Thank you.
Welcome everyone. It's just a wonderful, special day to be here. It's the 153rd day of the first day of classes in 1873. And I'm sure you saw students walking by going to classes. It's a very special day for us. 153 years of serving the state, transforming lives with our educational mission and our research mission. So it's a very special day and I appreciate you being here.
The Buckeye ethos has many wonderful things in it. But one of the things is gratitude. And I'll start there today, if you don't mind. First, my wonderful partner and spouse. She doesn't know I was going to do this. Just an incredible partner that has embraced her role on top of all the other things she has to do as a faculty member. She loves the academic mission. And importantly for me, she loves Buckeye sports, both men's and women’s sports. And it's just been wonderful having her as a true partner in this endeavor. I would like to thank you.
(Applause)
I'd like to thank our Board of Trustees, many of whom are here. Cannot thank you enough for your leadership, including our student trustees, for the time that you've dedicated to this university. Importantly, the love you have for this institution, and the expectations you have for high achievement, and your support and encouragement. Thank you as volunteers. I have never seen such hardworking volunteers in my life, and thank you for your leadership.
To my cabinet colleagues, many of whom are here, thank you for being here. It's a pleasure to be your colleague. You represent unbelievable expertise, you and your staff. We couldn't do what I'm proposing that we take on without your expertise. It's a pleasure to be your colleague.
To our faculty leaders, our faculty, staff, staff leaders, students who are incredible, it's an honor to be your 18th president. Thank you for allowing me to serve. You are the heart of the university, and thank you for what you do.
And to our incredible alumni, our philanthropic donors, our elected officials who support us so much, our community leaders and partners as well as our business partners and leaders. Thank you for embracing the Buckeye spirit, for your partnership, for your advocacy. And we are a village, and we do this together. Thank you for what you do.
As I reflect on the path ahead for our university, I'd like to start a little bit from our roots, because place matters – and I've said this before – place matters, and where we come from matters, and we draw our strength from that. And as I reflect, at this time particularly at the 250th anniversary of our nation's founding, I cannot help but realize and embrace the fact that our genesis comes from a radical embrace of innovation and boldness.
It comes from an embrace of the best of what it means to be human, and the ideals that stem from it. 250 years ago, we decided that we'd be a nation of citizens, not subjects. That we would draw from John Locke's principles that there are certain inalienable rights to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, the right to property. What an incredibly bold idea that gave birth to this nation. And 86 years later, an incredibly bold idea again came forth in the Land Grant (Morrill) Act of 1862, where the notion of education is a democratic endeavor accessible to all, not just the clergy, not just the elite, but the land-grant mission has in its heart access to education, and that is our founding. And so we were founded in this bold idea of belief in the human endeavor, in the democratic principles, in 1870.
And in 1873, we opened our classes for the first class. And we were bold to begin with, with the notions of access to excellence. In the first class were two women, Alice and Harriet Townshend, daughters of Norton Townshend, who was a trustee, physician, farmer, inventor, who quit being a trustee to become a faculty member in the Ohio Agriculture and Mechanical College. And his two daughters were in the first class. And just our commitment to access – access to all who wish to work hard and learn, kind of goes back right to our founding. And this was radical because it was 1920, before the 19th Amendment came to be. And we're talking about 1873 for the first class.
And in 1916, we were invited to be part of the Association of American Universities, AAU, which is an august body of the highest-quality research universities. We're a member to this day. And we have been members from 1916.
So if I look at this – innovation, boldness – this belief in the human endeavor is a part of our DNA. And today, I'm happy to say, fast-forwarding to today, we are a powerhouse in athletics, in healthcare, and in academics.
And I'll start with our athletics program. We have been, in the last many years, one of the most consistently successful athletic programs in the country. Not just the largest, which we may also be; we are one of the most consistent athletics programs. And this just didn't happen. It's a culture and pursuit of excellence that is relentless.
