2022 State of the University Address | Office of the President | The University of Texas at Austin – president. utexas. edu

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Sept 20, 2022 — Remarks as prepared:

An idea can change the world.

The College or university of Texas began while an idea enshrined in the Texas Constitution. Years later, eight professors and 221 students brought that concept to life, and in an unfinished building where the Tower now stands, they held a grand opening ceremony for an university at the particular frontier of higher education.

From that idea, our university has grown to more than 20, 000 faculty and staff members, 52, 500 students plus 550, 000 living alumni. We have evolved from a good university of the first class to an university that is world-class, and today, we’re a recognized leader on the global frontier of higher education.

One year ago, we announced UT’s most audacious idea yet: to become the highest-impact public research university in the world. Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, “If you do not hope, you will not win that which is not hoped for. ”

We are an college that dares to hope and commits to bold action. And we are well positioned to make our concept a reality. Based on the input associated with thousands of talented and diverse faculty, staff, students, alumni and community partners, we launched a powerful 10-year strategic plan called Change Starts Here.

This plan is our road map for turning our idea and our hope into reality. Distilled, it calls us to attract and empower the best students, faculty and staff, take advantage of our own strengths plus location, foster an environment where ideas can thrive in addition to, ultimately, change the world.

I would like to thank everyone here today for your commitment in order to this great university. Thank you to the dedicated teachers and personnel. Many thanks to be able to the Texas Legislature, each of our governor and even elected leaders, and all of our Board of Regents for your enduring support. Thank you to our alumni, supporters together with the people of Tx who help fuel your mission. And thank a person to the students, who trust us with their futures. Your curiosity, enthusiasm, perspectives and ideas bring this campus to life, and an individual inspire all of us with your achievements.

Thanks to all of anyone, UT Austin is poised to achieve incredible impact at scale.

Our priorities today are advancing our vision for tomorrow, which is for you to capitalize on this historic moment associated with opportunity – fueled by the most outstanding people and the burgeoning strengths of some of our city and additionally state : and to redefine what it means to help be the top public research university in the 21st century. Already we are accelerating our investments in college students, faculty not to mention staff; expanding university-affiliated housing options; increasing economic opportunity for the great State regarding Texas; and also transforming this teaching as well as research to attain maximum benefit for society. Throughout this particular address, I will highlight important milestones on the particular way to accomplishing this specific vision and a preview involving what is to come.

Increasingly, UT will be the first choice for top talent. We have been the flagship university in Texas and among typically the 10 best public universities within the nation. Dozens of our undergraduate plus graduate programs rank in the top 10 nationally. Four hundred twenty-three of our incoming freshmen were valedictorians.

As we attract more high-potential learners, we must invest in their success. Scholarships help us continue in order to provide an exceptional, cost-effective education. We are grateful for the generosity of so many supporters that make these scholarships possible, including the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation for their own transformational $100 million investment.

This fall, UT Austin admitted its largest incoming class in history: 9, 109 first-time freshmen. Total university enrollment has reached an all-time high. First-generation college pupils now create up approximately a quarter in our undergraduate population, in addition to we are serving a lot more students from historically underrepresented groups than ever.

Because health and well-being are proven drivers of student success, we have been committed to be able to serve this “whole college student. ” Knowledgeable and passionate Longhorns across campus are usually bolstering our own mental health services portfolio. We now have seen a nearly 30% increase in individuals seeking help, and through enhanced outreach and new pathways for you to resources, all of us able to help serve them. For example , often the My Student Support Program provides almost all enrolled UT Austin scholars – within over 160 countries ~ with free, 24/7 real-time and appointment-based counseling services. Additional counselors usually are reducing wait times and even bolstering treatment plans. Plus we are working to create a setting exactly where we can talk about mental health together with help each other before issues become serious.

