Scholars Invitational
Fall 2007
Good afternoon! I have the pleasant task of welcoming you to the luncheon sponsored by the Scholars Invitational. So on behalf of the Chancellor of the Knoxville campus, the administration, and the faculty, I want to extend to all of you in attendance today a heartfelt welcome to the University of Tennessee. It’s great to see all of you here today.
At some point in the past it might have been difficult to deliver an uplifting message about the academic side of the campus, but that is happily and decidedly not the case at present. Great things are happening here in Knoxville, and I am here to ask all of you to join us and participate in the rising fortunes of this campus.
Today our goal is to inspire and impress you with the new face of the University of Tennessee; we aim to convince you that your son or daughter should come back and spend more time with us. I am thinking four years or so would be about the right amount of time, and I can promise you that these four years will be the best time of their lives. The reason is simple: we have so much to offer here at the University of Tennessee, and it’s not just football, Rocky Top, and Smokey. What we have here is a great institution of higher education – and it's getting better every year. Let me give you just three reasons among many that your son or daughter should consider the University of Tennessee high on their list – or highest on their list – for where they are going to spend the next four years of their lives:
1. The first reason is that we have great students, and the students we are getting are better every year. We know that they are better because of their performance in the classroom, but for those of you who doubt our judgment, you need only look at the numbers. The standardized test that most students take, the ACT, indicates that students are considerably better prepared for the rigors of university education this year than they were in the past. In 2001 the average ACT score for students entering this campus was 23.8; this year the average ACT was just a hair shy of 26. In the course of a half dozen years, therefore, ACT scores have increased by over two points, an achievement I believe to be unprecedented among first-class universities anywhere in the country. Now many of you, like me, may be more familiar with the other standardized national test, the SAT, so I want to mention how our scores measure up against some other premier public universities in the country. An average ACT of 26 places us at or above such institutions as the University of Colorado and Colorado State, Arizona and Arizona State, Iowa and Iowa State, North Carolina State, Texas A&M, and Michigan State. It puts us on a par with such schools as the University of Minnesota, Ohio State University, Clemson University, Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute, and the University of Texas at Austin. In short, our campus is now nationally competitive, not just in football or women’s basketball, but in a head-on academic comparison with some of the best institutions in the nation. Concomitant with this rise in standardized test scores over the past six or seven years has been the increase in the high school GPAs of incoming students. In 2001 the average was a respectable 3.27; but by the incoming class this year the average GPA was 3.65, a climb of almost 4/10ths of a point. A third of the first-year students on campus, in fact, have a GPA in their core subjects of 4.0 or better.
But what about the highest achieving students, like your sons and daughters? Do we have something special for them? A few years ago your child might have considered UT Knoxville his/her safety school. But there are good reasons that it should now be the first choice. Perhaps the best reason UT should be in first place on your son’s or daughter’s list is the Chancellor’s Honors Program and its new dynamic director, Steve Dandaneau. Like everything else at UT, the Honors Program has been getting better, and it’s fast on its way to being among the best honors programs at public universities. Again we can simply look at the data to prove this contention. This year the Chancellor’s Honors Program selected 365 students. Their average ACT score was 31.1, which is in the top 2% of scores nationally and equivalent to a 1380 SAT. The typical high school GPA for honors students is a 4.0, owing in part to the large number of advanced placement courses in which they are enrolled and in which they perform so well. These students compare to the top admits anywhere at public institutions of higher education. The program promises to its students more than merely an association with some top young minds among your peers. We now provide opportunities in almost every discipline for an honors concentration and for enhancements, such as undergraduate research and travel abroad; these enhancements make this program a real asset to the campus, to your sons and daughters, and their educational development. For the very best among our incoming class we will introduce next fall the Haslam Scholars Program, a group of 15 of our most outstanding students selected each year by a blue ribbon committee to participate in a once-in-a-lifetime educational experience. During the course of their careers on campus each student in the Haslam Scholars will receive a laptop computer ($1500 value), a study abroad experience ($5000 value) and up to $5500 in support of research and its presentation. They, and the other honors students, will also receive mentoring and advising on prestigious external scholars such as the Rhodes, the Marshall, the Goldwater, the Truman, and the Fulbright.
