Text transcript of Chancellor Martin’s welcome event address

Good afternoon. I’m not sure that the mic and the pager work together. Thank you, President Reilly, for your generous introduction. Thank you, Professor Sims, I think. I’ll talk to you later about the name.

Thanks to all of you who are here. I’m delighted and honored by your presence. I’d like to begin by thanking the sponsors and the organizers of this event. The UW Foundation, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, and the Wisconsin Alumni Association provided generous support.

The organizing committee was chaired by Paula Bonner, who is the president of the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and it included faculty, staff and student leadership from the university as well as members of the Madison community. Obviously they worked tirelessly and well in order to bring us this event, and I thank all of you for doing that.

I am delighted to be joined today by the chancellors of our other system campuses, by system administrators, by our regents, by state and local leaders, including Mayor Dave. It is an unbelievable gift to have my colleagues here from Cornell and to have family and close friends that I love more than anyone in the world is something I really can’t quite capture. I, too, want to acknowledge the former chancellors, and in particular Irv Shain, who gave me my degree. So all the alumni who are here, some of you from Madison and many of you from far away, I want to thank you for coming, but also thank you for everything you do for this university and the many different ways that you nourish the institution. And finally, a special hello to the faculty, staff and students of UW–Madison.

I am aware that many of you have wanted to know about my observations after my first two months in Madison and the way I would describe my experience so far is as joyful, and I am going to spend the rest of the time I have today talking about some of the reasons for that joy, and also some of the challenges we face, and finally offering some of my hopes for the future of this great institution.

The pleasure that I’ve had since I got to Madison arose from the kinds of experiences that we’re having here today, and that is the opportunity to enjoy the talent and spiritedness of our students. I want to thank all the students in the UW Wind Ensemble, the UW concert choir, and Spoken Word and the World Percussion Group for their inspiring performances.

These young people are our hope for the future and they are the reason why it is a joy to be on a university campus. I also want to thank professors Anthony Di Sanza and Scott Teeple.

Now some of you will have seen the slideshow that was on the Jumbotron when we came into the Kohl Center. And by the way, a special thank you to the Athletic Department and Barry Alvarez for hosting us here. I’m sure there is no other place where I’ll see my name in this light.

If you knew more about my background, you’d realize that having this event in an athletic facility is absolutely the right thing to do.

If you saw the slide show that was on the loop on the Jumbotron when you came in, you’d see that the photographs highlight some of our most treasured traditions at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and one of those that I love is our mascot. I ask you — what university mascot could possibly compare with Bucky Badger?

You may have seen a photograph outside of the pink flamingos that covered Bascom Hill when I was a student here or pictures on the slide show of the “Jump Around,” for which our current students are now famous and will be famous forever. What other students in the world have been as inventive and fun-loving as the students at UW–Madison? Where else have they come up with a “Jump Around” for the end of the third quarter of football games that rocks Camp Randall Stadium? And I mean literally rocks. I relish the colorful, festive and spirited Saturdays at Camp Randall.

The photographs in the slide show span many generations and they testify to the endurance and stability, not only of this institution of higher learning, but of higher education in this country more generally. Among the faculty depicted are legendary researchers and legendary teachers who have attracted class after class of students who are eager to experience a great lecture, a great demonstration, a good discussion, or to try out their own ideas on responsive professors.

The slideshow emphasizes the importance of place. My joy since I’ve been back in Madison has, in large part, been a response to the stunning natural beauty of this place — it makes me smile every day to drive to a campus located on an isthmus between two gorgeous lakes, with an arboretum as beautiful and extensive as any in the country, and with views of one of the most beautiful capitol buildings in the United States.

These traditions, places and spaces have made me feel at home. And this community, which extends across the campus, into the city and out into the state has made me feel welcome with the friendliness, openness, and the lack of pretense that is often associated with Wisconsin and the Midwest, and it turns out to be one of those stereotypes that actually has merit, as does Wisconsin’s reputation for vigorous political debate, pride in the quality of its education, agriculture, manufacturing and now high-tech industry, the preference for substance over form, and a strong sense of civic responsibility. I am very glad to be back in the state of Wisconsin.

It is an extraordinary honor and a huge responsibility to be chancellor of this great university where groundbreaking research and teaching are combined with unusual entrepreneurial spirit and a passionate desire to contribute to the world.

The faculty, staff and students here have built incredible cultural and artistic and institutions. The university’s athletic achievements are legendary. In short, the University of Wisconsin–Madison is one of the world’s liveliest, most public-minded and accomplished institutions of higher learning in the world.

