State of the University

Well, good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our Founders Day. 

And before I get started with my remarks, I'd like to just reflect on some of the things that we've seen happening in our nation. This has been a rough time for our nation. Events that happened just a week ago on a public university campus were horrific. And it's not okay. We've seen gun violence in our nation at a level that we've almost become immune to the next awful thing that happens. As a public institution and as a combat veteran, I've seen a lot that deals with life and death. I felt important to start this off on today, not just our Founders Day, but our Constitution Day and Citizenship Day, to say that we are an institution that is about unifying, about bringing us together. We are an institution that's going to recommit to the principles, of civil discourse, academic freedom, freedom of expression, and the pursuit… 

The pursuit of diversified excellence. This is an important time. These principles cannot just exist. They must also get to the level at which we can lift ourselves up. So, let me just start by saying thank you for everybody being here today. 

I want to say thank you to Chairman John Zeiger who is here representing our Board of Trustees. Many of our Board of Trustees are here today. Thank you all for being here. I see Chancellor Mike Duffy. Thank you for being here. Our elected leaders representing the state, our city, and our county. My wife Lynda, the First Lady of The Ohio State University. Thank you for your continued support and all that you do. I also want to say thank you to our President's Cabinet for being here, our academic deans, our faculty, our staff, our student leaders, our university senate leaders that are here, philanthropists that are here, those that represent our alumni, 630,000 strong, and of course, all of our Ohioans and the fans of the Buckeyes. 

Now, as I said, today is our Founders Day, and if you take a look at what's happening here on our campus just today, we just welcomed 8,200 students from all 88 counties all over the country, all over the world. And those students came here for one of the most amazing convocations we've ever had. It was a great experience. We got to see our students move in to their housing, and there's a buzz right here on the campus just centered around the energy of being here on the Oval, being right here in Vitria on the Square looking out over the Oval, and all that's happening on our campus. 

Oh yeah, and the defending national champion football team, our Buckeyes are 3-0, and have been ranked number one in both polls for three weeks in a row. Yeah. 

So, it's a good time to be a Buckeye. And as I reflect back on where I was with you to give my last State of the University address, that was 17 months ago. And as you recall, I've reflected a lot on the past and some on the present, and we started to frame what the future would be. And over those 17 months, I've heard from many of you. I've listened to you as we built this plan, now called Education for Citizenship 2035. And I want to start off by telling you that the state of our university is strong. It is very strong. As I think about where we are going into this future today, leaning off that last State of the University address, going into my investiture on November 8th of last year, today will unveil the details of this plan that have been really underway since July 1st. 

And thanks to our Board of Trustees and many others, we have the plan ready. It is resourced, and because of our position of strength, because of our financial stability and our strength, we are ready to move forward. 

So, the plan is built around three big focus areas. And although the plan is fairly complex and it's a lot of different elements to it, I want to make sure that you understand that those three focal areas in which the entire plan is built, the first and foremost is academic excellence. And I'll talk more in detail about each one of these phases. But academic excellence includes not only the programs that we're doing academically, our faculty, the AI fluency initiative that you've heard a lot about, but also the research we have done in the past, how successful we've been at that and where we're going with research in the future. 

The second piece is based on world-class clinical care. We've got really one of the best medical centers in the entire country, and where that's going and how that's being built and where that's going to the future is a big part of this plan. 

And the third part is very simply based on student success, which is based on affordability and accessibility. 

So, those are the three big focal areas, and I'll touch on a couple other pieces as well. 

Now, before I get into some of the things about academic excellence, let's just pause for a second and talk about what's happening in higher education in our nation. As many of you heard me talk at the Patterson lecture just this past year, higher education is going through a transformation right now, and some of it's pretty tough. 

A lot of my colleagues leading other Big Ten universities, certainly the big privates, many of them are struggling. They've stopped hiring, they've frozen their budgets, they're not talking about merit pay increases. They're actually shutting down academic programs, mostly in the liberal arts and humanities. Schools are even talking about whether or not they can hold on to certain athletic programs. And of course, with the challenges in research and less dollars being available from the federal government, they're actually stopping and closing off masters and Ph.D. programs. 

Now, you're not going to hear me talk about that today here. Ohio State is a different place. 