And on the slide here, you'll see a few examples of this culture producing greatness: Jesse Owens, Archie Griffin, Kelsey Mitchell, Katie Smith, who will be our bell ringer at this Saturday's game, right? Great coaches: Woody Hayes, and we recognized Jim Tressel recently. Incredible culture of pursuit of excellence, and doing it the right way. And I'm grateful for Ross (Bjork, Senior Vice President and Wolfe Foundation-Eugene Smith Endowed Athletics Director) and his leadership of our athletics program.
And this culture goes on to our healthcare mission, which is an incredible mission also. And John Warner (Executive Vice President, The Ohio State University; CEO, Wexner Medical Center) is in the room, an amazing leader, leading our healthcare enterprise. I love this thing. World-class care for every patient, every time. We're fortunate in this region of the country to have multiple healthcare systems. But I'm telling you, if one of our loved ones needed care that needed to be informed by research, a little bit of extra expertise, this is where you want to get your care for our loved ones. 3,000 active clinical trials as we speak. Incredible healthcare system, and facilities with the new tower to match our ethos of patient-centric care – that we center the patient, the whole patient, not just the disease part and treating them. Just an incredible healthcare system.
And, we are an incredible academic powerhouse. And we have 17 majors that we offer that are in the top 25. 86 graduate and professional programs that are ranked in the top 25. Multiple colleges that are in the top five – nursing and pharmacy being two – and many, many other programs that are reputed highly. And this academic excellence is also not new. It is rooted in a certain tradition of innovation and boldness. And I'll share just a few examples as I learn more about this incredible institution that we call home. On the top here you see a picture of William Everitt. And he was a researcher here, an engineer, so I have to start with this.
William Everitt was an inventor who was studying antenna and antenna research for the Second World War in the 1940s. And his research directly led to the discovery of RFID, which is our radio frequency ID systems, which all your Apple tags have, which some of our pets have to track them... as well as, importantly, in every surgical suite to keep track of surgical instruments. We use RFID tags. Revolutionary technology has its roots right here. And by the way, William Everitt was a founding member of the National Academy of Engineering. And he went off to do the war and things.
Albert Prebus, in 1940, built the first electron microscope in this country right here on our campus. Electron microscopy is what you use when the wavelength of light is too big for us to image things. And so when you're trying to get fine resolution of materials – and I use this in my own research to image the neuromuscular junction and synapses and things like this – electron microscopy, the first one in this country was built right here.
A lot of you have autonomous driving in your vehicles. Some of you take pride in the percentage that you use autonomous driving for if you have a Tesla, invented right here. The first autonomous vehicle, Professor (Robert) Fenton built right here at Ohio State. And that led to the Transportation Research Center being founded.
And in agriculture, the roots of our founding, 4-H, you know, Head, Heart, Hands, and Health. Six million children are getting to know, work with their hands, our land, and farm animals and other animals, and becoming unbelievable leaders, are enrolled in 4-H right now. Two hundred thousand children right here in Ohio are enrolled in 4-H. That curriculum was born right here. And in health research, the feline leukemia vaccine by Dr. (Richard) Olson in our vet school, and Clara Bloomfield's work, for example, in lymphoma and leukemias, and chemotherapy, and how we treat this originated right here at Ohio State. So our culture of academic excellence runs deep.
So there's no doubt in my mind that we are a consequential university, important to this region, to the nation, and to the world, because of our spirit of innovation. The question really is, what do we do now, from this moment going forward? And it is important to trace our roots, our traits, before we plant that future. And my suggestion is that we will become the finest public university in the country. And that should be our goal, because our mission demands it.
So on that journey, I would suggest that a few principles guide us. And the principles go something like this:
That we make, as our DNA suggests, a commitment to relentlessly pursue excellence in all that we do.
That we not apologize for our scale, and that we embrace it as a competitive advantage, because when we do excellence at our scale, the impact is transformative.
That we take on the hard things worth doing, because pursuit of meaning and achievement is critical for us and our identity, and it's built into our DNA.
And that we do this the right way. That we commit to winning and leading, but we can do this with hard work, grit, resilience, compassion, and joy.
