IUPUI State of the Campus

Before I begin my official remarks, I would also like to say a word of gratitude to President Michael McRobbie, who will be retiring at the end of June 2021, before I deliver my next State of the Campus address.

During his tenure, President McRobbie has brought vision to his role as president that is firmly tied to university history and traditions at the same time as it has built a pathway to future for our institution.

Between now and next June, we will have additional opportunities to celebrate all that President McRobbie has accomplished, but I wanted to add my thanks to him in my State of the Campus Address, my official remarks about the state of the IUPUI campus.

Over the past eight months, we have been living through the pandemic together, and many of you have joined at least one of the eighteen town hall meetings for faculty, staff, and students at which I've presented over the past eight months to share COVID-19 updates.

Even so, let me recap a few major milestones on what has happened since March.

It goes without saying that the impact of all this on our budget has been enormous.

As we were preparing that budget for this academic year in June, we anticipated that our costs would be going up and our revenues would be going down.

To prepare for these changes, in June we cut budgets 5% across the board on campus. We implemented a hiring freeze and put in place restrictions on university-sponsored travel, as well as reducing other non HR related parts of our budget to stay true to our commitment of putting people first.

Additionally, in August when the semester started, the state cut our appropriation by 7.5%.

With our careful planning and management, we have been able to respond to the fiscal challenges that COVID-19 has imposed without experiencing a financial crisis.

Thanks go to Vice Chancellor Camy Broeker, school fiscal officers, deans, and directors for making the appropriate adjustments so that we could face these tremendous challenges.

As we look to the future, we will remain focused on keeping people safe, healthy, and employed, putting people first every step of the way.

As we have faced the COVID-19 crisis, we have kept our strategic priorities firmly in mind, and those priorities will serve as the basis for the rest of my address this afternoon. I will begin with student success, move to our thriving research enterprise, and close with a focus on our contributions to the city of Indianapolis, the state of Indiana and beyond.

One of those strategies was the Jaguar Check-in Telephone Campaign launched last spring.

Through that campaign, faculty and staff volunteers called 19,000 undergraduate students. We wanted to know how those students were doing and add a personal touch. One surprise for our volunteers was that 11,000 of those students actually answered their phones.

Students were surprised and grateful for the personal outreach, with volunteers helping to solve problems and connecting students to resources when needed.

We have also conducted student and employee surveys to gather feedback that we are using to refine our strategies to meet student needs.

As a result of this and the work of recruiters, advisors, and others across campus, our enrollment this fall remained relatively unchanged with 29,390 students.

Of those students, nearly 21,000—more than 71%—are taking at least one face-to-face class with 29% taking all of their classes online.

Let me add that our enrollment at IU Fort Wayne is up a remarkable 32% compared to last year. I appreciate all that Fen-Lei Chang, Ann Obergfell, and their team at IU Fort Wayne have done to continue recruiting, retaining, and providing educational opportunities for so many students in the region.

Thinking about the decline in applications, this fall we have developed the Jaguar Commitment Initiative Postcard Campaign, which will reach thousands of prospective IUPUI students. Faculty and staff members have volunteered to handwrite personal messages to these students, encouraging them to pursue higher education at IUPUI.

Of course, to qualify as a volunteer, you have to have legible handwriting!

I appreciate this creative engagement with prospective students and want to thank our Commitment Champions who are here as Red Ribbon guests this afternoon.

I would also like to extend a sincere word of thanks to our staff in Student Affairs, especially Housing and Residence Life. Your careful and considered work to keep students—and parents—informed and engaged and to promote health and safety ensured that they had the most up-to-date information so that they could the best decisions quickly.

I appreciate all that you have done to help our students stay engaged and succeed.

As we move forward, we will continue our efforts across campus to keep the doors of higher education open for as many students as possible, to stay connected with them, and to help them succeed.

Deeply connected with our efforts to help students succeed is our commitment to creating a diverse and inclusive campus where students feel like they belong.

The virus has not changed the fact that diversity and inclusion are among the core values of our campus. These values are woven into our strategic plan and guide our decision-making.

Our work towards a more diverse, inclusive, and welcoming campus is ongoing.

In fact, one of my first decisions as chancellor five years ago was to form taskforces focused on the recruitment and retention of students of Color at IUPUI. Those taskforces developed a number of recommendations, which we have worked to implement since.

This fall, more than 30% of our IUPUI student body were students of Color. I can almost hear your response. That's right, this deserves a round of applause.

In addition, we saw encouraging increases in the retention rates among our Latino students as well as our African-American students this year.

We can attribute these advances to changes such as the increase in need-based aid from zero dollars in the first year I started in my role as Executive Vice Chancellor in 2012 to more than $10 million dollars this year.

We have also enhanced our investment in recruiting and retaining faculty of Color so that students have role models who look like them.

And we have made many other changes, including developing a campus tour program in Spanish, expanding our staff in the Multicultural Center, and increasing housing stipends, among other important adjustments.

One of their most inspiring recommendations takes us back to 1969. At that time, residents of the neighborhoods where IUPUI now stands were displaced in the interest of campus expansion. In honor of the descendants of those displaced people, we have established the Through Their Eyes Scholarship. Those whose families were displaced are eligible to apply for this scholarship beginning in January.

