Previous Mission Statement
New Mission
Statement
Speakers' Commentary
Dr. Rich Becherer
Dr. Ron Cox
Dr. Debbie Ingram
Dr. Wilfred McClay
Dr. Mark Mendenhall
Dr. Gail M. Meyer
Dr. Irven Resnick
Dr. David Sachsman
Dr. James Tucker
Dr. Kim Wheetley
Dr. Michael Whittle
Review Session Summaries
September 20, 2001
September 26, 2001
A Review of UTC's Mission Statement
Michael W. Whittle
Walter M. Cline Chair of Excellence in Rehabilitation Technology
Mission statement, or vision statement?
When I was asked to help rewrite the University's mission statement, I thought, "What a monumental waste of time"! I have always presumed that a mission statement is a declaration of what an institution exists to do, and have taken the attitude that "if you don't know what you are doing, you shouldn't be here!" In those terms, UTC's mission statement would read something like "To be an excellent university". That's it - lets' all go and do something more productive!
However, in listening to my colleagues over the past two weeks, I realize that not everybody is on the same page here. We have heard some examples of really striking mission statements, that have been effective in galvanizing an organization to achieve higher goals. However, when I look at those statements, something strikes me - they are all written in the future tense, and often begin with the words "To become..." To me, this means they are not "mission statements" at all, but "vision statements". In other words they don't answer the question "What are we doing here?" but rather, the question "What would we like to become?" So the present exercise, as far as I am concerned, involves writing a "vision statement" for UTC, but calling it a "mission statement". OK - that's fine with me!
As I mentioned a moment ago, we have already heard a number of striking mission statements, of which the most memorable was certainly Honda's, "To utterly waste and destroy Yamaha!" But we have not yet heard what I think must be one of the most effective mission statements ever made. It did not refer to an industry or a university, but to a whole country. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy said, "This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth." If ever there was a statement of purpose that galvanized people to action, this was it! I imagine that the Pharaoh Khufu, around 2600 BC, must have said something like, "We will build the biggest and best pyramid ever", but unfortunately, his mission statement has been lost to history!
So what will UTC's mission statement look like? It will obviously be written in the future tense, and will probably start with the words "To become", but beyond that, I leave it to the Mission Review Committee - like David Sachsman, I am not an advertising copywriter! However, I do feel that we are likely to get a better result if one person writes a draft statement, and the other committee members polish it, rather than try to have it written by the whole committee. I am sure we are all familiar with the old joke that if a committee sat down to design a horse, it would end up with a camel!
So, having spoken a little bit about the grand strategy, I would like to address two points of detail, which I hope will contribute to UTC being the best that it can be. The two things I want to talk about are research funding and doctoral programs.
Research funding
Everyone knows that you need money to do research, and that money is much easier to come by in some academic fields than in others. In my own field, biomedical research, it is almost impossible to obtain significant funding unless you play the "grant game". Here is how it works. Using money you already have, you do a research project, including collecting and analyzing the data, but you don't publish the results. Instead, you apply for a grant to do the project. You are able, in the grant application, to say exactly what you plan to do, and what you expect to find, and even supply some sample data - because, of course, you have already done the project! The grant application is written by a professional grant-writer, with knowledge of content in your field, as well as considerable skill in knowing exactly how to get funded. You get the money, and use it to fund not the project it was written for, which has already been done, but the next one - for which you will apply for grant funding in due course. You may think I am joking, but this is exactly what happens! And it is a game which can only be played at large institutions, who are geared up to do this. Let me give you an example of the way in which "amateur" grant-writers can come unstuck. A few years ago, I applied for a grant to the National Institutes of Health, which involved collaboration with a number of other scientists in different countries. I attached copies of their emails saying they were willing to be involved. The application was turned down, not because the reviewers didn't like the proposed topic, which they did, but because I had not included proper "letters of support" from the collaborators. I was told "the project cannot be funded without actual letters of support, and the applicant should have known this"! Well, I didn't know it, and nor, apparently, did anyone in our Grants and Research Office. However, you can bet your bottom dollar that the professional grant-writers in the big research universities would not have missed having a grant funded through such an omission.
