Video Transcript
[Dr. Tromp] We have some wonderful special guests here today from our state board of Education, from our Foundation Board, from our Alumni Association. We have distinguished university partners and we have our ASBSU leadership. So thank you all for being here today to be a part of this conversation.
During my remarks. Yes, thank you. (audience clapping) During my remarks today, I’m gonna highlight a few of the people who’ve really helped build this university, so you’re gonna see some of them highlighted over the course of this talk. It’s been more than five years for me. Those five years haven’t always been easy. I go to these national higher ed conferences and people go like, “Dude, I can’t believe you’re still at Boise State. You are rocking it, that is some tenacity, man.” And they’re awed by what this community has accomplished. People say it to me all the time, they are literally awed by what we have accomplished. And it hasn’t always been simple. We’ve been through COVID, we’ve been through a lot of personal hardship, the economy, the crises that higher ed has faced, the negative energy that’s been focused on higher education and the way that that has really been fixated on universities as this site of damage when there’s so much good that universities do, such a powerful impact.
And I know many of you have gone through personal challenges too, as I have. So I’m really grateful for the way in which all of you have worked to continue to drive forward for the benefit of our students to make such an incredible impact with your research, with your teaching, with the service we do to the community. I am very grateful because what you have done in those five years, which is a lot of what I’m gonna talk about today, has been so phenomenal that it has made us a shining star.
We’ve been 50 years as a university, 92 years since we were founded, we’re creeping up on that hundredth anniversary. And it is an extraordinary place because of you, because of all that you have done. We are achieving remarkable things, not just for our students but for the state, for the people across the world who are benefiting from the outcomes that we produce. Not just the incredible students we graduate, but the research findings that we do. And I want you to know something. I know there’s a lot of work that people have to do, that folks have to do to produce data for the university, either for accreditation or for state board reports. So there’s a lot of data that you have to produce. That data actually makes a huge difference in us being able to track our trajectory and to see what kinds of accomplishments that we’re producing. It helps us understand where we need to do more for our students, where we need to do more in terms of improving processes. So that work that you’re doing, you don’t necessarily see all the outcomes, but what I’m gonna try to do today is help you see them. So for me, this is in many ways a five-year retrospective. I get to look back over what we’ve accomplished, but what I mostly wanna do is focus on what your incredible work has achieved for the university, for our students, and for our communities over the past several years. So this, our awesome staff. You know, I wanna just take a moment to thank the Extra Mile Arena staff, the events staff, and the folks who work in communications who put together these videos for me. Can we please give them a round of applause?
(audience clapping) So this is a little highlights reel for the last five years. Let’s hit it. (upbeat music) – Hey!
(upbeat music continues)
(audience clapping)
I gotta tell you that, that I watched that, I could watch it a hundred times in a row. I showed it to my sister last week when we got the final cut of the video and she burst into tears and she said, “How proud you must be of all that your community has done.” And it’s true, what an exciting place. Our strategic plan has guided us. And you may have heard me say before, when our accrediting body came to assess us, they said they had never seen on a college campus greater buy-in to the strategic plan than they saw for the Blueprint for success. That’s really incredible. And what it shows is the input that you made in making that plan and the buy-in that you have to our goals, so that’s what we’re gonna talk about.
Improve educational access and student success is our number one goal for a reason. It’s number one because it is the center of what we do to bring students here to make the university accessible to them. Our strategic enrollment and retention plan has been a key part of that, where we actually set metrics for ourselves, and we set specific goals about serving students and finding new ways to reach students. We’ve created new scholarship support, we’ve hired new staff to make sure we can get those students in the door. And when we get them here, we want them to be successful. And so our Center for Teaching and Learning has done an incredible job of helping our faculty prepare. So we’ve made these investments in moving things forward and it has produced incredible outcomes. In the last five years, we’ve increased our graduation rate 39%. It’s incredible. (audience clapping) I get invited by Harvard to be their crisis leadership speaker every year for their workshop. I can’t imagine why they pick me. And when you’re in a room full of higher ed leaders and you say you’ve increased your graduation rate 39% in five years, people say, “Wait, what?” Because a one and a half percent graduation rate increase is phenomenal. 39% is meteoric. And that’s down to our faculty and staff. We have graduated almost 25,000 students in the last five years. That’s phenomenal. Think of the impact that makes on this state, on this region, on the world that we’ve sent that many students out into the world to take their talents and to make their impact. And you can see on this slide, the ways in which we have increased the number of students who are graduating, the number of students who are completing their degrees all across the spectrum. So we’re churning students out with those talents magnified into the world. That’s real change. That’s real impact.
