Speeches and statementsInaugural AddressPresident B. Joseph White Thank you. Chairman Eppley, Members of the Board of Trustees, Colleagues and Honored Guests: When Mary and I moved into the President’s House earlier this year, I came upon a book documenting the inauguration of David Dodds Henry on September 24, 1956. Like an oath of office, the words with which he accepted the presidency of the University of Illinois cannot be improved. So today, I recite them with honor and humility: “Mindful of the contributions of all who have gone before in the service of the University, conscious of the new demands upon and new opportunities for the University in the days ahead, sensible to the expectations of students, faculty, alumni, and citizens of the commonwealth, appreciative of the honor conferred by the appointment, in humble spirit and with complete dedication to the mission of the University, I accept the charge which you, the Board of Trustees, have given, and I publicly receive this symbol of the duties and responsibilities which, without reservation, I have undertaken as President of the University of Illinois.” In my own words, let me add: thank you for entrusting me with the honor and responsibility of leading the University of Illinois. I welcome members of the University community and the Boards of Directors of the Foundation and Alumni Association. Mary and I thank our family and friends from every stage of our lives for joining us. I would especially like to acknowledge my parents, Bernie and Gena White, who I am so fortunate to have here today. There is a favorite family photo of my mother and father in May 1941, striding up Wisconsin Avenue in Milwaukee, beginning their life’s adventure. I’ve always been impressed that my mom made that pretty outfit herself. I want to thank Jim and Joan Stukel, who gave Mary and me such a warm welcome. And Stan and Judy Ikenberry for their advice and friendship. On March 2, 1868, three faculty stood on the steps of the single building of the new Illinois Industrial University. They greeted James Newton Mathews from Mason, Illinois, the first student to enter what was to become the University of Illinois. Students dubbed the all-purpose building “the Elephant.” Even in our earliest days, we had standards. Students had to be at least 15 years old. They were only admitted after passing a standardized test of 65 questions. Over the years, many alumni have said to me, “I’m glad I went to school when I did; I wouldn’t even be admitted now.” Well, I have bad news for all of us: based on the admissions test of the 1870s, we wouldn’t have been admitted then, either! Here are three sample questions:
For those of you still back on question 1, a Leyden jar is a device that early experimenters used to help build and store electric energy. Today it might be called a capacitor. Of course, as your president, I knew that. From the very beginning, there was conflict about the University’s purpose. As signified by its name, the original purpose of the Illinois Industrial University was to provide practical training. But John Milton Gregory, the University’s first Regent, insisted on a broad interpretation of the Morrill Act of 1862 that established Land Grant universities. The Act required studies in agriculture and mechanical arts “without excluding other scientific and classical studies.” Gregory insisted that courses such as literature and languages should be available to people who wanted them. Many people in Illinois disagreed, wanting only the practical. Gregory prevailed and planted the seeds that grew into the University of Illinois as we know it today. From this history of conflict — intertwined, of course, with cooperation — emerged one of the world’s great institutions. This is as it should be. For a university at its best is an arena in which the best and most carefully researched and argued ideas prevail. That is why we protect freedoms of thought, inquiry and expression so vigorously in our university community. Now we must do a quick flyover of our 138-year history, recognizing that we will miss many achievements and moments of greatness. We will miss meeting most of our 19 Nobel Prize-winning faculty and graduates. But not all. As you know, we are honored today by the presence of two faculty colleagues:
I am also grateful for the presence of Professor Carl Woese, the recipient of the 2003 Crafoord Prize in Biosciences for his work identifying a third form of life, the archaea. Carl and his wife Gay were among our first neighbors to reach out when Mary and I moved into the President’s House. We will miss many great moments not only in academics, but in Illinois athletics. Like the famous 1924 victory over Michigan. Red Grange, perhaps the greatest college football player of all time, electrified the crowd at the inauguration of Memorial Stadium by scoring a 95-yard touchdown in the opening kickoff and then scoring three more — all in the first quarter. We will miss the building of this great campus in Champaign-Urbana. And the three stages of development of the University of Illinois in Chicago: the Navy Pier days (or Harvard on the Rocks, as thousands of veterans on the GI Bill of Rights called it); the Chicago Circle campus that Mayor Richard J. Daley called his greatest contribution to the people of Chicago; and UIC, the consolidation of the Circle and Medical Center campuses into a single university. We will miss the addition of the Springfield campus to