What else do we have for students coming to Knoxville? The answer is so many things that I can’t even begin to talk about them in this brief period of time. There are a plethora of opportunities for students to engage themselves on our campus. Some students get involved in laboratories, assisting our scientists with path-breaking experiments. Others are trying to figure out how we can develop alternate fuels made from crops or waste materials such as cooking oil, so that we can reduce our energy dependency and become a more environmentally responsible state and country. Still others are working with the Howard Baker Center for Public Policy as Baker scholars, assisting with programs and participating in the various public events that this center sponsors every year. Still other students are involved in other campus activities: from the martial arts club to the Pride of the Southland Band, from the food science club to the chess club, from the cycling club to the equestrian team. In fact there are over 200 registered student organizations on the Knoxville campus, something for every palate and every interest.
2. The second reason your sons and daughters should have a special interest in Knoxville: we have great faculty, and they’re getting better all the time, especially if outside recognition is any indicator of excellence. For many years we have been one of the top public universities in the nation, and we continue to be ranked in this very select group of institutions. Many of our programs are ranked near the top of their disciplines in national surveys, and faculty members here in Knoxville are beginning to attract the national and international attention they deserve. One professor in Information Science, for example, was named among the top couple of researchers in her field; the program she was in is regarded as the top program in the country in terms of citations per faculty member. The logistics program in business is again ranked among the top ten programs in the country; social work is tied for 28th; our program in nuclear engineering is 12th. We have had seven recipients of the National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship over the past three years, which puts us with the very best public and private institutions across the nation. This year we garnered three awards, an achievement matched or exceeded by only eight other universities. A computer scientist here in Knoxville was selected as the Principal Investigator on a 65 million dollar award from the National Science Foundation for a petascale computer. Such a computer, if operational today, would be considered the world's fastest; it may even be the first to break the 1 petaflop limit. A petaflop computer, for those of you who are interested, performs 1 quadrllion (1015) floating-point operations per second. And earlier this term I learned that one of our faculty members in the History Department, Jay Rubenstein, had won the coveted MacArthur “genius” award. As you may know these fellowships, usually valued at several hundred thousand dollars for a five-year period are given to a small group of 25 of the most promising scholars and most creative individuals in the country – with no strings attached. Rubenstein is our first recipient of a MacArthur, but with the quality of the faculty we’ve hired lately, we know we will have another recipient soon. Everywhere you turn on campus you can find burgeoning excellence, in the natural sciences, in the humanities and social sciences, and in the professional schools.
3. A third reason that UT is right for your child: the programs. In the nine colleges dedicated to undergraduate education, we have dozens of different majors that will appeal to every taste and every combination of ability; most of them, as I noted already, have an honors component. From English to Entomology, from Social Work to Statistics, from Nuclear Engineering to Nutrition, your son or daughter will find a major that is interesting, challenging, and sometimes plain fun. But there is so much more on the Knoxville campus, programs that enlighten students about their community, themselves, and the world they live in. Probably the most important program that we are working on is called “Ready for the World,” a five-year initiative that came out of a concerted effort on the part of faculty to set a new course for the campus in the twenty-first century. The premise of this program is rather simple: the world is getting smaller. If students are going to succeed in their careers after they receive their degrees and leave the campus, they will need to be able to communicate with individuals whose backgrounds and experiences differ significantly from their own. The global economy is a reality, and it is our obligation as educators to prepare students for what they will face in the real world. We have been working hard on this initiative, setting up structures for learning about international and intercultural dimensions of modern life; promoting exchange programs with foreign countries on the level of both faculty and students; celebrating diversity on campus with special events, such as theater, music, and the arts; and creating a curriculum that is commensurate with the knowledge students must acquire about foreign countries, their customs, their languages, and their way of life. Will the students of the University of Tennessee be “ready for the world”? Indeed they will if we have anything to say about it.
So if your son or daughter is seriously considering your future educational plans, if they want a place that is exciting and stimulating, I think UT is the ticket. And by the way, we also have great achievements in athletics: from football to basketball, from track to softball, from soccer to swimming and diving.
Thank you very much for taking the time to be with us today, and welcome once again to the Knoxville campus! I hope that your visit here today will convince you and your son or daughter that UT is the place to be! I would like to see all of you again: the next time at parents’ orientation over the summer, and I’ll be expecting to greet your son or daughter as a new Vol next fall.
Posted: October 16, 2007