State of the University Address Transcript

Good morning. I hope all of you are getting off to a good start at the beginning of the academic year. The start of a new year is an appropriate time for us to pause briefly to take stock of our University, and to look to the future that we face together.

The future looks especially bright right now, because we’re approaching a monumental period in our university's history. It's one that will draw together every member of our community. Those of us here in Charlottesville, and others around the nation, and across the world. Just 13 months from now in October of 2017, we will launch the university's bicentennial commemoration. 

The first events will take place on October 6, 2017, to mark the 200th anniversary of the laying of the university's cornerstone at Pavilion seven. Events will continue through the anniversary of the university's charter in January 2019 and culminate in May 2019 with the graduation of students who will become the first alumni of UVA's third century. 

Next month, we will launch the bicentennial commission that will provide oversight for the commemoration. The co-chairs are Dr. Bobby Battle and Tom Farrell. Bobby's here. Raise your hand, Bobby, so people can see you. There you are. 

[APPLAUSE] 

So Bobby is a UVA alumnus, a parent, school of medicine faculty member, and a UVA health system doctor. Tom, as you know, is a UVA alumnus, parent, and former director, and CEO of Dominion Resources. The commission will develop plans for the bicentennial, which will include academic activities, exhibits in our museums, special publications, and social events. 

To bring a broad range of perspectives to the planning work, the commission will seek advice from UVA stakeholders, including the Board of Visitors, deans, faculty, students, alumni and parents. Faculty, staff, and students will be heavily involved, both, in planning the celebration and participating in events. 

Faculty senate chair, Mimi Riley, will be part of a steering committee that will guide the work of the commission. Faculty members will be involved in advisory groups focused on three areas. Commemorating our history, envisioning the future, and promoting the celebration itself. This bicentennial coincides with a significant increase in the university's international activities. 

And this will allow us to make our bicentennial a truly global experience. Major events will take place in Charlottesville. But the celebrations reach will extend to all of the UVA clubs across the United States and the 19 clubs in foreign countries. With the bicentennial fast approaching, we've completed the renovation of the Rotunda. 

This was not a coincidence. From the beginning, we saw the Rotunda renovation as an essential step in preparing the university for this moment in the spotlight. With its reopening this fall, the Rotunda is, once again, serving as a center of student life and learning. 

About 20 classes are being held in the Rotunda. And there are new, comfortable spaces for students to study. Many of the classes being taught in the Rotunda this fall are College Advising seminars for first year students. And one is an architecture class, which is a nice perk for our students. 

Not many students get to attend class in a UNESCO World Heritage site and acknowledged masterpiece of American architecture. If we want the bicentennial to tell the complete story of UVA, and we do, we know it needs to include recognition of the historical role of slavery at UVA. In 2013, I established the President's Commission on slavery and the university to explore and report on UVA's relationship with slavery. 

Through the efforts of the PCSU and the support of the UVA community, we've accomplished many things, including restoring and commemorating the rediscovered African-American cemetery at UVA. Naming a new dorm Gibbons’s House after William and Isabella Gibbons, a couple who were enslaved at UVA and who became community leaders after emancipation. 

Hosting a national symposium titled Universities Confronting the Legacy of Slavery, which includes institutions across the country examining their own histories relative to slavery. Establishing a new course called Slavery and its Legacies, and developing new interpretive material in the Rotunda Visitor Center, among other initiatives. You'll hear about some more of those initiatives later this week, I believe. 

Like the Rotunda restoration, the work of the President's Commission on slavery is another necessary step as we prepare UVA for its bicentennial. The bicentennial gives us an opportunity to look back at UVA's past 200 years. And we will do that in appropriate ways. But also, and more importantly, this is our chance to look forward. 

When Thomas Jefferson founded the university, John Adams wrote these words to him. "I congratulate you, and Madison, and Monroe from such a noble triumvirate. The world will expect something very great and very new." The great, new university that Jefferson and his colleagues created has stood as a standard of excellence in higher education for 200 years. 