Our job now is to sustain and enhance the university’s special character, its excellence and its contributions. It is going to take every one of us — even those of you from Cornell — and unprecedented cooperation to succeed, because at the moment, we face enormous challenges. We are in the midst of a serious global financial and economic crisis with no clear end in sight. The world is full of conflicts that were not foreseen when the Cold War ended and we were encouraged to think about a more lasting peace and the spread of democratic values. Migration patterns are transforming the populations of many nations around the world and, in some cases, redrawing national boundaries, but not without conflict and hardship.

Meanwhile, ecosystems continue to be threatened and destroyed, global climate change challenges the well-being of the planet and here in the Midwest, the consequences of globalization have had significant effects, which are being felt more strongly right now as manufacturing jobs have disappeared, leaving states like Wisconsin with the daunting challenge of creating a new economy and new jobs. And in the interim, here, as elsewhere, the unemployed, the underemployed and even the fully employed struggle to gain access to affordable health care.

As for universities, especially public universities, we currently face the perfect storm of financial problems — flat or decreasing federal funding for research when the nation desperately needs research and development, states that are facing enormous budget deficits, significant hits on university endowments and limits on what families can pay for tuition.

This is only a partial list of the challenges we face, but a strong indication of how interdependent the university and the rest of the community really are and how badly we need each another to succeed. Interdependence and the importance of integrated approaches to problems are my themes today.

Given the volatility and the problems in the short term and the now fully evident consequences of seeking only immediate gain and gratification, it is going to be important for us to take the long view and to be inclusive in our thinking and do everything in our power to focus our attention on the things that matter most.

My task here is to familiarize myself with the aspirations of our faculty, staff and students and do everything I can, guided by principles, to enable them to achieve what they are capable of achieving. On the basis of what I know now, let me outline some of the principles and priorities that are going to help us set our course, and I will list them first and then say a bit about each one:

Access and Affordability for students

Recruitment and retention of world-class faculty and talented staff

Excellence and focus in our approach to research

Accountability for the best possible undergraduate education

Diversity

Invigoration of the Wisconsin Idea

So let me take each in turn and talk first about affordability.

The key to keeping the University of Wisconsin–Madison affordable is need-based financial aid, so that students from any economic background can afford to attend this institution. Some people will imagine that the key to affordability is either lowering or keeping tuition flat. And it is very important that when we talk about affordability, we talk about the affordability of education and not the affordability of tuition. And why is that? Tuition will continue to rise over time. We can try to keep the rates of increase as low as possible, and I’m sure we will, but it’s unrealistic to think that tuition will stay the same or go down. And the reason for that is because the traditional revenue sources for universities, states, the federal government are flat or falling. Philanthropy and other private sector support, which is increasingly important to public universities, cannot yet make up the gap. They provide us with the margin of excellence that we absolutely must have, but they can’t make up the shortfall.

So let me explain my approach to tuition and why I believe strongly in need-based financial aid. Those who can afford to pay tuition — those who can afford to pay more — should pay more. Those who can afford to pay less should pay less. And those who can afford to pay nothing should not pay anything in actual dollars, but should be allowed to contribute to their own education, at least through work-study. I think it’s important that everybody have skin in the game, so to speak. Now some will say that the use of need-based financial aid means that those students who can afford to pay full tuition are actually subsidizing the students who can’t afford to pay tuition.

I ask you to consider two important realities when you are thinking about the issue of tuition and about affordability. First of all, tuition at the University of Wisconsin is near the bottom of our peer group. It is one of the lowest tuitions in our league. Secondly, tuition or the sticker price of an education does not nearly cover the actual cost of educating a student at a university of this caliber, or at any research university. So it is fair to say that every single student at this university, whether they are paying full tuition or getting aid, is being heavily subsidized. Everyone is being subsidized. We must and we will raise need-based financial aid.

Now I have been talking about undergraduate students when I talk about aid, and it is also really, really critical for us to talk about affordability and funding for graduate students.

Universities don’t always do a good job of explaining to the public why graduate students and graduate funding are so important, so let me just say this:

Without graduate students there is no research university. The faculty absolutely cannot do the work they do without graduate students. And they are essential partners, not only in research, but also in teaching, and they add great value to the teaching of undergraduates. In addition, the path that graduate students mark out in their studies actually bring faculty together from different disciplines and different parts of the university, and they advance the knowledge of faculty as well as of students themselves. They not only become the next generation of university professors, scientists and scholars — they go on to distinguished careers in other nonprofits, in industry and in government, and a significant number of graduate students who earn their Ph.D.s here stay in the state and they become the professors for other campuses or they become part of industry and bring much needed expertise to the state.