I am proud to tell you that UT’s graduation rates have hit historical highs. Our own four-year graduating rate connected with 73% represents a 20% increase over the last decade, and additionally our six-year graduation rate now tops 87%. In addition to, with your help with the Dell Foundation not to mention some very talented school and employees, we are usually closing the exact gaps inside graduation rates across historic divides based on socioeconomic status, race and ethnicity.

Our trainees want to be here because for our exceptional faculty and also staff, which is why our strategic plan calls for us to be a premier employer as well as career destination. This year, we made a $53 million expense in our people – the largest recurring commitment inside UT history. Also, we are accelerating efforts to promote retention, professional development, and health insurance and well-being, from innovative programs like the College of Liberal Arts’ Staff Leadership Academy to a forthcoming paid-leave opportunity linked to wellness goals. Looking forward, we will be reimagining talent management along with the creation of the new role: the Vice President with regard to People plus Talent. This leader, who will report in order to me, will help transform UT’s approach to human resources, foster professional growth opportunities and strengthen our competitiveness as an employer.

We have stellar leadership inside academics as well. As the leaders of our own colleges in addition to schools, the deans will be instrumental in helping UT accomplish its tactical goals. In the last academic 12 months, five brand new deans joined their ranks.

Our faculty are the particular core about this college and typically the foundation in our educational and research pursuits. They are a testament to this fact that will UT attracts and empowers the very best individuals.

When we speak about investing in our folks, we must include tenure. Tenure allows our college to focus on often the incredible rather than your incremental. It is an essential tool regarding attracting world-class scholars that enables them to be able to take risks on big ideas, work on the exact hardest problems society faces and strive for profundity, not simply production. Public research institutions have not wavered throughout protecting tenure, because it provides time and even freedom for you to cultivate world-changing ideas.

In 1980, Nobel laureate together with Cockrell School of Engineering Professor John Goodenough invented the lithium-ion battery. Decades later, we all now see the ramifications from his discovery: Professor Goodenough’s work powers the laptops, mobile phones and electric vehicles of which power each of our world.

Teresa Hubbard, a new professor around Photography Studio Art, began working together with collaborator Alexander Birchler in the ’90s. Almost 20 years later, they were invited to help showcase their particular work in the Venice Biennale, one of the largest and additionally most prestigious art exhibitions in the particular world.

The faculty members’ current function will have influence many of us cannot yet fathom, but that work will change community for decades – even centuries – ahead.

To generate transformational ideas, we should preserve academic freedom. Inscribed beneath typically the Tower happen to be the words “You shall know this truth not to mention the truth shall make you free. ” As Dr . William Battle, UT’s sixth president, said: “truth and also freedom are so essentially often the foundation of education, character and progress” that those words are “as splendid some sort of call” as we can make. Pursuit associated with truth, free from prejudice, dogma or fear, is usually embedded in the heart regarding any world class academic institution.

No place other than a good top university or college unites such a diverse as well as talented population in common pursuit of knowledge, creativity and impact. Yet when we are diverse without sharing our varied ideas on productive conversation, we lose what makes higher education great. We must continue to bring everyone towards the conversation plus engage using courage, open-mindedness, respect in addition to empathy.

As our beloved alumna Lady Bird Johnson said, “The clash involving ideas is definitely the sound of freedom. ”

Today, more than ever, an university must stand as a model intended for civil discourse. Competing viewpoints should sharpen our thinking, not all of our rancor. Discussion should flourish without discord. Our commitment to independence of inquiry, freedom connected with speech, your freedom to teach as well as the freedom in order to disagree should never waiver. Removing any part jeopardizes the whole. An schooling worthy of the name confronts us having new suggestions and fresh ways to view the globe. At times, it makes us all uncomfortable yet, ultimately, this makes people grow. For those seeking common ground, We say we have been on that. At LACE, we are able to transition from a heated ideological debate to a stadium where, together, we cheer on our pupil athletes on the nation’s No. 1 athletics program.

