Chancellor's Vision
The Chancellor's vision represents a new and challenging path for the future of higher education in Florida.
In the long term, our Board must sustain three fundamental qualities to advance our system and its universities. To advance from where we are today, to get beyond the tyranny of the short-term, we need courage, vision, and a plan.
Courage - to do the right thing. The decisions that we are making will determine the course of our public universities and the public university system for the next thirty years! We must be driving our state into the innovation economy. We must respond to regional economic development opportunities and needs. Without public universities, our state cannot generate the high paying jobs and solve the myriad social problems that accompany a state gaining nearly 1,200 new residents a day.
We must charge into the future. Like Rosa Parks, a national hero who refused to be relegated to second-class status, we want our system of public universities to be at the front of the national bus of public university systems; we want best in class for our universities in the context of their diverse statewide and regional missions; we want every institution to have an improvement strategy that is consistent with state needs and opportunities and that can be nationally benchmarked.
Vision - this is the art of seeing the invisible, believing that it is possible, and knowing how to pursue it. You must have the courage to see the invisible in the same way that the founders of our eleven universities saw the invisible years ago.
A Plan - finally, we must go on the offense with a robust multiyear plan that builds upon the foundation already set in place by the Strategic Planning Committee.
My 19-year-old son Benjamin wears an inspiring T-shirt. It says:
"What the mind believes, the body achieves!"
I choose to believe that we can and must have a leading public university system that prepares and leads our state into the challenges-economic, social, health and ethical-presented by the rapid change of the 21st century. I choose to believe that you are at the right place at the right time and that together-through partnerships and collaboration-we can produce results that individually are impossible.
I pledge to do my best to represent our public universities before our many constituencies and to enhance our state university system as the critical driver of Florida's success in the innovation economy of this 21st century.
I choose to believe that you are at the right place at the right time and that together-through partnerships and collaboration-we can produce results that individually are impossible.
I pledge to do my best to represent our public universities before our many constituencies and to enhance our state university system as the critical driver of Florida's success in the innovation economy of this 21st century.
