Eaton, Philip W.

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Seattle Pacific University: Digital Commons @ SPU

Seattle Pacific UniversityDigital Commons @ SPUSpeeches Philip W. Eaton, 1995 - 2012September 21st, 2005State of the University: 2001-2002, "Building onAncient Foundations"Philip W. EatonSeattle Pacific UniversityFollow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.spu.edu/president_pweaton_speechesThis Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Philip W. Eaton, 1995 - 2012 at Digital Commons @ SPU. It has been accepted forinclusion in Speeches by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ SPU.Recommended CitationEaton, Philip W., "State of the University: 2001-2002, "Building on Ancient Foundations"" (2005). Speeches. 3.https://digitalcommons.spu.edu/president_pweaton_speeches/3 Building On Ancient FoundationsState of the University AddressPhilip W. Eaton, President, September 21, 2005My thanks to Dr. Congdon for his warm introduction. Thank you Bruce. I would like to thank TamiAnderson and all of the team participating in the worship service. And to our pastor, Mark Abbott,for his wonderful reflections.And my welcome to all of you as we begin the 2005 academic year.Can you believe the beauty of this morning! We hope it holds as our eager, young Freshmen andtheir parents arrive. This is the way the academic year should begin: the strong glimpse and feelof fall; the sense of new beginnings; a huge number of new people entering into our community.What excitement!By the way, have you seen the entry archway to Tiffany Loop? Is that cool or what? We haveintended this to be the monument entrance to the historic campus. My wife Sharon has beenarguing for this for years. I met some students the other night and asked them what they thought.It’s okay, they said. And I went nuts. Okay? It’s fantastic.This is the tenth State of the University Address I have delivered as your president. And I wantyou to know I come to this opening of the year with as much energy as I have ever had, with asmuch excitement, as much confidence about our future, with enormous commitment to our plans.As I look out across this audience, I am humbled and inspired by all of you. The State of theUniversity is about our people. It is about this team, working as a team. It is about all of youcontributing your individual gifts. It is about all of those gifts coming together for a single bigpurpose.What an extraordinary privilege it is to be working with all of you, with so many things going on ineach corner of this campus. Sharon and I feel so blessed to be part of this special community. So,as I look out and see your faces and know of your work — I say the State of the University ishealthy and strong. Thank you.I want to talk about momentum this morning. Strong momentum describes the State of theUniversity. That’s a very good word to me. That says something very positive about anorganization, that we feel a strong sense of momentum.Let me tell you what I think the State of the University is right now. We are healthy. We arefinancially healthy. We are people healthy. We are vision healthy. We have strong momentum.I think we know where we are going. I think we have fully and deeply adopted a vision andmission. When we talk about engaging the culture and changing the world, we know that thismission somehow guides our work. We believe our task is big and challenging and meaningful.We sense there is something very distinctive in the kind of education we offer. We believe we aregrowing together, working hard to get better all the time at what we do. And those are signs ofmomentum, signs of a flourishing organization.We understand some of our weak spots. We know we have needs that must be addressed. But Iam not one to dwell on needs. Needs do not drive productive action. It is critical that we knowwhere we are going. It is critical that we are growing.Momentum requires two things: 1) that we celebrate what has been accomplished and wecelebrate the people who are accomplishing those things; and 2) that we make sure we areplanning and dreaming and sketching out the future. I want to address both of those things this morning.So, first, let me briefly scan the year we have just finished. As I told the trustees last week, we hadan extraordinary year last year. All kinds of things came together, a kind of culminating year for somuch work we were doing.We finished the Campaign! $56 million. 4,000 new donors. A huge new base of support.One $4 million trust that came into the campaign has how matured into endowment. That’sthe way it works. The Murdock Trust just completed its $1 million pledge last week. It was apledge; now it is in our pockets. My thanks to Bob McIntosh and his team for their greatwork.We finished 2014: A Blueprint For Excellence! This is work that we were doing for a least ayear, and it all came together in November. We have a bold plan in place. We know whatwe need to do. My thanks to the President’s Cabinet for their amazing collaboration on thisplan. For their patience as I stumbled my way through the language and the concepts tolead this planning forward.We just finished restructuring the Board of Trustees.As part of the blueprint work, our board asked this critical question: what does itmean to be a premier, national Christian university board of trustees? We decided,among other things, it was critical to be a smaller board. That was a huge task, toreduce from 33 to 15. Risky business for a president. But we did it, and we had ourfirst meeting Friday: a smart, savvy, and smaller board of trustees. I had some ofthe best, most substantive and strategic, discussion I have ever had with the board.And let me add this: our relationship with the Free Methodist Church has neverbeen stronger. We received a resounding affirmation and confirmation of our planfor the board on June 18, 2005 at the Pacific Northwest Conference AnnualConference. My thanks to Matt Whitehead and Bishop Roger Haskins for theirleadership. In addition, my thanks to Roger