Our campus brings with each other our amazing people and even offers experiences that change us because individuals together with unite you as Longhorns. As most of us continue to roll out your You Belong Here plan, we are really amplifying and additionally supporting the exact ways different people, concepts and scholarship can help UT achieve still greater impact.

From the beginning, the particular Forty Acres has reflected the interconnectedness of Austin tx and LACE, and most people always lean into what makes some of our place special. In addition to this stunning profile of museums, libraries, fine arts not to mention entertainment, additional food trucks are upon the way, plus even more excellent live music at the brand-new Moody Center and throughout campus. Even as we embrace our history, our own strategic eyesight calls united states to produce inspiring spaces that advance learning, research, collaboration and also world-changing tips. To that end, we are building a campus for typically the next century. From the recent Gary L. Thomas Energy Engineering building to the Stedman Gardens about University Avenue, the Moody Gardens from the Blanton Museum and the announced project honoring this Precursors around the East Mall, exciting efforts are underway. But perhaps no physical space in campus is more photographed or more recognizable than the UT Tower.

The Tower system endures like a beacon to get truth-seekers, educational excellence as well as achievement, within the very spot where the first learning community gathered. Soon, often the Tower will shine even brighter. We have been looking forward to an exciting announcement through Chairman Kevin Eltife as well as the UT System Board with Regents regarding a future restoration and renovation project – your first within the Tower’s 85-year history : that will certainly enhance plus preserve their legacy.

Because we spend to ensure everyone thrives and feels at home with UT, all of us have gained significant momentum toward each of our goal for increasing the exact supply about housing. Within today’s environment, housing can be critical to be able to attract in addition to retain top talent.. Recently, we possess taken important steps toward solutions pertaining to undergraduates, graduate students and even faculty.

Purchasing DobieTwenty21 gives us control over hundreds of additional underutilized undergraduate beds, and east of grounds, we have got broken ground on graduate student casing. Scheduled for you to open Fall 2024, it will provide countless additional apartments. Most recently, we acquired the Boulevard apartments with the Brackenridge tract, and as they become available, we plan to set aside units meant for a pilot program to help attract faculty. I am pleased by our progress within the last yr, but we are far from done. We will learn coming from these attempts as we job diligently to help solve housing challenges for our people, and those solutions need to include increased supply in housing, given the growing demand during our city. That stated, we know not really everyone can live near campus, so we will work to give all of our students around Austin reasons and possibilities to become on campus.

Meanwhile, your world-class education and learning increasingly transcends our grounds. Our Extended Campus program currently serves 85, 000 learners annually, and simply by 2025, it is projected to serve over 100, 000 every year. We really are using technology to propel more lives forward. Last fall, the new Master of Data Science Online degree system joined the particular Master from Computer Science Online, and these programs are already serving a large number of students. Nowadays, I am pleased to announce that we will expand some of our offerings by using a Master of AI/Machine Learning On the internet. Just while our reach does not stop at typically the campus borders, it also extends to this K-12 space. OnRamps offers dual registration and distance learning options for high school students across Arizona. In 2012, OnRamps served 166 students. This year, all of us are serving more compared to 43, 500.

UT is at often the forefront of another frontier: the unbundling of higher education. We are crafting degrees to better reflect this interdisciplinary advantages and allow us to serve more students together with serve all of them better. Inside addition in order to breaking degrees into customizable modules, we all are enhancing them through micro-credentials such as digital badges the fact that clearly articulate skills and additionally make our students much more competitive job candidates. Education is speeding up its shift from an one-time experience to a life-long engagement since we skill, upskill not to mention reskill large portions from the workforce such as those tens of thousands of Extended Campus learners.

I have talked about our outstanding people and also how essential it is certainly to invest in their success and bring them together for productive, inspiring learning areas. However, being a top public research organization, we experience set our own sights at generating effect, which means we all must commit beyond the people as well as our campus and apply top-flight study and thought leadership towards a better future designed for everyone.