With our bicentennial right around the corner, this is the right time to ask ourselves, what will the world expect of this university in its next 100 years or its next 200 years? The answer now is the same as it was in Jefferson's time. The world will continue to expect something very great and very new from UVA. 

Those two qualities, greatness and newness, are mutually dependent. UVA will continue to be great in its third century only if we commit ourselves to make it new again and again in a and continuous cycle of innovation and reinvention. Today, I'll talk about some of the things we've accomplished over the past year that sustained a tradition of innovation at UVA, and some of the things we'll do in the years ahead to ensure that UVA remains, both, great and new. 

We know UVA will be neither great nor new unless we successfully recruit and retain an excellent faculty for the university's 3rd century. Last year, we hired 107 new tenure and tenure track faculty. The number rises to more than 200 if we had non-tenure tenure track faculty to the county. And this includes a large number of clinical medical faculty. 

For example, physicians whose primary role is providing care. This was the most diverse new class of faculty ever. 40% of our tenure, tenure-track hires were women. And 31% of our tenure, tenure-track hires were underrepresented minorities. 

We plan to continue to hire a more diverse and more interdisciplinary faculty in the coming year. The schools and departments have worked hard to evaluate what UVA's needs will be in future decades. Fields that are important today are often different from those that were important 30 or 40 years ago. And our hiring reflects that. 

For example, last year, we hired in many fields that we had not previously targeted, including environmental history, Latin American literature, and development economics. Arts and science has made a particular effort to hire scholars in a variety of fields whose research focuses on the global south with generous help from the Mellon Foundation. 

Engineering engaged in a multi-position cross departmental search for faculty in cyber physical systems, such as those used in smart cars and smart phones. Arts and sciences continues to seek faculty in areas of growing interest with searches ongoing in fields that include neuroscience, the sociology of health, data science, and coastal and wetland ecology. 

Our business schools are also seeking new faculty to further distinguish their ranks. McIntire in finance and management fields, Darden in data analytics, global economies, marketing, and operations management. Engineering is searching in several cross department areas, including biomedical data science, neural engineering, soft materials, and advanced manufacturing for biological applications. 

This year, we will continue our centrally supported pan university cluster hires and target of opportunity searches known as TOPS. For cluster hires, we identify an area of important scholarships spanning disciplines and schools. Then, seek multiple faculty members in that area. These searches often result in joint appointments in more than one school or department. 

Our cluster hires this past year included global markets, cloud scale data analytics, design thinking, biomedical data science, education policy, youth violence prevention, autism spectrum disorder, energy systems and molecular modeling, neuroscience, and traumatic brain injury. Several of these cluster hiring initiatives will continue this year, including potential new hires in neuroscience and autism spectrum disorder designed to complement the launch of the new UVA Brain Institute. 

The provost has also just approved new cluster hires for this year in African urbanism, cybersecurity, and digitally mediated learning. The TOPS hiring occurs when a school identifies an exceptional candidate who can bring extraordinary value to UVA, even if there is no search underway in that field. TOPS hires have brought us many superstar faculty, including Jayakrishna Ambati, one of the world's leading researchers in macular degeneration. 

For the coming year, we've authorized and encouraged each school to seek out a TOPS hire. This will give school leaders the opportunity to think expansively and ambitiously about top faculty whom they wish to recruit. Other faculty who've joined UVA recently are working at frontiers of their fields. 

Yen Do came to UVA last year as an assistant professor of mathematics, following a three year appointment at Yale. Do's research focuses on the application of harmonic analysis to research problems in a mathematical physics and probabilistic analysis. Maurice Wallace joined us last year as associate professor of English and Associate Director of the Carter Woodson Institute. 

A scholar of African-American and American cultural studies, Maurice studies the history of photography and its convergence with black freedom struggles from emancipation to the current Black Lives Matter movement. Anne Ming joined the faculty this August as an assistant professor in the politics department. Her research focuses on political institutions in dictatorships, using game theory, and statistical methods. 