We now have the highest retention rate in the state of Idaho. (audience clapping) And we produce more graduates than all the other public institutions in the state combined. (audience clapping and cheering) That is such impact on those individual students, on the state, on the region. And I’m so proud to say one of our goals in our strategic enrollment and retention plan was to ensure that we were bringing more Idaho students in the door. We have grown that number by 20% in the last five years of Idaho students coming to Boise State. And it’s no question why they’re choosing us. They’re choosing us because the experience that you give them and our incredible strategic enrollment and management team has worked to really go out and reach out into those rural communities. We’ve grown our enrollment from the bachelor’s level all the way up to the doctoral level. And we’ve touched so many lives and so many families lives with that work. Thank you for that incredible work. So you’re seeing here now what our strategic enrollment and retention plan looked at. Where were we demographically not reaching students, not impacting students? Where were we seeing that we weren’t matching our own demographics in the state? And we made targets and we changed our plans, we structurally changed what we were doing so we could reach those targets. And in the first two years of the SERP, this is the kind of impact we’ve made. Now we’ve just added new retention goals for transfer students, so that’s a new addition to the SERP. And we’re gonna be working towards those goals in the coming years. But when Boise State sets a goal, we achieve it. When Boise State strives to serve students better, we accomplish it. And that’s changing people’s lives. We serve students from all 44 counties in the state of Idaho. And we have students living who’ve graduated from Boise State, alumni living in every single county. We are changing the face of Idaho with the work that you do. That’s impact.
Over the past five years, I’m very proud of the services that we provide for veterans. And over the last five years, we’ve enrolled 3,586 veterans at Boise State. And there are already 1,056 enrolled for this fall. And that doesn’t even include other military affiliated students. Isn’t that incredible? (audience clapping) And our tuition assistance program covers the gap. So you probably know that if you’re in active duty military or you’re serving in the guard and you wanna go to school and you get that GI Bill, there’s a gap between what the federal government covers and what a university education cost. Boise State covers that gap for those students, which is incredible. (audience clapping) And this is another thing I’m really proud of. Any veteran student, any active duty military student comes to Boise State, our Veterans Services Center will help them go to any university anywhere in the world. We don’t just serve people who come to Boise State. We serve veterans who are going to school anywhere so we can help them get an education. (audience clapping)
You guys are gonna get tired of applauding ’cause there’s so many amazing things to talk about. It’s gonna be like a basketball game right here in Extra Mile Arena. We are so proud of what we’ve accomplished in online education and we’ve been doing it for decades, and we’ve been able to touch so many people and give so many people access to that online degree. And our hallmark in online education has been excellence from the very beginning. You see some of our incredible rankings here. Nearly one third of all of our undergraduate students take an online class during the course of their degree. And nearly a quarter of students who graduate from Boise State graduate from an online program. So we are providing that impact in a way that is flexible and responsive to people’s needs.
I wanna talk, brag a little bit about student affairs because we’re talking about student educational access and success, right? That’s the first goal of our strategic plan. When our leadership team met two years ago, and we created goals for our senior leadership at the university, one of the things that we agreed on as a leadership team is that we needed to make the university easier for students to navigate. And so our VP of student affairs and enrollment management went to his team and said, “We have to make this a priority.” And they’ve worked all year. They’ve made over 150 improvements. But the one that just blows my mind is the wait time for financial aid assistance has gone from 30 minutes to three for our students. (audience clapping) They’ve made it easier for students to access experiences, programs, events. So I’m gonna give you a couple of other examples. They changed the housing application process. They improved the digital strategy to reach students. They modernized note taking services and technologies. They changed the way we process, excuse me, veteran services processes. They created a fast application for students who had been admitted but hadn’t enrolled. So they’ve tried to make everything easier for students and it’s made a difference in student success.
Some of you may also know that we are a powerhouse in eSports. We’ve had the number one eSports coach in the country. We’ve had four national championships, we’ve been program of the year. But what you might not know is that we’ve had nearly 10 million viewers of our eSports program. And we’ve amassed more wins than any other NCAA eSports team. And here’s a fact that astounds people like me, but not our students, more young people tune into live broadcasts or match highlights on social feeds like Twitch, Facebook, YouTube, than they do for professional sports. More students are watching Twitch than are watching pro sports. That means Boise State is reaching a critical demographic of students to make them aware of this university with the outstanding excellence of that program. And those are students, the reason that it was engineering schools that launched the first eSports programs in the country is because those students often become engineers. They’re tech savvy, they’re quick thinkers, they’re adaptable. And so we’re really proud of the work that we’re doing in that program because that program is helping us reach people we wouldn’t otherwise reach.
And our student athletes in other areas of the university are doing incredibly well too. Our athletics program has spent the last five years really focusing on the whole student athlete. Do you know that we are in the top 5% of NCAA D1 programs for student athlete academic success? Isn’t that incredible? (audience clapping) Not only are those 375 student athletes competing at the top of national competition, but they are performing academically as well. So when they leave the university, they go on to have great careers. And we have an all time high graduation rate for our student athletes. 94% of them graduated on time. It’s incredible. So yeah, I’m gonna give that a woo woo. (audience clapping) Many of you are aware of the kinds of changes that have come to our athletics facilities under the leadership of our AD. We’ve created new support systems for those students, which is part of the reason that they’re so incredibly successful. And we’ve raised almost $21 million just in the last year for the work we’re doing in the athletics facility in the New North End Zone project.
