Chancellor Harvey Perlman called on faculty and staff to start thinking bigger.
In his annual State of the University address Sept. 1 at the Lied Center for Performing Arts, Perlman descirbed UNL's move into the Big Ten Conference as, "an opportunity to reset the table." And with more than 1,000 in attendance, Perlman outlined four, six-year goals that will help define what it means for UNL to be a member of the new conference. Those proposals — each to be reached by 2017 — are:
• Increase enrollment by 20 percent, to 30,000 students. Enrollment in recent years has grown to nearly 25,000.
• Increase to 1,300 tenure track faculty positions. That translates to an added 160 positions, with an average growth rate of 2.25 percent each year between now and 2017.
• A six-year graduate rate of 70 percent for undergraduates. The current rate is 64 percent.
• Total research expenditures of $300 million.
• Double the number of faculty receiving national recognition and awards for research and creative activity.
Perlman said he looked at recent growth in those four areas and extrapolated the figures to set the 2017 benchmarks. All of UNL's academic units and programs have until spring semester to establish a target to meet each of the proposals.
"I am confident that we can achieve these targets if every academic unit on campus is involved," Perlman said. "We have the opportunity to reset the table — to now start anew to reformulate our ambitions and our aspirations, to set new goals and objectives, to rise to the elevated expectations in which we have been draped, to take advantage of the opportunities to lie ahead, to learn from but also to lead our new peers, to demonstrate that while we are in a new place, there is still no place like Nebraska."
The text of the entire speech is available online at http://go.unl.edu/sua2011.
- Troy Fedderson, University Communications
More details at: http://go.unl.edu/sua2011