for us long term
to reflect the greater population that we serve.
Non-tenure track faculty, less dramatic,
but again, some changes in increase
in that demographic as well,
when you look at our professors of practice
and our research professors.
Innovation Campus, another one of those goals.
This has obviously been a very big year
for Innovation Campus as we populated that campus now
for the first time, if you will.
Academically and in partnership basis,
still a lot of work to do there yet,
but we've made huge progress in the last nine to 12 months.
This is what the campus looked like back late in the summer
as we were preparing for that big launch that we had.
380,000 square feet involved in that phase one
of the footprint for the campus.
The new food science or Food Innovation Center
is now occupied by our department
of Food Science and Technology.
It went very well as a general move to that facility.
Both from the actual physical move,
as well as the integration, if you will, of the academic
program into that facility for the fall term.
So amazing facility if you've not seen it.
We think it's the best facility of its kind in the world.
And we expect to see great things come from that
in the use of it long term with our partners.
You've seen this slide before,
the big relationship that we have there at the moment
is the Alliance for Advanced Food Sanitation
and the development of that alliance,
centered around these initial eight partners
that are part of that in helping us
to develop new ways to approach food manufacturing
from a sanitation side of the food safety
piece of that industry.
So we're excited about that.
A search is currently underway for the director
of that alliance to kick it off
as we move fully into the center.
New Greenhouse Innovation Center
is being burnt in as we speak.
This is a long process.
I'm not going to tell you
that we immediately have this center working
and that tomorrow we're cranking
the research results out of that.
It's a much more complex process than that.
And a team of faculty with ARD that have
been working on that continue to make progress
in having that facility up full scale and running.
This is the list of current partners at Innovation Campus
as of the ones we can announce today.
There are another four or five major ones
that we're far advanced in the development of that we'll
probably add in the next three to four months of time.
So you can kind of see this big picture here is growing.
There are 13, if I think I counted it correctly,
partners that are non-university related entities
that make up part of those partnerships.
And if you had looked at that a year ago,
we would have had three.
So we're very pleased about how that progress continues.
I expect in the next month we'll add two more major ones
to this list that keep us very excited
and up at night thinking about it.
The institutes that have developed.
So over this five year period,
we have stood up the Water for Food Institute
to its first five years of history.
They just celebrated just before the holidays.
A five year birthday cake celebration
reception at Innovation Campus.
You see that picture there in the lower right.
Has made huge progress in the first development
of a system wide institute for the university, if you will,
around an important topic like this one for us.
Some of you are aware, we're in the process
of hiring the second executive director.
Roberto Lenton will be stepping down
out of that position by his choice.
As soon as we get that new person in place
and we're in the final stages of making that decision.
The Rural Futures Institute,
one a couple of years later in development
behind Water for Food,
but on this rural security side, if you will.
So the standing up of these two
big system-wide institutes has been
a big part of that last five years.
Of course, the Institute of Ag and Natural Resources
is tightly tied to.
The Foundation, philanthropically.
Now I mentioned in the research side
that we had increased the expenditures
coming from private support,
or based upon private support
when you saw that graph.
There's a tremendous amount more
that has been behind our increase
in philanthropy entering that five years.
Roughly 140 million dollars
donated to the institute in some shape or form
over that period of time.
That is a huge number.
i don't know if you understand how big that number is.
When you think about where we're coming from.
Some of those are big gifts.
You have the 50 million dollar
Daugherty gift in Water for Food.
You have the 20 million dollar
gift in Engler in that group,
but there are a lot of other gifts
beyond those that make up
that total of 140 million.
You will see some new faces on this slide.
Ann Bruntz, who you have all known for a long time.
Ann's been our development director
at the University of Nebraska Foundation
for the last number of years.
Ann is retiring this year.
She tells me it's March.
I'm guessing it will be somewhere in that time frame,
but she is retiring after a long amount
of service to the institute.
I would like to get you to give her
a round of applause.
She's not here today, but give her a round of applause
because she's been a big part
of that 140 million dollars. (applause)
Josh Egley came on a couple of years ago now
to join Ann in our efforts for IANR.
He is now been promoted
to the Senior Development Director
for the Foundation for IANR.
And he was given the opportunity
to hire immediately two new development directors
to work with him and a third to come in the next year.
You can kinda begin to see the growth now
and support, if you will, at the Foundation
for growing that private giving
of the university around the institute as well.
Craig Buescher, I saw Craig come in.
Craig is one of our two new development directors.
Many of you know Craig.
A long history here in agriculture
in the state of Nebraska.
And Kristen Hassebrook.
Is Kristen here?
Yeah, Craig why don't you stand up,
so everybody can see you.
Craig Buescher, we'll welcome. (applause)
Kristen Hassebrook, who comes to us
from the Nebraska Cattlemen, most recently.
Kristen has a background in law.
Is a graduate of our College of Law here
and was representing the cattlemen
in terms of legislative affairs relative to environment
in particular in that most recent position.
So we're very pleased to have them joining us.
We've talked a lot about these endowed chairs.
And the importance of endowed chairs moving forward.
We set the goal of having 25 of them by 2025.
We're at 13 currently.
I highlighted the red ones there
that are the ones that we will be filling,
that don't have a person in them at this point,
or will be a change in the Water for Food
case with Dr. Lenton.
So those are ones that are currently in play
in the immediate near term ahead of us.
And we have a number that we hope to add.
Facility improvements.
I've summarized these a lot for you
in the last couple of All Hands meetings.
Rolls up to a total of 382 million dollars,
across the state.
A lot of that here on campus,
a lot of that at Innovation Campus
that makes up those totals, if you will,
of the facilities improvements.