As part of the UW System’s Growth Agenda for the next biennium, UW–Madison has sought funding for graduate students, and that’s a very important priority for us when it comes to research and keeping faculty.

Number two — recruiting and retaining world-class faculty. The contributions that the University of Wisconsin–Madison makes to students, the state and the world are made possible by the quality of our faculty. It is imperative that we continue to attract and keep the best faculty out there. This will require that we bring average salaries for faculty up from the bottom of our peer group, which is where they now are.

Now this is a very hard argument for people outside of universities to accept. Why should faculty at the university who already make significantly more than the median family income in Wisconsin get even more in their salaries? Why should they make more than the talented and hard-working officials in other state agencies? The answer is really simple to articulate, but really hard for a lot of people to accept — understandably. And the answer is this: capitalism.

The University of Wisconsin–Madison competes in a national and international market and its preeminence is the basis for its contributions. University professors are not in this business first and foremost to make money. Indeed most of them could be making a lot more in the private sector, but they have chosen this route because of their passion for research and education. Our goal is not to offer the biggest or largest salaries in the country, even if we could. Our goal is only to reach the median of our peer group and to reach it by rewarding performance or merit differentially. Just like businesses in this state have to set their own prices and their own salaries, so, too, does a world class university.

To borrow the succinct formulation of our Law School dean, Ken Davis, UW–Madison is both preeminent and public and we have to remain true both to our long history of distinction and our public purposes.

Let’s talk for a minute about research. In total amounts of external research funding, UW–Madison receives $905 million annually. That’s an average of $440,000 per faculty member. That’s extraordinary. UW–Madison is a research powerhouse. It has consistently been in the top five of all universities in the United States in research funding, and right now, the University of Wisconsin–Madison is secondly only to Johns Hopkins University in the total amount of external research funding in the country. That’s pretty amazing.

Obviously our faculty, staff and students do a lot of different things well here and are incredibly entrepreneurial. In fact, I’ve never been in a more entrepreneurial or creative culture and that’s clearly the reason why a zillion flowers bloom here. At the same time, I feel we could benefit from some greater coordination and integration of our efforts, and I think we’re going to need to focus our investments if we want to take advantage of our unique strengths and our comparative advantages.

So let me mention only a couple of the areas in which our reputation has been made and is still being made — areas where we also we have the potential to address what have seemed to be intractable problems in the world.

Please bear in mind, for those of you who are not in these fields, that I’m only listing a couple. UW–Madison is an acknowledged leader in the biosciences and in biotechnology, and the university has wisely placed its bets and focused resources in those areas. Our strengths in agriculture, engineering, computer science, biology and medicine are well known nationally and internationally, and every one of those fields turns out to be essential to what we call biology in the 21st century. Biology is a fundamentally interdisciplinary field in this century and requires excellence in all of the domains I just listed. Our faculty and staff are leaders in some of the most promising areas at the intersections of those sciences, including the derivation of stem cells and the development of regenerative medicine, also including the prevention of epidemic-causing infectious diseases. Wisconsin is a powerhouse in microbiology and virology, and it is here that Yoshihiro Kawaoka found in flu viruses the genetic mutations that permit it to adapt to human hosts, and he also developed methods that will speed the development and production of flu vaccines for avian influenza, which people have been working on and trying to do for a very long time across the world. These developments hold out tremendous promise, not only for the treatment and eventually the cure of some of our most ravaging diseases, but also for the prevention of those diseases, which means more affordable and effective health care. Over the next several years, the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery and the Morgridge Institute for Research will go up on University Avenue. What will occur in those institutes will contribute to what our faculty is already doing in the realm of interdisciplinary translational science, which means science aimed at understanding organisms and systems and moving discoveries quickly from the bench to the proverbial bedside.

I think we can do even more in the biosciences and in medicine if our view is expansive and integrated enough, if we pioneer a more inclusive definition of medicine and medical research by more fully recognizing, for example, nursing research, work in public health, the work of historians of science and medicine, and the contributions of bioethicists. Indeed, the integration of these fields is foreseen for the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery. Together these approaches could offer a powerfully synthetic approach to defining the frontiers of biomedical research, not to mention to human health and well-being.

