(presented as prepared)

Hello, and thank you all for joining us today.

Before I begin, I would like to recognize several guests in attendance today. It is my pleasure to welcome students, members of our faculty and staff, alumni, Board members, as well as elected officials and their representatives, CSU’s community organization partners and industry partners.

Today, I’d like to use this time to talk about where we’ve been, where we are now, and where we’re headed. This is also a message of sincere admiration for our alumni and students.

I want to express my appreciation to our entire Board of Trustees for their guidance and support. Several members of the Board are with us today.

This year, we welcomed new leaders to our Faculty Senate. Carol, Dana, and Jacqueline have already been remarkable partners and contributors to our Strategic Planning Task Force. I look forward to our continued collaboration throughout this year.

I would also like to recognize our Senior Leadership Team at CSU. I am so grateful to each of these leaders for providing their counsel during a critical time of re-examination at our University and for their eagerness to approach our challenges with creative solutions.

Over the past year, I have been asking all offices and departments at CSU — and that includes my own leadership team — to rethink how our work is structured and how we all accomplish that work. I’ve used this opportunity to do that very work at the Cabinet level.

Earlier this fall, I announced several changes to the structure of our Senior Leadership Team. With this new structure, the Senior Leadership Team includes broader areas of expertise. We have flattened the organization and brought new voices to the table who have been with CSU for years and can lead from experience, which will result in a net savings.

These new additions include:

Nicole Addington as our Chief Financial Officer. For the past three years, Nicole has held the position of Associate Vice President and Controller, and she has over 20 years of experience in higher education finance.

We also welcomed Dr. Stephanie Brooks, our Dean of the College of Health, as a representative of the college deans.

Dr. Wesam Helou is continuing his role as Chief Information Officer. As a part of this team, Wesam will spearhead the much-needed upgrades and improvement to our campuswide software systems.

Dr. Randy Deike, our Vice President of Enrollment Management. Dr. Deike is bringing four decades of experience and a personal passion for expanding access to education, especially for traditionally under-represented students who may be intimidated by the college application and enrollment process. Welcome, Dr. Deike.

And P. Kelly Tompkins will advise me and the Senior Leadership Team on a limited basis through this academic year in business affairs.

With this team, I am confident that we have excellent leaders and thinkers in place as we design and implement our new strategic plan for CSU — which I will touch on in a bit.

As I use this time to recognize some of those here with us today, I would also like to take a moment to recognize those from our community who aren’t with us. Over the last year, we have felt tragic losses. We have lost colleagues, students, friends, mentors.

I dedicate my remarks today — especially those about progress, growth, and hope for the future — to the memory of all the individuals we have lost.

When we build on and amplify the accomplishments of beloved students, colleagues, and partners we have lost, we ensure their contributions to this place are sustained and they themselves are long remembered through those contributions.

As we think about Cleveland State University in the year 2024 and beyond, I have found it exceptionally worthwhile to reflect on the history of our University and the circumstances that led to our founding 60 years ago. For me, it puts things into perspective. So, here’s a little history lesson.

In 1962, two years before CSU was established, James Rhodes made a campaign promise as part of his run for governor of Ohio. He pledged that all Ohio residents would live within 30 miles of a public institution of higher education. He was looking to meet the growing desire of high school graduates to continue their educations and receive the experience they needed to enter their chosen career fields.

In the years following, CSU was one of four new public universities established. The state’s already established universities grew as well, creating dozens of branch campuses across Ohio.

Without a doubt, this effort of Governor Rhodes was successful. By the fall of 1969, college and university enrollment was more than 358,000. Ten years prior, enrollment was less than half that — only 169,000.

When CSU was established, it was founded on the existing Fenn College, which itself was an extension of Greater Cleveland’s YMCA educational program. Fenn College began in 1923 and served largely as an engineering and business college with a model that put students both in the classroom and on the job.

Just last year, we celebrated Fenn College’s centennial. Fenn alumni arrived on our campus, and we welcomed them as our own alumni — because they are. Fenn College is integral to our own history and the role we play in Northeast Ohio. It’s easy to see how Fenn’s mission and model served as the basis for our own mission in the decades following.