I've been joking with folks
that the cranes were heavy downtown for a long time.
We're going to see the cranes heavy out here for a while.
Which is a really cool thing to experience
and to be able to see that kind of transformation
that will be happening to our campus
that's already started with the two major
building projects that are underway.
The Heuermann Lecture was an addition
in the last five years.
This is personally one I'm very happy about.
Both because of the support
that the Heuermann family has provided
to make that lecture happen,
as well as the community gathering that it does
for us in the institute.
That was one of our 2025 planks,
talking about how do we pull the community
of the institute together.
And this was the way we've done that.
The next one we have tomorrow night,
with Clayton Yeutter and Darci Vetter,
focused on trade in particular,
the Trans-Pacific Trade Agreement
that's currently part of the political landscape
out there that has a lot of implications for agriculture.
And we haven't announced it,
but we will tomorrow night,
the other Heuermann lecturer will be April the 26th
jointly with the Water for Food Conference
and it will Dr. Sally Rockey,
who some of you met when she was
a candidate for the presidency position here last year.
Formerly a head of extramural programs for NIH,
and is now the Executive Director
of the Foundation for Food and Ag Research
that was stood up by the farm bill this past year,
so we'll be very excited to have Sally joining us in April.
Extension, last five years.
A lot of change in Extension.
Probably the most visible change
is the one that's occurring currently.
I think you'll agree with me, Dean Hibberd, on that.
Related to the development of issue teams
and the thinking about how to do that,
and to operationalize those issue teams,
which I know is kinda where Extension
is currently in developing those.
A lot of background went into,
as we talked about in the fall.
They had the idea of these issues teams,
a lot of feedback externally to help us think about that.
And as you can see,
we're rapidly on our way to the
operationalizing those issue teams this spring.
Extension has continued its strong presence
in youth development.
I don't have a slide in here specifically for 4-H,
but we continue to be one of the leading
4-H states in the country.
And we also have added this kind of element
of things like Raising Nebraska.
That is an element for not just 4-H students,
but for youth across the state,
and for adults across the state
relative to agriculture at the state fair
and the use of that facility.
You'll remember a year ago
that exhibit in its first year was awarded
a big international award in fairs and exhibitions
for agriculture in particular.
This year it received a second award
just in the last few months of the fall,
for the outdoor portion of that exhibit
that was developed and opened
in the shape of the state of Nebraska.
A lot of our faculty were involved
in the design and planning and development of that,
and that was part of the state fair this past year.
You can see that picture of that
in the top right of the slide.
Science literacy was an important part
of that 2025 process.
We've come a long way in the
operationalizing the faculty in that group
as one of the six emphasis areas
that we've hired new faculty into.
And quite pleased about where we sit
on that effort as well.
We also have become quite active
nationally in the STEM effort.
You see a picture here relative again
to the fair and exhibit at the fair
from this group this past year.
In STEM for food and ag, in particular.
And we're now an integral part
of the Ag STEM and Food Council at the national level,
that the university is one of just a few universities
that are helping to lead that group.
And then lastly, global engagement.
This has multiple frames to it.
I think oftentimes when I talk to people
across the campus, not just in IANR,
but across the UNL campus generally,
oftentimes people conflate international
engagement with study abroad.
And that's the way they think of
when we say international engagement.
That's where it kinda stops for them.
We're talking about global engagement
at a comprehensive level here.
We're talking about study abroad
as an important part of global engagement.
We're talking about international student development here
as an important part of global engagement.
And we're certainly talking about research
and engagement outside of the student experience as well,
of our university and of our faculty.
And, oh by the way, we've begun talking about
internationalization of Extension.
And where Extension will fit into these efforts.
So we've been very pleased about
how these have developed.
Many of these things on this map
are centered around the Water for Food Institute.
I'll be very honest about that as well as in early childhood
that we'll talk about here in a few minutes.
So there's these big new relationships
that are broad in terms of the research
and their engagement and how we go about doing that.
Things we highlighted in the fall and I'll come back
and talk about in the last half of the talk,
more in the next five years.
Particularly development of partnership degree programs,
two plus twos or three plus ones,
I'll define that a little bit better for you here relative
to food science in talking about the next five years.
And the start of a big new program around Rwanda.
And I'll come back as well and talk about
relative to the next five years.
So this is a little different mindset than we've had before,
and we're trying to really
operationalize it at a high level.
Research growth.
I'm not gonna go into these in depth.
And this isn't an all-inclusive list.
There's probably some people that will look at this
and say where am I on this list?
It's not an all-inclusive list.
But we have invested significantly
in research infrastructure in the last five years.
We have a lot of investment left to do
in research infrastructure in the next five,
but we've tried to strategically think
about where we need to make these dollars work,
where the biggest opportunities are,
and we're going to continue doing that
in terms of investing in the future,
as you'll see in some of the later slides.
Now to kinda bridge to talking about the next five years.
I've got two slides in here
that are meant to convey a message,
so I'm gonna try to paint the message for you
and then let you look at the slides.
One of the things that I've always respected
about the University of Nebraska,
I respected it before I became a graduate student here,
I respected it when I was a graduate student here,
and I've respected it in the years since,
is that we are a balanced institution.
That we have a three part mission as a land-grant university
that is balanced between instruction and teaching,
both at the graduate and undergraduate levels,
and balance there, in terms of research,
both basic and applied,
and in terms of outreach and engagement of what we do.
Not only in the state of Nebraska,
but even beyond the state of Nebraska.
And that balance is not only in the tri-part mission,
it's also across the fields that are important to us.