What I want you to understand that a lot of people don’t understand is that’s often the way that people find this university is through our athletics. I was visiting a family member this last week, and people were like, “Oh, where are you from?” And I said, Boise, Idaho, and they would all go, “Blue Field.” And then I could talk about our engineering programs and our healthcare programs and our arts and sciences programs. It’s often the way that people find us. And when in over our history, most of the philanthropic funding that has come into the university had come in through athletics. What we have been able to really achieve in the last five years is help people walk across that bridge from athletics to academics because they understand how important the work is that the university is doing academically.
So the Stueckle Sky Center that is in our athletics facility that you see towering up over the football field, there was a major gift from Duane and Lori Stueckle for that Sky center. But what you might not know is they also funded Julie Oxford’s endowed professorship. (audience clapping) Duane has said it was the best investment he ever made in his entire life as a business person. It was the best investment he had ever made in his life because the return on that investment was so enormous to the university because of all the money that Julie’s incredible research brought into the university because of all the impact that she’s made on students. And Julie, thank you for your incredible 24 years at Boise State University and for all you’ve done. (audience clapping)
We’re also working to serve our students with new spaces. Our incredible CVA facility for the arts. Many of you heard me say the year that was opened, the director of the NEA came out and visited and said it was the most incredible arts facility she’d seen at any university in the country. We continue to create these incredible buildings that blow people’s minds, because of the way that they are so innovative, because of the kinds of facilities they offer, the impact they make. And we’re growing new spaces right now to serve our students. And they’re all purpose driven. They’re purpose driven to help us become a stronger university to help us produce better outcomes for our students in our state. One of them is a new residence hall because we know that students were having a hard time finding a place to live when they came to Boise. I had parents write me and say, when I first arrived here and say, “I drove around for an entire week trying to find a place to live. My dream was to come to Boise State and now I’m not able to find a place to live and I can’t stay.” We also know that when we give students a place to live, those first year students a place to live on campus, that they’re more academically successful because they take access to other things that they might not do. They go to the lecture, they go to the library, they meet with a study group. So we know we’re gonna make an impact on student success. The data is unequivocal about that. Our new residence hall is gonna be designed to have the kind of programming that will make an impact on those students’ lives.
We’re also creating a new science building because we are producing so many amazing STEM graduates. And right now we’re running labs from seven in the morning till 10 at night every day of the week. And we need to create a space where students who are training and all those STEM fields can get the access to the lab space and get their classes. And the faculty researchers can do their incredible pathbreaking research, like Julie’s done. And plans are also underway for our construction management building ’cause in a place that’s booming like Boise, there’s an incredible demand for construction management. And our engineering college is just thriving, and we wanna prepare people to get out there and be a part of that marketplace.
Our honors college has also grown nearly 18% in the last five years. It has 1,253 students, and look at the outcomes that we’re producing. Fulbright Fellows, Truman Scholars, Goldwater scholars. The impact that we’re making with that Honors college is incredible in terms of our whole student body, because you’re putting students into conversation with young people who have such talent and such ambition to make a difference in the world. We are inspired by the faculty who teach. Our students are inspired, our faculty and staff are inspired.
And I wanna recognize Dr. Shelton Woods, who’s the associate dean of our honors college. (audience clapping) He served so long in that amazing honors college and he is the author of six books. And I gotta tell you, as a humanist, like I just am in a kind of delighted awe at all that Shelton has done. Thank you Dr. Woods for everything that you do for our students and for Boise State. (audience clapping)
So this is our second goal. Innovation for Institutional impact. Boise State’s culture was built on this kind of scrappy creativity. And when people ever say to me, “Hey, blue field.” I tell them that what is so exciting about that blue field is that people were making AstroTurf that was green for a long, long time. And nobody ever asked the question, “Hmm, if it’s not real grass, does it have to be green? Until Boise State.” So we’ve had that innovative mindset and because we grew up as this scrappy upstart university, our faculty and our staff were innovating all over the university. And what we’re gonna see in this section is our trailblazing academic programs, the way that we’re supporting faculty and staff innovation in CID’s space, which is a new opportunity. They’ve served so many people in that new space since they’ve opened it.
We are recognizing the impact that our faculty and staff are making through new innovation awards. And we’re trying to provide resources for our faculty and staff to really move forward in a new world of AI when the world is changing so quickly to be ready for those challenges, and to be ready to think in front of those challenges. We’re gonna meet Idaho’s demand and needs for students that are graduating in these incredibly what they call hot jobs in the state. These incredibly important fields for the state’s future. And part of the way that we’re doing that is we’re willing to think differently as an institution about how we prepare and serve our students.
Our math learning center has won, not just one, but two national awards this year for the incredible work they’ve done in making an impact on student success in mathematics. Mathematics is one of the courses that’s often the barrier course for students who are interested in not just STEM fields, but across our curriculum. And when somebody can’t succeed in a math class, that’s often the thing that shuttles them out of college. We are not permitting that to happen at Boise State. We are striving to ensure that Boise State is accessible to our students and when we want them to be successful in these fields, we’re gonna provide the supports they need. And that Math Learning Center is now a national model. The Association of Pubic and Land-Grant Universities named it the number one student success program in the entire country this year. (audience clapping) Because they saw the impact that we were making on those students, and what we found, and this is so important, it’s not just that when students come into their degree and they do that first math class, and they get support from the Math Learning Center, that they just perform better in that math class. They actually perform better in their subsequent math classes too. They learn skills that make them better students all the way around. They become more successful academically. And now people all over the country are modeling our success. We’ve had outreach from universities across the country saying, “Tell us how you did that.” And we’re supplying information to them to help them produce models like the Math Learning Center. And that’s the goal of both the Beacon Awards and the APLU Award is to help spread these innovations across the country.
