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Text of Commissioner's Swearing-In Remarks

Delivered by Commissioner Richard M. Freeland on February 26, 2009, at Framingham State College.

Governor Patrick, Secretary Reville, Chair Desmond, President Flanagan, colleagues from the Board and Department of Higher Education and from the many distinguished colleges and universities of Massachusetts, and friends of higher education from business and government:

Thank you all for being here on this proud day for me and my family. Let me begin by thanking Governor Patrick, Secretary Reville and the Board of Higher Education for honoring me with this appointment. I am proud to join Commissioners Chester and Killins as a member of the state’s education team. Governor, let me also thank you for your remarks a few moments ago about the importance of higher education to our state. You have repeatedly identified education as one of your leading priorities. Your restructuring of educational governance is fostering an integrated system of learning extending from pre-kindergarten through graduate school. For higher education, you have sponsored the state’s most ambitious program of capital improvements in a generation. You have also won approval of a massive investment in the biosciences that recognizes academia’s role in research and workforce development.

As you have noted, we are in a difficult time. I assure you that I and my colleagues throughout public higher education will work to make sure that our students are well served and our scholarly work is well done despite the crisis of the moment. Over the longer term, I and we look forward to working with you to advance the academic excellence of which you have just spoken so eloquently.

I have spent most of the last four decades in the higher education community of Massachusetts. As a young, and then not so young, administrator at the University of Massachusetts over a span of 22 years; as President of Northeastern for ten years; and as a professor at both Northeastern and Clark Universities, I have taken pride in being part of a global center of academic excellence. As Governor Patrick has rightly said, for thoughtful people around the world, our state is associated most strongly with leadership in higher education. The quality and variety of our colleges and universities is our greatest claim to distinction. It is the intellectual vitality of these institutions that has fostered our prosperity and has made us a center for health care and for cultural achievement. It is the magnetic power of our campuses that has attracted generation after generation of talent to this state. We in higher education have much to be proud of, and our state has much to be proud of in our work.

And yet we cannot be complacent. Other states, and indeed other nations, have seen in our example the generative power of higher education and have been pouring resources into creating their own centers of academic strength. We can no longer assume, as we once could, that our position of leadership is assured, or that the prosperity that flows from our historic stature will be sustained without a major effort, or that the educational opportunities we offer our citizens will be unequaled without a commitment to truly making them so. It is my belief that to retain our position as the nation’s leading academic center two longstanding patterns need to be addressed.

The first of these has to do with our system of public higher education. This system has grown up in the shadow of well established private colleges and universities. The University of Massachusetts was a state college until the late 1940s. We created our first community college only in 1958. Our normal schools began to evolve as state colleges only in the 1960s. Today this comparatively young system of public campuses plays a vital role in driving our economy and assuring educational opportunity. Each part of the system—community colleges, state colleges and university—can boast impressive achievements. Yet history is still with us. Our public colleges and universities still struggle for the support and recognition they deserve in a state that has for many years equated academic quality with private higher education.

This pattern needs to change. We need to fully grasp and then act on the truth that we can no longer rely on our private institutions alone for either economic strength or educational excellence. This reality is being brought to our attention in dramatic fashion today as more and more families, faced with the economic pressures that afflict our entire nation, turn to public campuses as institutions of choice to educate their sons and daughters. We need to be sure those students have access to well supported and competitively compensated professors, to well-equipped laboratories and classrooms and to well-stocked libraries and to the latest in information technology. Massachusetts needs to take the support of our public campuses as seriously as do competitor states that have long understood public higher education to be the key to their futures. As the state’s Commissioner of Higher Education and as part of our education Governor’s education team, I will be an evangelist for that message.

The second pattern that needs to change has to do with the relationship between state government and our private colleges and universities. Even as we build the excellence of our public campuses, we will remain dependent on the contributions of our independent institutions. These campuses educate a large percentage of the graduates of our high schools and provide scholarships that save the Commonwealth millions of dollars every year. Our private campuses are at the center of our knowledge-based economy. These realities cry out for a comprehensive public-private partnership in Massachusetts higher education. We in academia need to find ways to coordinate our efforts for the benefit of the Commonwealth and the state needs to recognize and embrace its unique opportunity to utilize the strength of both public and private institutions. As Commissioner, I will work to foster such a partnership, and I call upon the leaders of our college and universities, from both academic sectors, and colleagues in government who help shape public policy with respect to higher education, to join me in that effort.

We have much work to do. Over the past 15 years, Massachusetts has made a massive investment in improving the quality of our elementary and secondary schools and has begun to forge a system of early education. As we sustain those efforts, we must also remember that a high school diploma is not enough for many of our young people to succeed in today’s world. We must therefore pay greater attention the full education continuum. We need to make sure not only that high school graduates are ready for college but that a high-quality college education is available and affordable for them.

We also need to do more to support our students as they make the transition from high school to college and as they transfer across institutional boundaries within higher education, and we must help them persist and ultimately succeed as they do so. And finally we must assure that the degrees we give them at commencement equip them to enter productively into the workforce and constructively into civic life. I am confident that higher education is dedicated to making this ladder of opportunity work. Fostering an ever more effective system for educating our young people is a goal we all share.

But the spirit of partnership of which I have spoken is essential to achieving this goal. In order to win the heightened financial support on which our success depends, we in public higher education must achieve greater economies through collaboration among components of our own system while also reaching out and joining hands with our colleagues in the private sector. We have impressive examples of both kinds of cooperation to build on. Our success will depend on other partnerships as well—with early, elementary and secondary education and with the business community and with the agencies of state government, including those with responsibilities for economic and workforce development. Building these partnerships and accomplishing the educational goals I have identified represent daunting challenges. The economic conditions we face will compound the difficulties. But adversity can, indeed, foster innovation. We have an historic opportunity, my friends. Let us grasp it together.