I know we often kinda get in pulls and tugs
about whether this program's getting more funding
than that program's getting,
or whether priorities are perfectly matched or not,
but this is a really balanced place,
and I'm really proud of that.
And that's something we have to make sure
we keep that balance in as we move forward,
because there are a lot of drivers out there
that might drive us to not keep that balance
or to go too far in one direction or too far in another.
And hopefully this collage of a couple pages of pictures
shows you a little bit of that.
Both a disciplinary balance,
both mission balance,
both types of research and engagement balance that we do.
Moving into this next five years I would say that
that's an area that we want to make sure
we pay attention to and we keep focus on as well,
but I'm very proud of that.
And I think you hear that from people
about the University of Nebraska
when you go out and you talk to peer institutions.
That's one of the things that they see as a hallmark
of this institution that we should be very proud of.
Okay, so great last five years behind us.
Now I want to spend the next 20 or 25 minutes
giving you some thoughts about where
I think our challenges will be in the next five.
And remember that we're talking about 15 years here.
So we finished five, these are the next five
we're going to talk about,
and there are five beyond that in the 2025 plan,
if you will, that lies ahead of us.
Enrollment.
We talked about how significant
enrollment increases have been for us.
How successful we have been in this part
of the university in enrollment growth.
Driven all by the right reasons.
These are some of the numbers
that I think we need to pay attention to.
If we are a 30,000 student campus at UNL,
in some year in the future, and 15% of that is us,
remember that metric I mentioned to you before,
I have some mathematicians in here,
that's about 4500 students.
We're at about 3500 students today
when you roll the program together.
So there's growth opportunity of about
a thousand students there that I believe is real,
is viable, can be done, and can be supported,
if we are smart in how we do that.
So in the next five years I'd like to see us
increase our undergraduate enrollment
by five to 600 additional students
beyond where we are today.
I talked in the fall about one of my pet peeves
at the university currently and I'm finding
this out across the campus,
it's not a pet peeve on any one part of the campus,
is that we have not emphasized
graduate student recruitment enough.
And we have not emphasized increase
in graduate student recruitment enough.
The discussion's been too much a generic 5,000 students
and not enough about who those 5,000 students are,
what they're going to be made up of,
where they need to be,
where the greatest needs are.
And in my mind, graduate students
have to be a significant part of that.
And we've got to start figuring out how to resource that
in order to help make that happen.
So you see a number of a couple a hundred
additional graduate students over the 680
that we have today, 660 excuse me, that we have today.
And I think that's a significant goal for us.
I think we also need to reflect
that we should increase our non-resident enrollment.
And this isn't meant as,
this is not a business practice point,
this is a student population point.
So this isn't saying, I think we need to have 10% more
non-resident students because they bring
more dollars to the university.
That's not what I'm suggesting here.
I'm suggesting that we need about 10%
more non-resident students for the demographic
of our student population to be
more optimized than where it is today,
for our students as well as for the university,
in order to make up that right mix.
And you can see some of that
is from international students,
some of that is from non-international
or domestic students.
And you can see where I'd like to see those numbers go.
I showed you this slide in the fall
relative to the graduate student numbers.
These are our actual numbers in various
graduate programs in CASNR currently.
I don't have those that would be
in our partner programs in CEHS included there,
but we do have a number of those in the institute
that work with graduate students that impact our programs.
So just in simple math in CASNR, a couple
of hundred students is not an unrealistic goal here.
As long as we figure out the financial model
for how to help 'em make that happen.
Graduation rates.
You saw this number earlier, I'm not changing it.
75 to 82% is where we need to head.
So that's not an insignificant increase
in six year graduation rates from our campus.
We have to look at every opportunity for how we can do that,
including what the obstacles are
to our students being able to matriculate
in less than six years of time,
preferably in four years of time.
And we need to look internally at ourselves in CASNR,
as well as the rest of the university
in how we go about increasing that number.
Faculty success.
We have hired as I said, a tremendous cohort of new faculty.
And we will continue with the remainder
of those new faculty that we're bringing in
through the next year as well as
as we have new faculty come on board
over the next five years,
obviously from those who retire
or leave us in positions that come open
over the years out ahead of us.
We have to be assured that we are
successful with those new faculty.
And the one thing that I worry about
more than any other single thing
is that we have tried to bring in new faculty,
hired them into emphasis areas,
remember the five that became six
emphasis priority areas for the institute,
and we're wanting them to work as teams in a culture
that isn't always perfectly designed for that to happen.
We all know that.
The academy is not perfectly designed to allow you
to finger yourselves out, your network out,
beyond your discipline directly.
So that's an area we have to pay careful attention to,
including whether we need to think about that
in our P and T evaluation system,
and whether that's properly recognized
and rewarded and supported
for these new faculty that we have hired.
Endowed chairs.
We have 13, I'd like to go to 25.
I think we should get at least halfway there
in the next five years if not more.
And while the emphasis in the previous endowed chairs
has been mostly in the food area,
mostly in the plant sciences area,
the next big wave of these positions
needs to be in the, all things spoken, animal world.
Whether that's grassland studies,
whether that's animal science,
whether that's vet science,
whether that's natural resources,
and environmental sciences.
So those are the areas that likely will receive
that next emphasis in these next five years.
Faculty success and recognition.
Remember one of those UNL goals
is to increase the stature and recognition
of our faculty that make up the university.
Two of the three members
of the National Academy of Sciences,
who are on our faculty are IANR faculty members.
Both of them happen to be in the audience here today.
I saw both of them walk in.
We need to have five, at least five,
members of the National Academy of Sciences.
That is a big hill to climb.
