UWF is made for people like her, Bense said. Solid B+ or A- students who are “finishers,” who have to study, who “find a way to get it done.”

“We take in real people here,” she said. “We create the middle class.”

Those students need more help than the best and brightest that the state’s flagship universities peel off the pile. But, Bense said, the return on investing in them is worth it —even if your scores on the Florida Board of Governors Performance Funding Metrics suffer for it.

‘Walk the halls’

Bense acknowledged the rift that has developed between her and some of the faculty.

But she explained, when she had to make cuts, she did not do what her predecessor, John Cavanaugh did, and cut across the board.

She eliminated “vacant lines” in the staffing chart to avoid laying off faculty and eliminating programs.

She challenged the assertion that the university’s academic integrity was compromised by an effort to boost enrollment.

Enrolled was increased by accepting student who were in the lower quarter but met admission standards, she said.

“I did not throw open the doors to any warm body who could get financial aid,” Bense said. “I need to say that more.”

To counter faculty complaints about needing more face time with her, Bense promised to go across campus to meet and listen to faculty, to host drop-ins at the library, to reinstate open office hours for faculty to come and talk.

She promised to do as her brother, Allen Bense, did when he was Speaker of the Florida House and “walk the halls,” and drop in to visit faculty on their turf.

“So don’t be nervous,” she said, as laughter filled the auditorium. “I’m not there to tell you something bad that I didn’t want to put in writing.”

Achievements

Bense highlighted the academic and athletic accomplishments of students and the research grants and contracts earned by faculty in the last year.

Those projects will, Bense said, bring money to UWF to study the connectivity of the Gulf of Mexico’s ecosystem; to find solid ways to measure achievement in the hard-to-quantify subjects of physical education, art and music; to study what strategies work in early education to improve children’s reading; to increase the number of minorities at the graduate level in STEM fields; to figure out how to make the Florida Virtual Campus program work.

“Research develops new knowledge from old,” she said. “We will figure out a way to do it. That’s what we do.”

She asked the faculty not to lose sight of the transformative power they have on the lives of the young people who are in their care.

“How different they are when they come out of here,” Bense said. How many more choices they have.”

She reviewed the academic restructuring plan that created four colleges at the university where there had been four, including the new University College, which aims to improve graduating students’ communication skills, and focus on efforts to improve retention and workplace preparedness.

The college will provide new learning opportunities, such as first-year experience courses, living and learning communities, collaborative assignments and projects, global and diverse learning, service- and community-based learning and internships.

She talked about efforts to target 95 people who enrolled as freshmen in 2007 but hadn’t completed a degree. She wants to get them to finish. That outreach effort will, she said, ensure UWF makes the 26 points on the performance metrics it needs to not lose any of its base funding.

Work together

All of which means that if UWF is to succeed in the new reality of tight economic times and base funding tied to metrics, it must do it as a united front, she said.

Even though there are a lot of challenges, they owe it to the students, their families and the community to set aside differences, she said.

“ Our students deserve peace,” she said. “They deserve a university with a good reputation.”

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