Trey Lee came to UVA from the National Cancer Institute, and now serves as assistant professor of pediatrics. He focuses on immunotherapy that harnesses the power of the immune system to battle cancer. These are just a few examples of the new, diverse generation of faculty who are strengthening UVA in our approach to its third century. 

Their international profile reflects UVA's increasingly global character as we recruit top talent from around the world. Just as building a third century faculty is an urgent priority for us, enhancing the research enterprise is one of our top goals. We also want to enhance our research infrastructure so that we're able to support the work of our extraordinary faculty. 

By many measures, this past year has been a banner year for UVA research. Research awards increased by more than 8% in the last fiscal year. And we managed to achieve this growth in spite of flat federal budgets for research. 

More important than the percentages or the stories of how UVA research is improving the human condition, you've probably heard about the breakthrough discovery by researchers Jonathan Kipnis and Antoine Louveau, which revealed that the brain is directly connected to the immune system by lymphatic vessels. Vessels that were previously thought not to exist. 

This discovery will alter the study and treatment of neurological diseases ranging from autism to Alzheimer's disease. What you may not know is that 12 of our undergraduate students are working in the Kipnis Lab, along with three graduate students. We encourage our undergraduates to seek out these kinds of opportunities. We created the undergraduate student opportunities and academic research program, known as USOAR, to match undergraduate students with research positions. 

We want students to embrace these opportunities because great experience and valuable connections to the faculty will result. And occasionally, if students are lucky, they may end up on the front lines of a revolutionary discovery. The discovery of the lymphatic vessels in the brain was rated one of the top 10 discoveries in science last year by Science magazine. 

There are many examples of how UVA research is improving lives. Last month, the New England Journal of Medicine carried a story about the use of focused ultrasound to cure essential tremor using a technique pioneered and perfected by UVA neurosurgeons. This Friday, Dr. Ariel Gomez, professor of pediatric neuphrology and director of the UVA Child Health Research Center will receive the American Heart Association's 2016 excellence in hypertension research award, the most prestigious national award offered by the AHA'S council in hypertension. 

Assistant professor of microbiology, Melissa Kendall, recently received the American Society for Microbiology's Merck Irving Sigal Memorial Award for her research in investigating how bacterial pathogens establish infection. Our research translates into exciting start-up companies. UVA faculty member, Ben Calhoun, and his colleagues launched PsiKick, which manufactures some of the lowest power wireless sensors in the world. 

These chips could lead to a technology revolution in which everyday items, from doors to gym equipment, are embedded with wireless sensors that enable news smart behaviors. PsiKick recently raised $16.5 million in financing. These are just some of the most recent examples of the quality and variety of research happening at UVA. 

We continue to focus on cross-disciplinary research. The new UVA Brain Institute is a good example drawing together faculty, and students, and recent cluster hires in arts and sciences, medicine, engineering, the Curry School, and the Data Science Institute. These colleagues are developing better methods for understanding the brain seeking new ways to prevent, treat, and cure brain diseases and injury in teaching our students what they learn. 

Corporate and new government partners will be increasingly essential to the success of our research enterprise. This past summer, UVA hosted its third annual conference on national defense and intelligence at our Applied Research Institute. This conference attracts companies from across the nation, agencies within the Department of Defense, and a number of universities. 

We created UVA's Applied Research Institute in 2011 to create pathways for government and industry partners to connect with our research enterprise, our teaching capabilities, and our human talent. In recent years, the institute has worked with partners on projects related to cybersecurity, infectious disease, bioinformatics, and other global challenges. 

We're working aggressively to expand our network of research partners and to strengthen our research capacity. Succeeding in this effort will be essential to the university's future. And as I mention our prominence in research, let me not overlook the 50th anniversary of the National Endowment for the humanities being celebrated here in Charlottesville, Wednesday through Saturday. 

There's a great story about it that Derek wrote this morning in the daily progress that you can refer to. And a schedule of those events is readily available to you. That recognition for UVA is very much deserved because of our continued strength and effort in the humanities. 