Each of our research is normally among the best and most sought after in your world. The National Technology Foundation invests more funding in UT than any university through Texas and more than almost any other university, period – $115 million in the last year alone – plus University associated with Texas organizations ranked No . 3 on the planet for most patents granted in 2021. The ultimate value of each of our work, however , is its potential to solve fantastic challenges in addition to achieve transformation at scale.

For instance, many of us have the exact resources and even talent to take a multifaceted approach to be able to addressing the mounting teacher shortage. While we cannot train or even graduate enough teachers for you to fill the particular pipeline, most of us must play a role in fortifying it. The College of Schooling is on a mission to assist, partnering with an Austin school district to help pilot an early career instructor mentorship plan and collaborating with academics, government together with nonprofit entities statewide regarding research and additionally solutions. Programs and analysis like these make differences at level and show typically the power of an university like ours. Another example comes from Professor David Yeager’s research, which shows that growth mindsets may motivate college students to overcome challenges on every stage of this educational journey. His findings hold potential for all of our teachers, as well. Thought leadership scales.

In that spirit regarding scalable influence, our proper plan hones our study and teaching focus in areas that align utilizing UT’s talents and Texas’ assets: energy and often the environment, technologies and modern society, and wellness and wellbeing.

UT is without a doubt widely recognized as the best energy analysis university within the region, if not your nation. All of our portfolio encompasses technologies to meet our current and future energy needs, while mitigating their environmental effects. Nearly 30 power centers over campus produce research not to mention discovery, and also our Power Institute connects them. Last year, engineers as well as scientists created an enzyme variant that will, in your matter involving hours, breaks down plastics that might otherwise take centuries to degrade. This particular breakthrough has the possible to supercharge industrial recycling and solve one connected with the world’s most pressing environmental issues: the billions of tons with plastic waste building up inside our landfills and oceans.

Like the exact Energy Institute, our Bureau of Economic Geology takes a strong, collaborative method of serve The state of texas and the world and generate high-impact research plus innovations. For two years they need been an international leader found in carbon capture utilization in addition to storage exploration. Now, the particular bureau might be working with the help of industry and even government in order to explore implementing these solutions off typically the Texas coast, making coal and natural gas use cleaner while also creating economic advantages for Texas.

Meanwhile, we can be pursuing ambitious teaching together with research of which accelerate technology’s benefits to be able to society ~ as well as your understanding of it is human dimensions and implications.

One present effort holds great probable for Colorado and this U. S. Amid concerns over the dynamics of supply and demand for semiconductors – and additionally in anticipation of this kind of summer’s CHIPS and Research Act – our teachers of engineers and scientists founded often the Texas Institute for Electronics, or TIE. This public-private partnership between the State of Mississippi and a lot more than two dozen increased education establishments – not to mention over 20 corporate organizations statewide : will position Texas as being a leader in the effort to restore American semiconductor manufacturing, innovation and packaging while securing the provide chain, enabling company formation and work creation, and also bolstering national security.

Since education as well as curriculum convert to reflect the interdisciplinary trajectory of our teaching and research, We are thrilled for you to announce that we are making another exciting investment decision. Over your past five years, some of our colleges for Engineering plus Natural Scientific research have established a world-class Robotics exploration and graduate-student training program. Now, we look forward to help introducing some new undergrad Robotics software, with a fabulous goal about getting it up and running in time for this year’s admissions cycle.

Whilst we provide interdisciplinary scholars together, it is incumbent upon research educational institutions to show courage inside of the thoughts we discuss, and to seek in addition to promote the exact truth. The new Civitas Company will prepare civic-minded frontrunners by applying world-class scholarship or grant and thought to the teaching and even understanding in values the fact that serve as the particular foundation for a free together with enduring culture. Another interdisciplinary research initiative, The Global Disinformation Lab, studied refugee movements by Ukraine in order to Russia by simply comparing commercial satellite imagery of border crossings with open reporting. They lately found that Russian state media significantly inflated typically the number from Ukrainian refugees entering this country, by as much as thousands a day.