At the start of this calendar year, we began celebrating the 60^th anniversary of CSU — our “diamond jubilee.”

Thanks to the efforts of our marketing and communications team and our Department of Africana Studies, we had the opportunity to recognize and reflect on CSU’s shared anniversary with a critical milestone in our nation’s history — the Civil Rights Act of 1964. CSU began the same year that the United States entered a new era of liberty and social justice. With the exhibit “Protest to Progress,” which stood open in Berkman Hall for everyone to see, we examined CSU’s infancy during this pivotal time. The city of Cleveland, our students, and the faculty, staff, and administrators at CSU at that time were exploring this new cultural context and what role CSU could play, both on our campus and across the city.

This exhibit offered a vivid reminder of how Cleveland State University began, the ways in which we succeeded, and the ways in which we faltered. And, most importantly, we were able to see how far we have come.

Our core mission as an urban, public university has largely remained unchanged since 1964. We are here to provide education and opportunity to our students and to serve the communities of the Greater Cleveland area. Yet, the context in which we fulfill that mission is clearly different from what Governor Rhodes imagined in 1962.

As we well know, institutions of higher education are facing challenges on many fronts. To determine how we should move forward, we must be honest with ourselves about the perception of higher education today. Not all Americans see the value of a college education in the same way they once did. Since 2015, the public’s confidence in higher education has dropped 20 percent, according to a Gallup poll.

In addition, students in middle school and high school now — who would become our next classes of enrolled students — are showing less interest in enrolling at any college or university. Fewer students have plans to attend college, either full time or part time.

At the same time, the number of upcoming high school graduates planning to head directly into full-time jobs has more than doubled, now accounting for 11% of the Gen Z population.

Let’s keep this in perspective, though. Students who plan to continue their educations still make up a majority of their peers at 74%.

At census this fall, we had more than 14,200 students enrolled at CSU across all of our degree programs. That includes a fall class of 2,800 new undergraduate students, 1,000 new graduate students, and 200 new law students — which I am pleased to report is well within our projected enrollment numbers and slightly higher than last year.

This number of new and returning students is a solid reminder of our responsibility as an urban, public, research university. Each one of these students is on a personal journey, and our core priority is to support them on that journey and offer the educational tools to ensure their success. When we succeed in advancing our mission together, we enable our students to succeed in achieving their dreams.

Personally, what I find most encouraging in my daily life are the personal stories that we have all become familiar with. I am talking about the stories of our graduates — the anecdotes that show us that CSU provides transformative education.

As president, I speak to many of our alumni, either here on campus, at events, or visiting them in their home states outside of Ohio. They use that time as an opportunity to talk to me about whatever is on their minds. Often, it’s what they fondly remember of their alma mater. Over two years of these conversations, I’ve noticed a wonderful commonality; a through-line woven into these stories.

In preparation for today, we’ve taken the time to speak to some members of our community and capture some of those conversations that I have with them so often. Let’s take a look so you can see in a condensed form what I have observed over the past two years…

“If not for CSU.” It’s a phrase I’ve heard in some form or another so often, I really wanted to share it with you. What we saw in that video was just a handful of stories…

And I will be sharing more of them over the coming weeks on my social media. I encourage you to follow along using the hashtag #IfNotForCSU.

I find these stories so inspiring, as they move past the trends and data points. These stories are the heart of our mission. They are records of the individual, transformative experiences that our students articulate, appreciate, and deserve.

CSU provides students with opportunities that change their lives. Our University serves as a launch pad where students can reach that dream that they couldn’t achieve alone.

If not for CSU — It makes me proud every day.

Our graduates go on to incredible heights, and they are a driving force in Northeast Ohio. As a majority of our graduates remain in the region, they become significant contributors to Cleveland’s major industries. Today, more than 1,000 of our alumni are working in the Cleveland Clinic, developing and maintaining the health system many of us rely on.

Another significant portion of our alumni are in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District, shaping business functions and operations for the district, teaching and aiding our young learners as they themselves come to understand the value and the promise of a strong education.

