State of the Campus Address Luncheon
From digitalmedia
views
comments
Related Media
State of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Address - November 10, Palmer House, Chicago
I am delighted to be with you today to present the State of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign address. I will share a similar message with other audiences throughout the year, but I wanted to start here in Chicago. Your dedication and loyalty have been critical in our accomplishments and are critical to our future.
Chicago is very important, not only to the sustained success of our university, but also to me personally. It is the home of the largest number of our alumni, over 140,000, including about 600 of you in this room. We count among us doctors, lawyers, accountants, educators, artists, entrepreneurs and CEOs. As proud members of the Illinois family, we have a powerful impact on one of America’s greatest cities.
As I enter my fourth year as your Chancellor, it is my privilege to join you today to celebrate our latest successes and share our vision of the university’s future: to be THE pre-eminent public research university with a land-grant mission and global impact.
Last year, we unveiled our Strategic Plan and outlined the four goals that express our near-term focus. These are:
For nearly 150 years, we have focused on our people, our work and our resources to tackle the grand challenges of the day. We are ambitious. We take risks. We do the impossible every day.
At Illinois, every day is:
The most recent U.S. News & World Report rankings place Illinois as the 11th-best public university in the nation and second in the Big Ten, behind only Michigan.
Many of our programs across campus are highly ranked, both nationally and internationally.
Recruiting outstanding faculty
Our strategic plan sets a goal to hire 500 new faculty members within seven years. Again, “Make no little plans ... ”
In the past year, we launched 180 searches and successfully recruited 150 new faculty members including those from such respected institutions as Harvard, UCLA and Michigan.
Recruiting new faculty is an incredibly labor-intensive undertaking, and this year we had unusually high success rates. We attribute this to the strength of our academic community, our established opportunities for interdisciplinary work and our ongoing focus on pre-eminence. Let me give you a few examples of the kinds of talent we were able to attract.
Jimena Canales is one of the newest additions to our Department of History. She left Harvard to join Illinois because of the Thomas M. Siebel Chair in the History of Science. Professor Canales will open new collaborative doorways with the sciences and engineering, and with colleagues in communications and comparative literature.
The $100 million gift from the Grainger Foundation that we received in 2013 has already enhanced our ability to attract top faculty.
We landed a very talented husband and wife team, Jun Song and Jessie Shelton. Jessie received her Ph.D. from MIT, after undergraduate work at Princeton and a postdoctoral at Harvard. Jun was an associate professor at the University of California, San Francisco. It was the combination of collaborative opportunities and our ability to offer Grainger Founders Professorships that made the difference.
That same Grainger Foundation gift was responsible for another new faculty hire this fall, Tandy J. Warnow, Founder Professor in Bioengineering and Computer Science at the Institute for Genomic Biology, who comes to us from the University of Texas at Austin.
Diversity and inclusion must be part of our DNA – they are part and parcel to pre-eminence. We have paid special attention to recruiting outstanding faculty with diverse backgrounds, as well as women in STEM areas. In the past year alone, we recruited 23 new women faculty in the College of Engineering, and across the campus we were able to recruit several faculty of color.
Recruiting these outstanding individuals to our campus is only the first step. Once they are here, our focus shifts to making sure they are given the resources to succeed. They want to work with the best colleagues and students, and to have the greatest opportunities for both personal and shared successes.
Our people have so many accomplishments that I could fill the entire hour just listing these. Let me call out just a few:
Tami Bond received a MacArthur “genius award” in recognition of her studies of the hazards pollutants from kerosene lamps and other fuels pose for human health, climate, and the environment. Tami is working on practical, low-cost solutions to lower pollution caused by these sources.
May Berenbaum received the National Medal of Science from President Obama, the highest honor the President bestows for achievement and leadership in advancing the fields of science and technology.
Dianne Harris competed successfully for a $3 million Mellon Foundation award to lead a Midwestern consortium of universities that aims to create new avenues for collaborative research, teaching, and the production of scholarship in the humanities.