To get from one to two is a big hill to climb,
to get from two to three, or three to five,
is a huge hill to climb considering
most of those members of the academy
are very accomplished senior light members of their career.
The three I should tell you who are here,
Jim Van Etten is here, Brian Larkins is here today,
and Joe Francisco, our Dean
of the College of Arts and Sciences, is the most recent
addition to our members of the National Academy
when he joined us going on two years ago.
So that's a big goal.
I was extremely pleased, as you saw the press,
earlier this fall about AAAS,
where we had eight new AAAS Fellows
to be inducted this year.
That adds to the 18 that Nebraska had before that time.
So you can see the big jump, if you will, in one given year.
That's across all of the system, Med Center,
all of the campuses the University of Nebraska collectively.
And a big chunk of those, 11 of those,
are members of the faculty of IANR.
Big chuck of the members of AAAS Fellows,
so increasing the stature of our faculty
is also equally important.
Increasing research expenditures by 50%.
If we were at 125 million in 2014,
well think like I said before,
we'll be at 136, 137 this year
when we close the books in 2015.
You can do the math.
That's a significant number.
I don't think that's an unrealistic number.
I think we're going to see that organically happen
as the faculty that we have in place
are going to increase those research expenditures.
And it's going to be not in all
of just the key areas that we've talked about traditionally,
it'll be in a broad range of areas I predict
as we look forward.
Leveraging the institutes.
There are now four of these institutes system wide.
The Buffett Early Childhood Institute,
the Water for Food Institute,
the Rural Futures Institute,
and the National Strategic Research Institute.
The Institute of Ag and Natural Resources
needs to be a key part of all of those.
We obviously are already the underpinning
for two of these very heavily.
Buffett Early Childhood, you see the picture
of Dean Kostelnik there in the fall,
announcing a big elevation, if you will,
of early childhood at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
And they're a key part of the
Buffett Early Childhood Institute,
the leader of that institute I would say currently.
We need to continue building that program.
And then NSRI, which is this defense related,
Department of Defense related,
related to the UARC that we started
at the university system a couple of years ago,
is one that really is still just getting off the ground.
I'm spending the brunt of the day tomorrow at STRATCOM,
visiting with the leadership at STRATCOM,
with our leadership from the university
about how we continue to build this cell.
And as you think about what they want us
to focus on at the University of Nebraska,
which has this big acronym, WMD, attached to it,
which is a term I really hate, but it's there.
Weapons of mass destruction, that's tied to it.
We have a role to play in that.
A big role to play in that relative
to the biological side of that piece.
We continue to hear from NSRI.
As I've listened to this discussion
over the last nine months,
we continue to hear from them
that a key part of what the Defense Department
is interested in is stabilization of agriculture
and food systems in various parts of the world
that they are considering is unstable.
That's one of the big challenges
the Department of Defense is concerned about,
not the Department of Agriculture,
but the Department of Defense.
So tying into these institutes
and working very effectively with them
in the next five years as they go to their next level,
if you will, will be a key element for us.
Tying the system together.
You've all heard our new president
talk about tying the University of Nebraska
system more tightly together.
I think he's got a lot of good thought
in that way that we'll have to change
and be more a part of from the university moving forward.
How we tie to UNMC in the life sciences.
Folks, I will tell you, I know this is on tape,
but I'm gonna say it anyway,
we would not be in the position
of not being in the AAU
if we weren't set up the way we are set up
today between UNMC and UNL.
That would not have been an issue for us.
So figuring out a way for these two campuses
to do more of this is critically important
as we move forward.
We've got a lot of good starts on that,
and including in IANR,
some significant good starts on that,
but we have to do more.
UNO and UNMC, in particular in engineering and NSRI
that I've just talked about,
and then obviously BSE from our perspective in engineering.
And then UNK.
We often dismiss UNK as not relevant to us,
but I would wager to you that they are relevant to us.
We should be thinking about two plus two programs with UNK.
And UNK is very interested in talking to UNL
about two plus two programs.
How do we put engineering together
between those two campuses?
Oh by the way, how do we put ag and natural resources
together between those two campuses?
Because there is an opportunity there
that we haven't explored fully,
but we need to think about how we might do that.
I had the GUT function highlighted there,
you'll understand why here in the next few slides.
Global engagement.
This is a reiteration, if you will,
of the slide I showed you earlier.
On this case, the external side.
The next slide will be on the internal side,
but it's got some metrics in here
relative to what what we've already started.
So we have a new program in food science,
three plus one program,
where three years of that program is delivered
at Northwest Ag & Forestry University in China,
our major partner there.
The last year is here at the University Nebraska-Lincoln,
for a four year joint degree
from the two institutions in food science.
This is the first year cohort of those students.
There's 61 students I believe engaged
and enrolled in that program.
Where three years from now we'll see
those students come to Lincoln.
Our faculty will teach the third year
of that program on site in Yangling
at Northwest Ag & Forestry University.
So it's a shared two and two, if you will,
delivered program and it uses the same curriculum.
Our curriculum is being used in delivering that.
I think we need at least two more
of those kinds of programs out there in the institute.
Not necessarily in food science,
but we need at least two more joint degree programs
that I think we should develop in the next five years.
The Rwandan program, first semester,
finished successfully last fall.
We had our first seven students enrolled in that program.
We are now in the process of recruiting
the next cohort of students, where we expect
to admit 50 of those students to come in the fall.
And Josh Davis told me the other day,
a couple of days ago last week,
that they have over 500 applications
for that program.
So it tells you a little bit about,
something about the need for and demand for that program.
Fully funded by a private foundation.
Fully funding and paying for the full cost of education
for these students for a full four year degree
in applied ag science.