We’ve also built incredible new academic programming like the School Of The Environment, which is asking complex questions. You saw in that first video a link to that Beaver story. Do you know that’s been our most clicked on story of the year because it’s so fascinating to bring together scientists and engineers, people from across the curriculum, people who are working in the social sciences, and to ask the question, “How do we improve water access in the state of Idaho?” And to use the NASA data to understand where those waterways are and to rewild beavers into waterways, and produce 21 additional water days across the state. That’s a phenomenal story of collaboration across the curriculum. That doesn’t happen at every university. And our School Of The Environment is a way to bring people together to have those conversations because you solve real problems when you bring a lot of voices together in the room. So they’re working with external partners, they’re working across the curriculum.
The same is true for our School of Digital Futures. What we learned right out of the gate when AI emerged was that you can’t just have technology. You have to understand the social, the human aspects of that. You have to understand the implications. So it’s not just about what our scientists and engineers can produce. It’s about understanding how people fit into that, how culture fits into that. And our School For Digital Future for the digital future is gonna ask those questions and do problem solving and prepare our students for that new world.
And we’re working, we’ve worked over the last five years to make our programs in these tech fields accessible and available to all of our students no matter what their major is. So semiconductors to cyber, it doesn’t matter what your major is, you can access programming that will help you be prepared in those areas for a world that’s changing outside of the university. So if you’re studying HR, maybe you want to study semiconductors too, so you can go work in the semiconductor industry. If you are studying English like I did, what are you gonna do with that? Maybe be a University President, right? If you’re studying English, maybe you wanna study cyber and then you’re gonna be the person who understands the human element of the banking industry and cybersecurity. We know that we can equip our students in ways that make them more competitive on the job market and help them get great jobs that change the lives of their families. And we’re producing these graduates across the academic disciplines and across the lifespan of a student from certificates all the way up to those doctoral programs.
We now have a new certificate in the College of Innovation and Design, an Artificial Intelligence For All. So we’ve moved across these critical areas in our state and we’re helping students problem solve and understand the potential of AI. I’ve had, when I was working with the healthcare system recently, I had several people saying to me, “We’re still trying to figure out how AI works.” And there are challenges with it. We need students that are trained and we need innovators who are thinking about these questions to go out and problem solve so that our doctors and nurses and radiologists and folks across the healthcare fields can spend more of their time with patients and less of their time doing things that are technical things like writing reports. And if AI can help them, then we’ll produce better outcomes. There’s so many ways that AI can change the world around us for the better, but we have to understand the tool. As I said when we had our AI conference at the beginning of last year, “It’s like fire. It can either burn down your village or heat your homes.” And so we need to understand how to make it work for us. And that’s what our College of Innovation and Design is working to do.
And we have faculty, and here’s another one of our builders. We have faculty who have been working on this kind of thinking for decades. Andy Hung has long before most of us had even heard of AI, was exploring the benefits it could offer. And some of the research he’s been doing is to understand how AI can help us discover when students are struggling so we can reach out to them and help them be more successful. He’s been doing this work for decades, designing tools and using, thinking about how we can use that technology to make us better teachers and better servants to our students. Thank you, Andy, for all you’re doing. Will you give him a round of applause? (audience clapping)
Our next goal is advanced research and creative activity. And now you know that I’m reaching the halfway point. We have made incredible investments just as we have in the other two goals in this goal as well. We’ve made incredible investments across the university to help us achieve the kinds of outcomes that we have been able to achieve. And they are extraordinary. And I wanna note, these are investments that we’ve made from the central budget and from the VP’s office, the VP of Research and Economic Developments office. But you all have made investments across the university as well. This is just a fraction of the way that we’ve invested in research at the university. So that research, that investment has produced incredible research outcomes. An $83 million increase, 10 grants over a million this year, a 57% increase in our research awards in the last five years, isn’t that phenomenal? (audience clapping) We’re just breaking record after record. Our FY 24 numbers were more than double what it was just five years ago. That’s your incredible work. That’s your incredible work. And we are striving to invest so that you can achieve those outcomes. That doesn’t mean that we don’t recognize that there’s more for us to do, and we’re gonna keep investing and keep finding new ways to invest and asking the questions about what will help you achieve those incredible outcomes, sustain them and produce more? We’ve also grown our PhDs.
Here you’re seeing some of the numbers of the incredible number of students that we’re impacting with our PhD programs. We offered our first PhD program in 1992, and now we’re producing more and more PhD students all the time. The enrollment in those programs have grown. The impact and outcomes of those programs have grown. And we’ve really asked questions about what kinds of programs make sense for Boise State and for the state of Idaho. How can we produce programming that’s actually gonna produce what we need in the state, what our students need, what will help our faculty thrive? And we’ve tried to really accelerate it with the Grand Challenges Program.