Thank you for your support of our faculty through endowed chairs and professorships. These gifts are vital to our task of recruiting and retaining the very best talent in the world. Our success is due, in no small part, to your generosity.
Beckoning a strong, diverse freshman class
We continue to attract this state’s finest minds. Our newly arrived freshmen class – the class of 2018 -- is outstanding.
Making a significant and visible societal impact
Just as with faculty achievements and student accomplishments, I could fill my entire time here with examples of how we are making an impact locally, nationally and globally. But I want to touch on just three examples today.
First - and this is particularly timely as we celebrate Veteran’s Day this week – I am so proud to say that construction is well-underway on the new Chez Center for Wounded Veterans in Higher Education on the campus. This center brings us full circle in our pioneering advances in opportunities for those with disabilities – advances that began with Professor Tim Nugent in the wake of World War II. Today our nation is once again welcoming home thousands who have served in the military and who return with physical and mental injuries that require us to develop new treatments and new resources to help them. The Chez Center for Wounded Veterans will help our own Illinois student-veterans and the research undertaken here will lead to advances that will help all of our veterans – today and for generations to come. We expect the center to be open and welcoming our first new class next fall.
Next I want to share with you our exciting plans to help shape the future of healthcare in Illinois and across the nation by establishing a separately accredited College of Medicine at our campus.
When I think of this new College of Medicine, I am mindful of what John Milton Gregory, the first president of the University of Illinois, said in 1868: the university must provide not only a "liberal and practical education to the industrial classes," but also offer "a full table spread with every form of human knowledge” available.
One of society’s greatest challenges is delivering better healthcare to more people at lower costs. Advances in engineering, technology and big data are driving medical breakthroughs. The future of medicine lies in discovering and developing new sensors, new devices, new materials, new robotics, new miniaturized imaging, and new uses for big data and remote monitoring.
We are in an exciting place and time where medicine, engineering and technology are converging quickly, and where the shape of regional, national and global healthcare is being redefined.
The state deserves to have two great colleges of medicine under its University of Illinois system umbrella. Let me tell you a few of the distinctive characteristics of the new college that will allow us to complement the strengths of UIC’s College of Medicine.
The window of opportunity is small. Several other universities are seeking to do the same thing during the next few years. None is as qualified as we.
There are several steps to the process of establishing a College of Medicine, but we are going to get this done.
The second initiative I want to discuss is the Digital Manufacturing Design Innovation Institute at Chicago. At this time last year, we were working feverishly to assemble this complex proposal, and Chairman Kennedy urged you to contact your legislators to tell them how important this would be for the state of Illinois and the University of Illinois.
With your help, our efforts succeeded. With 23 university partners and 41 corporate partners, we won the bid and secured a $70 million federal grant. The partnership with companies including GE, Procter & Gamble, Lockheed Martin, John Deere, Caterpillar, Boeing and Dow Chemical and universities including the University of Chicago, Northwestern and UIC brought an additional $250 million to the project.
This was a huge win for the university and the state. Thank you for your advocacy and efforts to make this a reality.
Stewarding and growing our current resources
We are saving money by renovating and maintaining our campus facilities. While upgrades come with a cost, many of these improvements provide long-term returns. Our conservation programs have been very successful to date, with a 24 percent Energy Use Intensity Reduction since 2008. Our success has been a campus wide effort through user-based conservation efforts and centralized programs like retro-commissioning, lighting retrofits and energy performance contracting.
A key example of renovations and savings is the massive renovation of the State Farm Center, which was enabled by an incredibly generous gift from State Farm and numerous other donors like you. The finished project will include disability access and air conditioning that will generate additional revenues through rental to outside vendors.
Speaking of athletics, I work very closely with Mike Thomas to ensure that the entire Department of Intercollegiate Athletics creates a culture which fosters the development of our student-athletes for excellence, competitively and academically, with the utmost integrity. During the last academic year, 64 of our student athletes were Academic All-Big Ten selections and seven of our teams achieved 100 percent graduation success rates.