Eigsti, Gary Ames, Dennis Weibling,Bob Nuber, Marj Johnson, and Barry Rowan for their leadership on the TrusteeBlueprint Team.This was an extraordinary process with extraordinary results.We opened the Perkins Center for Reconciliation under the able leadership of TaliHairston. We are staying the course with our commitment to reconciliation. With Tali andJoe and Stephen and Dante and Harvey and Alex and David and John Perkins—we havea team that is teaching and guiding us on what reconciliation is all about. My thanks toGary and Barbara Ames for their support for this effort.We formed a wonderful partnership with John Medina in what are tentatively calling theBrain Center and Applied Learning Research. My thanks to John Medina, of course, and toDennis Weibling for his commitment and support. And to Bill Rowley and so many of ourfaculty who have gathered around this effort.We held three President’s Symposia: with John Perkins in the fall, John Medina in thewinter, and N. T. Wright in the spring. This is an ongoing effort to continue to invest in avibrant intellectual community focused on our mission of engaging the culture. This yearwe will host Christian Smith for the Day of Common Learning on the spiritual life ofteenagers, John Perkins again for the Perkins Lectures, David McCullough for theBusiness Breakfast. For next year we have booked the New Testament scholar RichardHayes and the European intellectual historian George Weigel.Let me add three other notes about what’s happening:We are restructuring our bond financing package. We expect some major savings on ourdebt service once this process is complete. This is all made possible because our creditrating has improved significantly. My thanks to Don Mortenson and Craig Kispert and VicMoses, Fred Stabbert, Ted Kibble, and others on our board for their expertise andcommitment to this initiative.We just received word yesterday that the Lilly Endowment has awarded us a $500,000sustaining grant to continue our work for the theological exploration of vocation. You willrecall that we received a $2 million grant from Lilly in 2001 for this program that has madea huge impact on our campus. Last spring, we were among a select group of colleges anduniversities asked to submit a new proposal, and we have now received their positiveresponse. This is great work. My thanks to Les Steele, Susan Gallagher, Bob Drovdahl,Mike Hamilton and others.We received word this summer on a $1.5 million National Science Foundation Grant. Mythanks to Stamatis Vokos and his colleagues in the sciences and to our folks in School ofEducation for their collaboration. This grant supports a huge amount of activity acrosscampus to understand the learning of science.All of this spells momentum, but momentum also requires a strong sense of direction for thefuture. And so for the last year and more, we have been working hard on a plan. We call that plan2014: A Blueprint For Excellence.What is this Blueprint all about? What is this plan that drives our direction for the future? What’shappening? Where do we stand?Let me say this about my notion of planning. The Blueprint is in place, but it is unfolding. It isdefined and clear, but it is evolving. I have come to believe that strategic planning in our time isnever linear. That’s the nature of a good planning.There are four stages to the 2014: Blueprint for Excellence.First, we need a clear vision for the Blueprint. And our vision is this: we want tochange the world with the transforming gospel of Jesus Christ. That’s the big idea.Preposterous and audacious, but I hope not arrogant. Can a university change theworld? Should that be the goal of the university?Well, that’s what our vision says. We want to equip our students to becomegraduates who are change agents. We want to equip and support our faculty in theirscholarship and their teaching to become change agents. We want to modelsomething very powerful and important in the way we do our business, a model thatwill change things in the world. We want to be change agents. That’s our vision.We want to enter into God’s big drama for his world. God’s drama is about changingthings to be better. For all of his children everywhere. Always. We want to beplayers, participants. That’s our vision. That’s the big driver for the Blueprint.Second, I think we need to define the distinctive signatures of this vision. This isnew territory for us, a new dimension to our identity discussions. I think it is criticalthat we craft a sense of our unique identity. If we don’t have anything distinctive tooffer, forget it.And so what would we call our distinctives? Our signatures? Let me try out thesenotions with you all. I have been talking to groups all over campus about thesesignatures. Are we not committed to something like this list of signatures?We want to be a place that knows and understands what’s going on in theworld. We want to be in the mix, engaged.We want to embrace the Christian story (becoming biblically and theologicallyeducated). This now identifies us distinctly from any secular institution.We want to master the tools of rigorous learning (becoming a vibrantintellectual, learning community). We do the first two as a university.We want to model grace-filled community and practice radical reconciliation.This is perhaps the most profound dimension of our Christian identity.We want to graduate people of competence and character equipped to changethe world.Are these our distinctives? Keep talking to me about these notions. I believe wehave to be pretty sharp on these in order for our Blueprint to have a deeper shape. Ibelieve we have to have that deeper shape in order for us to flourish.By the way, I talked to our board last week about my own need to continue to growinto this vision and into these distinctives. They have supported me in that effort. Iam convinced in the coming year that I must continue to carve out the time to writeand to speak about these distinctives and the vision that drives us forward.Third, we need to try to spell out our notion of excellence. This