State of the University 2010 A Message from President Taylor Reveley
Dear William & Mary Community, This fall I look at the College of William & Mary with a mix of pride, concern and confidence.
Why pride?William & Mary is marvelously special. We link the intimacy of an exceptional undergraduate education in the liberal arts with the scope and energy of a university expanding human knowledge. Or, as one professor puts it, we combine the heart of a college with the brains of a research university. William & Mary, in short, is a Public Ivy. Even as we develop graduate and professional programs of serious distinction, our commitment to undergraduate education remains unsurpassed among public universities. The College has a remarkably low student-faculty ratio for a public institution and typically provides small classes and intense faculty engagement with students. We delight in being a residential campus of striking beauty and historic significance. We also value our heritage of civic engagement and public service. If any university can fairly be called the alma mater of the nation, it is William & Mary. The College constitutes a splendid, hardy species of one.
Examples of our excellence are legion. To mention a very few from last year: a Rhodes Scholar from among the 32 chosen in the United States, 13 Fulbright Scholars (the most ever for William & Mary and a remarkable number for a school our size), two faculty members among the 12 professors winning the most coveted award for faculty excellence in the Common- wealth, a strong run at a national championship in football, a senior selected by the Washington Post as “America’s Next Great Cartoonist,” another named Miss Virginia USA, national awards for our staff in fundraising and communications, and high rankings from many sources, rooted in an enormously talented and thriving campus community.
Why concern?The College’s success no longer rests on a sustainable financial foundation. At risk, accordingly, is our current excellence, as well as our capacity to move forward on the path charted by the university’s ongoing strategic planning. Virginia’s public colleges and universities face a financial cliff in fiscal year 2012, when the steep reductions in state funding of the last few years will be fully felt. More telling, a generation ago the state provided 43 percent of William & Mary’s operating budget. Today, that percentage is 14 percent and will likely drop to 12 percent next year. Nor is it realistic to assume that this trend, well established over several decades, will reverse; the Great Recession didn’t cause the decline in state support, only accelerated it. William & Mary now lives on borrowed financial time!
In my judgment, a solution to this enormous financial chal- lenge is feasible. William & Mary can build a new financial foundation resting on four interdependent pillars: (1) continued
STEPHEN SALPUKAS
JOHN HENLEY
STEPHEN SALPUKAS
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