President Judy Rogers' Founder's Day Luncheon Address

April 5, 2008

Welcome home to Cottey! I am so pleased that you have chosen to come back to campus for Founder's Day. I hope this visit will reignite memories, reconnect you with old friends, and allow you to rediscover Cottey as it is today.

I've had the pleasure of greeting many of you already, but I want to be sure that you have also met Dr. Glenn Rogers. Glenn would you stand so you can be recognized. Glenn and I look forward to welcoming you to President's House this afternoon for a reception. I hope to see you there.

Returning to the campus, no matter what your class year, surely calls up vivid memories. Can you see yourself in your mind's eye as you were when you were here? Were you the shy, quiet girl or the rebel who just knew that you couldn't spend two whole years at Cottey? Can you recall what you wore, how you combed your hair, what your dreams were? We have some alumnae in the audience who were Cottey girls in the 1940's. I wonder if any of their college clothes might have come from the Sears Catalog. The look was great: fitted coats and jackets, hats sometimes with wide brims, wide shoulders on suits. Or the year might have been 1958: what did the Cottey girl of 1958 look like? Well, and here I will generalize, she probably wore peddle pushers— maybe tight peddle pushers— with a sleeveless cotton blouse. I recently saw a page from an old catalog showing sleeveless cotton blouses for $1.86 and peddle pushers for $2.47. In winter, the girl from 1958 would have thrown on a bulky knit sweater. That was standard for campus. To dress up, she probably wore a "sack" dress and pointed toe shoes that might have been dyed to match. Can you see yourself as a Cottey girl in 1958?

How about the Cottey girl of 1963? The 60's were dominated by the miniskirt or longer very straight skirts. Scenes from "Dirty Dancing" come into my mind. To dress up, the 1963 Cottey girl might have worn a blazer with brass buttons and wide shoulders, but of historic significance was the appearance of pant suits which were considered appropriate for professional or even formal occasions, the origin of the "Hillary" look or the Judy Rogers look. The famous dress of 1963 was the shirtwaist dress which Jackie Kennedy wore so well.

Maybe you were a Cottey girl a decade later, in 1973. If so, you ushered in denim, tattoos, big hair, and balloon dresses. My, look where that has taken us! Denim was the rage in 1973 in a multitude of forms—faded denim, brushed denim, embroidered, studded, or sequined denim. Recycled jeans were popular. Denim came, and it has never left. It is still the campus uniform.

By 1983, jeans were tight and stone-washed; they could be super tight. Sneakers were topped with long, slouchy socks. You may have worn your sweater around your waist, and it was probably pink. It was fun to wear long tee shirts, or rock band tee shirts, or Ocean Pacific tee-shirts. Spandex was introduced that year and became a part of our vocabulary. (The word "awesome" also came into our vocabulary in 1983.) When the 1983 Cottey girl really pulled her outfit together, she wore sheer, colored hose! I had red ones!

It is fun to reminisce and relive earlier times, and I hope you will enjoy doing just that this weekend. But as important constituents of the College, you are also interested in what and how Cottey is today and where we are headed tomorrow. Providing this information is the purpose of this "State of the College" message. Cottey students today may dress very casually on campus, with flannel pajama pants frequently sighted, but their goals are ambitious and the challenges they face are formidable. Preparing them to achieve their goals is the work of the College.

So what is Cottey like today? We opened in fall 2007 with 320 students from 44 states and 11 international countries. This was a third straight year of growth in enrollment. We are on the march to full capacity enrollment with 350 students, and we are working very had to improve our recruitment and our retention to achieve this.

I want to stop and to say clearly why I believe enrollment growth is important. With a larger student body we will be able to offer more courses and programs that young women want and need. We will be able to hire additional faculty and to have more than one faculty member in each discipline to offer additional opportunities and perspectives. With more students we will be able to have a greater impact on this community and on the higher education community. But most important of all, we know the value of a Cottey education, and we want more students to have the opportunity for a Cottey education--up to the reasonable limit that we have established.

The person who will lead our efforts to grow is Mr. Rick Eber, our new dean of enrollment management. Rick comes to Cottey from Crookston, Minnesota, but he has many family connections with Missouri and, in fact, was born here and went to school in Missouri. He is not here today because he is recruiting for us at the Sakae Institute in Tokyo, Japan. Rick has 15 years of experiences in recruitment, admissions, and financial aid in different types of institutions. I hope you will get to know Rick and that you will support our efforts to grow by sharing information about Cottey with your friends and acquaintances and by making referrals.

Students who come to Cottey today want a solid academic program that will prepare them for transfer as well as begin their preparation for careers or professions. Cottey's strength is in offering a strong liberal arts foundation, but we also offer the beginning courses in many majors. To continue to improve our educational program, we are adding two new academic disciplines and a new athletic program. We are offering mass communications with timely courses that will prepare students to pursue majors in media, journalism, advertising, public information, public relations, and other related fields. This is one of the top ten career fields right now.

We used expert consultants to develop the curriculum for mass communication, and we have just completed a national search and have hired our first full-time faculty member. Ms. Deborah Macey will be joining the faculty in August. Deborah is in the process of completing her doctoral program at the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon.

