Good morning! It’s a beautiful day in New York and I am so very happy and pleased to be here with you. This is the beginning of my fifth month at New York Institute of Technology and I want to use this opportunity to share some thoughts and ideas with you.

Let me thank everyone for the terrific reception that I have received since joining here on June 1. Everyone has been friendly and positive, and I could not be more thankful for that. That is all the good news—the upside of moving to NYIT.

The downside is that the food here is too good. Like the lox we had for breakfast with this meeting, I cannot resist it and some of my suits fit a bit too snugly for comfort these days. I have to turn that back around and fast!

I am excited to be here for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that in my own way I very much identify with the students who come here— first generation college students who work and commute to school. I can relate because this was my experience also. I am less than a generation away from my grandfather’s entry through Ellis Island, and I never forget that. Schools like ours make the difference for so many students and it is a noble mission. So, rather than seeing our non-residential status as a negative, I embrace and extol it.

Together, as we have in the past, we will offer a first-class education for place-bound students and, then open the world of possibilities to them. My college education did that for me, and I stand before you today with accomplishments that I never dreamed of having, and that no one else ever thought I would have, save for a few keen-eyed professors—people who saw something in me that no one else saw and then developed it. Many of you have had that kind of effect on NYIT students and all of us can continue to have that kind of impact on our students now and into the future.

Also, I am fully aligned with the mission of providing students who come to us with an education that sets them up for success as professionals. Today, this kind of relevance in education is what students and their loved ones are asking for across the country. We provide it already and we will do even better in the future. We had a better than 93 percent success record for graduates being placed in careers of their choice or graduate school. I am told this number has gone over 95 percent this year. That is a point of pride, as it should be for us all!

As good as we are, we can get better. We want to have even higher student success rates in terms of retention, graduation, and placements. We want to be educating more students and at higher levels, specifically at doctor of philosophy level. Everyone wants to be rewarded more and recognized more often. I want that for you, too. We want to do more research and scholarship in medicine, healthcare, engineering, and the sciences that are widely recognized, important, and valuable. We want the institute to be known more commonly as a top-notch institution regionally, of course, but also nationally and internationally. I could go on with our shared aspirations, but let me stop there.

To do all these things, we need a strategy, a good plan. A plan that can take us into the future that we all embrace and envision.

But, before we plan strategically, first we need to work on our culture. Certainly, I need to work with my colleagues on the managerial and administrative cultures of NYIT, and I can assure you that this is underway. But, we also need to work on the overall institutional culture. Why? Because culture eats strategy for breakfast! The very best strategy will not work if it does not resonate with the culture, and if the culture is not one in which people can flourish—and by people, I mean students, faculty, and staff. Some of the greatest strategic plans have foundered, if not crashed, on the rocks of culture, and not just ineffectively but to the detriment of the organization its people.

I am not going to go into a critique of our current culture, but I know from many discussions across the institution—with faculty, students, staff, administrators, alumni, and trustees—that we need to open the windows and let in some fresh air.

To do this, to begin to change our culture, I want to introduce and operationalize three simple ideas:

• Put people first.
• Be transparent with business information.
• Provide gain sharing (profit sharing).

I wish I could claim these as my own invention but they are not. They are well known values in the world of business and, when implemented, they work. The goal is to bring people from being and feeling like mere employees to being and feeling like empowered partners in the enterprise.

Putting people first is crucial to a university because we are a people enterprise. In most cases, 70 to 80 percent of a university’s expenditures are made on people—their salaries, their benefits, and their development. This is as it should be because we teach and we educate young people. We don’t produce widgets, or even reports; we seek to enhance the lives of the young people who come here. We share with them our professional expertise and life learning in order to build their own expertise and make their lives better, maybe even easier, than our own was. We are all about people. So, let’s embrace the idea that we put people first—it only makes sense to do so.