To take an integrated view also requires that we focus not only on the health of the body-and this is especially important in a university community — but the health of the mind. In the Waisman Center for the Study of Childhood Development, directed by Marsha Seltzer, the behavioral sciences interact with the natural sciences in genuinely novel ways. Neuroscientist Richard Davidson has worked with the Dalai Lama and Tibetan monks to study the effects of meditation, and he has received significant funding from the NIH and foundations to support his stunning results. He will soon open a Center for the Neuroscience of Compassion, Love and Happiness, and I find this work utterly compelling. And why do I find it so compelling? Because it has as much potential to improve the quality of lives as do the discoveries designed to heal and prevent diseases of the body. Because it points to the importance of the behavioral sciences and the humanities. Because it provides important, if tentative answers to age-old questions about the relationship between nature, now typically defined as genetics, and the environment. They may be tentative answers, but what they highlight is human beings’ incredible capacity to learn and to relearn throughout our lives, giving us all the more reason to value education directed at the whole person. I am also drawn to this work, because the way we live our lives in the 21st century allows too little space for the contemplative, and for a relationship to time that makes us fully alive to the world. And I am persuaded that we owe our students the chance to reflect on these themes and to experience what it means to be unplugged, as well as plugged in.

Our preeminence as a university and our well-being as a people depend not only on the sciences, but also on the social sciences, the humanities and the arts, independent of the sciences. UW faculty in the social sciences attract an extraordinary amount of external funding for the work they do in political science, history, economics, sociology and psychology, and they also attract funding and attention for the work they do at the intersection of those fields. Among our social scientists are some of the most distinguished members of their disciplines, but also members of disciplines who are also public intellectuals, and in the work that our faculty and staff have been doing as part of a reaccreditation I’ve been amazed to see how much focus there has been on the importance of creating and fostering public intellectuals in the university.

Many of our social scientists are well known to you around the state, whether through the political polls they do, whether through the institutes for governance and democracy, whether through our education programs from our top-ranked education school, These efforts have incredible effects on the state and the nation.

One of our very talented social scientists recently said something that captured my imagination. We were talking about the relationship between challenges and opportunities entailed by globalization and over-population, and he said to me, ‘These are extraordinary problems, especially here, but it is also the case’ — and now I’m quoting him — ‘that a truly international humanity may also finally be coming into view.’ To the extent a truly international humanity is coming into view, I say let us hasten its arrival by enhancing support for social scientists, humanists and artists who are hard at work advancing our understanding of different cultures and social orders, and who are engaged as they always have been in understanding and expressing what it means to be human.

Let’s move on to undergraduate education. Our students need to be prepared for the challenges of the 21st century. In an age when information is so readily available and when its modes of presentation seem to me at least to substitute mere assertion for fact or informed argument, we have a greater responsibility than ever to make critical and integrative thinking “second nature” for our students, and to provide them with the tools to distinguish between opinion and grounded knowledge. That means promoting again and continually liberal arts education, or what perhaps we could call general purpose education that allows students to develop the knowledge, analytical skills and independent thinking that are required for responsible citizenship.

The world needs citizens who know the difference between a gene and a chromosome, who understand and can use statistical methods, who know the difference between correlation and causality, who not only use computational tools and logic, but can actually develop them and direct them to worthy ends. The world needs citizens who have dwelled in the riches of the world’s cultures and histories and languages, and who can speak more than one language, who can understand how cultural meaning is created and changed through different media, and who are able to synthesize what they have learned from those different domains. So how do we ensure that our students develop the capacity for that kind of integration and synthesis? Our faculty and staff have proposed a range of different answers to that question and over the course of the next five to ten years, we will offer students many more opportunities for research experiences, field-based learning opportunities, international study, and internships, because these opportunities help students bring different bodies of knowledge to bear on specific problems and in specific contexts and it will increase our students’ success. Our graduation rate just went up again according to still tentative data, from 80.4 percent 82.3 percent, which is great. We should increase it still further over the next five to 10 years, but we should also be graduating students who are better prepared than any of the students we’ve ever graduated.