These principles are enduring, and make for enduring success for what we do.
So with these principles in mind, I'd like us to think about our citizenship for education framework, and I suggest a strategy for this pursuit of excellence. And the strategy has sort of six focus areas. Now these areas don't describe all that we do. And so we do a lot of things that are very important. But these are focus areas, for our leadership, our deans, and our department chairs to think about. And invest strategic dollars in, and pay particular attention to. And they go something like this:
There is no question that our undergraduate program is central to our identity. I often say that, without our educational program, we would be a research institute. We're a university because of our students. And so the undergraduate program epitomizes our university status in a particular way. And I'd like our quest to create a signature, distinctive undergraduate program to be anchored on the principle of access to excellence. Access to excellence.
And we do well by our access mission, by the way. 70% of the incoming class just this fall is from Ohio. Right? 16% Pell-eligible, 20% first-gen. 850 students from the governor's guaranteed admission program, guaranteeing admission to the top 5%. All 88 counties represented. 50% increase in our regional college enrollment of students indicating regional schools as their first choice.
Our access mission is alive and well, and we're committed to doing even better. We have 200 students joining us from the Buckeye Bridge Program. So, we do well by our access mission. But access is not the goal. Access to excellence is an important goal. And by excellence, we have an emphasis in this thing to provide transformative experiences for our students. A great honors college, and we are working on that.
Experiential learning from the first day. I had the pleasure with Dean Horn and colleagues to visit Ramseyer for an experiential learning lab that Arts and Sciences is building.
The business school is redoing their entire curriculum to introduce the “why” in their first year, with experiential learning and companies and students working together.
Engineering just opened a building with experiential learning and its design at the heart. And many of our colleges are doing this. Experiential learning is at the core that then translates with our Center for Career Excellence for internships, co-ops, and job placements. And success of our students is very important. Our retention rates, our graduation rates, we can do better, and lead the country in these rates for institutions like ours.
And critical to the undergraduate experience is also that residential experience. And we have many leaders in this room who are working hard, and I'm grateful for the trustees for approving $145 million for improvements on our existing dorms. And we're also reimagining the experience for residential, the entire plan for housing, not just in terms of beds, but it's serving our mission for academic excellence. And I'm very excited about this plan that our colleagues are working on.
So investing in the undergraduate program and creating a distinctive experience for our students is a critical area of focus for us.
But this focus on students wouldn't be possible without an investment in our extraordinary people that call Ohio State home. And I'll start with the staff.
The advisors that we have, the many people that make this possible, our mission possible, are really staff. The picture you see there is Lalita and me with Mr. JR (Laws), who's been here at Ohio State for 47 years. John (Prosek) is here somewhere from WOSU, and he was telling me, he's been here for 46 years himself. It's not just these staff. You have a picture of staff awards. Our staff bring incredible expertise to their jobs in finance, in data, in law.
Our staff are, in some ways, our secret sauce, and that's why this university runs, because of our staff, and I'm very grateful for that. And we need to invest in our staff and our faculty.
Students come here for our academic programs and our faculty, and we have incredible faculty. We have 31 members of our faculty that are either in the National Academy of Engineering, Medicine, or Sciences. Fifteen more in the National Academy of Inventors, 17 in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and many, many more in AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) and their Society Honors Fellowships as fellows of IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) and Accounting and all of this stuff. Incredible faculty strength. And we need to invest in our faculty.
That's why I was happy in the last 12 months, thanks to Mike Eicher (Senior Vice President for External Affairs), Sara Rubin (Vice President for Development), and our deans, and their teams, we were able to raise $100 million for new endowed chairs for our faculty to invest in our amazing faculty, and we continue to do that. Incredible investment.
We are hiring game-changers. Jan Box-Steffensmeier is here somewhere. Thank you for your leadership, along with our deans, and Trevor (Brown), our provost, to recruit game-changer, thought-leading faculty across the disciplines to our thing. So investing in our faculty is critical, and recognizing and celebrating them. I was happy to visit an event that the provost's office put out called Written in Scarlet and Gray, where we celebrated 60 books of scholarship that our faculty generated just in the last year, and we were able to celebrate and recognize our faculty, delivering scholarship in that way. Investing in, recognizing, supporting our faculty is a key part of our strategy.