This is our way to express gratitude and respect to those whose history is tied to our campus. We named the scholarship in honor of the IUPUI Black Student Union's 2006 Black Student Initiative, which advanced efforts to achieve racial equity and inclusion on the campus.

In addition, just last month we established the Center for Africana Studies and Culture. The center broadens the scope of the School of Liberal Arts' existing Africana Studies program through opportunities for public scholarship, professional learning, undergraduate research, and related programming.

These are vital investments in diversity, equity, and inclusion that strengthen the foundation upon which we will continue to build.

As we make changes to academic policies, procedures, practices, and traditions, in support of diversity, equity, and inclusion, our faculty are also continuing the hard work of research and teaching.

It gives me great pride that 15 out of the 37 projects to be funded by the broader Indiana University Racial Justice Research Fund were based on the IUPUI campus. I want to recognize all of our Red Ribbon guests who received that funding from the Office of the Vice President for Research. Your work in the interest of racial justice is also work in the interest of a better, safer, and more humane world for all of us.

I'm proud that many of our faculty rallied in response to the pandemic, conducting research specifically focused on COVID-19.

From early in the pandemic, the SAVI Coronavirus Data Hub, developed in our Polis Center, has served as an important resource for the state of Indiana as we have tracked the spread of the virus as well as its impact on families of Color.

In addition, the School of Informatics and Computing, in partnership with the IU School of Medicine and IU Health, helped develop faster COVID-19 diagnostic tests for healthcare workers.

The School of Engineering and Technology has continued to develop ventilator, PPE, and other innovations. Among many projects, these include pneumatic-powered ventilators, reusable face masks incorporating virus-killing copper, and protective boxes for intubation procedures that help contain virus-laden aerosols.

Our School of Social Work and School of Nursing are also addressing the pandemic, helping K-12 teachers and other school personnel who work with students struggling to cope as a result of this health crisis.

Throughout the crisis, Fairbanks School of Public Health has also been a leader. They have worked with the Indiana State Department of Health, the Marion County Public Health Department, and the Regenstrief Institute to develop predictive models to forecast COVID-19 patient impact on Indiana hospitals.

I will return a little later in my remarks to the outstanding and far-reaching work our Fairbanks School has done in response to this global health crisis.

I want to congratulate our faculty members who received COVID-19 Rapid Response grants from the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, who have joined us as Red Ribbon guests.

As much as COVID-19 has preoccupied many of us, work continues steadily across our entire research portfolio at IUPUI.

With the enrollment challenges we are facing, especially in terms of international students, I was pleased when I learned that the Office of International Affairs and the School of Liberal Arts had received a Title VI U.S. Department of Education Undergraduate International Studies and Foreign Language Grant.

The primary goal of this collaborative research project is to internationalize the first-year experience. There may be no better time than now to have received such a grant, which will allow students to continue building global skills even as global travel has become more challenging.

While we are thinking globally, we are still acting locally as our School of Education received a significant grant from the Indiana Department of Education to deliver cultural competency training and support to Indiana schools. I appreciate the fact that this grant extends our commitment to diversity and inclusion and shares it with our community partners.

Another important development in our research enterprise is our establishment of the new Institute for Integrative Artificial Intelligence led by Professor Shiaofen Fang. The institute is helping to coordinate and promote AI and AI-related research activities in areas as varied as the automotive industry, medical imaging, and law enforcement.

Now, I will move to IUPUI's third strategic priority: our contributions to the well-being of the citizens of Indianapolis, the state of Indiana, and beyond. In many different ways, IUPUI's outstanding staff, our productive faculty, and our successful students work hand-in-hand with this great community. Even in the face of the pandemic, we are continuing to build ever-stronger relationships with our community partners.

In September, we officially concluded the For All Bicentennial fundraising campaign, that benefits so many IUPUI students.  This first university-wide philanthropic campaign at Indiana University. I am proud to say that every school on the IUPUI campus surpassed its goal.

This tremendous success is due to the hard work of our gift officers, directors, and deans as well as the leadership of IU Foundation Vice President Dee Metaj. I want to congratulate these Red Ribbon guests and thank them for their good work.

The IUPUI total (with Medicine) was $2,174,080,889 dollars. I also want to thank the more than 6,800 members of the IUPUI faculty, our staff, and our retirees, who donated more than $76 million dollars to that campaign.

Your generosity has made a transformative difference in the life of our campus, especially for our students.
 

We have been successful on so many fronts—even in the face of a global pandemic—because of the leadership team on this campus. I look back and think about the chancellors that preceded me. They worked tirelessly to generate a culture that values planning, collaboration, and innovation at the same time that it encourages vision and creative risk-taking.

I have learned so much from their examples and hope that my own contributions will stand up as strongly as theirs to the scrutiny of the future.

I see leadership vision every time I meet with my Council of Deans, which includes my Cabinet, and I am grateful for this group’s sacrifice and their dedication.

As you know, we have welcomed two new deans this year, both selected after competitive national searches.

Dean of McKinney Law Karen Bravo is bringing 16 years of experience on the IUPUI faculty to her new leadership role, which she assumed on July 1.

And Dean of the School of Science John DiTusa joined us on August 1 from Louisiana State University where he had served as department chair among other leadership roles.

In addition, we will be welcoming incoming dean of the School of Liberal Arts Tami Eitle in January.

I want to extend my deep gratitude to Rob Rebein for seeing the School of Liberal Arts through this period of transition.