So a total of 200 students we expect to matriculate
through that program in the next four years,
next five years of time.
Very excited about that.
And expansion of that into the graduate program,
that is another plank of that on a much smaller scale,
but still tied to that effort.
Robust research partnerships in countries
where we have started these already.
I have the University of Sao Paulo at ESALQ in Brazil,
shown as one of those here in the slide,
where we have the nascent starts of those,
now we need to fully develop them
and make them come off the ground, if you will.
Routine culture of this comprehensive
approach to global engagement.
And then the last one down here is the one
I draw your attention to that is tied to enrollment.
Where we should be doubling
our international enrollment.
That goal is not going to be hard to meet
when you add the number of students
in these partnership degree programs,
and the undergraduate side, we're already there largely.
So that goal might ought to be four instead of two,
but it's doubling of the international enrollment,
and I would add to that a tripling
of our study abroad efforts.
The number of students who end up having matriculated
with a full study abroad experience out of our college.
Completing infrastructure, campus facilities.
This is the list at the top that is already
underway in some way, shape, or form,
either under construction or about to go to construction.
The one that's about 2/3 of the way down,
the NCTA Men's Dormitory is in renovation,
that we're hopeful to be able to do in the next year.
And then there are a couple of new ones on here.
And these are campus developments.
I'll talk about off-campus here in a moment,
but on campus at UNL, the Ruth Staples facility
that you're all familiar with here on East Campus,
CEHS is looking hard at how to develop
the next generation of that facility,
at perhaps a different location on campus
then it's located currently.
So early thinking, if you will, about how to do that
and build a new facility for that important program,
tied to a nature learning classroom
that's been a part of and interest to the school
of natural resources for some time.
And you can think about the juxtaposition, if you will,
of facility to Hardin Hall and how that might tie together.
So that's a relatively new development.
And then we're thinking a lot about greenhouse capacity.
Sure we have two nice, gee-whiz, bang,
big fancy greenhouses at Innovation Campus,
but we have a whole row of greenhouses
here on this campus that are probably needing work,
and needing support developed to them.
So that will be a big part of what
we think about in this next five years.
The legislative session.
The unicameral of the legislature,
usually I talk about them a lot in this presentation.
I'm not doing that today necessarily except for this slide.
Because our big emphasis in the unicameral this session,
short session, 60 days that they have
between now and mid-March to do all of their business,
non-budget setting year.
We are approaching them with a capital needs request
by the University of Nebraska system.
It's summarized here on this slide.
I've highlighted the UNL portion of that,
and the facilities that are targeted at UNL as part of that.
A lot of you will be familiar with the term LB 605,
which was the last legislation
that enabled us to do deferred maintenance
and to address projects like we did with Keim Hall,
you'll remember a number of years ago,
like we did with the HVAC system in animal science,
Larry Berger several years ago.
So funds that the state sets aside.
They've been setting aside 11 million dollars a year
for that deferred maintenance
initiative across the university.
And the university had been contributing
11 million dollars a year, so 22 million dollars
that was put against bond financing
for capital renovation and renewal projects.
This proposal would double that commitment.
So the university would now be putting in
22 million dollars a year,
and the state would be putting in 22 million dollars a year
out over the decade ahead
to give us a total of about 400 million dollars
in bond proceeds to work with against new renovations.
The downside of that?
While it's not a big percentage
of our base budget from the state,
you can see that it's less than 2% of our base budget,
the downside is that it would require
the university to raise tuition.
And that's the other side of this sword,
if you will, or the equation here.
So it goes forward with a 1% increase
in tuition for each of the next four years
in order to fund that additional university
investment into these facilities.
That's the list.
The top two are the engineering complex
downtown on City Campus.
The food industry facility is that first floor
of the Food Industry Complex,
form our pilot plants for a classroom center.
We feel very strongly that that will be funded.
Mabel Lee and Henzlik Halls on City Campus,
the home of CEHS has long been slated for renovation.
Marjorie just is anxious to see what they're
going to do with the swimming pool in that facility.
The CBA facility is the old CBA building.
We obviously are building a new CBA building on campus.
The existing College of Business Administration
would be converted in portion to
instructional needs for the campus,
in particular on the first floor of that building
and some funds for that.
Manter Hall, some additional funding
for Manter and Hamilton Halls as well.
So we're excited about that.
This is obviously a difficult budget climate that we're in.
You've probably read the newspapers
that talk about tax receipts being down,
a pretty challenging ag economy in the state
currently over the short term, certainly ahead.
So we'll have to see what the legislature does with
this request, but it's been received very favorably so far
by both the governor and the appropriations committees.
Eastern Nebraska Research and Extension Center,
I mentioned earlier, last fall about this,
and about the process that we're going through there
to focus on having a research and extension center
for the eastern third of Nebraska,
that would be headquartered at the
Ag Research and Development Center at Mead.
Told you about Don Adams taking on
that leadership role in a transition that he did
effective November 1st, this past fall.
And the conversations that are now being held
to be able to move that forward
and operationalize that concept
we believe by July of this year.
So this is the timeline that that is on.
It's already kicked off with a meeting later this week.
You'll see that at the top with heads and chairs
to develop the steering committee for this,
and hopefully to be at a point
where we are in an operational mode
for this new structure for eastern Nebraska
July 1st of this year.
Innovation Campus.
We have some facility to fill there yet
in the existing footprint.
So some opportunities for additional partnerships
that I've already mentioned to you we're developing.
And then in the next five years,
we certainly would expect to build out
about 240,000 square feet of additional space.
And the next 80,000 square feet of that space
is already designed and is being discussed
about moving into that design,
just north of the Greenhouse Center
as you look at that complex currently.