I’ve got a giant number on this slide, and I’m gonna tell you what that means in just a moment, because we’ve really thought over the last few years, and when we met last year, I said, “We’re gonna be on a path to R1, but we’re gonna look different than other universities might look.” We’re gonna be a university that focuses on being innovative, that is focuses on being interdisciplinary, that focuses on a different kind of outcome. We’re not striving to be what a different university would need to be, but as many of you may know, Carnegie changed the way that they do the classification. And so now it requires 50 million in annual research expenditures, a goal we have long since achieved. And 70 research doctorate graduates a year. We are six doctorate research graduates away from achieving R1, six. (audience clapping) So we are walking down that path and just by being who we are, we’re just a hair’s breath away from producing the doctoral students that we need to be in R1. It will not be long before I stand on this stage and we are celebrating that achievement.
And I wanna thank our awesome faculty researchers that support staff who work with them and our VPR’s office for all they’ve done to help us get to that place. (audience clapping) Being an R1 for us doesn’t mean we stop serving our students. We’ve heard our faculty say this over and over again. To us, that remains a priority. We don’t wanna be one of those places where our faculty researchers don’t have contact with undergrads. In fact, one of the things that makes us special is how much our undergrads are actually connected with our faculty researchers. So we’re gonna break the mold of what an R1 looks like by being Boise State and by continuing to do what we do.
And that means that we care about things like our VIP program, the Vertically Integrated Projects that brings undergraduate students into people’s labs and archives and those research spaces. And research isn’t gonna be every single faculty person’s focus. We’re gonna have people working in a lot of different ways, but we are gonna achieve those incredible goals of giving students that experience that for them is often life changing. When I was at Arizona State University over the space of six years, we did a research study where we took the students who had the lowest measures of academic performance coming into the university, the lowest measures. So these were students who had a predicted graduation rate of about 24%. And if they did research with a faculty member, and it didn’t matter what field it was in, it didn’t matter whether it was individually or in a small group, if they did research with a faculty member, do you know what their graduation rate became? It sounds almost like I’m making it up when I say it, 99%. We know that if we engage students in that experience, it will transform their learning, their understanding of what they’re studying. And so the work that we do as researchers doesn’t just impact people with the incredible outcomes. The snow research we do changes the way we understand water in the state of Idaho. It doesn’t just do that. It changes the lives of our students. So we are committed to driving it forward and to making those outcomes work.
Now, sometimes when we think of research, all we think about is labs. I wanna feature another one of our faculty members now. Darrin Pufall Purdy. Yeah, let’s give Darrin a round of applause. (audience clapping) Darrin is a costume design expert and he designed the costumes. One of the critiques when “Doubt” first premiered on Broadway, one of the critiques that was made of that play is that they didn’t understand the costumes for the religious order that was represented in the play. So Darrin became the consultative expert, and when that play premiered on Broadway, people were blown away by the accuracy and beauty of the work that he had done. And he works with hundreds undergrads and make such a profound impact. Thank you Dr. Pufall Purdy for all that you do and for making our light shine in New York City this year. (audience clapping)
Our next goal is foster a thriving community. We’ve created a number of new positions and invested in a number of new positions to really try to ask questions about how our university can thrive internally and facing out externally. So for example, we’ve created the new Professor of Public Scholarship and Engagement, as you all know, that is Brian Wampler, who has worked to really understand how the university’s research can make an impact that public scholarship and how our faculty members and staff can work out in the community, and serve in the way that universities were meant to serve. We have a new Director for University and Industry Partnerships in Pete Reese who’s gonna really coordinate our efforts across the university to make sure that we’re serving our industry partners.
And we’ve built an entirely new human resources structure and we’re gonna continue to move forward. We thank Bill Brady for all the work he’s done, and we’re gonna continue to move forward with our focus trained on two goals. How do we help that unit become more strategic and help our, everyone across campus, make more strategic hiring, figure out how we can be more effective and also how it can be focused on the service that it gives to the rest of the university? So we will continue to pursue that goal.
Now, one of the ways that we have built thriving community is with the support of philanthropists who have made such an impact on us. So I’m gonna ask you now to watch a video for our incredible unbridled campaign that’s already done so much. Please watch the screen.
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[Narrator] From humble beginnings, a community came together to create a place where women and men could pursue education and build a better life. For themselves, for their community, for Idaho. From the very beginning, inspired by the landscape and the freedom it represented, they called themselves Broncos. (upbeat music) What they built will become a catalyst for community, for audacious ideas and relentless innovation. A powerhouse university – [Crowd] Boise! State! – [Narrator] Where challenges lead to trailblazing breakthroughs, and humble confidence inspires curiosity. Exploring every detail down to quantum DNA. Our passion ignites our pursuits and our and our people become rocket fuel for reaching the stars. And when faced with adversity, we draw up a blueprint for success. Because our blue collar work ethic turns impossible dreams into triumphs that shock the world. – [Reporter] And it’s a fake play, they’re gonna score! The Broncos have won the Fiesta Bowl! Can you believe it! (upbeat music continues) (footsteps thumping) – [Narrator] Boise State was built on the backs of Broncos and their unbridled spirit, who made Idaho their stomping ground and put Boise on the map? But that was then, and this is what’s next. Empowering the next generation of Broncos by removing obstacles to success, we are pushing the boundaries of research discoveries, forging a path of progress and relentless innovation. Competing at the highest level on the blue and beyond. Why do we do this? Because we are Broncos and nothing will hold us back. We are proud, we and loyal. And we are charging into a future of our own making, together.