The Instructional Space Improvement Initiative is an $82.5 million, five-year plan for infrastructure and technology upgrades to classrooms and labs on our campus. Faculty and students benefit greatly from technologically state-of-the-art learning. These remodels ensure that we are using the most innovative teaching modalities, including the new blended learning model of lecture and online learning.
I hope you have an opportunity to come to campus and tour our new $95 million Electrical and Computer Engineering Building that will greatly benefit students and faculty alike. With more than 230,000 square feet of innovative classrooms, labs and offices, the building will be another center of interdisciplinary research. This is a state-of-the-art green building that will have a net-zero energy impact. Fifty percent of the building was funded by private gifts from individuals and corporations.
Passing it forward
These success stories have been made possible through your generous gifts. Let me make it abundantly clear: the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign would not be the pre-eminent university without your unswerving support and generosity.
Were it not for you, many bright, high-achieving Illinois residents would not have the opportunity to attend our university, nor would we be able to attract amazing faculty without your gifts that establish endowed chairs.
Another area of immense importance is endowed scholarships. When we survey students who have applied and been admitted, but who do not accept our offer, the top reason they give is that they were unable to afford Illinois, or that another university offered them a scholarship that covered more of their costs than we did.
You have allowed us to establish several programs designed to address the financial needs of students who would not be able to attend Illinois without financial help. Let me highlight just three.
Illinois Promise began in fall 2005 to ensure the affordability of higher education for high-achieving students from the lowest income levels. More than 2,000 students have benefitted from the program. Illinois Promise assures eligible recipients full tuition and fees.
Not only do these students receive full tuition and fees, but they are provided mentoring, advising, and counseling. These mentors are alumni, peers or university employees, or just folks in the community who want to help.
Many of these students are the first in their family to attend college. They go on to be role models for their family and their community. Many of you have made gifts to this program, and we thank you for your generosity.
This academic year, the College of Business has awarded 25 new Anthony J. Petullo Leaders in Business Scholarships to a diverse group of high-ability students from across the state of Illinois.
The need-based Thomas M. and Julie E. Scott Foundation Centennial Scholarship, initiated by a $1 million gift, will support high-achieving students pursuing their interests in accountancy, finance, or entrepreneurship. The Scotts also have contributed more than $700,000 to the Division of Intercollegiate Athletics.
I started out by saying the Chicago is a very special place to us and to me. It is special to us because so many of you, our most ardent supporters, advocates, and ambassadors make Chicago your home. It is special to me because my parents emigrated from China to the U.S., and my father got his Ph.D. at Northwestern University. Furthering his education and marrying my mother here was a new beginning for them, and charted the course of the rest of their lives. And were it not for them deciding to stay in America, instead of returning to China, I would not had the privilege of being the Chancellor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and to be here with you today.
Go Illini!
…Read more
Less…
I am delighted to be with you today to present the State of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign address. I will share a similar message with other audiences throughout the year, but I wanted to start here in Chicago. Your dedication and loyalty have been critical in our accomplishments and are critical to our future.
Chicago is very important, not only to the sustained success of our university, but also to me personally. It is the home of the largest number of our alumni, over 140,000, including about 600 of you in this room. We count among us doctors, lawyers, accountants, educators, artists, entrepreneurs and CEOs. As proud members of the Illinois family, we have a powerful impact on one of America’s greatest cities.
As I enter my fourth year as your Chancellor, it is my privilege to join you today to celebrate our latest successes and share our vision of the university’s future: to be THE pre-eminent public research university with a land-grant mission and global impact.
Last year, we unveiled our Strategic Plan and outlined the four goals that express our near-term focus. These are:
- Foster scholarship, discovery, and innovation
- Provide transformative learning experiences
- Make a significant and visible societal impact
- Steward our resources and grow them
For nearly 150 years, we have focused on our people, our work and our resources to tackle the grand challenges of the day. We are ambitious. We take risks. We do the impossible every day.