So what can we, at UTC, do about this? Well, we could strive to acquire the skills of the professional grant-writers, and some departments are certainly very successful at attracting big grants, but there is another way. We need to make better use of the funds available to us from the University of Chattanooga Foundation, and from the philanthropists in our area. Again, I speak from personal experience. When I decided I would have to leave England and come to the USA, I was actually offered four jobs on this side of the Atlantic. One of my problems in choosing which to accept was that I needed to raise about half a million dollars to build a gait analysis lab. Three of the institutions talked about the amount of help they would give me in writing grant applications. However, at UTC, Grayson Walker, who was then Dean of Health and Human Services, told me, "Don't worry - you can get that sort of money easily here, for a worthy cause! You won't even have to write a grant application!!" Those words were sweet music to my ears, and I accepted the job. Within a year, without having written a grant application, I had the money and was building my lab. One of my colleagues from Oxford, who was also a victim of Margaret Thatcher's over-zealous budget-cutting, went to the University of Vermont. Two years later, he was still writing grant applications, and failing to get them funded!
So, we have a tremendous advantage here, for attracting faculty who would rather be doing research than writing grant applications! We already exploit this advantage to some extent, but I think we can make a lot more of it. I propose that the University of Chattanooga Foundation institutes a new class of research grant, with the following characteristics: Firstly, it should be possible to receive substantial money. The present research grants available to faculty from the Foundation are limited to a few thousand dollars. I suggest that there should be no limit to the amount which can be requested, although obviously the Trustees would decide how much would actually be awarded. Secondly, these grants should be reviewed by experts in the applicant's field, at other institutions, thus giving them a true peer-review. Thirdly, I suggest that applications for these big grants could be made at any time of year, and the application cycle should be shortened, so that the money is available within a reasonable timeframe. I also think it should be possible for applications to be submitted by prospective faculty, and not just by people already on the payroll. This would be a big help in recruiting people who, if they went elsewhere, would probably earn a higher salary, but would have to spend years writing grant proposals before they could actually start doing research. Obviously, if they didn't take the job at UTC, they wouldn't get the money! I am not suggesting that this grant program should be an "easy" way to obtain funds for research. I believe that projects should be judged on their merits, and that applications should be held to the same high standards that they would have to meet in grant applications at national level. The difference is that grant applications would not be turned down for reasons of mindless bureaucracy, and that applicants would not be competing with large research institutions who are skilled at playing the "grant game"!
Doctoral programs
Moving on to Doctoral programs, we have heard it said that UTC is perhaps not ready to train PhD candidates. I will leave others to argue the pro's and con's of this one, but I want to make a point that I do not think has come across very clearly so far, and that is that not all doctoral programs are research degrees. There has been a trend, particularly in disciplines allied to medicine, to award higher and higher degrees for essentially learning the same skills. I teach students in the Physical Therapy program. This was advanced three years ago from being a bachelor's degree to being a master's degree. The nationwide trend now is to advance it further, to become a doctorate. This has already happened in several other fields: pharmacy, podiatry, optometry, osteopathy and chiropractic already award doctorates. Over half the physical therapy programs in this country are now taking active steps to award doctorates. If UTC doesn't follow suit, and quickly, we will have no students applying for the program, and we will have to close down. The discipline of occupational therapy is a year or two behind in the same process, but you can guarantee that they will go the same way. UTC must be able to award doctoral degrees, if these professional programs are to survive. But we are told that THEC does not want UTC to become a doctoral-granting university. Somebody needs to explain to them the difference between a research doctoral degree and a professional doctoral degree. You can argue about whether UTC should award research doctorates, but if we can't award professional doctorates, we are going to shrink, rather than grow, and some very competent faculty are going to be looking for other jobs!
What next?
Finally, I would like to make a request of the Chancellor. I am sure the Mission Review Committee will come up with an excellent mission statement for the University, based on their own thoughts, as well as on the input from these meetings. But I hope it does not stop there. As well as the suggestions relating directly to the mission statement, these meetings have generated dozens of ideas for ways in which the University could be improved. I hope that the Chancellor, or someone appointed by him, will have a good look at all of these ideas, to see which of them are worth pursuing, so that we not only have a great mission statement, but a great university that lives up to that statement!