Speeches and statements
University of Illinois Foundation LuncheonPresident B. Joseph White Thank you all for taking time out of your busy schedules to join us this afternoon. Today is the beginning of the Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday weekend. Though much time has passed since his tragic death, Dr. King is a reminder of the power of courage, high moral conviction and strong leadership even when they are exercised by very imperfect human beings, like all of us. While our world is far from perfect in America today, it is certainly better in terms of basic human dignity and freedom and opportunity than the one Dr. King set out to transform. I am coming up on a year in the job. Among the many things I have learned is that, to paraphrase Frank Sinatra: Chicago is an Illini kind of town. But Illini are found every where. In Chicago, in Illinois, in the U.S. and around the world, all three campuses have nearly 600,000 graduates. In Chicagoland alone, the Urbana campus has 117,138 graduates. UIC has 107,477 graduates and UIS, our Springfield campus, has 1,510 graduates. I have a theme today. It is that the University of Illinois thanks you, and needs you. The thanks are brief but heartfelt. Thank you for your interest in your University as reflected by your presence here today. Thank you for your support of your University, your time, talent and money. Thank you for representing us well in the world. Nothing builds the reputation of a great University like the achievements of its alums, except perhaps the achievements of its most famous dropouts and almost-wents. Examples include Bill Gates from Harvard, Steve Jobs from Stanford and Larry Ellison from Illinois. But these are anomalies. It is you, our graduates and your achievements, who really count. A paradox I’ve discovered about the University of Illinois is that our graduates dominate the Chicago area numerically, but Northwestern and the University of Chicago and even the University of Michigan seem to dominate the reputation space. We need to change that and this is a good turning point for why we need your help. Let me set the stage by telling you briefly why I sought the job of President of the University of Illinois and how I got the job. I sought the job because I believe deeply and completely and passionately in the mission of the University: to help people transform their lives through education and to create knowledge through research that leads to a better world. I love the way the U. of I. strives to do it on a large scale: 70,000 students a year across campuses in Chicago, Springfield and Urbana; 25,000 faculty and staff; and more than half a million alumni. We’re the opposite of a boutique organization. We’re big, powerful and consequential in the life and history of the state, nation and world. I believe I got the job because when the search committee and trustees asked what I thought of the University of Illinois, I said that in a nutshell, I would describe the University as high achieving, under-recognized relative to its importance and value and under-resourced relative to its needs. I told them that I would be honored to spend a decade or so maintaining the high achievement and fixing the recognition and resource problems. A year later, after learning about U. of I. in depth, I feel even more strongly about this assessment than I did at the time I made it. I tell the world each and every day that the University of Illinois is the state of Illinois’s single most valuable asset in creating a prosperous future for the people of Illinois, the nation and the world. The reason is that well-educated people who live in free societies and have drive and have ambition have never had better prospects. By contrast, people who lack a proper education have never faced worse prospects. We provide a great education to thousands at a value price. We offer an education with a market value of $25,000 to $35,000 a year for about $8,000. And, our faculty does the research—in science, engineering, health care and beyond—that produces the discoveries that creates new companies, industries and jobs. They do it by winning more than $600 million a year in grants and contracts, importing those dollars into the state of Illinois, and spending them here with a multiplier effect of at least five times. Tom Friedman says in The World is Flat that for America and Americans to prosper in global competition, the first place to turn is our great public research universities. We have one: the University of Illinois. So why does your University that thanks you also need you? Here’s why: Because I have learned in this first year on the job that we at the University can’t—I can’t—fix the problems of recognition and resources without your help. We need your help in telling the story of the University of Illinois. Its glorious past: Red Grange and many Nobel Prize winners in Urbana; Navy Pier, Circle and UIC in Chicago; Sangamon State to UIS in Springfield. Also our impressive present: Did you know that we have the nation’s largest medical school right here in Chicago? That the Nobel Prize winners score between Illinois and the University of Michigan is 19 to nothing? That we have one of the nation’s great Lincoln scholars, Professor Philip Paludan at UIS, and wonderful proximity to the fabulous new Abraham Lincoln Library and Museum? That UIC is both one of America’s top 50 research universities measured by the dollar value of grants and contracts while at the very same time has an undergraduate student body so diverse that there is no clear majority group? That the new Institute for Genomic Biology in Urbana is bringing together our very best scientists from the science and engineering north end of campus and the animal science and agricultural south end to make the University of Illinois a global leader in the biological century? The Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, a cultural mecca, is arguably the best university-based performing arts center in America. The Krannert Art Museum holds Illinois’s best art collection beyond the Art Institute of Chicago. And on and on it goes. We need you to know, love and, frankly, brag about your university. Go ahead, I give you permission; Be a U. of I. fanatic. If you hear you are being obnoxious about our University, perhaps you’ve gone too far. But not until then! We also need your help in securing the resources we need to continue to be a great University. The University of Illinois was built over a period of 140 years largely with state dollars and capital. For nearly five years now, the state has struggled financially and been unable to provide significant incremental operating support and new capital for the University. So now we are forging a new Compact for support of our great University in which five parties must all do their parts: the state as it can and when it can; tuition payers and their families; faculty by winning research grants and contracts; private donors like you as well as corporations and foundations; and the leadership of the University by bringing very tough-minded cost management, wringing out the waste, improving productivity and quality. The Compact is coming together. But we need your endorsement and your dollars to make it work. We have to ponder this question: If the University of Illinois is the state's most valuable asset in creating a prosperous future, how can the leaders and representatives of the people back away from strongly supporting this asset and not hear a peep of protest from the people? Something is amiss here and we need to fix it. Let me end where I started, by thanking you. It is a tremendous honor to serve as President of the University of Illinois. We are just completing strategic plans for each of our campuses and every school and college to create what I call a brilliant future for the University of Illinois. I am confident we can achieve it. And I look forward to linking arms with you to make it happen. And now, let me hear your comments and questions. |
