Address to Alumni During Reunion Weekend 2018

On February 21, 2018, the Wall Street Journal published an article titled “U.S. Colleges Are Separating into Winners and Losers: Schools that struggle to prepare students for success losing ground; the shake-out is coming.” I think this is already taking place in the United States, and that it will have serious implications for higher education. That said, Lehigh is one of the winners – and deserves to be. Lehigh is ranked by U.S. News & World Report among the top 50 universities in the nation. Kiplinger’s Best College Values ranks Lehigh 26th among national private universities. We are ranked 23rd in the country by PayScale based on salary potential of graduates. And the Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education’s latest ranking of U.S. colleges places Lehigh 50th out of 1,054 institutions. And our goals over the next 5–7 years are intended to secure Lehigh’s rightful place as a winner for years to come.

Our work to move Lehigh forward must be guided by the fact that students of today yearn for educational experiences that will prepare them for the increasingly global and complex world they will have to navigate. If our students are going to be the leaders they aspire to be, the leaders we expect and need them to be, they must be able to think in an integrative, cross-disciplinary way. More than ever, it is imperative that we provide a purposeful education, building on Lehigh’s distinctive ability to put theory into practice – in fact, to embrace both as each informs the other – and do so in facilities that are competitive with the very best. Our students’ careers will encompass multiple jobs and pursuits, many of which they themselves will devise, many in fields that do not exist today. To lead as we need them to, they must be able to think collaboratively. In their hands, skills and knowledge must be transferable from one field to completely different fields. Lehigh is a premier institution because we provide the integrative experiences through which such capacities are developed.

When I arrived in 2015 we were planning to launch Lehigh’s comprehensive campaign during that academic year, as part of our 150th anniversary celebrations. But we weren’t ready. We had not fully framed the institutional vision that would secure Lehigh’s place in American, if not global, higher education that a campaign would enable. Last year, I shared with alumni the goals of our strategy Path to Prominence, our foundation efforts to define our vision. Today, I want to share our progress and how our work is shaping the longer-term institutional aspirations that will be fueled by the public phase of Lehigh’s $1B comprehensive campaign. Our work to date was motivated by five pillars.

First, increase the intellectual footprint of Lehigh. There are five key components to this:

• Add 100 faculty positions.
• Establish Lehigh’s new fifth college focused on health.
• Increase the graduate population to 2,000 full-time students.
• Expand the Mountaintop experiential learning model.
• Continue to develop strategic partnerships (at home and abroad) with institutions that share our values.

Second, increase the undergraduate population by 1,000 over a 5- to 7-year period, expanding our reach nationally. This is necessary to achieve and support faculty growth, to create vibrancy in our new health college, and is at a level where we will not lose the personal feel of the Lehigh experience.

Third, build new residential communities and renovate the UC to enable a diverse set of living experiences on campus and reestablish the role of a university center in the college experience. I think right now that while the UC serves as the geographic center of the university, it does not serve as a magnet for student activity. Along Brodhead Avenue you can see that the new SouthSide Commons is under construction. This complex will house ~400 students in apartment-style living. Site work is about to begin for the Bridge West residential community, just south of the President’s House. (So yes, like the students on Birkel, I will have to adjust my schedule to the sounds of construction.)

Fourth, build a health/technology building on Packer campus, to be located on the Whitaker parking lot. This will enable undergraduate and graduate students to avail themselves of forefront research and experiential learning opportunities in interdisciplinary areas that build upon our strengths in engineering, science, and health-related fields.

Fifth, and most important to me, Lehigh must continue to attract exceptionally talented students from around the world; to this end, a major focus of my time is to raise money for financial aid. No student who would thrive at Lehigh should be forced to go elsewhere because of financial constraints.

Our campaign’s public phase is bigger than simply an enabler for the goals of Path to Prominence. I’d like to take this opportunity to share with you where our thinking and actions have led over the past two years and then discuss the organization of our campaign designed to fulfill our institutional aspirations. I also invite you to join one of our launch events (they will be fun) this coming October – on campus, New York City, or San Francisco.

So what’s involved in achieving our vision? Consider student growth and the attracting of talent to Lehigh. Between the years 2025 and 2030, the number of 18-year-olds in the U.S. headed for college will decrease by nearly half a million students (on a current base of about 3.5M). But not all of the higher education ecosystem is predicted to be impacted by this decrease in the same way. In fact, if prepared for it, the top schools, which include Lehigh, could not only weather this demographic storm but actually emerge stronger.