Now, these amazing scholars give rise to a research enterprise that is also incredible, and investing in research is an important focus area. And I'm happy to tell you that we have an incredible research enterprise. 1.7 billion dollars of extramural research that we, our faculty conduct. Twelfth in the country, not just publics, in all of the universities. Sixth in industry-funded research. Twelve hundred patents just in the last four years.
And research doesn't begin to describe the impact. It is because of our research prowess that we attract great graduate students to our PhD programs, great professional students to our professional programs. Research is a magnet for talent, and that's one significance.
The other significance of research is not the numbers. It is a drug for cancer, and immunotherapies that we're working on. I don't know if Kim (Rathmell, CEO of The James Comprehensive Cancer Center) is in the room. I see her there, Kim, and the incredible work in The James. Incredible research. We have one of the strongest programs in narrative studies through Project Narrative in the College of Arts and Sciences.
We have incredible research in the business school, for example, where the theory for consumer behaviors, and how economics is not all about rational behavior, that psychology plays in, with the Engel-Kollat-Blackwell Model of Consumer Behavior that originated right here in the Fisher College of Business.
So our research, and then recently, David Weinberg is in the room, I saw, incredible work with the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope, which is a successor to the Hubble Telescope. And right now, as we speak, it's hurtling to its Lagrange II position, L2 position, so that it can start peering the deep universe with gravitational lensing and other techniques to understand our universe better.
This research is important because whether it's the world inside, the weather of our health, or the weather outside, and how the two are related, all aspects of this our research enterprise takes on. This is the power of a consequential, comprehensive research university.
Now, this research, these people, these students cannot exist in a vacuum. So a central focus area for us is in the investment in our colleges, departments, and programs through the commitment to having highly reputed, strong, dynamic academic units.
And this means many things. One is embracing our identity and knowing what are we known for. Who are we known for? How do we serve our educational programs, our research programs, and how do they stand out, be distinctive and special? This question of identity at that level is critical.
Financial resources are important. So one of the goals we're working on with the trustees' blessing, and our cabinet, is can we double the endowments for our colleges to give them more firepower to fuel the academic ambition of our faculty and our students? So the financial strength of our colleges is very important. And I know the deans’ retreat focused on this just this past summer.
As well as spaces are important. I was happy that engineering, I happened to be in the building, we opened a new building, BMEC (Biomedical and Materials Engineering Complex) building. There's a picture here. As well as the law school is going to have amazing new spaces downtown. And we're working on dynamic spaces that match the program and ambition of our business school. And we're working on creating dynamic spaces for the business school.
So space, capital, and finances, and identity all mixed together to make for a dynamic, vibrant academic unit. And we need leaders who embrace that and can help our colleges lead that. And we're fortunate to have many amazing deans in our midst today.
But all of this wouldn't work, but for something that's behind the scenes that makes everything tick. And we have a commitment to operational excellence. Operational excellence is a boring thing. You could advise me not to talk about it in a setting like this. But it is critical for us to be good stewards of taxpayer dollars, and efficient in the way we do our business. The work of a student navigating their curriculum. The work of a faculty member just trying to do research, hiring a graduate student, and such, should be easy, and not painful. And so I'm very thankful to the faculty leaders in the audience here who've been part of this effort through, I think it's called Continuous Improvement. University UCI (University Continuous Improvement) – I call it red tape. But it has a euphemism to commit to operational excellence. And we've had some small but important early wins.
The travel – I heard a lot about this when I was a provost – travel and reimbursement was painful. And the process has been streamlined now. I'm told 6,700 hours of work has been saved just with that one change. 6,700, in three months. And that's the amount of time that a staff member – we expect the burden of bureaucracy falls on our staff, although I hear from my faculty more. It falls on our staff. And it's a fundamental respect for our staff and our faculty that we take this on to make our mission work better and for our students.
