Presidential Inaugural Address

My sincere thanks to all for a wonderful weekend. I want to take this opportunity to share my words with you. Your input, comments, observations are welcome. Thank you and welcome to dignitaries, guests and family members, faculty, staff, students and friends, visiting marching dignitaries and fellow presidents. And a sincere thank you to our Cougar Battalion, Columbus State University ROTC unit, winner of the General Douglas MacArthur Award, and thank you also to the men and women serving in the armed forces here and abroad, preserving our freedom so that we can participate in events like this. My thanks as well to these exceptional young men and women from our Schwob School of Music in our newest College of the Arts and the director of the Schwob school, Dr. Fred Cohen. Chairman Hatcher, you bring wisdom and energy to your leadership role impacting 290,000 University System of Georgia students. Thank you. Chancellor Davis, thank you for your guidance, your advocacy and your support. Thank you for your visits to Columbus, and thank you for your impact on our system. Dr. Herbst, you are an advocate, coach, mentor and academic leader. Thank you for always responding to e-mail in real time, day or night. Thank you for your support. Jimmy Yancey you are Columbus State University. From student to regent. From chairing corporate boards to chairing Columbus State University capital campaigns. You are a special source of inspiration to me. Your leadership and execution sets the highest of standards for performance. Thank you for all that you do. To Mr. Bill and Sue Marie Turner. You represent the soul of this community. As you review the six core values of Columbus State University, you see servant leadership as one of our defining principles. Mr. Bill, you are the embodiment of servant leadership and Columbus State University, in general, and me, in particular, benefit from the example you set. Thank you for your access, wisdom, courage and support. My parents, Mike and Enid Mescon, epitomize first-generation Americans pursuing the American dream. They have instilled that unique spirit that de Tocqueville described when he wrote: “America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.” Thank you. My sister and brother, Nance and Jed, thank you for your lifetime of support and encouragement. Abbie, David, William and Preston, our precious children. I am so glad you are here, so proud of your accomplishments and so excited about your intent to pay it forward. You mean the world to me, and I will always, always be there for you. Most importantly, to my wife, my friend, my cheerleader, my partner, Lauren, I could not, I cannot, serve this great university and great community without you. As hackneyed as it may sound, you are my rock, my foundation, and we are a great team. Thank you for everything. I am humbled and proud and honored to have the opportunity to serve as the fourth president of Columbus State University. For 51 years, Columbus State University has enjoyed an exceptionally unique partnership and alliance with this great community. It is my distinct pleasure to embrace the great tradition of this great institution and the legacies left by Drs. Whitley, Brooke and Brown as we create and commit to enlightened strategy and focused execution in the coming years. The late Herman Wells, former president at Indiana University, said this about a university president: “To be successful, the president must have the physical charm of a Greek athlete, the cunning of Machiavelli, the wisdom of Solomon, the courage of a lion, the skin of a rhino and the stomach of a goat.” So at the very least, I have the physical charm of a rhino and the wisdom of a goat … It is almost inconceivable for me to believe that three decades have passed in a blink of an eye. It was 30 years ago this week that I said goodbye to my office mate, lifelong friend and catalyst, George Vozikis, a noted chair at California State University-Fresno. I said goodbye, loaded a U-Haul trailer in Athens, Ga., with all of my worldly possessions, and I and my distinguished colleague and friend, Ken Nusbaum, a long-term professor in the veterinary medicine school at Auburn, made the 1,918 mile drive from the University of Georgia to Arizona State University. That is where I began my academic odyssey 30 years ago this week. Over these three exceptional decades, I have been joined by thousands of students, faculty and staff colleagues on an exceptionally engaging, challenging and formidable quest to make an impact, make a mark; on this wonderful arena we call the academy. It all happened in a blink of an eye. I so vividly remember my own excitement in seeing my name listed in the fall, 1979 course catalog and the extra buzz when I noticed that, among a faculty of 45 in the Department of Management, I was the only professor assigned to Metro Center. Shortly thereafter, I learned that Metro Center was a mall in northwest Phoenix and, as a new faculty member, it was my turn, my first semester to teach at that mall, an hour from the main campus. It became imminently clear to me at that moment, as a neophyte faculty member that sometimes, many times, you take one for the team. While I am so very thankful and grateful for the opportunities that I have been given, no single recognition has meant more to me than this handmade plaque, on my office wall, that Iwas given my first semester 30 years ago by my 75 students in my undergraduate course in corporate social responsibility. The plaque reads as follows: “The Premium Bean Award (I frequently made references that semester to Jelly Bellys, jelly beans, just recently released on the market and a true reflection of innovation and creativity in the world of business). In recognition of the ability to make the fifty minutes between 9:40 and 10:30 Monday, Wednesday and Friday an eye-opening, entertaining, educational, enlightening and most of all enjoyable experience, this award is presented to Dr. Tim a genuine, through and through, inside and out, fantastic prof.” You see my friends, at the end of the day, at the blink of an eye, after 30 remarkably exciting and invigorating years, this is what it is all about. The gratification from scholarly research, book publishing, sponsored grants and contracts, leadership in professional organizations is so very important. But all of these activities pale at the buzz, at the