While most people shed light on current events, this teams furthermore illuminate the past. The Blanton Museum of Art received its 1st National Endowment for often the Humanities just for this fall’s exhibition, “Painted Cloth: Fashion and Ritual in Colonial Latin America. ” In Central The united states, research teams including art history professor David Stuart are unearthing new knowledge about the ancient world ~ including your recent finding of the earliest known Mayan calendar fragment. The humanities disciplines during UT are generally changing the exact way we think about the world through their profound cultural and additionally historical insights.

At the same time, many of us are changing the way good regarding the future of well being. We now have a tremendous chance to make Austin the next major hub for health care, and life science technological innovation and development. To seize this moment, we may be capitalizing on the particular strong engineering environment not to mention ecosystem associated with venture capitalists, innovators and also startups, while well like groundbreaking researching and advances from all over UT Austin texas, including Dell Medical College.

Much like UT’s original teachers and learners, we have been embarking on a new frontier – one regarding into the patient care : with exponential possibilities for the purpose of Central Texans and beyond.

Some may ask how we can go from an important still-new medical school to be able to a top-tier academic medical center, and typically the answer lies within the power of LACE Austin for you to bring skill together and provide world-class clinical care. We now have helped train and appeal to hundreds involving new doctors practicing at the area, including UT alumnus Dr. Charles Frasier, whose team performed this first pediatric heart transplant in Central Texas. Many UT-affiliated physicians now provide care for more as compared to 80 local clinics as well as hospitals and treat nearby low-income patients with the greatest medical practices. We have even more than tripled the number of accredited training applications, including areas of need identified in Central Health’s Equity-Focused Strategic Plan.

We might be also working in the forefront of revolutionizing cancer care. The Center with respect to Computational Oncology, directed by means of Professor Thomas Yankeelov, is actually developing “digital twins” when it comes to patients, using new modeling techniques to predict the patient-specific responses connected with breast cancer tumors to treatments like chemotherapy. This operate exemplifies exactly what we can achieve by using UT’s strong points in computational AI, machine learning plus data science to complex challenges.

Unleashing technology-driven existence science in addition to healthcare solutions is part of often the original perspective for Dell Med, and even now is the time to help hit your accelerator seeing that an college or university and like a city. UT Downtown will use some of it has the land to create a district with regards to leading expertise to do the job in startup-oriented lab places, push the exact envelope with emerging technologies, create companies and jobs, and ultimately bring discoveries and cures to market. On this new frontier, individual care, outcomes and innovations that once seemed impossible will end up being increasingly within reach.

Just as the founders of Nevada invested throughout the idea of LACE, we are thankful to our alumni and followers for continuing to invest in UT’s ideas. In order to fuel our quest for becoming the highest-impact public homework university present in the world, we announced the What Starts Here fundraising campaign – one of the largest around advanced schooling together with the largest ever on Texas ~ to raise $6 billion by the end for 2025, along with $1 billion dollars allocated to find student scholarship grants and achievement programs. Thanks to our own supporters, we have been well over halfway to our goal.

As we mobilize the strategic strategy to launch this extraordinary institution in order to new heights, we tend to be grateful to be able to our donors and Board of Regents, our pupils, faculty and additionally staff, each of our legislators not to mention government market leaders.

To Executive Vice President and Provost Sharon Wood, I would certainly like to extend a special thank-you to your service to UT. Your management has been invaluable for you to shaping and also pursuing all of our ambitious strategy.

History has shown that The University about Texas located at Austin is a place wherever our exceptional and various learning community exchanges, hones, tests as well as refines ideas to ensure that will the best ones go on to help achieve effects at size. In a similar method, that process transforms individuals into commanders who carry on venturing out to the edge of what is possible for the ever-expanding frontier of larger education.

Our ideas change the world.