The past year has brought a number of challenges to higher education. Here at McNeese, we --like most of our peer institutions across the nation -- are weathering a series of unprecedented cuts to our operating budget. What we discovered here at McNeese is that our constituents do not just want a generic brand of comprehensive higher education. They do not want online or face-to-face coursework delivered in vanilla fashion. They want "excellence" delivered with a "personal touch." To others, it may seem anticlimactic to wind up so many brainstorming sessions with an observation like that. But for those of us who work here -- and especially for someone like me, who must facilitate campus operations as university president -- it has been important, and even inspiring, to know that our constituents view McNeese as a special place requiring a particular type of faculty-student interaction. And of course, we learned a great deal about the hopes and dreams of our constituents, not to mention learning a great deal about the constituents themselves.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/philip-c-williams/college-budget-cuts-_b_1653819.html