In fact, this data indicates that — among the top 20 employers of our alumni — 29% of these alumni are employed at educational institutions.

This is followed closely by the 25% of our alumni in health care. 15% of these alumni are in manufacturing, and 7% serve in vital public sector positions.

These industries are relying on our students to graduate and to be prepared to head into the workforce. As a university working with the community, we provide the link between students and our regional partners.

If not for CSU, students looking for professional guidance and connections to Cleveland’s longstanding industries wouldn’t be part of the Sherwin-Williams Career Accelerator in our Monte Ahuja College of Business. Last fall, we invited our inaugural class of second-year students in accounting, finance, and information systems to participate in the program. They receive personalized advising and support, and they have access to career readiness workshops and corporate field trips. We will soon be expanding this program to include more students in more programs across campus.

If not for CSU, so many of our students wouldn’t be learning from subject matter experts among our impressive faculty. Here are just a few examples:

Dr. Charles McElroy in our Department of Information Systems, who earned the top prize in the Defense Data Grand Prix, a competition hosted by the Department of Defense, for his project “Identifying Disruptive Technologies.”

Dr. Stacey Litam in our Department of Counseling, Administration, Supervision and Adult Learning. Dr. Litam was recognized as one of Crain’s Cleveland’s 40 Under 40 as a leading researcher on the COVID-19 pandemic’s lasting social and wellness impacts.

And Nick Klein, our Head of Voice in the School of Music, who received an Emerging Leader Award from the National Association of Teachers of Singing.

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t use this opportunity to mention this year’s Vocal Theater Workshop, which will be performing an original musical by alumnus Jacob Bremkamp titled Poe is Dead, as well as the opera Cosi fan tutte in collaboration with the CSU Symphony Orchestra.

If not for CSU, our students wouldn’t have the opportunity to share their talents on stage in the second-largest theater district in the country. Every year, our Department of Theater and Dance puts on performances in Playhouse Square, where the public can come to see our students and enjoy musical theater, dance, and drama. This past year, those student performances included the musical comedy Avenue Q and the original production of Ancestra, co-written and directed by Holly Holsinger, the chair of our Theater and Dance Department.

In addition to our student-performers, CSU students are the stage managers and technicians who operate the equipment, build the sets and props, and learn about the business of theater.

Our students go on to build careers as actors, screenwriters, dancers, stage and theater managers, and other roles that keep them connected to the performing arts.

Playhouse Square was also home this year to a short film by students in our School of Film and Media Arts. The downtown video marquees played the film “Pride at Playhouse Square,” which included both animated and live action sequences to celebrate Pride Month. What an opportunity for them!

Graduates from our School of Film and Media Arts go on to deploy their filmmaking skills in marketing departments of Fortune 500 companies, in the commercial filmmaking industry, and in schools and universities like CSU.

In fact, our own videographer, Val Garrett in University Marketing, is a CSU alumna and graduate from our film school. Thanks to her incredible skills, our YouTube channel has been actively posting new videos to show off so many aspects of CSU. In the past year alone, our videos received more than 18,000 views.

If not for CSU, our student-athletes wouldn’t have the chance to compete and take home conference championships. Our 365 student-athletes, representing 21 countries and competing on 18 teams, earned 11 team and individual league championships in our previous fall and spring seasons. Student-athlete and softball player Jenna Deang was selected as the Horizon League’s nominee for the NCAA Woman of the Year Award.

Thanks to our Athletics Department, student-athletes at CSU are encouraged not only to be the best they can be in their chosen sport, but also they’re encouraged to reach their highest in the classroom. 72% of our student-athletes last year were recognized for academic achievement, earning a GPA of 3.25 or higher. And the entire department recorded a cumulative GPA over 3.0, which is a streak of 35 semesters in a row. This past spring, two of our five University Valedictorians were student-athletes — Kiersten Clark and Jenna Deang.

While I’m on the theme of “if not for CSU,” it only seems fitting that I use this time to mention an alumnus who, likely, most of us have not met and never will. It is unfortunate that, often, we never know the full impact that we have on the trajectory of our students’ lives. Yet, we recently were made aware of how much CSU changed a life.