So, when I add all that up, most schools right now, and we're not immune from all of this, are doing what I call playing defense. How do they sustain themselves? How do they maintain themselves in this different environment? As I said, we haven't been immune from it. We've seen some research grants shut down, in the tens of millions of dollars, but yet we've been able to sustain ourselves. Our class that's incoming right now is exactly the number that we targeted for, and our strategy for the number of students that we want to have here is right on target. 

And of our 14,000 researchers, we've been very fortunate to maintain those up to this date. We'll see where that goes in the future. But here in this program of academic excellence that we're talking about is a whole new approach. We are in a position to invest in ourselves, take ourselves to that next level. 

And when I say academic excellence, you might be wondering, well, what does that mean? What exactly is that? Some people say, "Well, you'll know it when you see it." I kind of reflect back to somebody that would be a Nobel Prize laureate, somebody that might be a gold medalist in the Olympics, or even an entrepreneur that's taken their business to that top level. Those people eat, sleep and wake up every day trying to make themselves the best they can be. We can do that here at Ohio State. 

Now, don't get me wrong, our academic programs are premier. We're very strong. We have some of the best scholars in the world right here. But we can still do better and we can commit to that next level. So, to do that, we have to be not afraid and not getting too comfortable in just keeping the status quo. So, this part of our program right now is talking about investing additional resources into key academic programs, six academic programs to be precise. And I'll list some of them for you just so you get a sense of where we're talking. 

So, Arts and Sciences is our biggest college at the university. We're talking about investing in programs like physics, chemistry, biochemistry, political science, psychology. College of Engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, metal sciences, all looked at through the lens of national security and health. The Moritz College of Law, the Fisher College of Business, College of Medicine, and the College of Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. Just yesterday, I had the chance to speak at a major agricultural event, the Farm Science Review, 63 years strong, talking about our largest industry here in the state of Ohio. $124 billion is our agricultural industry, and our College of Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, with our 88 extension officers where we touch 170,000 students and young people in 4H alone, is a critical part of that. 

So, those are just some of those elements, and that's not to say that our other colleges and our other university offerings are not still important. They are. We will continue to be supportive of the humanities, the arts, our other science and technology courseware. 

We're going to invest in having the best faculty that we can get in the country. We're creating an eminence faculty program that will be $100 million strong, mostly on philanthropy. $20 million of that has already been raised, and much of that money will be in there to retain some of our best faculty. 

We're also going to be looking at what we can do in the research side. So, our research arm is one of the strongest elements that we have here at the university, $1.6 billion in grants just this past year, $775 million of that from the federal government. And yet, in this more austere environment of trying to get research grants, we are still on the rise. And our 2035 plan here will have us get to $2 billion in research grants in the next five to 10 years. 

But it's more than just the numbers. It's what does that research do? What are the achievements that we're making in programs trying to fight diseases like diabetes, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's? The work that we're doing in agriculture to help with land and crop resiliency in times of drought and flood. And then, we have the opportunity even more with industry. This is a part of the country in central Ohio where so many more partners are coming here to work, and we have a 350-acre campus, our innovation campus that we're just starting to grow. So, we will build that out also over the next five to 10 years, working with the Pelotonia Research Center and many others. 

And then, there's artificial intelligence fluency, a bold initiative where every student starting with a class of 2029, this is the freshman class that just came here, will have the opportunity to be artificial intelligent fluent in whatever course of study they're in. This is an approach that is so comprehensive, nobody else in the country is even attempting it. This will require us to get our faculty up to speed on AI. It'll require us to get our staff up to speed on AI. And on top of that, we will hire in 100 additional AI experts that will complement the 300 that we already have here working on artificial intelligence, going all the way back to 2018. And we're making more and more achievements in this. 

We've even developed courseware that is facing the public for small businesses to be able to take that courseware. We've recently received a large federal grant from the National Science Foundation that will help us set up artificial intelligence for responsible use and governance, using our faculty from business, from law and engineering, and partnering with other schools like Baylor, Northeastern and Rutgers. So, this is a remarkable approach to AI. 

And just recently, the Brookings Institute listed Columbus as a star AI hub. That means that we're in the top 25% of all cities across the country for what we are in here. Simply stated, with the work that we're doing and the work that's happening here in the industry, Columbus and central Ohio will be the Silicon Valley of the Midwest. It's a really exciting time to be involved in all of this. 