Hopefully tomorrow night
when you're out for the Heuermann lecture.
This is developing very nicely
and I tried to design it in a way that would reflect
to you the opportunity that we're seeing build.
The Foundation for Food and Ag Research
is a new entity, stood up by the farm bill,
on the previous farm bill,
with 300 million dollars of federal money
that went into this foundation.
Where the foundation is run externally from USDA.
I mentioned Sally Rockey who is the new
Executive Director of that group.
Operated with a board, an appointed board
of 15 people that have been assigned
to that board by the federal government
to fund public, private partnership research
in the ag and food space.
Where this is required one-to-one match
kind of public, private partnership.
It's not the kind of thing where we
often write a grant proposal and we have
in-kind funding that we bring to that match.
This is cash match funding.
So when there is an RFA that will come out
of the Foundation For Food and Ag Research,
and if that RFA is 25 million dollars,
that will be real money where 12 of that
will have come from,
12 1/2 of that would have come from
the mandatory funding in the
Food and Ag Research Foundation,
the other 12 1/2 would come from a partner.
They would be funding that effort.
They have started their discussions in earnest
about how they plan to operationalize that funding.
And their big issues right up front
are soil health and water.
Those are the two areas that they
are talking about most consistently.
And they have engaged us in those discussions.
Roberto Lenton is the Water for Food Institute Director,
was part of that discussion,
where he was invited to be at that round table
discussing priorities on water.
So that opportunity with that foundation
is going to be we think significant,
and we think it will be significant for Innovation Campus.
The Food for Health Initiative,
that icon that you see on the left,
it's the University of Nebraska.
So that's this new system wide emphasis
that is being placed on how we fund
holistically work and food for health
across the university system.
And some of you were part
of that first workshop this past fall
that was held to discuss that,
being driven by Provost Fritz's office in Varner Hall.
And then the Food Factory of the Future icon on the right
is being driven out of the College of Engineering,
here at UNL.
And looking at how we tie
to that food innovation center,
to re-engineer food manufacturing, if you will,
above and beyond the Alliance for Advanced Food Sanitation
that we talked about.
Some 51 companies who now are engaged
in that discussion with us, where FFAR,
the foundation here, may be part of that,
but even more importantly, the Department of Commerce
is very interested in these kinds of innovation institutes
where we're headed really with that discussion,
if you will, on the engineering side.
So I don't know, you might call this cheesy.
But this is kinda the way I think about it.
Is there is no reason that Nebraska Innovation Campus
shouldn't be the Silicon Valley for this.
I know that sounds like a long way
from where we are today,
but that's the vision we should have.
We should be thinking about Innovation Campus
being the Silicon Valley for food, fuel, and water.
And attracting those kinds of relationships that are there.
And I hope we'll see that happen,
that we'll see that synergy begin to happen.
Don't fall out of your chair, Craig,
as the new guy in the room here,
but I believe we should raise 200 million dollars
in the next five years.
We raised 140 million in a campaign
that was well designed by the University Foundation.
I think we should raise 200 million in the next five years.
And I think we'll see that happen
to support our IANR programs.
A lot of that will be building money.
I'll just be real candid with you,
it'll be built around infrastructure and buildings
to support our efforts.
We should increase our total rolled up budget
of the institute by 100 million dollars.
That sounds like a big goal,
but organically that will happen somewhat on its own.
It will happen somewhat based on the research
growth that we talked about earlier.
It will happen somewhat on the enrollment
growth we talked about earlier,
and it'll happen somewhat on the philanthropy
and public, private partnership arena
that I talked about earlier.
So these things are additive and they add to that base
and I expect we will see that happen as well.
Those allocation of new resources though
are going to be a little different
than they've been in the last five years.
This is my crystal ball.
We've invested in people the last five years.
We've invested largely in people and faculty,
tenure track faculty in the last five years.
The next five years we're going to need
to invest heavily in our staff.
We're going to need to assure
that we have our staff optimized
to meet the needs that are out there for us long term.
We've just begun to look at that to be real honest.
We haven't studied that at the level
that we need to, unit by unit,
to know what our staff needs need to be moving forward.
And we're gonna have to figure out a way
to invest more in graduate students.
Invest more in the needs to support graduate students
than the traditional model of going out
and finding external dollars before you bring a student.
We've got to have some level of base support
that is greater around what we do
than just relying on all of it to be external
to support those increased numbers
of graduate students that are there,
both on the research side and on the teaching side as well.
We will continue to have added infrastructure growth.
I've already mentioned some of that to you,
what's out there ahead of us in the next five years
to get that to where it needs to be overall.
And I think I've mentioned to you in the past
that there are additional gifts that we expect
to be coming to the institute.
Some of which may occur in this five year period
that will add infrastructure to us as well,
and add capacity for us out across the state.
We can't just talk a global engagement walk,
we also have to fund a global engagement walk.
'Cause this doesn't come free.
And so in order to do the kinds of things
that I laid out to you on the global engagement side,
there's going to need to be some dedicated resources
that come out of that growth, in budget, if you will,
that will help to fund some of those efforts.
I mentioned staff.
You've heard me talk about in the last couple
of All Hands meetings, the Inspire program
and the HR Management program
that our staff in business and personnel in finance
have put together and are launching
the next phase of that as annual evaluations,
to change the annual evaluation process, if you will,
for our staff and to make that a part
of our culture as we move forward.
So they're in the process of doing that.
And I'd look forward to seeing that happen.
Now I'm gonna make a couple of closing comments here.
One of the things that you have to be
real careful of in any organization
is to understand how you got where you are,
what the leaders that came before you did
and how that happened.