Walter Lee McCombs was a graduate from our College of Law in 1976. After earning his degree, Walter had a successful career with Abbott Laboratories. CSU had such an impact on his life that, before his untimely passing, Walter wanted to make sure that he gave back to this University. In fact, I am humbled to say that we will soon announce the largest gift in CSU’s history thanks to the McCombs family.

I will have more to share with you this spring about the McCombs legacy at CSU and how it will support the educational experience we provide.

It’s not only our students and alumni who can say, “If not for CSU.” The communities of Northeast Ohio say it, too. If not for CSU, many wouldn’t find the help or services they need.

For instance, our Speech and Hearing Clinic in the College of Health provides services to anyone in the area, not only those affiliated with CSU. The clinicians running the program do everything they can to ensure that patients continue to get services, therapy, and equipment that allow them to communicate, listen, and interact with the world.

This clinic is one of the many CSU programs that I have shone a bright light on in our monthly CSU Matters series.

I encourage you to take a look, if you haven’t already, to learn more about this and other fascinating programs.

If not for CSU, hundreds of young individuals with special needs wouldn’t have had the opportunity to visit our campus this year for programs with the Special Olympics. In the past year, our Department of Health Science and Human Performance in the College of Health hosted two such events, which educated these young boys and girls on the fundamentals of basketball, lacrosse, and soccer. Hundreds of participants from Cleveland area schools and scores of volunteers came together on Krenzler Field and in Woodling Gym to embrace the athletic spirit and learn from one another.

CSU is now actively engaged in supporting the city of Cleveland in its bid to host the 2030 Special Olympics USA Games, which would bring over 5,000 athletes and more than 100,000 fans to our city.

If not for CSU, students at Hathaway Brown School wouldn’t have experienced this past spring’s total solar eclipse in quite the same way. As an outreach project, our chapter of the Society of Physics Students worked with high schoolers at Hathaway Brown to educate them on the science of the eclipse. Not only did these high schoolers gain a greater understanding of this rare event, but they were then able to share that knowledge with first graders at the school.

For their work, our students received a prestigious outreach award from the national physics organization. This is the second time our students received this award just in the last three years.

And if not for CSU, the projected gaps in knowledge and professional expertise in Northeast Ohio could grow larger in the years to come, but by working with our community partners, we have been making concerted efforts now to avoid the harm those gaps could bring. For instance, medical professionals are predicting significant shortages in healthcare workers in the years ahead. As part of CSU’s plan to combat this shortage, the Washkewicz College of Engineering launched a new undergraduate program in Biomedical Engineering, enrolling its first cohort this fall.

Thanks to a team of faculty from the Cleveland Clinic, our students are learning alongside instructors from one of the world’s most prominent healthcare systems, and students are participating in Clinic labs to fully understand the role they can play in health research.

In partnership with Cleveland Clinic, we are also able to offer several joint doctoral programs. Students interested in Applied Biomedical Engineering, Cellular and Molecular Medicine, Clinical and Bioanalytical Chemistry, and Regulatory Biology have an advisor at the Clinic as well as unique research opportunities.

These are top tier doctoral programs made accessible to a wider range of students because of CSU.

And one last example: We are also working to address the need for more computer science education in Cleveland. Last fall, in this very ballroom, we launched the Center for Computing Education and Instruction. This center is the culmination of over a decade’s work with the Cleveland Metropolitan School District and the Cleveland Foundation. With this new center, our region will have teachers prepared and excited to teach computer science courses and expand those opportunities to more K-12 students. Careers in information technology are expected to grow at twice the rate as the labor market in the next decade, and our schools need teachers specialized in this field of study.

As an institution of higher learning, as a pillar of the Greater Cleveland community, and as an employer, it is our responsibility to continue creating generations who can proudly exclaim, “If not for CSU.”

So, what are we going to do to live up to that responsibility in the midst of difficult times?

For starters, we have been taking a hard look at how we need to operate today compared to how we operated five or ten years ago.