To do so, we need to pay attention to the shifting geographic, ethnic, and socioeconomic demographics of the future student population. While there will be an overall decline, many areas of the country will grow, and Lehigh is going to have to change how it approaches student recruitment, because the population will no longer be heavily concentrated in the Northeast. This is why we have become relentless in the search for talented students in the Western region. And it does not end with recruitment. We must establish the support infrastructure to assure student success once they arrive at Lehigh. As the Wall Street Journal article emphasized: Schools that struggle to prepare students for success are losing ground. This is why we have launched our Center for Student Access and Success.

Toward the end of spring semester, I spent most of a two-week period on campus. This was unusual, as most weeks I have at least a few days of travel. This was the busiest time of year for events on campus, and what I enjoyed most about those two weeks exemplifies the very best of Lehigh today.

It began with DanceFest. Diane and I watched ten amazing student-organized dance companies – and we learned that no matter what type of dance you prefer, students today like to dance to hip hop (the Swing Dance Club was an exception). It’s the only time I’ve ever seen Baker Hall filled with students. Students turning out to see other students. It was a real evening of community.

That week I also attended the induction of the Martindale Student Associates, 12 of our most distinguished undergrads who are passionate about global engagement. I had the honor of hearing the 12 outgoing students talk about their experiences in the UK in the wake of Brexit and how Brexit was influencing the topics they had chosen to research. The new cohort of Student Associates introduced themselves and talked about their nascent research interests to be explored in Malaysia. In fact, the Student Associates just returned from Malaysia a few days ago.

The most amazing event was the Scholarship Dinner. It’s hard to put into words what happens when roughly 100 scholarship donors spend an evening with the students they support. This is a very emotionally charged evening. You can see the pride the donors have in their students and how grateful the students are for the support that enabled them to come to Lehigh. Two years ago, Diane and I started an endowed scholarship because we felt it was the best way to support Lehigh’s mission of admitting and educating the most talented students.

The highlight of the evening was when Joe Buck, our VP for DAR, interviewed four students. I want to talk about two of them. First is Nadine Elsayed, a Bethlehem native and recent graduate of our global citizenship major. Nadine said:

“What has been extraordinary for me at Lehigh has been the unparalleled opportunities that I’ve been presented with during my four years. I think these types of experiences are what is special at Lehigh. I’m really grateful to these programs and the donors to these programs, otherwise they would not exist.” What Nadine’s talking about is discovering the Iacocca Internship program. Through that program, at no cost to her, she worked as an intern in Milan for a summer. She’s also talking about her trip to Cambodia to do research. She’s talking about her trip to Libya where she profiled a British family and their years in that war-torn country. And she’s talking about her trip to England associated with the Martindale program.

The other student whose story I want to share is Daniel Amankwatia. He’s a 2018 graduate of our Integrated Business and Engineering program, one of the most selective degrees at Lehigh, a true gem. Daniel’s clearly a star, and he said that he wanted to be the next Iron Man. What he really was saying was that he wanted to be Tony Stark. This young man is entrepreneurial. I decided to Google him. I discovered that when he was an eighth grader in Macungie he won the state-wide science fair for modeling different structures of nose cones for rockets. This was the title of the newspaper article: “Whiz Kid Is Going to Become an Engineer.” And so he came to Lehigh and certainly achieved this part of his dream, but combined it with an education in business. I actually met Daniel in Spain. He was a member of the Lehigh choir, and last year Diane and I joined the choir for part of their tour in Spain.

What struck me the most about listening to our students is that none of them talked about the classroom. They talked about their experiences outside the classroom, the teamwork that they engaged in, the activities that built upon what they learned in the classroom.

If I think back to my generation – and many of you in the audience are from the same generation – and I consider what influenced me academically and who influenced me, I can generally point to specific faculty members that made a difference in specific classes that I took. What this generation talks about is: What was the experiential learning opportunity that changed how I think about myself? What was the interdisciplinary opportunity that enabled me to work on a real-world problem? What was the internship that shaped my career choice? What was the global experience that enabled me to understand whether I wanted to work abroad or not? That’s what education is today and it’s going to become even more so in the future. The classroom experience is and remains necessary but it is not sufficient. When I look at the most selective programs at Lehigh, and some of our most distinctive programs, they’re actually the interdisciplinary majors – IBE, CSB, IDEAS, HMS. And the demand for them is tremendous. So we have to scale experiences like these so that they become the norm of the educational experience.

