Dr. Catanzaro's 2008 Convocation Address
"We're in the 'Thrive Stage'"
Courtesy of Media Services, 28-1/2 minutes
Non-verbatim Transcript
One thing I hope you got from this morning, all the talk about Volkswagen and the energy you just felt, hopefully expressed from this stage, is that we’re in a new stage of our growth and of our campus life, a brand new stage. While the city is moving on to a new world of challenge, we’re in a new world ourselves and I was serious as all get out that night, that speech and I went oh, oh. 'Cause I remember in the meeting we had, we had a 9 o’clock to about 3:30 meeting with Volkswagen people and it took the whole time really, I think, to communicate just what we could do but we had to stick our necks out pretty far. One thing that we face right from the very beginning is they understood education and education institutions from a German perspective, and in Germany you build up educational institutions over centuries and you change them at glacial speed, and we were talking about a revolution that would occur right here. That we would have to make some major changes, expansion, in a very short period of time, and it took quite a bit, a while. Didn’t it, Jim Barrott and Jeff, who were with me there, Debbie? It took quite a while for them to digest that, and understand it and believe it, and so we finally did get them to believe it. I guess we did. We left there about 3:30 or 4 o’clock, met with them again at dinner and talked to them over dinner, and they seemed to get the concept and then I got the concept. Hey, we’re going to have to deliver. We’re going to have to do things differently; we’re going to have to step up. So that’s what I want to talk to you a little bit about today, but actually this pushes us into a thrive stage.
The good news is not only are they bringing a billion dollar investment that as you probably know the state of Tennessee is making a 500 million dollar investment before it’s all over in this community, in this business venture, and when you take in the suppliers and their companies, we’re probably talking 3, 4 billion dollars just in the next 5 years. So, while the national economy has been sagging, this economy, maybe uniquely, is going to be exploding. So for all of us who own property and all of you who are smart enough to own that property in Collegedale or Ooltewah, yeah, you’re going to love Volkswagen. You’re going to love it. Lots of folks are going to come to this town needing property, but it’s going to throw us into, I think, for the first time in a long, long time, a thrive stage. Things are going to be going very well for us. Just like those core sections are filling almost automatically, and we were slugging it out over the last 5 years just to get a minimum enrollment in those core sections, to keep them alive – well, things are changing and they are going to change for the good. But, it’s going to require a lot from us and one word you’ve heard consistently this morning is this word “team”, “teamwork.” Well, we’re going to have to function as a team, and I do think, more and more, we have operated as a team, all of us, and to be a team doesn’t mean just doing what the general purpose is, you know, meeting those overall goals that are specified in our master plan and provided to SACS and others, like the Tennessee Board of Regents. It really means that each person sees himself or herself as a team member and begins to think out, just as Fannie challenged us earlier, how in the way I teach my class do I now take into account that many of these students are going to be working at Volkswagen or working at a different Middle U. than we had anticipated before. What does it mean for the way I do my job, whatever that job is admissions and records, whatever it might be, how do I do it differently because of this vast change that’s coming our way?
Well, one thing we had to convince them of is not just that we could provide the training but that we had the capability, and I hope you do appreciate that over the last 10 years or so most all that we’ve done has been to invest in building capability. You know, I see my job as having two principle functions, believe it or not, one is vision, where are we going, what are the challenges that are coming at us from over the horizon, and how can we respond to them, and the other part of the job is building up our capability. That’s why the German’s correctly see higher education institutions as developing over centuries, over long periods of time. It takes a long time to put in place the kind of faculty and staff that we have today. We have the capability. We have the senior members that anchor the faculty and staff of this institution, and we have lots of people that have joined us in the last few years that are just superb, and the combination is potent, it’s powerful and I can speak and did speak with great confidence that we would not only respond to their training needs but we would respond at the level of the excellence that they anticipate their work force to operate at. So, we’ve been developing the facilities, as well as the people, the equipment, the knowhow. I want to stop for a little bit and go back to facilities and then talk about learning objects because we’ve been working on them as well. Now, Fannie mentioned a number of facilities that are underway or will be underway on this campus but she didn’t mention a couple that I see coming at us over the horizon. One of them, which we hope will be in construction in September, as early as September, is a residence hall that’ll be built just behind CBIH on the county property, the city property, the city park. It’ll be privately built, privately managed, but it’ll serve our needs fundamentally and primarily. We anticipate that there will be 40 rooms, 30 to 40 rooms, with 3 to 4 students in each complex, and that if we fill that residence hall next year then the subsequent year they’ll be the construction of another residence hall, and if we can fill that they’ll look at possibly a third. So, that’s good news.