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I wanna thank our incredible CEO of our Foundation, Matthew Ewing and our executive director, Paul Powell and all the foundation board for all the work they have done to help energize, the giving to Boise State that has made such a difference to how we move forward as a university. Last year, we launched the most ambitious, comprehensive alumni engagement campaign in the university’s history. And it has made an incredible impact, an incredible impact.
And I’m gonna talk about a lot of those ways as we move forward, but what I want you to know is that sense of community is something we are deeply committed to. You’ve seen the Here For You campaign that our university put together across Student Affairs and Academic Affairs. We’ve created new staffing investments for our counseling center across the university. We’ve created new programming, we became a JED Campus. JED is a program that helps reduce student suicide, and it helps you set up metrics in the same way that our strategic plan set up metrics for us to analyze how are we achieving student success. We wanted to set up metrics to understand how can we help our students maintain or regain their mental health. We know that in the wake of the pandemic, students who are traditional college age experienced some of the greatest losses in their mental health and wellbeing. We’ve made an effort to help them be successful.
In our Bronco Bold program, we saw some incredibly courageous athletes, like Simone Biles, talk about the pressures that produced mental health issues over the last several years. And our Bronco Bold program works to help our student athletes, especially in the age of social media, really achieve and sustain their mental health and wellness. And that program is now reaching out even to high schools to help their student athletes in high school ensure and secure their mental health. These are things that we are committed to and that we are working on together. We’ve seen the outcomes in what we’ve achieved. We are the only university in the state of Idaho that is one both the Carnegie Leadership for Public Purpose Classification and the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification. Both of those. (audience clapping) It means that the Carnegie Foundation, the same foundation that recognizes research excellence, has acknowledged our excellence in public purpose and our excellence in community engagement, because that care we’re giving internally to the community is a care we want to extend out to our broader community. That’s incredibly important for us in terms of impacting the quality of life in our state. And I wanna thank Heidi Reeder and Brian Wampler for their work on both of these projects. (audience clapping and cheering) Incredible.
All of you are probably aware now of our Institute for Advancing American values. I wanna tell you what incredible work it has done. We bring together people in our Idaho Listens Program from very different political backgrounds. So people who are explicitly in very different places politically, and we invite them to tell their story, their story of what they value and why. And it changes the conversation from one of issues where people are likely to collide to a conversation about values and it makes it possible for people to hear each other in new ways. And that program has met all over the state, and has now impacted hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people. And it has, we’ve conducted those programs here at Boise State as well. And we are striving to do what a university is meant to do, which is to teach people how to be in dialogue. I’m not trying to tell you what your convictions need to be, but I want you to be able to talk to people who have convictions that are different than your own so that we can all learn and grow. And the institute is strive to be a model for that across the state. And so powerful is that model that I have yet to be at one of those programs and not seen people break down into tears because it is so profound to hear someone who thinks differently from you, and to not the vitriol that has infected so much of what happens in conversations of difference across the country. And it has become a model for the rest of the nation. We are bringing this program now to other states, and I can tell you that Dr. Finstuen, who has led the institute for me since its inception is its inaugural director and I are committed to creating America Listens as our next step. (audience clapping)
This year on this campus we’ve seen a lot of narratives about college campuses being places of division. Now that has not been true at Boise State. That doesn’t mean people always agree. Let me be clear. I guarantee we have more perspectives than I could count on this campus on the complex issues that this country faces. It’s not about whether or not you agree with someone that you can live in dialogue, in conversation, and in peace with those people. We can strongly disagree with each other and still work together for the common good. And the university is committed to being a model for that. And so we are working to bring together some critical events. We’re gonna host, the Institute for Advancing American Values, is gonna host the Dialogue for Democracy program because I think there’s no question there’ll be tumult on college campuses as we head into the federal election season. And we wanna teach our students how to disagree with respect, how to talk to each other, and how to learn from each other. We want to be a part of teaching our nation that that’s the work that universities can do. And I’m incredibly proud of the efforts we’ve made and of the outcomes we’ve achieved already with that program.