A funny thing happens to lots of students who come to Lehigh. They arrive thinking they know what they want to be, but they leave as something quite different. I think that’s because they come to us unaware of the extraordinary range of opportunities that exist for them. That’s the business we are in: to graduate people who can go out and lead in society in whatever area they choose to make their impact. We do this well.

Now I want to share with you some of the changes that have taken place at Lehigh over the past few years.

When we started to look for partnerships around the world to expand upon our signature programs in entrepreneurship, we found lots of interest. The Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center chose us to be their sole academic provider in the financial district of San Francisco because of the way we approach and teach entrepreneurship. This led to Lehigh student groups working with entrepreneurs in the greater San Francisco area, and provided a home base for our Lehigh in Silicon Valley program. This summer, our College of Business and Economics is launching a start-up academy for students to experience the summer in the Silicon Valley ecosystem, using the Nasdaq Center as its base. We now teach courses from the Nasdaq Center to students in Bethlehem. Our programming is rapidly increasing and to date more than 300 students have interacted with the Center over a two-year period.

Ashoka University, outside of Delhi, recently chose us to partner with them around entrepreneurship, and that’s given our students access to the entrepreneurial ecosystem in India. I had a productive trip to Ashoka last year to sign an agreement enabling student and faculty exchanges and allowing for the creation of joint academic ventures. Working with Ashoka and Startup India, the Baker and Iacocca Institutes created an internship program for Lehigh students at start-up companies in Delhi. Our inaugural cohort left for India last week. This furthers our intention to be known as the institution where students can experience entrepreneurship at the global level. Related to our efforts in entrepreneurship, this summer the Baker Institute launched the Hatchery Student Idea Accelerator: an immersive, full-time learning experience in which participants apply design thinking and learn start-up methods to develop solutions and test potential business ideas. This is taking place right over there on the fifth floor of Fairchild-Martindale.

Up on Mountaintop, in Buildings B and C, Khanjan Mehta, our vice provost for creative inquiry, just kicked off the sixth summer of the Mountaintop Initiative. Inside these former Bethlehem Steel research buildings, Lehigh creates a vibrant and unique learning environment – a space in which students are given the freedom to pursue answers to open-ended questions while working in, and across, all disciplines. In the process, the students are challenged to increase their capacities for independent inquiry, for taking intellectual risks and learning from failures, for collaboration, and for recognizing opportunities to effect constructive and sustainable change. Students from several partnering institutions have been engaged in this experience. As an example, the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn chose to put its design students in our Mountaintop experiential learning program because they wanted their students to understand how engineering students think. I was really excited about this because we wanted our engineering students to understand how design people think. I remember overhearing a conversation between a Lehigh engineer and a Pratt fashion designer discussing how to design the product they were developing. How they approached the problem could not have been more different. But the reality is, in a lot of professions today, that type of team is assembled to solve problems. Our students need to understand how to work in such a collaborative and multidisciplinary environment, and how to succeed in that environment.

Under the leadership of Vice President and Vice Provost for International Affairs Cheryl Matherly, Lehigh is now a more global campus than it’s ever been. Over 40% of today’s Lehigh students have an international experience during their time on campus. Lehigh has 15 institutional memoranda and some 50 agreements regarding research and student exchange programs, we offer 200 study abroad programs in 40 different countries, and last year we had 13 Fulbright scholars. Lehigh is a founding member of the U.S.-Indonesia Partnership Program, and our United Nations Youth Representative Program has become a model for colleges and universities the world over. Last year the U.N. program drew the participation of 400 students from 80 countries.

In 2011, Lee Iacocca (Class of 1945) generously donated a matching grant to establish an international internship program. He envisioned a cutting-edge program that would offer undergraduates access to a broad range of work opportunities in other countries. Today, his vision is reality. This summer we are sending nearly 100 students abroad to intern in some 30 countries. The Iacocca International Internship Program positions students for leadership in the global marketplace. It also serves to advance global leadership as a hallmark of a Lehigh education.

In 2015, Lehigh unveiled its Data X Initiative. Computer science and data analytics are increasingly driving discovery and opportunity at the intersection of disciplines. How Lehigh introduced data science follows our commitment to interdisciplinary learning. Most schools introduced data science through their computer science curriculum. We introduced it between departments. We hired faculty across fields – across computer science and journalism, across computer science and marketing – and we strongly believe this serves our students well and meets them where they are. It enables them to study what they are passionate about studying. Because while students are interested in understanding algorithms for analyzing data, they want to learn how to apply it in different professions.