At Illinois, every day is:
- A chance to tackle new challenges.
- A chance to learn in ways you never thought you could.
- A chance to succeed in ways you never imagined you could.
- A chance to meet someone you never would meet anywhere else.
- A chance to interact with Nobel Prize winners, Pulitzer Prize winners, MacArthur genius awardees and Olympic champions.
The most recent U.S. News & World Report rankings place Illinois as the 11th-best public university in the nation and second in the Big Ten, behind only Michigan.
Many of our programs across campus are highly ranked, both nationally and internationally.
- Our College of Engineering ranked fifth in undergraduate and sixth in graduate programs.
- Our College of Business ranked 16th in undergraduate programs, and the Department of Accountancy ranked second.
- Our School of Music consistently ranks among the top 10.
- Our Graduate School of Library and Information Science is ranked first.
Recruiting outstanding faculty
Our strategic plan sets a goal to hire 500 new faculty members within seven years. Again, “Make no little plans ... ”
In the past year, we launched 180 searches and successfully recruited 150 new faculty members including those from such respected institutions as Harvard, UCLA and Michigan.
Recruiting new faculty is an incredibly labor-intensive undertaking, and this year we had unusually high success rates. We attribute this to the strength of our academic community, our established opportunities for interdisciplinary work and our ongoing focus on pre-eminence. Let me give you a few examples of the kinds of talent we were able to attract.
Jimena Canales is one of the newest additions to our Department of History. She left Harvard to join Illinois because of the Thomas M. Siebel Chair in the History of Science. Professor Canales will open new collaborative doorways with the sciences and engineering, and with colleagues in communications and comparative literature.
The $100 million gift from the Grainger Foundation that we received in 2013 has already enhanced our ability to attract top faculty.
We landed a very talented husband and wife team, Jun Song and Jessie Shelton. Jessie received her Ph.D. from MIT, after undergraduate work at Princeton and a postdoctoral at Harvard. Jun was an associate professor at the University of California, San Francisco. It was the combination of collaborative opportunities and our ability to offer Grainger Founders Professorships that made the difference.
That same Grainger Foundation gift was responsible for another new faculty hire this fall, Tandy J. Warnow, Founder Professor in Bioengineering and Computer Science at the Institute for Genomic Biology, who comes to us from the University of Texas at Austin.
Diversity and inclusion must be part of our DNA – they are part and parcel to pre-eminence. We have paid special attention to recruiting outstanding faculty with diverse backgrounds, as well as women in STEM areas. In the past year alone, we recruited 23 new women faculty in the College of Engineering, and across the campus we were able to recruit several faculty of color.
Recruiting these outstanding individuals to our campus is only the first step. Once they are here, our focus shifts to making sure they are given the resources to succeed. They want to work with the best colleagues and students, and to have the greatest opportunities for both personal and shared successes.
Our people have so many accomplishments that I could fill the entire hour just listing these. Let me call out just a few:
Tami Bond received a MacArthur “genius award” in recognition of her studies of the hazards pollutants from kerosene lamps and other fuels pose for human health, climate, and the environment. Tami is working on practical, low-cost solutions to lower pollution caused by these sources.
May Berenbaum received the National Medal of Science from President Obama, the highest honor the President bestows for achievement and leadership in advancing the fields of science and technology.
Dianne Harris competed successfully for a $3 million Mellon Foundation award to lead a Midwestern consortium of universities that aims to create new avenues for collaborative research, teaching, and the production of scholarship in the humanities.
Thank you for your support of our faculty through endowed chairs and professorships. These gifts are vital to our task of recruiting and retaining the very best talent in the world. Our success is due, in no small part, to your generosity.
Beckoning a strong, diverse freshman class
We continue to attract this state’s finest minds. Our newly arrived freshmen class – the class of 2018 -- is outstanding.
- We received more than 35,000 applications and had 6,932 enroll this fall.