Our effort to make UVA great and new in its third century includes making the curriculum new. The effort to create a new undergraduate curriculum led by the faculty of the college and graduate schools of arts and sciences had a breakthrough year this past year. And the momentum is building this fall. The changes are designed to build on UVA's historic academic strengths while better preparing our students to succeed as professionals and as active, articulate citizens. 

In May, the college faculty voted by an 83% majority to pilot the new curriculum beginning with a cohort of students in next year's entering class. In preparation, arts and sciences just announced its first class of college fellows, the group of faculty who will lead the design of the first component of the new curriculum. They met for the first time about a week ago. 

The new curriculum will be based on three components. Engagements, literacies, and disciplines. The first component, engagements, will be designed to help students engage the world from the moment they arrive at UVA. These two credit courses will frame students intellectual journey encouraging them to embrace innovative, ethical, and critical thinking. There will be four engagements. 

In aesthetic engagement, students will learn to identify, describe, and analyze aesthetic phenomena. In empirical and scientific engagement, students will analyze claims about the material and social worlds by testing questions and hypotheses based on observation and experience. In engaging difference, students will reflect on their own perspectives in relation to their expanding knowledge of other human experiences. 

And in ethical engagement, students will learn to evaluate human conduct, to consider the ethical components of individual and collective behaviors, and to engage in moral deliberation. The college fellows will be responsible for designing and teaching the engagements. And they will represent a rotating cohort of faculty drawn from across departments and disciplines. 

The second component of the new curriculum, literacies, is designed to help students navigate an increasingly global society that's becoming more dependent on data analysis. The literacies to be covered under the proposed new general education requirements include world languages, rhetoric for the 21st century, and quantification, computation, and data analysis. 

In the third component, of the curriculum, disciplines, students will explore a range of subjects from various perspectives grounded in disciplinary thinking and scholarly practices. Thomas Jefferson wrote these words in 1805. "Science is progressive. What was useful two centuries ago has now become useless. What is now deemed useful will, in some of its parts, become useless in another century." 

Constant re-invention, including curricular reinvention, will be an essential part of our effort to prepare students for success in the careers and communities they will enter after graduation. As we approach the beginning of UVA's third century, the cornerstone plan continues to guide us forward. In our second year of implementation, the plan produced a number of new programs and initiatives. 

We established and now lead the academic preservation trust, a consortium of research universities focused on the preservation of digital scholarship. We enrolled the second class of fellows in the Meriwether Lewis Institute for citizen leadership. We developed a new semester long study abroad program in Delhi, India. 

We launched phase one of research UVA to streamline and support the administration of sponsored research projects. Our licensing adventures group executed 203 invention disclosures, and 80 commercial transactions, and was awarded 38 patents. All of those numbers are the highest in our history. 

These are just a few highlights of the products of the cornerstone plan. To keep UVA new and great in the next century, we must continue to make strategic investments that will keep our university affordable while strengthening the faculty and expanding research programs. UVA has a long standing record of prudent financial stewardship. 

And that history of careful management, together with strong investment earnings, has enabled us to create the new Strategic Investment Fund. The fund will allow us to make significant, ongoing investments to enhance the quality of our university. To help us carry out this work, we formed a faculty evaluation committee chaired by former law dean and current law Professor John Jeffries. 

The evaluation committee is making recommendations to an advisory committee, which will, in turn, make recommendations to the Board of Visitors. The board will consider the first round of investments at its meeting later this week. The Strategic Investment Fund will help us advance priorities we've identified in the cornerstone plan and the medical center strategic plan. 

Proposals could include strategic recruitment of top faculty, specialized equipment or laboratories, initiatives that enhance student life, matching funds to leverage philanthropic opportunities, and seed funds for endowed student scholarships. We plan to carefully monitor and measure each investment to make sure we're accomplishing our objectives. 