Over the last year, we set in motion a process by which we would review the financial stability of CSU at all levels. In consultation with our Board of Trustees, we established a committee of senior leaders and trustees to conduct this extensive review. We are so thankful to the community partners and foundations whose financial support made it possible to retain the external expertise we needed to do this work.

Last fall, this steering committee dug in. They collected and analyzed vast amounts of data related to our operations, the structure and success of peer institutions, and the trends at large that I spoke about earlier.

The committee focused their assessment on both where we could reduce our budget and where we might strategically invest for the future. In May of this year, the committee submitted their consolidated analysis and findings report to the Board of Trustees.

Among these recommendations was a Voluntary Separation Incentive Plan and other rightsizing measures, which we put into action this summer. Already, we have said goodbye to faculty and staff members who chose to depart under this plan. We will see more voluntary departures throughout this academic year.

It is clear that we need to reduce our employee headcount to balance our budget, yet saying farewell to colleagues has been difficult. We wish them well and hope to see them again on campus for events like today or to watch our student-athletes compete.

I am pleased to report that, in late August, we presented a balanced budget for Fiscal Year 2025. The Board has approved this budget. The Senior Leadership Team and I are hard at work on our remaining restructuring targets for Fiscal Year 2026, but we are seeing signs that our measures are making the positive impact we had planned.

Each year, the Senior Leadership Team and I develop a shared set of institutional priorities. Once we establish our priorities, we break them down into measurable action items. If you would like to read about our 2023-24 priorities and how we as a leadership team made progress on these goals, I invite you to visit our online Accomplishments Report to see where we focused our time and energy over the last academic year.

Setting priorities this year, however, will look a bit different.

Now, it is time to look ahead clear-eyed toward a future with realities that are admittedly challenging but can give rise to new opportunities, commitments to excellence, and to new investments. This summer, the Board of Trustees and the Senior Leadership Team, together with our college deans, held strategic planning retreats to begin this important work. These were broad conversations. We discussed where we see CSU doing groundbreaking work, what sets us apart, and where we would like to grow. We studied the challenges that all of higher education will face in the next five years, and we began to brainstorm how we might tackle those issues head on.

Most importantly, we found areas of common ground in our thinking. We discovered topics, ideas, and themes that came up again and again.

Two years ago, I stood before you as your newly invested president. I spoke to you then about our position within Cleveland and that, for us all, this city is our campus.

This is true, even for our online students who benefit from the rich economic and natural resources of Cleveland. Even for our international students, many who will take what they learned in this city and take it back home to theirs.

That idea has continued to flourish in our conversations about our University’s strengths, it became clear that our downtown campus and the large number of students we educate from Cuyahoga County alone mean that we are Cleveland’s University. And we have the potential to provide infinite opportunity to those around us: our students, our faculty and staff, and the region.

This is what we are doing well, what we’re known for. We are Cleveland’s university, and this is also an area of growth. This is a commitment we can reaffirm ourselves to for the next five years.

If we are planting our flag on this concept, then we must also hold ourselves accountable to it and measure our success. Already, there are metrics we consider regularly that give some indication of how well we are serving our students. For instance, we regularly review our year-to-year student retention and six-year graduation rates, and we know we have room for improvement. We are evaluating where we stand now in this regard and where we should be in the next five and 10 years.

To keep you updated on this process, we have created a new webpage for the strategic plan. From this page, learn about upcoming opportunities to provide your input, monitor progress, and review our timeline.

The detail of the strategic plan is still in progress. Before the end of the summer, I convened a Strategic Planning Task Force. This small but mighty group was charged with taking the seeds of our strategic plan and expanding upon them. I asked this group not to produce a heavy, detailed report outlining in detail our initiatives from 2025 to 2030. Instead, the Task Force will develop a nimble, easily digestible framework upon which we can build.

And they are not developing this strategic plan alone. Already this fall, we have held several input sessions with groups across our University. These meetings have helped to provide feedback through a comprehensive survey on our current thinking and direct our attention to areas we weren’t initially considering. We will continue to collect feedback throughout the fall, and thank you to everyone who has already shared their thoughts. We feel confident that we will have a plan that is inclusive and inspirational for all our work in the years ahead.