Faculty and staff also recommend something very interesting, I think — that we develop a fully e-campus at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, which I believe this university would be capable of doing. That’s a fully electronic-campus that would make use of advances in technology to make us present to one another across classrooms and across offices in ways that almost replicate being fully present, and Cisco is just one of the corporations that has developed technologies that are just about to do that. The capabilities associated with a fully outfitted electronic campus, according to our faculty and staff who proposed this, would permit novel ways of introducing new knowledge into existing fields. So instead of always having to add new courses, new programs, and new degrees, we could establish real-time interactions from classroom to classroom, across campus, between campuses and among campuses around the world where students learn how to integrate new knowledge into what they are learning in a particular discipline or two.

Diversity. Our students cannot get an adequate education or prepare themselves for the 21st century, nor can our faculty and staff do their most creative work unless they’re working and also playing with people from every conceivable background with different points of view. To attract and keep faculty, staff and students from underrepresented groups, the university has to create an environment that defines excellence as dependent on diversity. There is no way to succeed in diversifying this university unless we begin to knit appreciation for diversity and excitement about its benefits into the fabric of everything we do, making ourselves and our students nothing more and nothing less than alive to the realities of the world. On campus, we should have the goal of rigorously assessing which programs have worked over the past 10 years — we’ve now reached the 2008 milestone — and which programs have not. And we should focus our resources on the ones that do and create new ones where old ones have failed. We need to increase diversity and we also need to significantly reduce the so-called achievement gap for underrepresented students. Recent data shows that the graduation rate for targeted minorities jumped from 59.8 percent to 67.5 percent, which is an incredible jump. It’s great news, but that still leaves too big of a gap in the graduation rate of underrepresented minority students and other students, and that’s a gap that we should set a goal to close over the next five to 10 years.

Invigorate the Wisconsin Idea and support the emergence of public intellectuals. What I have found on my return to Madison is a renewed desire on the part of the faculty, staff and students for active and substantive dialogue in a reinvigorated public sphere. In fact, our faculty, staff and students would like to help redefine the public sphere itself and they have the capacity to do that in partnership with the rest of the community.

Faculty and staff have also argued that we can make more of a difference if we focus our efforts and become more intentional about some of our efforts to engage communities outside of the university and partner with them. Given what we know not only from university discussions, but also from discussion that we had with citizens around the state, there are several likely areas for focus when we think about invigorating the Wisconsin Idea. But again I caution you that these are just suggestions and not everything that we could conceivably do. So where could we focus and make a real difference in the state and beyond?

Definitely health care, which I have already mentioned. Definitely K-12 education, with our No. 1-ranked School of Education, which is already trying to address K-12 education in the state. Governance in a global world and the future of democracy, where our social scientists in Letters and Sciences, Business, Agriculture and Law have extraordinary expertise to offer. Sustainability, with a particular focus on environmental preservation and alternate energy sources. And economic development.

I am going to dwell here only on sustainability and economic development. What I would say about sustainability, which I know interests our students tremendously, is that the only hope we have is in cutting-edge research and in the passionate environmental advocacy of our young people, who are putting increasing pressure on universities, governments, and industry to go green. This university and state have a long history of environmental advocacy and leadership in environmental policy. Our Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, a thoroughly interdisciplinary endeavor, is named after one of those leaders, Gaylord Nelson. The university, in partnership with the state and the state’s industries, has begun to carve out the areas within the broad arena of sustainability where we could excel and make contributions — for example, in alternate energy sources. The University of Wisconsin–Madison was the only university in the United States to receive one of the DoE’s recent major bioenergy center grants and together with Gov. Doyle, has just announced a major bioenergy initiative. Ten years from now, I’m confident that the partnerships between the university, agriculture, business and the state will have resulted in thriving bioenergy industries in Wisconsin.

In addition, our engineering college’s highly regarded nuclear engineering program will also have educated the next generation of experts in safe nuclear power, and our engineers will also have made progress in the foundational work needed to produce cheaper and better sources of electricity. But our approach will be strengthened by our scholars of environmental history, cultural landscape studies, anthropologists and cultural geographers who teach us what matters about place and what impact significant changes in our physical environments are likely to have on us and on our ecosystems.

Finally, economic growth. UW–Madison is an extraordinary engine of economic growth in the state.

Excluding the rest of state service, UW–Madison is the single biggest employer in Dane County by far. The economic multiplier effect of 14,000 FTEs paying taxes and purchasing goods and services is substantial, as is the significant economic impact of construction activity at UW–Madison — after all, we’re now being called the city of cranes. Add to that the economic impact of goods and services procured by this university. In 2007-08, the total purchase orders were $277 million, with $83 million of that going to Wisconsin vendors. Of course, the effects on the economy go far beyond the impact we have by virtue of our day-to-day operations.