impact, at the wonder of engaging students in challenging thought and dialogue, and writing and research to truly make a difference and to sincerely make an impact. This is our raison de’etre, “reason for being”. Engaging in research, creative inquiry and in the Columbus State University tradition, servant leadership all contribute to making us truly better in the classroom and, thereby, producing a truly superior product, engaged committed students who will forever make an impact in the world in which we live. As faculty, this is indeed our reason for being. So to honor the freshman convocation component of this grand event … students, I urge you to continue to question, probe and challenge our faculty. Faculty, I encourage you to continue to raise the bar on classroom expectations and challenge our students, here at Columbus State University. This give and take, student to professor and professor to student has a time-honored tradition that creates vitality on our campuses that is truly without equal. In these exceptionally challenging times, we must stay hyper-focused on our strategic goals and key performance indicators. Jim Collins, the renowned author of Good to Great, said this: “It doesn’t matter whether you can quantify your results. What matters is that you rigorously assemble evidence, quantitative or qualitative, to track your progress. About this, we must be vigilant. The maxim states: If you don’t measure it, it does not matter. We must constantly evaluate and measure our progress, our efforts, our outputs, to determine if we are, in fact, on track to reach, to attain our goals. Nothing will be more important to us.” Ronald Heifetz, the founder of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and Marty Linsky, a faculty member there, have written for years about leadership in complex organizations. While I have been endowed with an exceptional opportunity to work with faculty, staff, students and the community in mapping strategy and building structure for our next half decade, it is essential, as Chancellor Davis has reiterated time and again, to build exceptional bench strength at all levels of the organization. Heifetz argues for the distribution of leadership across the enterprise, sharing responsibilities, sharing decision-making and sharing the successes. The key he writes is simply to mobilize everyone. To build a collective will. To energize many to focus on real and meaningful and timely solutions. To encourage all to feel as if this is “my responsibility.” To encourage diverse and inclusive thoughts and insights and to challenge historical assumptions. So, first, I commit to encouraging leadership development as a critical element of our strategy and building to the best of our ability bench strength from within. I have written for years about incremental entrepreneurship as driving innovation and creativity in organizations. Heifetz and Linsky reference corporate adaptability coming not from sweeping changes but rather from accumulation of micro adaptations originating from our many micro-environments. Fostering adaptation is crucial in today’s challenging, competitive, demanding higher education environment. Launching new initiatives in West Point to support the economic development explosion led by Kia is essential. Online course development leveraging world-class technology is requisite. New and innovative programs in servant leadership, earth and space science, education, creative writing, jazz, new media, real estate, history, gaming and simulation, defense and critical languages captivate our adaptive thinking today. As Heifetz suggests, we hit the organizational “reset” button, building on the turbulence of the present to better meet tomorrow’s higher education needs. So second, I commit to incubate, to foster an environment committed to innovation and creativity. It cannot be education as usual. We must collectively commit to building on the traditions and successes of the past and mapping new practices and programs that meet the needs of the future today. Finally, we must as Heifetz suggests embrace disequilibrium. The status quo is that there is no status quo. The challenge they say is to keep our hands on the thermostat. If the heat is too low, we won’t make difficult decisions. If it heats up too much or too quickly, we panic and run. It is about embracing tough and challenging dialogue, courageous conversations that challenge assumptions. This is particularly difficult in higher education. The late great Peter Drucker once suggested that higher education generally embraces successful, applied theories about 20 years too late. This is reflective of our deliberative, pensive culture. Today, embracing discomfort must become more the norm than the exception. Watching the development of the nation’s first-ever graduate degree program in servant leadership embodies innovation, seeing our Department of History and Geography and the Department of Communication move to the RiverPark campus is a good thing. Seeing our College of Education and Health Professions launch our first-ever doctoral program is a positive but different development, like the Turner College delivering an online-only MBA program. We must embrace and celebrate disequilibrium because, from it, from disequilibrium comes positive and productive change and response. You see, in the material unlike the spiritual world, the meek will inherit nothing. So my third and final commitment is to foster and embrace courageous conversation that challenges convention and pushes the norm. So, one, I commit to encouraging leadership across the university, faculty, staff and students. I commit to embracing leadership development as a critical element of our strategy and building to the best of our ability bench strength from within. Two, I commit to incubate, to foster an environment committed to innovation and creativity. It cannot be education as usual. We must collectively commit to building on the traditions and successes of the past and mapping new practices and programs that meet the needs of the future. My third and final commitment is to foster and embrace courageous conversation that challenges convention and pushes the norm. Family, friends, colleagues and students, I make these commitments to you. I am humbled by this great opportunity and enthusiastically commit to embracing the future on behalf of the great history of Columbus State University.