So, as I look to the next part of this investment in ourselves, Education for Citizenship 2035, I want to talk about our students, to make them successful, to take them to that next level. We have to continually think about, what is it that United States, what are the people of the United States saying about education? One of the things they say is it just costs too much. And as I've said many times on public radio and television and other media, 57% of our undergraduates leave with no debt today. That's a great number. We could be happy with that, and if we could sustain that, that'd be great, but I think we can do better. 

So just Monday, we made a declarative statement working on a new partnership with Columbus State Community College, that we create a new program called Buckeye Bridge. 

Buckeye Bridge allows for any Columbus State graduate who is from the state of Ohio, whose family adjusted gross income is $100,000 or less, can finish their undergraduate degree at Ohio State tuition-free. 

I want to announce two more programs that many of you have not heard yet. The first is an attempt to attract the best students from the state of Ohio. Any student in the state of Ohio who achieves a perfect ACT or SAT score will not only be accepted at our university, we'll pay full cost of attendance. That's tuition fees, living on campus, the whole thing, plus a $5,000 research stipend. This will bring the best students. If we think there's 400 to 500 students that achieved that perfect score in the state of Ohio, I want them to pick Ohio State first. 

Yes, I know some of you want to clap. It's okay. 

The third one is just as important as the other two, and this is an investment in our regional campuses, which I care so much about. If you are at Ohioan and you choose to go to any of our regional campuses, and again, your adjusted gross income for your family is less than $100,000, we will pay for your tuition to go to any of our regional campuses, to include our Ag Tech Institute in Worcester. And after one year of being there in good academic standing, you can transfer and be here at the Columbus campus, and we'll pay for the rest of your tuition, tuition-free, to be on the Columbus campus to finish out your undergraduate degree. 

There are other programs that we're going to invest in here that will also help with support for students' success, and one of them is in nursing. Now, as a lot of you know, our nursing program is ranked number one in all the public institutions in the entire country. Today, if we were to look out over the next five years, our nation will have a shortage of over 500,000 nurses, and we are not immune from that either. So today, we produce 176 nurses a year. We are going to more than double that. We are going to double the throughput of nurses through our nursing program to 320 students in a year over the next five to 10 years. 

We're also going to, thanks to Governor DeWine, our members of the General Assembly, we're going to improve on making more veterinarians for our state. We have a veterinary shortage in this state, particularly when it deals with large animals, particularly in the rural areas. Today, we produce about 165 veterinarians a year. We're the only veterinary medicine program within three states, by the way. And that program will be increased to more than 200 students graduating per year, and those students will be focused primarily on hopefully staying here in the state of Ohio. 

By the way, our nursing program, I'm going to go back a little bit here, we are going to create their rotations and guarantee them a spot working at the Wexner Medical Center. To inspire them to want to stay here in the state and work in our medical center. 

We have other great programs that are focused on student success, things like the Keenan Center for Entrepreneurship. Thanks to the generosity of Tim Keenan, this is a center where we bring students that want to be innovative, bring their ideas, and then not only bring them to the commercial market, but also create jobs by what they do in that center. The Center for Software Innovation, thanks to the generosity of the Timoshev family, is growing at rapid pace. And this fall, we'll cut a ribbon on a new facility to house the Center for Software Innovation that will start being built next fall. Both of these programs are really about innovation and creating even more jobs for our students. 

And two more points I want to make about students. Now, we are very good at getting our students internships at Ohio State. How good are we? I couldn't actually tell you, because we have so many people working on that that we don't have a centralized office for how well we do it. So, we're going to fix that. We're going to move all the elements of what creates internships for our students and bring that together. And that will be another center of excellence, a one-stop shop for every one of our students who I expect every undergraduate student to get a paid internship experience while they're here at Ohio State. This will do two things. One is it'll show our students what is in the art of possible in that two-way interview that happens between an employee and an employer, the student being the future employee. And the second is, inspire our students to find not only the best-paying jobs, but the jobs that, again, are here right in central Ohio. 

So, very excited about this internship program. It's going to take us a little while to get that one up and running because it is a really large, complex thing. 