And we've been very successful
to have some really great leaders at this institution.
Here's a map of East Campus in the late 1800s.
There's your master plan,
the most recent one of East Campus,
for the years out ahead.
So at the campus level we've had some very good leadership.
We have to think about sustaining that leadership.
We have to think about who those people
are going to be in the future.
And how we develop those people in the future.
And thinking about where they're going to be.
In the next five years we're going to see
some change in leadership, undoubtedly.
I can't tell you what all of that will be.
I can't tell you who those people will be.
I know who a couple of 'em are going to be,
just because of their plans
and where they are themselves,
but there's a succession chain here
that we need to think very carefully about
and have the right leaders in place,
all the way down into the centers
and the institutes and the departments,
long term for us to be successful.
So we need to pay attention to that as we move forward.
So we can continue that building to happen,
to build on what we have laid out before us.
And I'm gonna close with this slide.
Some of you will recognize this sculpture.
It's called The Thinker, for obvious reasons.
It's been copied all over the world.
You see it in lots of different places,
in plazas in the world.
There's some big thinking we have to do, too.
And we have to ask ourselves the questions
as we keep going forward, it's really,
see if I can phrase it this way for you.
It's really easy to get locked into your step.
Everybody know what I mean by that?
You get your head down, you get locked into your step,
and you just march down the road,
and you hope that everything's
going to stay right in that road.
And it's easy to put the blinders on
and not see what's on the sides of the road.
And we can't do that.
We have to continue thinking about
the world that's changing around us.
We have to continue thinking about
how the plans we have fit or don't fit.
And so there's things like,
are we in all of the areas that we need to be?
Focus is important, but are we
in all of the areas we need to be in?
Should we be doing more outside
of mainstream in conventional agriculture?
It's a valid question.
Should we be doing more in local food production?
Should we doing more in the environmental sciences?
Those are valid questions that we need
to continue asking ourselves as we go down this road.
And so we got to keep our thinking cap on, if you will,
and not get locked into thinking
it just will be exactly this way as we move forward.
One of the things that has,
this is a really controversial one,
especially when I get ready to talk
to the Ag Builders of Nebraska on Wednesday,
but one of the things that has puzzled me
for a long time is this acronym IANR.
And I feel very deeply about that acronym.
I think you all know that.
But that acronym is not a very inclusive one.
If you think about what that acronym spells,
it spells the Institute of Ag and Natural Resources.
It does not talk about human sciences.
It does not talk about environmental sciences,
directly at least.
That's a big thought.
I sit and scratch my head all the time.
I would sit on a plane like I did the other day
and I'll try to come up with another acronym
that hopefully will form some word.
But you know, those are things that
we need to keep our thinking cap on about.
Does our name reflect who we are?
Our name is very precious to a lot of people, including me.
It's very precious to a lot of people,
but that's a valid question we need
to put in our thinking cap
and scratch our head a little bit about.
We need to scratch our head a little bit
about over the next five years,
of you know we have one college academically,
the College of Ag Sciences and Natural Resources.
And we have a partner college in
research and graduate education and extension
in the College of Education and Human Sciences.
And we have it's now a partnership here
in this particular way and another partnership here
in this 'nother particular way,
with maybe a college of arts and sciences,
or maybe a college of engineering,
or you fill in the blank, you get the idea.
Kind of more of one-on-one smaller partnerships.
But is that really the right way
to think about moving every area forward?
I've scratched my head and thought about,
should we have a College of Environmental Sciences
at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln?
It's a valid question.
It's often raised to me,
my colleagues in the school of natural resources.
And some of 'em are grinning,
looking at me when I say that,
but it's often raised as a question.
I don't know the answer to that
perfectly today where I sit,
but we need to continue thinking
about those kinds of questions
and whether we're structured right,
whether we're going down the right road.
So that's the meaning of the The Thinker here,
is that we can't not continue to scratch our heads.
We can't just think the number is already decided
or the goal is already decided
and we've got that locked in
and we can't continue thinking about
what we need to bring to the table.
With that, I'll close with where I started,
that the goal that we started out with in 2011,
11 All Hands meetings ago,
may not have been stated exactly this way,
but that's the goal.
Is to be the very best public university
that we can possibly be in the world
in serving the needs of food, agriculture,
natural resources, environment,
and rural and human security.
So those are big words.
And it's a big mission.
And I think we've accomplished a lot in getting there.
I look forward to the next five years
and what we're going to see accomplished as we move forward.
And I'll just close with saying,
what will they say, whoever is sitting in the room,
probably won't be me,
but what will they say in 2021
about where we got to in IANR?
Five years from now what will they say
in that All Hands meeting?
I think it's gonna be a pretty cool story.
So I'll close with that and see if there
are questions that you might have
or dialogue we might want to have.
I almost made it, Jill you won.
(audience laughs and applauds)
So I know we can take questions online
and Jill's following that online,
here in the audience as well,
so any question you'd like to ask
or comment you'd like to make,
or feedback you'd like to provide.
Oh, come on, surely.
Yep, Paul.
Voiceover: I applaud the idea of pursuit
of more graduate student support.
We build on our reputations,
well many of us, on what our grad students
have done, they've lifted us up.
And to make that really,
it will be an important component
of the big picture you've just described.
-: Paul Reed's comments,
some of you may not have heard the first part of it,
was around the graduate student plank
that I talked about and the importance of that,
building that in the future.
And I don't want you to,
I don't want to over simplify that.
It's easy to say we just need more money.
And we need to figure out a way
to support graduate students,
and we need to have more central resources
to put into that pool to support graduate students.