the U of I family a decade ago. But miss them we must in the interest of time. A few minutes ago, we met the University’s first student. Now, I would like to introduce you to one of our most recent students, Jared Perry from Decatur, Illinois. Two months into his senior year in high school, Jared joined the Illinois Army National Guard. In November, 2003, Jared’s unit, the 1544th Transportation Company from Paris, Illinois was called to active duty. Jared was assigned to duty in Iraq in early 2004. For most people, the demands of surviving in a battle zone would occupy every thought, ounce of energy and shred of determination. But Jared didn’t want to stop pursuing the life goals he set when he was only sixteen. A college education was at the top of his list. So while stationed in Baghdad, Jared continued his studies. He signed up to take two UIS courses on-line. He would go out on missions, come back in, recharge with his buddies, then get online and do his school work. Even though it was sixty-five hundred miles from Baghdad to Springfield. In the spring of 2005, Jared returned to Illinois and completed his classes. His older brother, Ryan Perry, is serving his third tour of duty in Iraq. Jared Perry’s resolve is a tribute to his character and to the global reach of the University of Illinois. We are honored to have Jared here with us today along with his mother, Jackie Perry. Please join me in recognizing them. I am honored to lead a university that for nearly 140 years has been an institution of such enormous consequence to the student, the state, the nation, and the world. With an overarching mission and three unique campuses, we strive to achieve the golden mean — a perfect balance — between collective identity and individual character. Our shared mission is to transform lives and serve society by educating, creating knowledge and putting knowledge to work on a large scale and with excellence. Yet each campus expresses its dedication to that mission in a distinct way. The University of Illinois at Springfield has a clear vision —to be the nation's leading public liberal arts university on a very human scale. The newest member of the family is educationally innovative. One-third of our faculty teach both in the classroom and online. We are home to the first telescope in the nation designed to give people who use wheelchairs access to the stars. This continues a long University of Illinois tradition, begun in Urbana, of national leadership in access to education for people with disabilities. The University of Illinois at Chicago is edgy and exciting. We do the most remarkable job of combining excellence and access of any university I’ve encountered. We are one of America’s top 50 universities in funded research. And UIC is so ethnically diverse that no single group comprises a majority among its 25,000 students. We serve thousands of first generation college students including many recent immigrants and their children. At Chicago, we graduate more MDs annually than any medical school in America. Each year at the University of Illinois Medical Center, there are half a million patient visits — two-thirds of them with the medically under-served, people on Medicaid or uninsured. Yet they have access to the excellent clinical care and specialties found only in a university-based medical center with a research faculty. An important measure of society is how we treat those who are least well-off. I am so proud of my colleagues for combining excellence in research and teaching with a strong commitment to serving the poor. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is a classic campus. It is everything that tugs at our heartstrings when we envision college life and a great university. A beautiful campus rising from the bountiful farmland of the Illinois prairie. The contemporary designs of the Beckman Institute and the Siebel Center at the north end. The lovely round barns of our working farms at the south. In the center, the sacred Morrow Plots and the glistening new Institute for Genomic Biology. Comprising the campus are world-class engineering and computer science departments, faculties dedicated to the arts and humanities, highly ranked professional schools and one of the world’s great libraries. Most important to quality are faculty. This week, we learned that Professor Todd Martinez, a theoretical chemist and faculty affiliate of the Beckman Institute, has been awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. He joins three Urbana and two Chicago colleagues, including Carl Woese, who are former University of Illinois recipients of the MacArthur “genius” awards. Professor Martinez, a graduate of Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, is just 37 years old. Our Urbana campus also features monuments to excellence in athletics and culture like the Assembly Hall, where we play winning basketball, and the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. These two landmark buildings were designed by Illinois alumnus Max Abramovitz, also the architect of Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center. Earlier this year, we had the opportunity to thank Coach Bruce Weber for his leadership over at the Assembly Hall. This is our opportunity to thank Michael Ross for his creative and inspired leadership of the Krannert Center. Thank you, Mike. The University of Illinois is a tribute to the foresight of past generations. They understood the contribution of a