We are also working to invest in our employees. We’ve striven to build career paths. Some of the work that our new HR infrastructure is really trying to do. How can we help people see the ways that they can grow in their career? We’ve created new events like the Brand Camp for communications and the HR summits so that we can bring people together. And we’ve really tried to think about how we can help people understand something that I think of every single day when I come onto this campus, which is that every student that walks across that stage at commencement. Every incredible breakthrough that happens in research is the product of work that is largely invisible to so many other people. It’s the product of our faculty and our staff and our students working together to achieve these outcomes. Our employees have done incredible things in those five years to change nearly 25,000 people’s lives and the ripple effects that go so far beyond that. So I wanna thank you all for all that you’re doing and we are gonna keep looking for ways that we can invest in our employees. (audience clapping)
I’m gonna feature another amazing faculty member now, Stephanie Witt. (audience clapping) And you can imagine that when we’re talking about service, that we would talk about Stephanie because she’s done such incredible things. One of my favorite emails that I get is an email that she titles that the subject heading “Witt among the Masses” when she talks about the, when she’s about to do public speaking on issues related to national politics or local politics. She’s made such an incredible impact on her students. She’s done so much of that work that I was just talking about to help people understand how we can connect and make an impact, and she celebrated 35 years at Boise State this year. Thank you Dr. Witt, for all you do. (audience clapping and cheering)
Many of you know that with Brian, as Brian Wampler the PI, we won a $6 million NSF Transform grant this year that is designed to help take the incredible work that’s happening on this campus and impact our communities at large, to translate it into tangible benefits for people all across this state. Congratulations to the team who work together on that award and I’m so excited to see what that will produce. But that’s about that thriving community.
I’m gonna feature another faculty member here, our friend, John Bieter. (audience clapping and cheering) You saw John in the five year retrospective video. He is a nationally recognized expert in arborglyphs and he has studied what these Basque shepherds, these arborglyphs that these Basque shepherds produced in these trees and he has cataloged thousands of them, and drawn national attention to this form of communication across history. He also is a descendant of Basque immigrants and the son of Pat Bieter who established the Basque studies program at Boise State in the 1970s. Congratulations Dr. Bieter on your phenomenal work. (audience clapping)
Our last goal, so now you know you’re getting closer to the picnic. Our last goal is trailblaze programs and partnerships. We have invested by creating the new positions that I just mentioned to you, but also by creating the MER Institute, the Microelectronics Education and Research Institute. Yeah, we’re growing those partnerships because those partnerships help the university become a better university and help our industry and nonprofit partners connect with us in ways that help them thrive as well. That’s a high priority for Boise State. It’s better for our state, it’s better for our students, it’s better for those partners. Last summer, I attended the G7 Summit to help strengthen and grow our multifaceted partnership with Micron and the microelectronics and semiconductor industry. We are deepening those relationships here. You see, Vice President Nancy Glen and our MER Institute Director, Dan Lambourne, when they traveled to Japan to continue to build on those, on that work.
Do you know that when Brian did his study of our faculty, he discovered that one third, a full third of our faculty have an active ongoing partnership with a community organization, government or agency or business. Isn’t that incredible? One third of our faculty. (audience clapping) So we’re reaching out across our community, and across the world to bring the work that our faculty and staff and students are doing out into make an impact directly on the people that we serve.
This summer, I had the privilege of visiting Vietnam, which you’re not gonna be able to tell in this picture. And I was telling CEO Garrett Lofto, from Simplot, this today, Mark and I may look cool and collected in this picture, but it was 95 degrees and 95% humidity. These two young men are the first students who are coming in our 2+2 Program with the National Economics University from Vietnam. And we have the first ever MBA program in Vietnam was Boise State’s MBA. So we have incredibly highly placed alumni, Bronco alumni in business, in government, in higher education. And when I got to meet these two young men, I went and spoke to their class, their class at NAU, the university that we have this partnership with. And we invited them down after we talked a little bit about Boise State, Dean Bannister and I talked a little bit about Boise State and what it was like to be there. We invited these two young men who are on campus right now to speak to the rest of the students in their class. So their class year at NAU. And Dylan, who is the student on the left, came up before all of his peers and he said, “Am I scared to go that far away from home? Yes, I’m afraid that I’m not gonna know the food and I’m not gonna have my family close by, and the customs are gonna be different, and I won’t have all of you who are my friends. But I am so excited to go and live my American dream. And to get an education at this great university and to be able to develop my talents and make an impact in the world.” And I am so excited to welcome these young people over from Vietnam this year for the first time. (audience clapping)
And we can’t talk about our Vietnamese partnerships without talking about Dr. Nancy Napier. (audience clapping) Nancy is now a Distinguished Professor Emerita, and she was the person who helped build the program, the MBA in Vietnam, and helped produce all these incredible graduates who care so much about Boise State living in this country on the other side of the world. She’s been given all of these incredible honors for her work there, for helping to make an impact in this incredibly beautiful country where there’s a 97% literacy rate, and where people are so eager to grow and learn and partner. I wanna note also that that executive MBA program that she helped build is now ranked 13th in the nation. Can we get a round of applause for Nancy? (audience clapping)
We just hosted on our campus the National Council on Competitiveness. So this was a bipartisan federal effort that began about 30 years ago. And it’s designed to help the United States be more competitive in the global market. And Boise State is now the only in the State of Idaho that’s a member of the Council on Competitiveness. And we are helping to drive forward how we can drive the entire country forward. And we hosted one of what has just been a handful of these competitiveness conversations from around the country. And I wanna thank our chief of staff, Erika Anderson, for the incredible work that she did on that. (audience clapping and cheering) These partnerships make such a difference. We also have, here’s another bragging point. I keep asking our team to come up with a name for this machine because it’s called the M-O-C-V-D and it’s got a real, it’s optical. All right, something, something, something. Thank you. Thank you Dean Lighty. It deposits crystals on semiconductor wafers. We are the only university in North America that has this technology. We are in the cutting edge, on the forefront. Never forget for a moment that this trailblazing University continues to launch new ways to make an impact. The only university in North America with this machine, isn’t that incredible? (audience clapping) It’s gonna allow us to trailblaze in the semiconductor industry. Those partnerships with the Council on Competitiveness are gonna allow us to drive forward what we’re doing as an institution to help move our nation forward, not just our state.