Second, economic or enterprise transparency is critical. To be empowered partners, people who work here need to understand our finances. It is not hard to do, and everyone can get them, but we have to share them and teach how to read some simple reports. We all need to understand our annual revenues and expenditures (i.e., the profit and loss statements). Also, everyone should understand the balance sheet (i.e., our assets versus liabilities).

But even more importantly, it is critical that everyone understand the important and active roles they play in our performance as seen by these financial lenses, especially in our yearly profit and loss. It doesn’t matter if you’re a vice president, a faculty member, a security guard, a person behind the bursar’s window, or the person cutting the grass—we all interact with our students, and those interactions affect them and their attitude toward us. If a student is willing to recommend us to another prospective student, then we have done well and we will know it. But, if they do not recommend us to prospective students, then we have failed and we will feel the pain.

A negative interaction can happen in so many places in the classroom and beyond. We all have to realize our role in forming students’ opinions of NYIT and we have to be mindful. No amount of advertising and marketing can overcome the negative experiences of even just a few students. With today’s social media, a few students who had a negative experience can have a disproportionate effect on the reputation of our institution and, therefore, its well being. So, it behooves each of us to know the influence we have, and the power we have, to affect the student experience. We all have to be mindful of this and realize that we will see the evidence of our performance in our bottom line. This is why we all need to know the basic economics of the institution.

The bottom line may sound un-academic to you. If it does, I understand. However, that bottom line determines how much we can pay you. Whether we can increase your pay, or afford to send you for further training and professional enrichment. Whether we can release you from normal teaching loads to do more research or to invest in necessary infrastructure—these all depend on the bottom line. There really are no silos at NYIT; everything here connects to everything else. NYIT is a network of people and operations. Silos are a figment of the imagination.

That brings me to gain-sharing. In the for-profit world, it is called profit-sharing with employees. You have all heard of it. If I ran a for-profit business, this is something that I would do and do well. I am not in the for-profit world, but I have seen it done and done well in the not-for-profit world, namely in hospitals. Physicians have had longstanding gain-sharing programs in hospitals, especially those affiliated with medical schools. It works, and it works well for them. Our own NYITCOM actually does this, and that is no surprise to me. I believe that gain-sharing can and will be effective across all of NYIT. We will begin to frame the approach and share that with you this year.

So, three simple ideas for the future at NYIT are in different words:

• We will put people first.
• We will teach and share our economics with all;.
• We will share the gains that we make with the partners who created them across campus.

Let me finish up with a summary of recent strategic activities. First, as you know, we have begun to make progress toward a clearer vision for the future. We are also updating and rearticulating our mission and enumerating that which we value here at NYIT. That is all a work in progress. At the same time, we are examining all of our operations and have new ideas to share across the board. I think of this level of planning as the near term one- to three-year strategic operating plan. It includes items like increasing the salary bump for the promotion from assistant to associate professor to $7,000 and from associate to full professor to $10,000. We will also add two new levels of professorship: the Distinguished Professor and the Institute Professor, both of which shall have salary and allotment monies associated with them.

I am also happy to say that we have a national search underway for provost using John Thornburgh at Witt Kieffer as our recruiter. Yesterday, I agreed to use Lois L. Lindauer from Boston as the search consultant to recruit a new VP for development. In the meantime, we have engaged Rod Kirsch the former VP for development at Penn State, who raised over $4 billion in 21 years, to help us put NYIT’s operation on solid footing.

Last, but not least, I am very happy to report that we have reached an agreement in principle with the AAUP negotiating committee for a contract over the next five years. With all the changes that have happened since February, it took longer this year than in the past, but it was a terrific process, especially over the last six to eight weeks. I learned a lot about NYIT and its people through this process, and the contract is very good in many ways. Not the least of which is that it positions us to become the research institution that we all want to become! Let me extend special thanks to Ellen and Yael!

And let me thank all of you for your service to the school through your work on the Faculty Senate as well as in all the other ways that you contribute to NYIT every day!