It's not a simple solution.
It's not one answer to that.
External funds are important.
I didn't mean to say they weren't earlier.
They are a big part of that.
But there are all kinds of different external funds.
And we're seeing those external funds
diversify more at the moment
than we've seen them diversify in the past.
Where they're coming from,
what they're interested in supporting because
these challenges are changing that are out there.
It's not just USDA anymore.
It's much broader than that at the federal level.
It's much broader than that at the industry level.
It's much broader than that at the private level.
And then we do have to figure out something
at the University of Nebraska about central.
We do have to figure out how we put
more of our central resources into those pools
to seed and support some of those areas as well.
So far we've done it mostly with private money.
So where you've seen graduate student growth happen.
I'll use the plant sciences as an example.
Private industry support with foundation support
that's allowed us to support graduate students
that we weren't able to support before.
So it's been private money.
We've got to figure out how we use
some of our additional funds, you know public monies,
to go into that as well.
That was my point at the end about allocating
those new resources as they do become available.
Where are those directionally?
We'll need to make those hard decisions as we move forward.
Yep, Mike.
Voiceover: How do you coordinate
the infrastructure and resources
that are needed to support the growth?
I'm talking offices, laboratories,
research and teaching classroom space,
and student living quarters.
-: Yep.
I don't mean to put the fear into you,
but I spend a lot of time in meetings now
thinking about next fall, at the campus level,
and really good news, the really good news
is we are significantly up in admits,
we are significantly up in deposits.
And if all tracks according to what we expect it to,
based on where we are this time this year,
we'll be up four to 500 freshman students next fall.
Campus wide.
Now, there's a lot of time between now and April,
but nonetheless, we're gonna be up
in our enrollment next fall in a significant way.
We have a problem with that because
dormitory wise and student housing wise,
we have a capacity issue there.
So Cather and Pound, right?
We've talked about Cather and Pound
are gonna be demolished for the last number of x years.
There's now a new dining facility being built
north of the new dormitories there on 17th Street
that will replace the Cather Pound dining facility.
The idea was those would come down in 2017.
We may not be able to do that.
We may actually need those facilities,
which is a really good problem to have.
But that's one example, Mike,
about how we've got to think out ahead of this capacity.
Right now we're thinking about
instructional needs for fall, of next fall,
of where we see this increased growth
in freshman students coming to,
and how are going to fund those new instructional needs?
I will say it, I've said it publicly,
I've said it to my boss,
we've got to think differently about
the revenue model on tuition
at the University of Nebraska.
We do.
We've got to think about that differently.
Now whether my next boss
will figure that out or not, I don't know.
But we've got to think differently about that
because more of those funds
have got to be put back into the instructional base,
in the growth piece at least,
where we grow that student population.
So there's a lot of big thinking there.
We've been able to,
I guess fortunately manage our growth in,
now I'm talking about IANR specifically,
over the last five years because of Innovation Campus,
to be very candid about it.
The opportunity to move food science.
That wasn't the reason we did it,
we didn't move food science because
we needed to free up East Campus.
We moved them there because
the reasons we wanted them there in partnerships,
but that result saved us
on capacity on the campus.
In the short term.
We're actually bumped up
right against the lemon, if you will,
when we finish this hiring process.
We're building a 382 student dormitory.
I thought a lot over the weekend
about whether that's enough.
That's a little bit hard to imagine.
We worked really hard to actually get one,
and get this new dormitory.
Didn't think we would.
Right, Steve?
You tell me that you thought,
you know you'd (stammers).
I won't tell 'em what you said
you'd do if the dormitory happened.
(audience laughs)
But you know it's hard to believe
that there's a crane building that dormitory
and we got to be thinking about maybe is that enough.
Do we have those sort of resources?
With that said, it has to be in relation
to all the building that's going on in Lincoln.
It's not a simple question.
There's a lot of building off the campus as well.
Just some thoughts.
Yeah, Jim.
Voiceover: In regards to the increase
in graduate enrollment,
you're probably, I'm sure you're aware
that there's this concern nationally
about are we training too many PhDs,
at least PhDs to go off and become academics,
where that market's obviously,
cannot accommodate all these.
And so there is thought about maybe
we should train people a little bit differently
so they have other options.
I don't know whether that plays
into your thoughts at all--
-: Well, I got this problem with double hats,
so I'm gonna focus on IANR here for this audience.
I don't see that as a big issue on the IANR side
'cause on the IANR side I think there is a need
for pulling forward those people
with master's and PhD degrees,
that is academic and non-academic.
There's a big pull there for those
kinds of people and their training.
At a more general level, like you point out,
at a more general level in the debate
about higher ed and graduate education
and number of doctoral candidates that are coming out,
there are certainly areas that are big concerns there.
We might touch a couple of those,
but I don't think that's the core of where we are.
We're more in a deficit area, that's my personal belief,
than we are in a surplus area for any time to come.
That becomes a problem when you think about it
at the aggregate campus level though.
How you prioritize and strategically think about
where that graduate student growth needs to be
and how you do that.
Does that make sense, Jim?
Yeah, you had another thought I can tell.
Voiceover: Well, I mean I think it's a matter
of possibly exposing students to other options
as they get their PhD.
I think that's part--
-: Right, right.
Voiceover: The circumstance we tend not to do,
at least some of us do I think.
-: Right.
Right, we think at it, you're training
the replacement of the academy, so to speak.
Other comments, Jill you didn't have anything online?
Okay, well thank you very, very much.
You've been attentive as always.
I got it down to one hour and 15 minutes.
Spring I'll get it down to one hour.
Thank you very much.
(audience applauds)