I want to allow time for questions and comments. So let me close with a word thanks. As we prepare to embark on a uniquely momentous period in the university's history, I'm grateful for the commitment of the faculty, staff, and students who help us advance the mission of the university every day. 

As we approach the bicentennial and reflect on UVA's first and second centuries, the first two chapters of the UVA story, we understand that we are the ones responsible for creating the next chapter. That is the hard work that we do together now, today, and tomorrow will become, in later years, the history of UVA's third century. 

That's a big responsibility, and a great opportunity. And I'm grateful to everyone in the UVA community who embraces that task every day. Thank you. And now I would be happy to entertain some questions. 

[APPLAUSE] 

I believe Elise has a microphone so that everybody can hear a question. And so does Cecil over here. 

Hi. Thanks. I wonder if you might explain the relationship between the Cornerstone Plan and the Strategic Investment Fund. 

So that's a very good question. When the Cornerstone Plan was first adopted, the board did not allocate funds for the strategic investments we would need in it. But instead, we found funds through philanthropy. Some of the ideas in the Cornerstone Plan were so exciting they immediately attracted philanthropists who were interested. And through reallocation from things that we were already doing. 

Pat Hogan and his team have saved almost $55 million in the university through their careful stewardship of our resources. That was money that, in many cases, we could direct towards other opportunities. But we've reached a point now where we have bigger investments that we need to make. 

And you know, those of you who work every day in our IT system and other parts of our research infrastructure around here, you understand that there are things here that take more money than we're able to get just by reallocating resources. So the strategic investment fund is intended to provide ongoing possibilities for additional investments we can make but carefully vetted and always approved by the board. 

And of course, one of the things that the proposals asked for is what is the relationship of this project either to the university strategic plan, the Cornerstone Plan, or to the medical center strategic plan. So we're trying to keep it all in very close alignment. Good question. Thank you. Did I cover everything? 

[LAUGHING] 

Rasheed, I think you had your hand up, yes. 

Yes, thank you. My question, I hope this is not seen as a critique. It's a question about what I've heard about our neighbors in Charlottesville. What I want us to pay attention to is that some folks in our community believe that the footprint of our university expands all around the world, and that we are not doing enough in a local community. 

And so my suggestion is that, as much as we raise the profile of all of these big things we do around the world, there's a lot that we, as individuals and as an institution, do locally in Charlottesville and in the Albemarle County area, but to find a way to make sure that is included in whatever it is that we talk about. 

Thank you. That's a very thoughtful comment. Our faculty do a great deal in this community. Not always with much recognition of it. But I think about the doctors, and the nurses, and medical and nursing students, for example, who offer health fairs and give parents who can't afford to get a physical for their child to get the physical so the child can participate in athletics at school. 

That doesn't get called out very much. But it's one of many things that we do. There are other things too that I think are, perhaps, not something that we take much credit for, though it happens. For example, a substantial subsidy to the Charlottesville bus system. 

So Pat Hogan and his people are currently commissioning an outside group because we don't want to analyze our own story but to let an outside group analyze our story to see what are the benefits of the university to the Charlottesville and Albemarle areas. And you know, a lot of that will be focused on economic benefit. 

But I think we provide a lot of other important benefits, too, in terms of health care, cultural events, entertainment, and over 3,500 hours a week of service that our students provide through Madison House to various agencies inside Charlottesville and Albemarle County. But we're not gonna forget our community. That's our home. And we'll always take care of our home. So thank you for bringing that up. Yes, sir. 

Yeah, OK. I have a question that's sort of related to that, and that has to do with slavery. I mean, it's a danger to even bring up the topic. I prefer not to. But if we're gonna make a effort to confront our history of slavery and be seen to be responding appropriately, maybe we ought to look at slavery around the world. It's not gone. 

There is slavery elsewhere. It's not in Charlottesville so much anymore. But elsewhere in the world, it's alive and well. And maybe we could focus on that. And I'm not sure exactly how. How do we go about it? I haven't thought about it much. But I think it might be an appropriate response. 

