GUIDING PRINCIPLES

Openness and access to our learning environment

My final guiding principle is openness and access to our learning environment to all. If we sequester the scholarship and creativity that characterize our university, if we build walls around our campuses, we diminish our own potential, and the magnitude of our contribution to society. ASU has more than one campus, and the capacity—and the obligation—to offer opportunities to as broad a segment of the populace as possible.

Without exception, academic institutions profess a commitment to excellence. I believe we should take a commitment to excellence for granted, and demand more from ourselves. I believe we should recognize and champion diversity, not for the sake of diversity itself, but because our ideas and our theories and our practices and our analysis and our solutions to the problems of both the natural and social world are incomplete and inadequate. We have not yet found solutions to the problems of poverty and sustainability and thee long-term viability of capitalism. All of these require new perspectives, and diversity may be the enabling catalyst. Diversity is the means to find mechanisms to expand our understandings of the natural and social world, and to expand our understanding of how to advance these in ways we cannot yet fully understand.

I believe we should find the mechanisms to be more than a place where faculty gather with students. I believe we must find mechanisms to project our knowledge, our willingness to be of value and to learn and to listen and to offer what we have to broader segments of society. I believe we should not build walls, but rather bridges, and while this is certainly a cliché, it is no longer a cliché if in fact one can see those bridges actually carrying traffic—the traffic of learners of all ages, from children in elementary school to retirees, somehow connected to the university and all that it has to offer.

By openness and access I do not mean opening the institution to people not prepared for college-level education. By openness and access I mean building a university that is linked to the K-12 educational system, linked to families, linked to the community to provide mechanisms to enhance the preparedness of students for college in an effort to increase the likelihood of their ultimate success.

Openness and access to our learning environment could be regarded as contrary to academic excellence. Let no one think that I am opposed to academic excellence. On the contrary, I am its champion, and will demand excellence from my new colleagues and our students. The building of academic excellence is the building of an environment where teacher and student can succeed together. And that is not a function of size.

Openness and access to our learning environment means opportunities for students once they are already at ASU. We live in a world that is changing rapidly and becoming increasingly global. A moment ago I spoke of the desirability of interdisciplinary collaboration in our research. Similarly, I hope to broaden educational opportunities available to our students. I would like to encourage students to explore disciplines outside their major areas. I would like to see physics majors to enroll in courses in musicology, and students in urban planning enroll in courses in Russian.

Because we live in a world characterized by an accelerated pace of advances in scientific knowledge and technological capability, I would like to see the building of new and broader programs intended to create higher levels of scientific and technical literacy, as well as higher levels of technological capability, even for those who do not happen to be gifted in calculus. I would like to see interested students from all majors enroll in appropriate courses in the School of Engineering.

Above all, I would like to see our learning environment accessible to all who are sufficiently prepared, with no financial barriers to students qualified to attend the university. Only then will we be able to speak of openness and access to all.