great public research university to developing the state into an agricultural and industrial powerhouse with an educated citizenry. Our University’s transforming power has spilled over to the nation and the world, through the brilliant accomplishments of our faculty and alumni. Consider the Internet and the 1.7 billion people who are online around the globe. In his latest book, The World is Flat, Tom Friedman calls the Web browser “one of the most important inventions in modern history.” He credits U of I alum Marc Andreesen, the founder of Netscape, with doing “as much as any single person” to bring the Internet alive. Marc and his team created Mosaic, the first widely used Web browser, right here at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in 1993. Other inventions and organizations powered by the genius of U of I faculty and alumni include the transistor, the integrated circuit, the light emitting diode, the plasma display, Lotus Notes, PayPal, Siebel Systems and, regrettably, Mortal Kombat. Every CD in the world is created with technology developed by National Medal of Science recipient Nick Holonyak, Jr., Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Physics. Our agricultural scientists played a vital role in the green revolution, which, in 50 years, converted feeding the world from a problem of food production to a challenge of food distribution. In Springfield, Phillip Paludan, one of America’s most distinguished scholars on Lincoln and the Civil War, is a member of our faculty. And we are an engine of economic growth. Our faculty generate more than half a billion dollars a year in funded research from sources outside the state—with a huge multiplier effect in intellectual capital and new jobs. Today we thank the people of Illinois and generations of faculty, staff, students and alumni for creating this wonderful institution for which we are now responsible. Without a doubt, the University of Illinois boasts a distinguished past. But what about the future? I believe I can predict the following with confidence. First, the University has never been more important than it will be in the decades ahead. We will be a great gateway of opportunity for students. And we will address the world’s most pressing problems, like safety and security, economic opportunity, energy and the environment, healthcare and nutrition, peace and justice. Second, the University will face more opportunities and tougher competition than ever before. So we will need to be both innovative and aggressive. Third, on our watch, we will need to navigate successfully a sea change in the University’s financial foundations. For much of our history, the state provided most of the money to build facilities and operate the University. Now, four years of budget reductions, no increases, and little capital have sent a resounding message: we are on our own as never before when it comes to incremental operating funds, capital for new facilities, and the money to address what is politely called "deferred maintenance." Let me be crystal clear about the challenge that the University of Illinois does and does not face. We do not face failure in any conventional sense of the term. No, we face a far more insidious challenge. If we are not masterful stewards, we will preside over the slow, almost imperceptible decline of a superb public research university. To paraphrase a recent best seller, the University of Illinois could, in the years ahead, go from being “great” to being merely “good”. In the privacy of your mind, you might categorize such a future as not desirable, but also not particularly alarming. I disagree. With an institution like ours, a decline to “good” is usually a mere way-station on the path to mediocre. I’m sure you agree that a future of mediocrity for the University of Illinois is both alarming and unacceptable. Understand: I did not come here to preside over decline. In the presidential search, the trustees asked what I thought about the University of Illinois. I said, “In a nutshell, the University is high achieving, under-recognized, and under-resourced. I would be honored to spend a decade building on the legacy of high achievement and fixing the problems of recognition and resources.” Nine months later, I haven’t changed my mind or my resolve. Our University is fast approaching a tipping point. In one direction is the slippery slope of decline. In the other is what I call our brilliant future. A future in which we will be excellent; win against our best competitors; serve the state, nation, and world; and be a continuing source of pride for millions. Such a future will not be given to us. We must create it. The question is not should we, but how can we, create a brilliant future for the University of Illinois? Four things are required. First, we need high-aspiration plans to guide us for the next decade. By the end of this calendar year, we will have a strategic plan for the University and for each campus. By the end of the fiscal year, we will have a plan for every school, college, and operating unit. Second, we will need resources. Resources are a necessary, not sufficient, condition for excellence. So, we don’t have to be the richest to be the best. But on our current trajectory, we won’t have the resources we need to be the University you expect. So we must forge a new Compact to support the University of Illinois, a partnership in which five parties do their parts to provide the resources we need.