There have been changes and sprints to make the changing of majors more easy. And there's other work going on in the operational excellence thing. And I appreciate there's a website. If you can think of things we can do more efficiently, please submit them because we have an entire team taking these things on across finance, HR (Human Resources), OAA (Office of Academic Affairs), and other teams working on this. It is important to do this right.
The last thing I will say as a focus area is, all this is good, but given our background, given our DNA, there's a few things I'd like to have that are in the big, bold idea that allow us to make a transformative impact true to our roots. And I'll share with you two such bold ideas that we're working on. And one meta-bold idea, and you'll see what I mean in a second.
So AI Fluency is an idea we announced last year. And I am deeply appreciative for our deans, our department chairs, and many program folks, as well as the Drake, the Center for Software Innovation, for your leadership in making this real. This is a hard thing to do, to say that every student who graduates in 2029 will be bilingual, will know their major of study, and be a domain expert, and know how to use AI in the service of that domain. It is a bold thing. To this day, a year later, no other university has come close to committing to that. And it is hard. What is an exam? How do you not lose critical thinking? All important questions. And I am betting on our faculty leaders to figure these things out, because AI is not going anywhere, and we need to embrace it in the service of our research mission, as well as our education mission. 50 new courses are in the works, are being launched this year in the service of AI fluency. And we are making clarity with our students about when AI can be used, when it cannot be used, and to our faculty in this space.
And I don't know if our partners from Google are here. We were very happy last week to announce a signature partnership with Google, “one of one,” as they describe it, for them to have a presence, for their engineers to be forward deployed, embedded with our graduate students and student researchers, our faculty, our staff, to take on things that are mission-centric for us, including the access to DeepMind tools like Co-Scientist and AlphaFold, and all these tools that are transformative for data-rich research, including biomedical research in protein folding, identifying drug targets, and things like this. I'm excited for this partnership and its impact.
And I'm also happy to say that we have expertise right here on our campus to think about the safety, the ethics. And we have a center that's funded by NSF (National Science Foundation), which is a joint center with industry. It's called an IUCRC (Industry-University Cooperative Research Center). The mechanism funded Dennis Hirsch, AC (Aravind Chandrasekaran), Rajiv (Rajiv Ramnath), and others are involved in leading the center called CRAIG (Center on Responsible AI and Governance), which is a collaboration between the law school, computer science, and business, together working on AI safety and governance and regulation. So all aspects of AI – big idea. I would suggest we're one of the leaders in the country in this space.
The other big idea is the notion of an entrepreneurial mindset. Many times parents ask me, what should my child study in a world that's changing so fast? And I say that one should optimize for meta skills. The ability to solve complex problems with incomplete information. The ability to work in a team, to have analytical skills, to have communication skills. And one of the qualities I always say is an entrepreneurial mindset. The ability to imagine a process, a product, or a state that doesn't yet exist, and have the confidence to make that real.
And so this big idea, BuildX, and I see Shereen (Agrawal, Associate Vice President for Student Innovation and Entrepreneurship) in the room, and Keenan Center is critical to this, as is the Center for Software Innovation. The idea is that we want 100 investable student startups coming out of Ohio State every year, starting in 2030. And we have 20 that we're going to invest in this year, I'm told. And we are very fortunate to have a donor who's given us $1 million to only exclusively invest in the student startups. And if you know others who want to invest more, I'm happy to do that.
So it is an amazing, amazing program to foster an entrepreneurial spirit amongst our students. And it's going to be housed in Pomerene Hall, in the Thompson Library, and builds on our expertise. And I'm excited to say we're going to break ground on October 20th for a new building on our West Campus, eight stories exclusively for startups. Life science and technology startups. And it's called the Timashev Tech Tower. And it's going to be a beautiful tower complementing the health care tower, but much smaller, on the other side of the highway. I'd like the Block O to be visible from 315, signifying the innovation ecosystem as a visible reminder to Columbus and the country. I'm excited about that project.