That’s going to change the nature of our campus as well. We’re going to have an anchor student population on this campus that I think will help us in many, many ways, student activities and learning, and it’s just going to reshape, as we’ve talked to colleges, community colleges that have built dormitories across the country, we hear the same story. It just dramatically changes the culture of the college, the nature of the institution itself. So, that’s coming our way and then out front we are talking to a private developer about building a major, major conference and training center that’ll include a hotel and that’ll serve some of these needs that we talk about for Volkswagen and for other existing industries here in terms of training. So, lots of building activity is under consideration right now. We are considering as well, the acquisition of another major facility and some of our satellite campuses, I think, will be expanded before we get back here next year. They’ll be well under way to expansion. It’s going to be quite a different Chattanooga State in the next 2 or 3 years. It’s an exciting time, indeed, and meanwhile, we’ve been doing something that I think has been really valuable to us, while we developed for the last 10 years a very sophisticated means of producing on-line courses. You know we advertise that we have 125 on-line courses and we do, but the real distinction is those are not just courses where lecture notes were turned into storyboards on the internet. They are courses with visual content, streaming media, interactive elements to them. They’re sophisticated courses and all of them have as their constituent parts, learning objects, you know, units or segments that could be lifted out of those courses and that’s what we‘ve been working on deliberately and aggressively over the last couple of years. Those learning objects, as we begin to develop a treasury or bank of those, they can be pulled down by faculty members teaching a variety of courses, and just for a variety of experiences that we want our students to have and that’s why we recently invested a lot of energy into getting into Second Life. I hope you’ll all become Second Life members and begin to think about how you can use Second Life to enrich your own courses and the activities you are involved with and, of course, our partnerships, like the partnership with Tom Edd Wilson, and the vision that we have had, and the vision we’ll have to have to propel this college forward. I hope you do understand that I made this speech since the day I got here.
This is the college, I hope,
that prizes collegiality. At the heart of collegiality is that we do
things not by virtue of coercive power, but by virtue of the power of expertise
and the power of inspiration. We want you, individually, whatever your
position is here at Chattanooga State, whatever your role is, whatever
course you teach, we want you to exercise the freedom you have to build
something unique in excellence and distinctive, and you should do it by virtue
of your expertise, and by virtue of the inspiration that you have, not because
you are commanded to do so, and I hope we all know our purpose, because that’s
the key to any team. When the team comes together and understands its purpose,
then things really happen, and purpose really comes down to important
differences that we make in the lives of students and our community. We always
talk about this. This is kind of our brand, “we transform lives.” We transform
lives through learning, we transform lives through developing emotional
intelligence, through developing skills, through a maturation process, self
understanding; that’s what we’re engaged in, that’s what our role is, and the
more we can align what we do, each of us, with this fundamental commitment, the
better off we will all be. I want to say a little bit about developing
emotional connections because one thing we’ve done over the last year, very
well, is we’ve taken on the challenge of giving everybody a little dose of
customer service training, thanks to Kym, and its gone very well, but, you know,
ultimately customer service comes down to emotional connections. I have had
very good customer service from my bank for the 18 years I’ve been here, but
almost all of it has been through an ATM, and I have no emotional connection to
that ATM. In fact, if somebody else’s ATM is nearby, I use it. I’ll pay the
dollar. Give me my money. Take my deposit, whatever.
The key to good customer service, I hope you will agree, is building emotional
connections. We want our students to be connected to us, connected to our
college, feel they’re part of this learning community, this family of learning,
feel that they’re rooted here, that they have an identity here, they have a life
here, and that they should stay here, therefore, and if we can do that, we’re
going to get past a great deal of the challenge that we face in terms of
retention. Of course, we respond to community needs. We break new paths. We
have to because not only we are a flagship institution, but we now are in an
environment where people expect us to do it. There are very few institutions
that have gone through what we’re going to go through. My good friend down at
Greenville Area Technical College, I don’t know whether you’ll like this or not,
but Tom Barton, he told me about five years ago, “Look, Jim, I’m going to
retire. I’ve had it here; 35 years of being president of this institution” and
then he got a call from BMW and they said, “No, we’re going to be doing this
expansion.” He said, “Okay,” so he stayed another five years. Well, he had to
break a lot of new paths and I need to stay and break those paths. This is good
time. I’ve got to get some payback for slugging it out for the last couple of
years and what I have, as a high priority, is building for our team, a sense of
unity. If you’re unified in purpose, if we understand our role, if we’re
committed, if we’re energized, if we love our students and our college, WOW!
We’ll handle those demanding Germans. We will be able to do exactly what they
want and more so. So, it’s clear our community believes in us. They see our
college as cruising along and doing well. They see us as ahead of the pack,
which is pretty nice. Our students experience, as we’ve talked about, uncommon
support. We are there when the need arises. One thing that Claude Ramsey
always says to these companies that come in, and fortunately only one for two
ever select coming here, is that, you know, you just tell Chattanooga State what
the needs are, they’ll do it for you - and we will, and we have. Now,
obviously change, we’re making major changes because of the rebirth of
Chattanooga as an industrial or manufacturing center, but I want us to think
about another area.