We have global partnerships in places like Gorongosa. Some of you may know that one of our state’s most generous philanthropists has worked for years in Gorongosa. We are building incredible work in partnership with Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique to help educate children to partner with our College Of Education and our Childcare Center. And I wanna thank Alicia Estey, who’s done so much work over in Gorongosa and our academic affairs unit under Dr. John Buckwalter. (audience clapping)
We are making an impact across the world. We also are one of just a handful of institutions in the country that’s a part of REP4, Rapid Educational Prototyping. You know, it’s hard to like categorize these things. This could easily have come under innovation, because what we’re doing in that program is asking students, “How do we make higher education work better for you?” And what this group of students did this year, what they built here at Boise State is a program where they’re partnering with Microsoft and LinkedIn to create for high school students a mentoring and career exploration platform, so that it can help drive them into higher education and help them have a better sense of where they might be going. It’s an incredible impact.
Let me feature another faculty member here when I’m talking about incredible impact. Jim Beltoff. Yeah, thank you. (audience clapping) Jim has done incredible work on bird conservation. He helped build our IBO, our Intermountain Bird Observatory. And his legacy, the work he has done with his 31 years here is going to impact this state and the world forever, because the work he has done on bird conservation and the knowledge that unit has created is gonna continue to make an impact long after Jim decides he wants to sit on his porch with a rocking chair and think about other things. That impact will live on. That’s the kind of research that’s happening here.
And when we talk about things like thriving community, we can’t fail to talk about the incredible impact we’ve made with our philanthropic giving this year. The incredible success of our unbridled campaign. It publicly launched in October of 2023. It has a fundraising, the incredible fundraising goal of $500 million and we have already achieved 300, over $346 million towards that campaign goal. (audience clapping) We have nearly doubled. So when we’re doing that five year retrospective, we’ve nearly doubled the total philanthropic support at Boise State over the last five years. And that’s made up of tens of thousands of individual donors who are giving because they see the work that you’re doing and they want to support that work.
And one of the things that we’ve made a real priority in that campaign is endowed faculty positions. Here are the positions that we are gonna recognize this year, our new endowed faculty positions from this year alone. This year alone. I’m so proud of this work because what it does is it enables our faculty to do their incredible research, and it enables students to become a part of that new ways. So this is a part and when, let me explain just for a moment what the difference is between an endowed and current use money. Historically, when people gave money to the university, it was all current use. So they would give us money and we would spend it. We’re now building endowments that will live beyond any of us at this university. That money gets banked and we take the yield from those dollars that get banked, so we can keep using it over and over and over again. That was our goal for student scholarships. That was our goal for faculty support. So we’re changing the future of the university with this incredible work.
And now I can feature another one of our (audience clapping and cheering) amazing faculty. Amy Spurlock has been a nurse and a nursing educator for so long, and she is one of our new endowed professors. And we’re so proud of the time that she has spent working at Boise State. And I wanna give her a round of applause, and also to celebrate the fact that we have now achieved over 5,500 nursing grads at Boise State University. (audience clapping and cheering) Dr. Spurlock, the work that you have done will impact people in this state for the rest of our lives. Thank you so much.
So I mentioned that what we’re striving to do is to grow our endowed funding for scholarships because then we’re not just gonna give student scholarship money to a student once and then the money is gone. We’ll invest that money and keep giving the revenue from that investment to students for decades and decades to come so that we don’t draw down that principle, but continue to support our student. And my goal in this comprehensive campaign is that no Idaho student will have unmet financial need at Boise State by the end of this campaign. (audience clapping) So that finances are not a barrier to an Idaho student coming to Boise State.
Now this slide says thank you, but I wanna add just a little color to it. You all have been a beacon of light and hope, you have changed people’s lives, changed our students’ lives, changed lives across the state, made incredible discoveries. You were the ones who were there when the student fell down to help pick them up and move them on. You gave them the courage to succeed. You made the breakthroughs in your labs, and in the archives late at night. You worked in your studios until your fingers were sore, you poured over meetings and you checked out books, and you did incredible work with our students. You strived after hours and you made an extraordinary impact in these five years. When you think about all of the accomplishments that I have just discussed in these five years, you have changed this university. You have changed people’s lives, and you’ve changed our state for the better. And I wanna thank you for all the incredible work that you’ve done. Congratulations on your accomplishments. Thank you to our amazing faculty and staff who have given so much over the last five years, many of which have been fraught with hardship. And let’s go forward and make the next five even greater. Congratulations. (audience clapping)