- They bring with them an average ACT score of 29 and an average SAT score of 1372.
- Sixty percent of them finished in the top 10 of their graduating class.
- We are proud to have 71 percent of our freshman from the state of Illinois. Our goal for the class was higher, as educating the best students from Illinois will always be a priority.
- More than 1,000 international students in the freshman class arrived from more than 100 nations. Our entire student body benefits from our diverse cultural and social community.
- Increasing the diversity of our faculty and students is a matter of excellence and remains a top priority. To that end, 15.6% of our freshmen are from underrepresented groups.
Making a significant and visible societal impact
Just as with faculty achievements and student accomplishments, I could fill my entire time here with examples of how we are making an impact locally, nationally and globally. But I want to touch on just three examples today.
First - and this is particularly timely as we celebrate Veteran’s Day this week – I am so proud to say that construction is well-underway on the new Chez Center for Wounded Veterans in Higher Education on the campus. This center brings us full circle in our pioneering advances in opportunities for those with disabilities – advances that began with Professor Tim Nugent in the wake of World War II. Today our nation is once again welcoming home thousands who have served in the military and who return with physical and mental injuries that require us to develop new treatments and new resources to help them. The Chez Center for Wounded Veterans will help our own Illinois student-veterans and the research undertaken here will lead to advances that will help all of our veterans – today and for generations to come. We expect the center to be open and welcoming our first new class next fall.
Next I want to share with you our exciting plans to help shape the future of healthcare in Illinois and across the nation by establishing a separately accredited College of Medicine at our campus.
When I think of this new College of Medicine, I am mindful of what John Milton Gregory, the first president of the University of Illinois, said in 1868: the university must provide not only a "liberal and practical education to the industrial classes," but also offer "a full table spread with every form of human knowledge” available.
One of society’s greatest challenges is delivering better healthcare to more people at lower costs. Advances in engineering, technology and big data are driving medical breakthroughs. The future of medicine lies in discovering and developing new sensors, new devices, new materials, new robotics, new miniaturized imaging, and new uses for big data and remote monitoring.
We are in an exciting place and time where medicine, engineering and technology are converging quickly, and where the shape of regional, national and global healthcare is being redefined.
The state deserves to have two great colleges of medicine under its University of Illinois system umbrella. Let me tell you a few of the distinctive characteristics of the new college that will allow us to complement the strengths of UIC’s College of Medicine.
- The class size will be small, starting with 25 students per year, and growing gradually to 50 per year. The new college will train predominantly M.D./Ph.D.s and M.D./M.S.s.
- We will educate a new generation of physician-engineers, physician-inventors, and physician-discoverers. These innovators, entrepreneurs, scientists and practicing physicians will design tools and conduct research to fully integrate rapid technological innovation into medical practice, while employing data to improve medical outcomes. We are confident they will transform the healthcare landscape.
- We will not own a hospital. Instead we will establish this College of Medicine in full partnership with Carle Health System. At every step of this process, Carle has been an equal partner in the planning and development of the college.
- We will not ask for any new state general revenue funds for this new college. Instead, we will rely on tuition, clinical revenue, research grants and contracts, and philanthropy. We already have a $100 million commitment from Carle. Our business plan calls for us to raise another $200 million in philanthropy from foundations, corporations and donors.
The window of opportunity is small. Several other universities are seeking to do the same thing during the next few years. None is as qualified as we.
There are several steps to the process of establishing a College of Medicine, but we are going to get this done.
The second initiative I want to discuss is the Digital Manufacturing Design Innovation Institute at Chicago. At this time last year, we were working feverishly to assemble this complex proposal, and Chairman Kennedy urged you to contact your legislators to tell them how important this would be for the state of Illinois and the University of Illinois.
With your help, our efforts succeeded. With 23 university partners and 41 corporate partners, we won the bid and secured a $70 million federal grant. The partnership with companies including GE, Procter & Gamble, Lockheed Martin, John Deere, Caterpillar, Boeing and Dow Chemical and universities including the University of Chicago, Northwestern and UIC brought an additional $250 million to the project.
