New president has big plans for GSU

In the first of what he vows will be an annual state of the university address, Georgia State University’s new president Mark Becker told his audience Thursday that his greatest challenge is to change the world’s perception of the state’s second largest university.

And, he said, he is doing that a time when he will also have to cut expenditures, including a plan to shut the school for two weeks at the end of this year to save hundreds of thousands of dollars.

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GSU students walk along Marietta Street between classes.

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“There are numerous details associated with such a plan, but they are manageable,” he told a crowd of about 900 gathered in the Student Center ballroom at the school’s downtown Atlanta campus.

After the speech, Becker said the closure — brought on by budget cuts across the state university system — would not interrupt classes: “It’s the only time of the year when the university has no classes scheduled.”

In the speech, Becker, the former provost at the University of South Carolina, laid out his broad ambitions for the 96-year-old school since he took the helm in January, succeeding GSU’s president of 16 years, Carl V. Patton.

Becker, 50, said he wants to channel money and effort into transforming the school into the “premiere urban research university.”

He invoked, as a kind of working slogan for that scheme, a mixture of an old advertising pitch for Virginia Slims cigarettes and a line from poet Robert Frost: “We’ve come a long way baby, but we’ve got miles to go before we rest.”

That line brought laughter. This one — “The average SAT score has increased [at GSU] from 1003 in 1995 to 1081 in 2008, and it’s projected that this fall we may hit 1100 for the first time in our history” — brought applause, including his own.

Becker invoked the name of that other new president, Barack Obama, and drew a loose parallel with Obama’s politics of inclusion and diversity in the shaping of GSU’s future.

“Our student body is diverse in race and ethnicity to the point that it represents the future demographic profile of our nation,” he said, noting that its student body of about 28,000 is 27 percent black, 11 percent Asian, 5 percent Hispanic, and 4 percent multi-racial.

He said the school soon will start touting its achievements to the world, and will even get so fashionable as to go “green,” which is not easy, he acknowledged, for a school built smack downtown.

When the school’s first football team takes the field in fall of 2010 playing its first game at the Georgia Dome about 10 blocks away, it will complete the transformation of the school from a Concrete U commuter college, to “the complete college experience in the heart of a major city,” Becker said.