We also have developed the curriculum for an international relations program and are conducting a search for a faculty member in that area. We intend for both programs to be developed as models of their type.

The focus of Cottey's curriculum must be global to prepare our students for the world in which they will live and work. Therefore, I am especially proud of Cottey's international trip for all second year students. This year's trip was number nine and we traveled to Italy. Students visited both Florence and Rome. There is no addition to the student's tuition to pay for the trip; it is provided by special funds designated by our board. The trip includes tours and events for the whole group and then educational modules on Tuesday and Thursday. The Florence modules varied from trips to the Uffizi and the Duomo to a bike tour of the Tuscan countryside. In Rome, the students visited the Coliseum and the Vatican and participated in educational modules with faculty and staff members. The travel group was approximately 150 people this year. The international trip is one way that Cottey prepares students to live and work in a global society.

In addition to our new academic programs, Cottey is also expanding athletic opportunities. We had excellent volleyball and basketball seasons this year. The basketball Comets broke their own previous record for the number of victories in a season and were successful in the play-offs. They won the semi-final game and lost, after leading at half time, in the final game. They achieved these records with an eight-person team. To continue to build athletic opportunities, we are beginning a softball team. We anticipate having our first competitive season in spring 2009. We know young women want and benefit from participation in athletics, and we want our athletic programs to grow.

Along with outstanding academic and athletic programs, our vision for Cottey is that we will earn a national reputation for being among the very best in developing our students' leadership skills. Our leadership program grew from five or six students in 2005 to over 60 students this year, and we have offered our leadership class every semester for the past two years. We have 24 students enrolled right now. The class is a combination of theory and application.

In addition to this class, we also offer a four-level leadership certification program that encourages students to continue their leadership development throughout their two years at Cottey.

Cottey's leadership program is developing with an emphasis on service, volunteerism, and good citizenship. This emphasis has emerged naturally from the interests of the students. So we developed and are now offering an additional leadership class on social justice, and we have a significant increase in service learning and service projects on campus. For example, a small group of faculty and students just returned from a service learning trip to Guatemala during the semester break. One of our outstanding students, Alyssa Christenson, has earned a scholarship to attend a national seminar on service at Georgetown University this summer.

Cottey is one of ten colleges in the state to have been awarded a grant to fund a Vista Volunteer for our campus to support and organize our community service activities. Our Vista volunteer recently reported that between October and January Cottey volunteers accounted for 2376 combined hours of student volunteer service in efforts as diverse as creative movement for children and food and blood drives. When others from Cottey are added, the combined hours are over 5,000.

I am convinced that Cottey is exceptional in many ways as an educational institution. I believe that young women who come to Cottey and who truly become engaged with their education develop, in the short time they are here, intellectual ability and social awareness. Let me provide an example: For about a year now, fourteen Cottey students and four faculty members, led by Dr. Brenda Ross, Cottey's assistant dean of the faculty, has been engaged in a research project to study the differential experiences of rural and urban women with chronic illness. The research group has recently joined forces with Cox College of Nursing to make this a joint study which has been accepted for presentation at the June conference of the National Council on Research on Women in New York City. Cottey is a two-year, associate-degree granting institution. This type of experience is highly unusual at the first and second year of college; Cottey is providing unique learning opportunities. The College will be a model for women's education. I believe that the title of our new strategic plan, Becoming a Model for Women's Education, can, in fact, be a prophecy of our future.

We need your help to fulfill this prophecy. Alumnae referrals are essential to our enrollment growth. Your financial support is essential to the support of scholarships, library acquisitions, improvements to the buildings and grounds. I am pleased to report that we grew last year in alumnae giving. We had an increase in the number of gifts and an increase in the total amount given. Thank you for helping to do that. Still, we have a long way to go.

To provide funding for Cottey to grow and improve, Cottey is exploring the feasibility of launching our first-ever comprehensive fundraising campaign. The feasibility study is underway right now, and a link to the case for support and a set of questions to elicit feedback on the case for support will very soon be on our website and the P.E.O. International website. A group of Cottey friends and supporters have been invited to review this case and to comment on the likelihood of support for the comprehensive campaign. The campaign will provide funding for scholarships, faculty chairs, and updated facilities such as a new fine arts building. I am sure you will be interested in reading the case for support and that you will have feedback for us. We will need your support.

Cottey's plan for the future to grow and to become a model for women's education is a daunting one, perhaps could even be considered a foolhardy one, if undertaken by any one small campus. But it is an entirely reasonable and achievable plan if undertaken by over 8000 Cottey alums and nearly 250,000 P.E.O.s All indicators—our financial indicators and the national higher education climate—point to this as the time for Cottey to grow and reach full potential.

Whether you arrived at Cottey in a straight skirt, peddler pushers or jeans, I am convinced you were a different person two years later when you walked across the stage in a white cap and gown and were handed your diploma. Through the influence of faculty, staff, student organizations, suitemates, and others, you grew and changed dramatically in two short years. Cottey provides an exceptional educational experience. With your help, Cottey can become a model for women's education. Thank you for coming.