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Simon: MSU to be model university
President plans for institution to be premier land-grant by 2012
MSU President Lou Anna K. Simon said she expects MSU to be a model land-grant university for the 21st century and a leader among its peers.
And she's set a timetable to make it happen.
Simon's address Thursday in front of several hundred people opened the Sesquicentennial Academic Convocation, held to celebrate MSU's 150th anniversary.
She announced her new "Boldness by Design" initiative - a series of strategic actions that include developing a new residential college and pushing the university's National Institutes of Health research funding past the $100 million mark by 2012.
At the center of the initiative is a commitment that MSU will be recognized worldwide as the United States' leading land-grant university by 2012.
There are more than 100 land-grant universities in the nation.
"We are simply going to execute in a way that's unsurpassed in higher education," Simon said.
She also outlined plans for increased university engagement in both local and global communities.
"No region of the state can be left behind if we're going to be successful," she said. "We've got to make home work."
Strategies for strengthening involvement at the state level will be discussed in the coming months, she said, and more specific plans will be unveiled by this spring's Founder's Day speech.
MSU will be opening offices in China and South America to solidify the university's international ties, and administrators will be examining the possibility of making similar investments in other countries, she said.
The South American office will likely be in Brazil, according to an early draft of Simon's speech.
Simon has created a new position for former Acting Provost John Hudzik to help coordinate the university's international programs. Hudzik relinquished his position to Kim Wilcox on Aug. 1.
"The notion that we are an international leader in education, and we need to be proud of that and we can always do better - that is a pretty powerful statement," said Wilcox, who will be assisting Simon's initiative by working on the quality of academics at MSU and the proposed residential college in the coming months.
There were few students in attendance to hear the speech, with the exception of a row of students who were required to come as a class assignment on leadership.
MSU Trustee Melanie Foster, who attended the convocation along with Trustee Colleen McNamara and several former trustees, said she was impressed with Simon's goals.
"They're ambitious, but certainly achievable," Foster said, adding that the trustees will play a role in realizing those goals. "At our next board meeting, we're going to be spending a lot of time on this new residential college."
Simon said the purpose of the "Boldness by Design" initiative is to focus on MSU's best qualities.
"This is really an asset-positive approach, not necessarily a deficit approach that says, 'These are all these holes we need to fix,'" she said Wednesday. "There are obviously ways we need to get better, but it's building on strengths."
Laura Collins contributed to this report. Bob Darrow can be reached at darrowro@msu.edu
Published on Friday, September 9, 2005