Our timeline to complete the strategic plan is ambitious. The Task Force is working diligently to complete the plan by Thanksgiving, and shortly after that we will submit it to the Board of Trustees for their consideration.

But we don’t need the plan to be complete before we embark on some of the work we know we need to do. Thanks to the hard work of many of you, certain actions are already well underway. These ideas in motion are our initial wave of innovations in education and the student experience.

Last year at this time, I spoke about the new Division of Student Belonging and Success and wrapping up our college realignment process. This year, I want to focus on innovation in the core of our university: our academics. This might seem like inside baseball — but it is vital and groundbreaking.

For over a year now, our faculty and Provost Nigamanth Sridhar have been moving at an incredible pace in reimagining our core curriculum. This group has not only looked at the series of requirements our students must meet to graduate, but they’ve also thought about our core curriculum holistically: What do we want our students’ academic experience to be?  What do we want all students to know and be able to do? How might we best link these essentials to our students’ own interests?

The result is CSU’s Inquiry Core, focusing on the development of skills that students need while they’re taking classes and long afterward.

In completing their core requirements, we want our students to learn how to find the answers they seek and, when they run into hurdles along their path, creatively approach the problem from another angle using the core academic tools they are acquiring — and giving them a path to graduation.

We are giving our students the tools they need to adapt throughout their lifetime.

Development of the Inquiry Core is still in progress. Over the summer, several groups of faculty developed five pathways to be part of the core, including environmental sustainability, emerging technologies, leadership, social justice, and health.

We will be launching the new Inquiry Core in Fall 2025.

We also have been thinking critically about our course offerings, how they roll into a degree, and how they match with a student’s interests and goals. This led our faculty to pursue the idea of integrated degrees.

Here’s an example: a student may be pursuing a degree with the intent of creating intuitive and attractive user interfaces for software. In this case, an integrated degree in Design and Computer Science would meet their pursuits without the need to design an individualized course of study or a double major.

This is a big deal. Integrated degrees are a differentiator for universities that provide them — and we are the first and only public institution of higher education in Ohio to do it.

This is just one example. Thanks to our faculty, we are able to offer 11 different integrated undergraduate programs.

We will soon be communicating these new degree options to prospective students who will be able to graduate career-ready and with the interdisciplinary skill set and knowledge base that employers in the region tell us they are looking for.

To help educate these students on their career prospects in these integrated fields, we have created online resources that detail the job outlooks for each of the 11 majors. Students who may be curious as to how their degree program matches their career aspirations will have that data easily available to them.

Speaking of our website, we have made significant upgrades to our online presence in recent months. Just a few weeks ago, our main page — csuohio.edu — got a major overhaul.

With the new website, we have improved the online experience for prospective students and their families who are looking to learn about CSU before and during the enrollment process.

Migrating to a new webpage is not a simple or quick process. It took months of work from all our content managers to transition to the new platform, so I thank the University Marketing staff and the team throughout our University who put in the work to make this happen.

This is our front door to welcome prospective students — and our team has made it more welcoming to enter.

This is just one of the tech upgrades we will be making in the years ahead.  We are in fact embarking on a comprehensive technology transformation that will enable us to work smarter, more effectively, and in a more integrated manner all across campus.  Many on campus would tell you that this work is long overdue. It won’t get done all at once, but within the next few months, we will have a plan and we will work the plan.

This December 18^th will be 60 years to the day that legislation was signed, establishing Cleveland State University as a new public university for the state and an urban university for the city of Cleveland.

In those 60 years, CSU has graduated more than 145,000 students.

In those 60 years, we have grown our campus to become a fixture at the heart of Cleveland.

I hope we will all — together — continue that legacy now and into the years ahead. Let’s continue to focus on the next generations of students who will know that, thanks to CSU, they achieved their dreams.

We are Cleveland’s university, and these are the students of Cleveland State.

These are the men and women who chased their dreams, often defying enormous odds against them to create their own “If not for CSU” stories.

These are the leaders who will build our future, and I am excited to see what comes next for them and for all of us.

Thank you.