[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 146 (2000), Part 7]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages 10172-10173]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



    HONORING BALL STATE PRESIDENT JOHN E. WORTHEN--A GREAT EDUCATOR

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. DAVID M. McINTOSH

                               of indiana

                    in the house of representatives

                        Wednesday, June 7, 2000

  Mr. McINTOSH. Mr. Speaker, today I honor a leader in education in 
Indiana and the nation. In the heart of my district in East Central 
Indiana lies Ball State University, one of the premier institutions of 
higher education in the Midwest. For the last sixteen years Ball State 
has been under the capable guidance of University President John E. 
Worthen. Sadly, he is leaving the university this year.
  Mr. Speaker, greatness is setting bold goals and then having the 
determination to accomplish them. John Worthen brought vision and 
greatness when he came to the university in 1984 and has spent the last 
sixteen years putting his vision into practice. Ball State, Indiana, 
and the nation are the better for his efforts. At the start of his 
administration, President Worthen focused on broad goals. He aimed for 
excellence in all things. The university has reached beyond its grasp 
to accomplish his vision. His plan was anchored in the premise that 
learning should be a lifelong pursuit. Under his leadership, Ball 
State's central mission has been to arm students with the skills, 
knowledge, and enthusiasm to continue learning even after they leave 
the university.
  John Worthen always looked to the future of education, not its past. 
He viewed technology as a fundamental component of that mission, and he 
directed Ball State's resources toward acquiring that technology. Ball 
State established courses and workshops to train faculty and staff to 
use the new technologies and

[[Page 10173]]

started the Center for Teaching Technology to help faculty use this new 
tool to enhance their instruction. During the past ten years, Ball 
State has spent eighty million dollars on renovations that have added 
computer labs, put Internet access in every residence hall room, and 
wired every classroom to an interactive fiber-optic multimedia network. 
The university now has a student-to-computer ratio of thirteen-to-one, 
one of the lowest in the country. This year Yahoo! Internet Life 
magazine ranked Ball State among the top twenty in its annual survey of 
``most wired'' universities. These technological capabilities have made 
Ball State a national leader in distance education. The Indiana Higher 
Education Telecommunication System has enabled Indiana students to take 
advanced placement courses--courses they would otherwise not have 
access to--that are broadcast from Ball State's ``Indiana Academy,'' a 
school for gifted and talented students. Ball State offers an M.B.A. by 
distance education and offers nurses the opportunity to complete degree 
programs online.
  President Worthen's education and training gave him a solid 
background for the challenge of running a university. A Midwesterner, 
he earned a bachelor of science degree in psychology at Northwestern 
University in 1954 and received his master's degree in student 
personnel administration from Columbia University in 1955. He served 
four years in the Navy as a carrier pilot and education and legal 
officer. He attained the rank of lieutenant. He earned an Ed. D. at 
Harvard University in 1964 in counseling psychology and administration 
in higher education. John Worthen began his career in education as the 
dean of men at American University in Washington, D. C., then moved to 
the University of Delaware where he taught education courses and 
accepted various administrative responsibilities. In 1979, he became 
president of Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Ball State University 
invited him to become its eleventh president in 1984.
  Although technology has been a major focus, John Worthen's presidency 
has been an attack on many fronts. His was not an administration of 
timid initiatives. The university reorganized the school year from 
academic quarters to semesters; a move that allowed students to involve 
themselves more deeply in a subject and that saved the university 
thousands of dollars in administrative costs each year. Departments 
were realigned to reflect common disciplines. For example, Journalism, 
Telecommunications, Speech Communication, and Communication and 
Information Studies combined to form a new college, the College of 
Communication, Information, and Media. By 1997, it was the fourth 
largest college of its kind in the country.
  John Worthen has applied the university's resources to statewide 
issues. Under his leadership, Ball State has moved to make education 
``at home in Indiana'' more attractive to top ability students who 
might otherwise leave the state and build their careers and lives 
elsewhere. New scholarships aimed at those students have increased the 
university's enrollment of National Merit Scholars and increased Honors 
College enrollments. For the past three years he and I have worked 
together to create a job fair on Ball State's campus to offset recent 
factory closings in the area. This year's event attracted seven hundred 
job seekers. Three hundred received job offers as a direct result of 
the event. Ball State really stepped up to the plate and made a 
determined effort to see the Muncie community thrive.
  In 1987, Ball State launched Wings for the Future, its first capital 
campaign. The goal was to raise forty million dollars. The campaign 
collected $44 million and created three endowed chairs and fourteen 
professorships. The university is now in the middle of another campaign 
that appears headed for the same success with a goal of ninety million 
dollars. One-third will go for faculty research, one-third for 
scholarships, and one-third for facilities. During John Worthen's 
presidency, Ball State's endowment went from twelve million dollars to 
eighty-five million dollars.
  Ball State researchers were there when the space shuttle Columbia 
landed in June 1996, conducting research on the effects of gravity in 
space on the astronaut's muscles. Other noteworthy research efforts 
have targeted nutrition among the elderly in Indiana, the decline in 
frog populations worldwide, tick-borne disease, and cancer prevention. 
While research has an important role in education, John Worthen has 
always ensured that Ball State's best teachers are still in the 
classroom. Ball State professors have won state and national 
recognition in teaching, including the 1997 Indiana Professor of the 
Year, national teaching awards, and honors for research, architecture, 
music, theater performance, history, and public relations, to name just 
a few.
  Many academic programs at Ball State have received national 
recognition. The music engineering technology program has been ranked 
first in the nation, the entrepreneurship program ranks fourth. Ball 
State has taken the lead in environmental awareness. The university has 
established an international conference on environmental education and 
practices. The conference draws hundreds of architects from around the 
world. The Center for Information and Communication Sciences, created 
in 1985, teaches students to design and set up networking systems, an 
area in desperate need of trained workers.
  Ball State athletics have achieved recognition on the field and in 
the classroom. Men's basketball made the NCAA Sweet Sixteen in 1990, 
the men's volleyball team has been in the NCAA finals fourteen times, 
and women's field hockey went undefeated in conference play for five 
consecutive years. But the most impressive figure is Ball State's 
athlete graduation rate, at 77 percent, the seventh best rate in the 
country.
  President Worthen has solidified and expended Ball State's 
international ties with study centers abroad and teaching exchanges 
with various international universities. The Chronicle of Higher 
Education ranks Ball State among the top doctoral granting institutions 
for students studying abroad.
  Since 1984, the university has built five new facilities, including a 
state-of-the-art telecommunications building, a new home for the Human 
Performance Laboratory, an arena, and a new alumni center. All of these 
improvements and additions have been accomplished with the intent of 
making Ball State accessible for people with disabilities.
  In closing, I cannot forget to mention Sue. The most complete and 
best preserved Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton ever found was named after 
its discoverer, Sue Hendrickson. This spring, using people, technology 
and programs that were the direct outcome of John Worthen's policies, 
Ball State dazzled the nation by bringing Sue's debut at Chicago's 
Field Museum of Natural History to an estimated five million school 
children nationwide. Ball State uses its technology to connect people 
and ideas in meaningful ways. That is what technology is meant to do, 
and Ball State certainly has got it right. They were able to get it 
right because of John Worthen's vision and follow-through. He leaves 
behind a university well prepared to face the challenges and pursue the 
possibilities of the twenty-first century.
  Mr. Speaker, I have been honored to work along side John Worthen. I 
will miss the benefit of his counsel and wisdom. I wish he and his wife 
Sandra much happiness as they move on to new challenges.

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