Make no mistake: this new Compact is critical to our University’s future. Third, we need leadership. Leadership in the state to fund the University as an investment in Illinois’s future. Leadership in our cities because the talented people for whom we compete can live and work anywhere. They value communities that have good jobs, schools, health care, and a fine quality of life. Leadership among our students and alumni because earning a degree is like investing in a stock – except that you can never sell it. You have a deep self-interest in maintaining the U of I as a top flight institution. And we need strong leadership in the University, at every level, starting with the president. I promise you will have it. The final requirement to create a brilliant future is big ideas. This is Daniel Burham country. Chicago’s great architect and planner, the mastermind of the Columbian Exposition of 1893, famously exhorted all to, “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work.” We need more big ideas, stretch ideas, creative ideas than I sense we’re thinking about today. Here are the kinds of questions I think we should be asking. Should the University of Illinois create a fourth “campus,” a virtual university? Perhaps UIUL: the University of Illinois Unlimited. Both degree and non-degree education are among the fastest growing enterprises in America. Are we fully participating? The Apollo Group, the private sector owner of the University of Phoenix, has nearly 230,000 students and a market value that has grown from $35 million in 1994 to $14.1 billion today. We have no desire to be the University of Phoenix. But might we combine the academic quality of the University of Illinois with the “user-friendliness” of the University of Phoenix and create something of substantial value? Another question. Should the University of Illinois take the lead to make the state of Illinois a global spire of excellence in sustainable energy production and consumption? Should we work with the Governor, the legislature, Northwestern and the University of Chicago, Argonne National Laboratory and Fermilab, and Illinois companies, to achieve this goal? In Illinois we have nearly every form of energy except large amounts of oil and gas. That is, we have tomorrow’s alternative energies in abundance – nuclear, coal, wind, bio-mass – plus the expertise to build enormous industries in a century of energy transformation. On a much more personal level, should the University of Illinois strive to be the national leader in developing what Yale psychologist Robert Sternberg calls “successful intelligence?” Perhaps we should go beyond recruiting and educating talented people, and also help them develop fully. Successful people depend not only on analytical intelligence, but on what Sternberg calls creative and practical intelligence. What if our University were the best in the world at enabling people to become extraordinarily effective in their professional lives, in their personal lives, in achieving their goals? We have a head start in this regard because of the highly relevant work of UIC Professor Roger Weissberg. I believe this competitive advantage is available to us if we choose to seize it. These are three examples of stretch ideas. I urge members of our University community to come forth with many more. You will find that I subscribe to the philosophy of “yes.” Yes, we welcome your ideas. And yes, we can make them happen. Looking ahead, I hope that when our work is done, others will say that on our watch:
Most of us have heard British Poet Laureate John Masefield’s famous passage, “I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky, and all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.” Over a century ago, Masefield described a university in these words: “There are few earthly things more beautiful …. It is a place where those who hate ignorance may strive to know, where those who perceive truth may strive to make others see … [F]or century after century the university will continue, and the stream of life will pass through it, and the thinker and the seeker will be bound together in the undying cause of bringing thought into the world.” Masefield was right. The University of Illinois is living proof. Our distinguished past inspires. A brilliant future beckons. Together, I know we will create it. Thank you. |