We are also making great strides here at home, in our backyard, partnering with the City of Bethlehem. We established a community school partnership with Donegan Elementary School (to complement our earlier partnership with Broughal Middle School). The partnerships, led by Lehigh’s Center for Developing Urban Educational Leaders, are part of an effort to expand opportunities for students in urban schools by removing barriers to learning.

Lehigh has expanded into the South Side, not by putting up our own buildings, but by serving as lead tenants. We now have administrative offices in the Flatiron Building, and the new office building at 3rd and New Streets.

I could go on describing other programs and partnerships, but I hope that you can sense the excitement we are feeling for where Lehigh is heading from these examples.

I want to share with you my experience at the Donald Gruhn (Class of 1949) Lecture last fall. This lecture is generally given by a Lehigh alum who has demonstrated leadership in business; they often talk about their career path and what it means to be successful in their sector. This past October, Wendell Weeks (Class of 1981), the CEO of Corning, spoke. So Wendell puts up his first slide; the title of the talk was “Sustaining Institutions for Long-Term Performance.” I’m thinking, “Hmm, that’s a pretty good job description for me, maybe I’ll learn something.” Wendell discussed the success of Corning. Then he talked about his four north stars, and that framing had a real impact on me; in fact, it shapes how I now think about the execution of our strategic objectives here at Lehigh.

The four north stars are: focus on problems that matter, have a distinctive set of capabilities, maintain the trust of your stakeholders, and partner with those who share your vision. I believe all of these apply to higher education. I especially think the last one, partner with those who share your vision, is really important going forward because no one institution can or should do it all anymore. I already described some of our partnerships: Ashoka University, Pratt Institute, Nasdaq, and the many corporations that participate in the Iacocca Internships, the Martindale program, and our Global Village. We definitely share a common vision.

Sustaining Lehigh for long-term performance is why we are launching the public phase of our comprehensive campaign. Our overarching goal: We must secure Lehigh’s place in the global educational ecosystem – by establishing how Lehigh will offer distinctive (excellent, top-rated) and differentiated forefront programs, and by providing access to internships, interdisciplinary experiences, and global experiences that prepare students for today’s jobs.

We organized the campaign in three “buckets”: students and the residential experience, programs that enable students to gain hands-on experience and apply what they learn in real-world settings, and research and faculty. We want to build communities of scholars in areas where Lehigh has demonstrated strengths and can take a leading position on the national and international stage, and through our students and our research make lasting societal contributions. You can see how the strategies of Path to Prominence and our progress over the past three years have shaped and led us to this campaign organization.

So what can you do to help? Like you have done this weekend, visit us! Meet students! The institution is really quite different than when many of you were here. Sometimes it’s hard for me to appreciate that difference because I’ve always been on a college campus, I’ve lived 40 years of change in higher education. But, for most people, when they think about their alma mater, their memories are from a certain time and a certain set of experiences. It is different today. The kids approach education differently. Technology has impacted what goes on in the classroom and beyond.

For our students, alumni exemplify what’s possible with a Lehigh degree. Our students are 18- to 22-year-olds. They are cocky. But they are also a bit insecure about what they’re actually going to achieve in their lives. Each year they consider themselves – because all of us have said this to them—the best class Lehigh has ever matriculated, and based on SAT scores we’ve been able to say that every year for the past eight years, and we’ll be able to say it again next year. You inspire them. You set that bar for them. That’s really important. They can benefit from your mentorship. They can use your advice. They can use internships. And you will enjoy providing them. These are all ways our alumni can connect.

And then there’s philanthropy, and I’m going to end where I started. I fully believe that at our core we are in the talent business. We need to attract the best talent to Lehigh to take advantage of what we offer, enable that talent to thrive during their college years, and then launch them into positions around the world where they can make a difference. Just as you define the reputation of Lehigh today, as alumni, by what you do, this generation will define it over the decades to come. I want the best talent at the university regardless of whether or not they can afford to pay tuition. We have structured our comprehensive campaign so that the largest bucket to fill is the endowment of financial aid. Because the ultimate winners in higher education are going to be those who can afford to recruit the best talent to their universities. Thanks for listening.