Welcome to the 2007/2008 Academic Year at Miami! I am delighted to have this opportunity to share with you some reflections on the past year and, even more importantly, some ideas regarding our future. You may have noticed that this gathering has changed in two important ways. First, we have changed the venue to make it more inclusive of the entire campus community, and, second, it has been re-titled as the "President's Annual Address" rather than the "State of the University Address" to allow for a greater emphasis on our future.
In the brief time we have together today, I would like to highlight a few of the many exceptional accomplishments of the past year, present a working draft of what I hope will become Miami's Five-Year Strategic Goals, and end with reflections on how all of this comes together to define our future.
For Valerie and me personally, this past year has been a year of wonderful discovery and exploration—new people, new places, new events, and new ideas. Most importantly, it was a year of peeling back the layers that make up Miami and discovering the richness of what makes this such a special place. Last year, we were fortunate to spend time not only on the Oxford Campus, but also on the Hamilton and Middletown regional campuses as well. And we were privileged to be able to visit Miami's Luxembourg campus and the Miami Tribe in Oklahoma.
Of course it has been reassuring to find out that what we thought we had seen from afar is in fact what we have found after arriving here. Of course, there have been a few surprises, and not all of them have been pleasant (such as finding a nest of mice eating part of our car's engine). But overwhelmingly, the surprises have been about discovering a place even better than we imagined it—better because of the warmth and commitment of our staff and faculty, the energy and creativity of our students, and the passion of our alums. I believe more firmly than ever that one of the most significant elements of Miami's success is how deeply we value community. It runs through every fiber of our university, providing an environment that encourages individual success through collaboration and support for each other.
So in that spirit, let me take a moment to highlight some of our accomplishments of the past year. Although these all have already been noted and perhaps even celebrated, it is valuable to spend a moment reflecting on the excellence and progress each of these represent. I use the word "represent" deliberately, as there is not possibly enough time to touch on all of the terrific accomplishments that have been achieved this past year.
We began last year with the announcement of the Miami Access Initiative. This fall nearly 200 new students have joined us through the Initiative, met by a committed group of faculty and staff mentors. It was a year in which we dedicated a new engineering building and a new Goggin Ice Arena, rededicated McGuffey and Phillips Halls, broke ground for the new home of the Farmer School of Business, opened a residential site in Over-the-Rhine, and announced plans for a new learning center at the Voice of America site in West Chester.
We launched the Top 25 Initiative to transform how we teach and learn, the Howe Writing Center to transform how we learn to write and use writing to learn, the Confucius Institute to encourage the learning of Chinese language and culture, while adding Korean and Hindi to our already impressive array of language opportunities. It was a year in which we created and launched SaturdaySelect and Degree Power Schedules at Hamilton and Middletown to provide more effective access to students, developed a new parental leave policy, created a new category of professionally licensed or clinical faculty, and implemented an unprecedented program of coordinated computer purchasing (the Big Buy) that saved hundreds of thousands of dollars. Wow! If I could only get that kind of deal with the Bass Pro Shop.
It was a year that saw Jack Kirby win the Bancroft Prize in history for his book, Mockingbird Song: Ecological Landscapes of the South, Susan Paulson win a Fulbright grant, Rodney Coates selected as the 2007 recipient of the Joseph Himes Award for a Career of Distinguished Scholarship by the Association of Black Sociologists (ABS), Thomas Klak named as the 2007 recipient of the Carl O. Sauer Distinguished Scholarship Award by the Conference of Latin American Geographers for his career contributions to Latin American geography, and Hardy Eshbaugh receive the 2007 Distinguished Economic Botanist Award by the Society for Economic Botany.
Miami saw another record for funded research with just under $25 million in funds that support everything from producing racial and ethnically specific strategies to manage diabetes, as Jennifer Kinney and her collaborators did, to studying the effects of gravity on growing plants in space, as John Kiss and his team did; from improving the effectiveness of 240 science teachers and principals, as Jennifer Blue, Terry McCollum, and Kevin Stinson did, to exceeding Department of Energy benchmarks for hydrogen storage, as Hongcai Zhou and his team accomplished.
Not to be outdone, students Franklin Grace III, Annemarie Spadafore, and Justin Wilmes also won Fulbright grants. Teresa Kim, a double major in political science and East Asian languages and literature, received a $20,000 Boren Scholarship for study abroad, Alexander Berrebi, a senior microbiology major, and Christine Hajdin, a senior biochemistry major, were selected as Beckman Scholars. Eric W. Frey, a junior physics major, was awarded a Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and recent music alumnus William Sauerland was named a Marshall Scholar.
It was a year in which two architecture students, James Diewall and Michael Frederick, won a prestigious competition (and $25,000) for airport design, the Mock Trial team won the Ohio Valley Regional Championship on the way to a sixth place national finish, and a student group, working through the social entrepreneurship program, put together a stunning business plan to take Edun Live shirts to campuses in order to support economic growth in South Africa. It was a year when once again, Miami’s six-year graduation rate exceeded the predicted graduation rate by 12 percentage points, one of only five universities with such a large degree of over performance in the top 100 colleges and universities ranked by U.S.News & World Report. And once again, Miami was in the top 20 universities in the country in the number of students studying abroad.
It was a year in which our basketball team won the conference championship game with an electrifying last second shot, our hockey team won its very first NCAA tournament game, and our women's synchronized skating team placed second in the WORLD—the first time a U.S. skating team had ever even won a medal. The team was also awarded the Michelle Kwan Trophy as winners of the Readers' Choice award for Skater(s) of the Year, while Coach Vicky Korn won the National Women's Figure Skating Coach of the Year award. And since I announced the formation of Team Rowdybush at last year's address, it is only fair that I report that our broomball team did in fact storm through the beginning broomball division with an impressive 1-11 record.
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