Judy Lowe and I had a very interesting summer. We got engaged with a guy named
Jerry Tacolliano(sp?), who’s a professor at University of Southern California,
and this guy, you could not call him for 5 minutes, or 10 minutes, or 15
minutes. You could only call him for 2 or 3 hours. He insisted on it. So, we
sat and listened a lot to him and sometimes it was intolerable, but, where’s
Judy? She can testify to it. I mean totally intolerable, demanding guy as he
is, but after the conversation we’d go, wow, this is good stuff. We’d better
pay attention to it, and what he told us is that he has been part of a team at
SC working on the rise of the “millennials,” who are really young people
emerging into our environment as people going to college. They are the next
generation and they act quite a bit different from us and I’ll bet you’ve
experienced this in your class already when you’ve run into them because the
first thing about them is, they’re interested in social networking. My
granddaughter, I just spent the week in Arizona with my granddaughter and my
wife, and my wife and I occasionally pulled out our computer and we connected
with the world and she, every 5 minutes, pulled out some gadget and connected
with the world, because this generation is the generation of sharing. Not just
sharing ideas, not just sharing music, but sharing themselves, and so we have to rethink our courses. We have to think about how
we teach people that want to be sharing, and if we don't start with them sharing
who they are and what their needs are, we may never get them engaged. That’s
kind of the key to this new generation, according to Jerry, and I think he's
right. Now, one thing about this generation, he says, is that we think that
there are certain experts in authority, authorities like ourselves, as
professors, or The Encyclopedia Britannica, but they think, no.
It's just whatever the collective wisdom is, whatever people accept as the case
or as true, is true, so, for example, they're far more interested in Wikipedia
than they are in Britannica. Now, that's very disconcerting, extremely so, but
Wiki's, see, are part of their world, sharing world, Britannica is not. Then,
the good side is that this is a global generation and they want to learn from
people from all over the world, not just you and me, but from others as well,
and how are they going do to it. Well, this is where Second Life comes in.
Right? This is where cyberspace comes in. We want them to engage people
anywhere in the world who might have an idea, useful and good idea, related to
our subject and, of course, sitting with that is virtual presence. While my
granddaughter sat next to me in the car for a couple of hours on Thursday, I
realized that I was present to her but other people, invisible, were present to
her as well, and, in fact, she was carrying on more of a conversation with them
than she was with me, which frustrated me, periodically I'd say, “Wait, wait,
wait, wait! I'm here.” Well, if we put all of this together, it says to us
that we teach different generations simultaneously and we have to learn how to
do that very, very hard job and it’s going to require some radical change on our
part. So, according to Jerry, there are new media coming over the horizon. We
will not have radios in the car in five years, he says. Not even satellite
radios. We'll have computers and we'll download whatever we want to listen to.
We can go anywhere in the world, not just 100 stations, but thousands, millions
of sites that we can go to, and what that says to us is that we're going to have
to use those media. We're going to have to think out how to use those media.
That’s one reason why we are selling WAWL, because it’s going to be an artifact
of the past. Old people will listen to it. The DJs themselves will listen to
themselves, but others will most likely not. So, we can get maximum dollar for
it right now and we're going to do it. Now, it suggests that new roles and new
expectations are going to be put upon us as a result, and we're going to find
ourselves, now, not just as faculty. We’ve always realized that we've had an
entertainment side to our work; that we're going to find we’re part of an
entertainment culture. One of my favorite sites is lastfm.com. What I love
about it is: you load up what you want to hear, and an automatic DJ starts
telling you about other songs that you can listen to. You've probably seen it
in Amazon.com. You go to Amazon.com and you say, I want to order the following
three books, and they say, “Wait a minute, now”. Right? Not just three,
people that order those three also order these five and once we get to the
eighth then they keep adding to it. Well, that's the way this generation
thinks and that's the way we're going to have to think in our class. We're
going to have to say, “You tell us what your interests are and we're going to
help you expand those interests.”
Well, the question is, are we ready to play as a winning team? I think we know
we can celebrate our institutional capabilities. We have the support for our
demand for excellence. We recognize and value our diversity. We have to seize
these opportunities like never before, and we have to win. One thing that we
have done in higher education over the years is we've acted like winning is a
bad word. Right? We want everybody to win. Well, we do. But we have to face
it; some people will not be hired by Volkswagen, some people will not get an "A"
in your class, some people will not graduate from this institution. I loathe the
direction that SACS is taking in stressing retention and persistence to
graduation. First and foremost should be quality of performance. Can students
perform? I do not want to stand on this stage and give degrees to people who
have not measured up. I don't want to turn over to Volkswagen people who that
can't use the English language properly, that don't have basic math skills. I'm
willing to take the heat, even from SACS, if our retention numbers and
persistence to graduation numbers are not exemplary, if I can show that our
students learning outcome numbers are exemplary. So, my challenge to you and my
challenge to myself is: nobody gets an easy "A", nobody gets a complimentary
“C", the few "C”s that are ever granted. Right? Are all these people that
good? No, they're not and I want us to step up right now to the challenge, and
I want us to use Volkswagen as the reason, and say, “Look here folks at SACS, TBR, wherever, our first obligation it to turn out a world class work force,
and, by golly, we can't do it if we compromise our standard.” We will not, I'll
support you; completely support you in taking that tough stance. Have a great
year!
Last Updated November 23, 2009