Approximately 350 Wisconsin companies have now been started by university faculty, staff or students, or based on technology developed at the university (averaging about a dozen a year). OCR just developed a new startup initiative to further promote this kind of growth.

Since the 1920s, WARF has been the gold standard for the transfer of knowledge and technology into commercial products. WARF now has 400 annual disclosures from our faculty. It has worldwide reach and it has over $1 billion worth of products on the market. Over time it will increase its value and its impact.

In addition, the University Research Park is now home to 115 companies, with over 4,000 jobs that pay an average of $62,000 a year and is indirectly responsible for creating over 9,000 additional jobs. Over the next several years, it will have more than doubled in size and will have significantly increased its overall economic impact. Plans for the future call for over 500 acres dedicated to technology transfer; adding over 200 companies and an estimated 10,000-15,000 jobs. This will make UW–Madison the most important economic development engine in the state of Wisconsin.

And the benefits of our faculty expertise to the entire state of course go way beyond the creation of companies and the transfer of technology. They include consultation of a range of different sorts, longstanding productive partnerships between various colleges and industries in the state. Obviously I should name the partnership between Agricultural and Life Sciences and our dairy and meat industries, agriculture in general, but also the College of Engineering and the School of Business with partnerships that are advancing economic development all over the state.

The state needs the expertise and intellectual property that our faculty, staff and students can generate and can make available through commercialization. The public also needs the work of social scientists, artists and humanists, whose purpose it is to help us understand how we create meaning, how societies and economies and governance work, so we can make informed choices about what matters, develop our own capacities and help build our own communities.

We not only need skills, expertise and technologies to build a flourishing economy; we need a sense of purpose that goes beyond ascendancy for its own sake, a commitment to integrity, a shared sense of humanity and respect not only for one another, but also for the planet. Without those fundamentals, I don’t think any economy will flourish over the long haul.

The university can contribute in these ways, but only if it holds on to both its national preeminence and its public purposes, and only if it attracts investment from the state, the federal government, private industry, and philanthropists. The university will not only need finances, however, to succeed. It will need flexibility so that we can help ourselves financially.

The competition is fierce. Right now universities all over the U.S. are racing to replace the faculty who were hired in the 60s who are now retiring. Emerging nations are intent on elevating their institutions of higher learning from good to great.

And here’s the thing: UW–Madison is already great, and for relatively modest investments, compared to what is being spent in many other parts of the world, we can sustain that greatness. To lose that greatness would be an enormous blow not just to the university, but to the entire state and beyond.

Ultimately, I’m not sure the current model in the United States for financing higher education is sustainable. It may be necessary to come up with different models, including having the federal government do more of its part, given that the flow of dollars from the federal government to the state seems to have reversed over the past few decades. Maybe the financial model should change and we should play a role in figuring out how higher education should be financed, but in the meantime we need the strongest possible partnerships with the state, industry and private donors We need to assure them that their investments will matter and that we’ll come back to them with ideas, achievements and solutions, and not just open hands.

My job is to understand the aspirations of our students, staff and faculty, to appreciate the interests and needs of our many external constituencies, to build community, to secure resources, and to try to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts. This university has many moving parts and pretty porous membranes. We are dependent and happily reliant on our external stakeholders and we are proud to have them depend on us. But it is also our task as a community to find the right balance between responsiveness to the outside and a focus on our own core missions.

I am eager and proud to represent the University of Wisconsin–Madison and higher education generally to our many constituencies — to alumni, friends, local, state and federal officials, and potential partners. In a world in which spectacle, sound bytes and partisan bickering too often overshadow the things that matter and make genuine understanding nearly impossible, I believe the University of Wisconsin can distinguish itself by promoting and communicating substantive values, ideas and achievements on a national and international stage. It will take the help of everyone in this room, and that brings me back to the beginning of these remarks and the themes with which I started.

To sustain the greatness of this institution, we will need to do a great many things, a great number of which I have outlined in these remarks. But let me emphasize again that we need, first and foremost, to take pleasure and find joy in our work separately and together. And, in keeping with that need, let me end by highlighting our Homecoming theme, which is “Bucky to the Rescue,” because my feeling is that when things get grim and even when they don’t, there is always Bucky Badger. On this, as on many other homecomings, we need only to call Bucky to the rescue! And when we call Bucky, we know we mean we’re calling all of us.

I say Go Badgers! And On, Wisconsin!