And the last piece I want to talk about is a drive to make The Ohio State University the most veteran-friendly university in the United States. Today, we're a top 25 veteran-friendly university. We have 2,300 students that are either veterans or veteran-affiliated students on our campus, but we can do so much better. There are 200,000 men and women that transition out of the military every year. One in three of them has a degree. The other two out of three do not, and 75% of them are looking for an undergraduate program. I want them to think about The Ohio State University as their first choice. And we'll be able to guarantee them a degree, get them to a degree in less than three years if they have 10 years of military experience, and if they want to come to Ohio, we'll get them a paid internship like the rest of our undergraduate students and we'll find them a path to a good-paying job. 

 That's exactly what veterans are looking for. And we're looking for veterans to do things like become educators here in the state of Ohio. And we have a great national guard here in the state, and of course we have Wright-Patterson Air Force Base right up the street. So, these are really important initiatives, again, that are all underway right now with Education for Citizenship 2035. 

Now, Dr. John Warner is here in the audience and he's had about a year’s time ahead of me before he got here and he's been working on his long-range strategic plan. It's called Impact 2035, and it's completely aligned with Education for Citizenship 2035. And the work that they are doing is so significant because today, they're taking care of roughly 1 out of every 4 people here in central Ohio, about 1 out of 7 of everybody in the state of Ohio. 

And they're doing amazing work to get out to rural Ohio. As a lot of you know, we're a complex state, seven metropolitan cities, 32 counties out of 88 that are Appalachian. And yet, even with all of these great facilities that we have here, our medical center and our people are doing everything they can to get out to all of Ohio. Last year, they did over 85,000 interactions with Ohioans that were not on our medical facilities, 13,000 interactions with digital appointments remotely. And they plan to do more. Using our extension concept and our College of Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences as places to get out to, they're focused on getting out there to help us become a more healthy state, which many of you know, we're in the bottom 10 of the country health-wise. So, there's a lot of work to be done there. And we're even employing and deploying dental vans that will get out to those rural areas to give people sometimes their first dental checkup. 

And there's already work underway about doing screening for lung cancer all throughout the entire state. And of course, our SOAR study looking to get after and understand the issues of mental health is a project that's already underway and it goes across the entire state, and it's the only one of its kind in the entire country. 

But maybe more important to all this is what is about to happen here, right here on our campus. So, the University Hospital Tower, 158 days from today will become operational. Now, if you haven't been over there and you haven’t seen it, it's extraordinary. This is the largest single facility project that our university has taken on in our history, in our entire history. In fact, when it opens 158 days from now, it'll be the largest single-facility freestanding tower hospital in the entire United States. 26 stories, 820 adult private room beds, 1,700 new employees. It's really quite remarkable. 

And soon, in a couple of weeks, they're going to hang a 30-foot-tall Block “O” on the side of that building that will light up the entire Columbus sky. 

But maybe it's more than just the structure and what it is. It's what it's going to do. 150 of those 820 beds are going to be for the cancer hospital. And when that gets co-joined with the James Cancer Hospital, the James Cancer Hospital will be the second-largest freestanding cancer hospital in the entire United States, only behind MD Anderson. That is remarkable. 

51 prenatal ICU bassinets will also be in that tower, that will be worked right alongside with Nationwide Children's Hospital. So, the point of telling you all this is this going to increase not only our stature, but our ability to increase what we can do in women's and child care, health care, what we can do for large organ transplants, what we can do in stroke care, and certainly in cancer care. So, this is a very important part of the future of this university for healthcare, taking care of every single patient, every single time. So, I'm really excited about that piece. 

And when we're talking about cancer, and one of the best hires that we've made in my time is Dr. Kim Rathmell, who I think is here somewhere, who is an oncologist. If you've not heard her speak, you have to wonder why she would be inspired to come to Ohio State and the James Cancer Center. And it's the ability to walk in a room with a patient who had cancer when they came in and to look them in the eye and say, "You are cancer-free." And that is not just a dream. It is a reality that we will achieve here at The Ohio State University to get to a point, in your lifetimes, where we can take care of every cancer patient and look them in the eye and say, "You are cancer-free." That is the type of work we're going to do here. 