That's a very interesting idea. Thank you for bringing that up. I see Dr. Marcus Martin who's co-chair of the commission thinking about that right now. 

[LAUGHING] 

Yeah, it's very appropriate considering the emphasis on global south that the college is making right now. Of course, it's not just a matter of global south, also global north. But that's a very thoughtful idea. Appreciate it. 

Yeah, I agree. I'm Marcus Martin. I'm the co-chair of the President's Commission on Slavery and the University. When we got a great start here by looking at the slave laborers contributions to the University of Virginia based on President Sullivan establishing the PCSU-- that's the abbreviation for President's Commission on Slavery and the University-- in September 2013. And I'm thankful that she listed a number of things that we were doing. 

But with the Board of Visitors meeting this week, there are some other things that will come forth, I'm hoping, like approval of some name changes to buildings or new names to buildings after slaves. The memorial to slave laborers. We have a student group that really got this all started in 2007. 

And the student group realized that-- well actually, it was 2009-- they realized that the monument we have from 2007, which is a gray slate monument right at the Rotunda, we step over it every day. And there is nothing there that truly recognizes the span of slavery and the slave laborers contributions. 

How do we extend that to the world? I think we set examples here in terms of the work that we're doing, recognition of the enslaved, commemoration of the African-American cemetery, get our whole community involved in this type of recognition, and we're hopeful that this will spill out beyond our walls, state, and national. 

As a matter of fact, it already has some implication on a national level. We started a group called Universities Studying Slavery. And this is a consortium of a number of schools around the country studying slavery as it relates to the United States. And inevitably, I think that will spill over into slavery around the world. 

And I'm not an expert on that. So I'm not prepared to talk about slavery around the world. But it is a great question and, I think, one that we'll see over time that the work here will extend particularly with our students, the student leaders and faculty, with the research that they do. So thank you so much. 

I just wanted to build on that. And I was wondering if we're doing anything akin to what is happening at Georgetown. Now there, of course because of the sale of the slaves, they had names. And here, we rarely have the names. But there might be historical digging of family, memories, and so on and so forth. And I was wondering if there were any research initiatives about that that might lead to, perhaps, identifying individuals. And perhaps, as Georgetown is doing, providing even preferential access, etc. 

Ray, right? Thank you so much for that. That question has come up a few times, obviously, as we would expect. The work we've done here actually helped Georgetown with their work. And they were one of the members of Universities Studying Slavery. 

We do have a scholarship called the Perkins scholarship that's administered through Ridley that's specific for descendants of American slaves. And the applicants for this scholarship or the ones who were selected to receive the scholarships are Charlottesville and area descendants of slaves. So we have that. It's nearly a million dollar [INAUDIBLE]. 

If anybody would like to contribute to that, it's called the Perkins Scholarship. Please, do so. And you know, the other question is admission advantage. Obviously, we have increased a number of low income and first generation students coming to the University of Virginia, which would include, likely, descendants of slaves. 

We have a disadvantage in that we don't have nearly the number of names that Georgetown has. As you were saying, they kept the record that was not kept here. But there is ongoing research. And we know a few names. 

You know, like Givens House and some descendants of Givens. So we hope to show this research to be fruitful over time to have more names. Kurt von Daacke, who is the co-chair of the PCSU is working every day with colleagues at the University around this type of initiative. But we are doing some great things here with access UVA and others. 

Being a public institution, we come under some different guidelines than Georgetown, which is private. But we are looking into it. We're getting opinions at the attorney general level. And hopefully, we'll have more answers in terms of what we can and cannot do. Thank you. 

OK. Well I want to thank you, again, for all the support and help you have been in the past year. You've had a great year, UVA. And it's really a pleasure for me to acknowledge that. The faculty senate will meet here how soon, Mimi? 

It's at 1:00. 

At 1 o'clock. And so for those of you who'd like to stay around, I'd like to invite you to supplement your lunch. Have another cookie, maybe. And enjoy one anothers' company. Thank you for your attendance this afternoon. 

[APPLAUSE]