This was a huge win for the university and the state. Thank you for your advocacy and efforts to make this a reality.
Stewarding and growing our current resources
We are saving money by renovating and maintaining our campus facilities. While upgrades come with a cost, many of these improvements provide long-term returns. Our conservation programs have been very successful to date, with a 24 percent Energy Use Intensity Reduction since 2008. Our success has been a campus wide effort through user-based conservation efforts and centralized programs like retro-commissioning, lighting retrofits and energy performance contracting.
A key example of renovations and savings is the massive renovation of the State Farm Center, which was enabled by an incredibly generous gift from State Farm and numerous other donors like you. The finished project will include disability access and air conditioning that will generate additional revenues through rental to outside vendors.
Speaking of athletics, I work very closely with Mike Thomas to ensure that the entire Department of Intercollegiate Athletics creates a culture which fosters the development of our student-athletes for excellence, competitively and academically, with the utmost integrity. During the last academic year, 64 of our student athletes were Academic All-Big Ten selections and seven of our teams achieved 100 percent graduation success rates.
The Instructional Space Improvement Initiative is an $82.5 million, five-year plan for infrastructure and technology upgrades to classrooms and labs on our campus. Faculty and students benefit greatly from technologically state-of-the-art learning. These remodels ensure that we are using the most innovative teaching modalities, including the new blended learning model of lecture and online learning.
I hope you have an opportunity to come to campus and tour our new $95 million Electrical and Computer Engineering Building that will greatly benefit students and faculty alike. With more than 230,000 square feet of innovative classrooms, labs and offices, the building will be another center of interdisciplinary research. This is a state-of-the-art green building that will have a net-zero energy impact. Fifty percent of the building was funded by private gifts from individuals and corporations.
Passing it forward
These success stories have been made possible through your generous gifts. Let me make it abundantly clear: the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign would not be the pre-eminent university without your unswerving support and generosity.
Were it not for you, many bright, high-achieving Illinois residents would not have the opportunity to attend our university, nor would we be able to attract amazing faculty without your gifts that establish endowed chairs.
Another area of immense importance is endowed scholarships. When we survey students who have applied and been admitted, but who do not accept our offer, the top reason they give is that they were unable to afford Illinois, or that another university offered them a scholarship that covered more of their costs than we did.
You have allowed us to establish several programs designed to address the financial needs of students who would not be able to attend Illinois without financial help. Let me highlight just three.
Illinois Promise began in fall 2005 to ensure the affordability of higher education for high-achieving students from the lowest income levels. More than 2,000 students have benefitted from the program. Illinois Promise assures eligible recipients full tuition and fees.
Not only do these students receive full tuition and fees, but they are provided mentoring, advising, and counseling. These mentors are alumni, peers or university employees, or just folks in the community who want to help.
Many of these students are the first in their family to attend college. They go on to be role models for their family and their community. Many of you have made gifts to this program, and we thank you for your generosity.
This academic year, the College of Business has awarded 25 new Anthony J. Petullo Leaders in Business Scholarships to a diverse group of high-ability students from across the state of Illinois.
The need-based Thomas M. and Julie E. Scott Foundation Centennial Scholarship, initiated by a $1 million gift, will support high-achieving students pursuing their interests in accountancy, finance, or entrepreneurship. The Scotts also have contributed more than $700,000 to the Division of Intercollegiate Athletics.
I started out by saying the Chicago is a very special place to us and to me. It is special to us because so many of you, our most ardent supporters, advocates, and ambassadors make Chicago your home. It is special to me because my parents emigrated from China to the U.S., and my father got his Ph.D. at Northwestern University. Furthering his education and marrying my mother here was a new beginning for them, and charted the course of the rest of their lives. And were it not for them deciding to stay in America, instead of returning to China, I would not had the privilege of being the Chancellor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and to be here with you today.
Go Illini!
- Tags
-