Now, I can't talk about the future of Ohio State without talking a little bit about athletics. I got Ross Bjork over here. Again, a great hire that we made here, and as you all know, athletics is changing so dramatically. We're about to enter into the first year of shared revenue, NIL, Name, Image, and Likeness, and yet we are still in a position of strength. And it isn't just because we are the defending national champions in football, something I can't keep saying enough, but it's all the rest. It's taking care of the Olympic sports, it's taking care of our student athletes, and that is the model that we want to make sure that we preserve. 

When our athletes come here, they don't come here just to compete in the Big Ten. They don't come here just because there's an expectation that we win. They come here because they want to get a degree. And we graduate our roughly 1,000 student athletes at a rate of just under 95 percent. It's extraordinary. And as much as we want to brag about our football team, the statistic that most of the nation keeps missing is our football program was the only program in all of Division I sports, not FBS, all of Division I, that had a perfect 1,000 out of 1,000-point Academic Progress Rate. 

By the way, fun fact, the year before, we're the only school that stood out. There was one other school that had a perfect score. That happened to be Harvard University. So, that's where we're competing there. 

But let me put one more final point on how much we care about our athletic programs. This year, we will share $20.5 million in shared revenue across our 36 sports. As a lot of you know, a vast majority of that will go to football, men's and women's basketball and some to volleyball. But coming off the top of that first will be an investment back in our other Olympic sports. These are sports that don't generate revenue. 91 additional scholarships that will go to student athletes, increasing them in a higher percentage of our student athletes that will actually be on scholarship. 

Very few other universities in the country are even thinking this way, to reinvest in those programs so that we can be competitive in all of our sports and maintain 36 Division I sports. So, sports is important to us. It is the front porch, and it is so important that I am fortunate enough to now represent not only Ohio State, but the entire Big Ten as being a representative on the Board of Governors for the NCAA starting, I'm already on it now. 

The last piece I want to talk about is being the employer of choice. I've known throughout my military career and 12 years of being in higher education that you can't get anywhere without great people. And Woody Hayes always said it best, "You win with people." And that's still true. 

We have a wonderful shared governance model with our university senate that's made up of faculty, staff, and students. There's no list of problems that we can't not talk about. There are many. And since the day I came here, I've heard many of them. Issues dealing with child care, access to parking, access for disabled people to get around on campus, compensation for our staff, our faculty, our graduate students. I want you to know that all of those things are things that we have not only started working on, we've already started making improvements. 

One example is our graduate students have already been given an 8 percent increase in their minimum stipends to come here and teach and work and learn while they're here. And our staff who are so strong and so good here have asked us to look at winter recess. We did a pilot on that a couple years ago, and then we stood it down. Today, I am announcing that we are permanently installing winter recess for our academic staff going into the future. 

I'll also commit that we will continue to look at compensation and all of the other health benefit packages that we have at this university, work to be continued and to continue going on. 

As I wrap up today, and I just gave you a lot, and there is a lot there, and I just want to tell you that this work could not have been done with the great work of our Board of Trustees, our finance folks. We are in a good financial position. All these that we're doing, they sound like a lot of change, but truly, it's getting back to the basics. It's getting to the basic things that we do. World-class teaching and learning, research that changes and saves lives, and providing the best clinical care that we can do. All with an eye in making sure that our students are successful. 

But we do so many other things here. We do so many other things that reach out to the community. So, as I think of just all of the many stories that I could tell you, I'll just leave you with this one short one. There's a woman that lives in Lima right near our campus area, regional campus. Ruthie is 80 years old. She has Parkinson's, a debilitating disease. And when we got to her, we were working with her and introduced her to a drumming program. Yeah, drumming program. And her family said prior to that, she was so despondent, in despair and her life was not really going very well, and now that she's in this drumming program, she's happy, and she has agency and she has something to look forward to. 

Now, Ruthie is not somebody that probably knows a whole lot about Ohio State. In fact, what she did say to us is, "I don't know much about Ohio State, but I thank God for them." 

When we do that type of positive force for good, we know we're doing the right things. I'm very excited about our future. I'm excited that we have the opportunity to not only be the future of higher education, but that we can change the trajectory for what higher education is in this country. 

As I think about all the traditions that we have here in Ohio State, so many of them, the greatest one is still Carmen Ohio, our song that's 122 years old now. Time and change will surely show, how firm thy friendship, Ohio. 

God bless all of you, God bless our university, and God bless the United States of America. Thank you all very much. Go Bucks.