The last idea, big idea, is this notion of a transformative research fund. The big idea and the reason it's a meta big idea is because we know that there is a young professor in chemistry or physics or engineering or business or art history that has a big idea that could be transformative to the world. And I ask myself, if we had a donor, I hope they're real, but maybe for now, let's assume a donor who walks in and says, Ravi, what does Ohio State have that's worthy of a $10 million investment, or $20 or $25 million investment? What would we say? And my bet is our campus has many such ideas. And to surface such ideas, John Warner (Executive Vice President, The Ohio State University; CEO, Wexner Medical Center), Trevor (Brown, Interim Executive Vice President and Provost), John Horack (Vice President for Research), and other leaders are working on this program that we will announce in November. And it's a call for big ideas to be submitted. But we don't have multiple tens of millions to give to our faculty members. So what we will do is give five, at least $1 million planning grants or awards to the big ideas that are submitted, with the idea that over the next two to three years, our team will work with the originators of the idea to generate the rest of the money through foundations, through philanthropy or through federal agencies. And the idea is to surface what I know exists already: amazing big ideas across our campus in the social sciences, health sciences, engineering, business and all the things that we do, including agriculture and vet med. So I'm very excited about this idea.
So I hope you get a sense for the kinds of things we're working on, from student experience, to research, to people, to big ideas, and strong academic programs. And I'd like to end with this notion.
As I stand here on this ground, and as you sit there, as we walk on the Oval, you know, I would like to take a moment to feel the earth. And I'm old-fashioned this way. I love trees, by the way. Those of you may or may not know, I love trees, because they signify a certain peace and a certain connection to the ground, and have an interesting relationship with time. And what you see here is Buckeye Grove, a special place on our campus. And I think of our roots in Ohio, in the first state of the Northwest territories, and we were founded in 1803 as a state. And we are of this place and proudly so. We are not going anywhere.
We own our identity in the Midwest, and we do this by embracing the manufacturing in the state. And I was, a couple of weeks ago, part of an initiative, because we are a manufacturing powerhouse right here at Ohio State. We have a 45,000-square-foot facility, one of the largest classrooms for manufacturing in CDME (Center for Design and Manufacturing Excellence) with Nate Ames (Executive Director, CDME) and group, where 150 undergrads at any given time are working with 150 companies, small and large, with their equipment, solving problems for companies. We are a manufacturing powerhouse, a materials powerhouse, a semiconductor powerhouse. We own our mission and our identity, and we draw and work on the roots. And this applies to vet med, agriculture, you know, business, nursing, multiple things that we do, because we derive our strength from the land we stand on, and we give back and serve the community, the region that we are part of.
And I say this because I said in the beginning that I'd like us to be the finest public university in the country. What does that mean? It means that we embrace who we are. We embrace our scale. We embrace our region. We embrace our mission, unapologetic. We don't need to be somebody else. We will be ourselves. We will be unafraid to lead. And we will do this in the pursuit of excellence. We will do this with our access mission, and we will do this with boldness and fearlessness to take on the hard problems. This is our path to defining and becoming the finest public university in the country.
And I have just one ask for you, before I let you go today. The ask is this: The story of Ohio State is still being written. And my ask for you is that we have high expectations of each other. That we have high expectations of each other. And it's a gift that we give ourselves when we have high expectations of each other. And we ask ourselves for this gift not because of our ego, not because we want to be elitist, because our mission demands it. The country demands it, at a time when higher ed is in scrutiny. The way we lead and define what it means to be a great institution of higher ed is doing the things I suggest we do: embracing our identity, being mission-focused and pursuing excellence in all that we do.
So I invite you to give yourself a gift of high expectations that each of us does, and write your chapter in the future of Ohio State, because doing so also impacts our students, our communities, our country, our state to become the economic powerhouse, the intellectual powerhouse, the healthcare powerhouse, the athletics powerhouse that we are. And we can do this together.
So let's do this Carmen Ohio-style, lock our arms and go on this journey. It's an honor to be your 18th president. Thank you and Go Bucks!