is where we adoptthe language, the aspiration, of becoming a premier, national Christian university.This is the language of excellence. I’ve done a lot of talking about this goal and a lotof thinking. I know not everyone is comfortable with this language. Pleaseunderstand this is not the vision. We are not doing all of this planning so that we canbecome a premier, national Christian university. We are becoming a premier,national Christian university so that we can change the world. And as one of ourtrustees argued on Friday, it is the distinctives, the signatures, that will make uspremier, not the other way around.Fourth, we need clear and concrete strategies in place in critical areas. How in theworld are we going to accomplish all of this? Where do we invest our energies andour resources? I think we need strategies in the following areas:We need to transform our resource paradigm, our giving, our endowment, ourfacilities.We need to cultivate the next generation of partners. We must extend ourreach, broaden the base, reach out nationally. We need new partners with anational profile.We need an aggressive, focused plan to support faculty.We need to recruit and graduate outstanding students, dramatically increasingour applicant pool, selectivity, persistence rate, and graduation rate.We need to aggressively expand our positioning and branding nationally.We need to create and shape a premier, national Christian university board oftrustees.So, that’s the plan. That’s the Blueprint. That’s our big idea, our sense of direction, our strategy. Iwelcome your interaction with us in this great work.By the way, on November 14, 2005, we are going to come out with a written version of theBlueprint. A kind of progress report, a momentum report, where we have come from with ourvision, where we going. Watch for this publication.Tomorrow we will welcome the largest group of new undergraduate students in the history of thisUniversity. The biggest and the best class ever, 730 Freshmen. Our SAT scores jumped some 20points to 1160. Our admit rate jumped to 85%; this is down from 98% when I first came to SPU.And our students are persisting in record numbers. And our graduation rate is increasing by ahuge 6% this year to 66%.Together with some 800 graduate students our total enrollment is just short of 4,000.But sometimes I look at those numbers, and I will look into the faces of these new students, andtalk to the parents about their expectations—and I am frightened by the responsibility we have. Itscares me. That’s not what I am going to say tomorrow night, but that’s what I want to say to youall. This is a huge responsibility. And it is our responsibility.And we better have it right. We better know what we are all about. We better have our motivesclear. We need to know what we are doing. We need to be focused. We need to do our work withexcellence. We need to stand for something. We need a signature on learning, a signature view ofthe world, a signature view of our Christian identity.That’s why we are doing this Blueprint work.But let me add one thing. At Christmas time two years ago, I received a note from a Freshman, aChristmas card, thanking me for my leadership and that sort of thing. And then she saidsomething that challenged me profoundly: “I am grateful that SPU’s current president loves Jesusand understands that Jesus call us to undivided devotion.” This is a note of thanks, to be sure,and I am grateful for this kind of student. But this is a note of longing and hope. She needs thisconfidence in a leader. And I need to respond. This is a huge challenge, an enormousresponsibility.And what is this call to undivided devotion to which my student challenges me?I have been reading a lot of Paul and a lot about Paul this summer. And in Romans 6, Paulspeaks to this challenge: “Let us use the different gifts allotted to each of us by God’s grace: thegift of inspired utterance, for example, let us use in proportion to our faith; the gift of administrationto administer; the gift of teaching to teach; the gift of counseling to counsel; if you give to charity,give without grudging; if you are a leader, lead with enthusiasm; if you help others in distress, do itcheerfully. Love in all sincerity, loathing evil and holding fast to the good. Let love of the Christiancommunity show itself in mutual affection. Esteem others more highly than yourself. Withunflagging zeal, aglow with the Spirit, serve the Lord. Let hope keep you joyful; in trouble standfirm; persist in prayer; contribute to the needs of God’s people; and practice hospitality.”Ultimately this will be the measure of our State of the University: an undivided devotion to Jesus,a profound love for each other at the heart of this community, all of which empowers us to use ourgifts to the fullest. Ultimately this will be the reason we flourish. This will be the only way we canchange the world.There is a verse in Isaiah that I like a lot. It speaks about crafting blueprints and about layingfoundations on which to build our future. The writer says “. . . you will build on ancientfoundations;/ you will be called the rebuilder of broken walls, /the restorer of houses in ruins.”As we think about the suffering of our brothers and sisters in the Southeast, with more frighteningforce on the way. Indeed, all around us, there are “houses in ruins.” When we think about thebroken walls of suffering and poverty and war. When we think about the ruins of lives and familiesand friends. Well, at that point, we are inspired to be the rebuilders of broken walls. And we havethe chance to make a difference because we seek to build on “ancient foundations.” May Godbless each one of you as you launch this new year.May God bless our work as we launch a new chapter in the life of this great university.

State of the University: 2001-2002,  Building on Ancient Foundations

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State of the University: 2001-2002, Building on Ancient Foundations

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