April 10, 2007

Butler University Sweet Sixteen Academic Champions

For people around the country who may not have heard of Butler University, our men's basketball team's showing in the NCAA tournament made a distinguished introduction with its demonstration of teamwork, fundamental play and sound coaching.

But there are victories and awards that go well beyond basketball. Butler University went into the NCAA Tournament having the second-highest federal graduation rate of the 65 teams. After the first round, we had the highest.

The Washington Post ran a large graphic with brackets of the Sweet Sixteen showing us as the academic champions. Eighty-two percent of our players graduated within six years. Our closest competitors were at 67 percent.

This is something to be proud of.

Throughout the tournament, we heard the CBS announcers talk about our team's academic prowess — how nine of the 12 players were Josten's Scholar student-athletes who qualified for that honor by achieving either a 3.25 grade-point average in the spring or fall semester of 2006, or by having a 3.25 cumulative average.

People talked repeatedly about what quality individuals our young men are. It's a tribute not only to them, but to what we believe is characteristic of the entire Butler student body. As someone put it, teamwork is ordinary people working together to achieve extraordinary results. I think that applies to our student body as a whole.

I see our basketball success as a trope to what we're trying to do at Butler University — to produce students who think critically, communicate effectively, work cooperatively and act ethically. These traits are what bind individuals into effective communities that can work together toward the common good.

The values represented by our men's basketball team are a microcosm of what we hope is shared by everyone in the Butler community.

The story of our athletes is not just how many points they score or how many wins our team has, but what makes them exemplary people. This is how our basketball players embody the qualities of all Butler students. That's the connection we need to make.

We are a teaching institution of the highest quality that has its excellence expressed in both our academic programs and our athletic programs — and just as much in our public service programs. The value of a Butler education was recently recognized by Kiplinger's magazine, which included Butler among its top 50 universities for being the best values among private institutions across the United States in the April issue.

We know this, and now the country has seen our values in action. Our players will change, our coaches may move on, our students will graduate, but they will disseminate our values wherever they go, and they know that Butler will continue to inculcate these values to the next generation.

In learning how to compose a speech, you're taught to begin with an attention-getter to get the audience to focus on what you have to say. For Butler University, men's basketball has served as that attention-getter. Now our job is to keep that positive attention coming.