INAUGURATION OF MARYE ANNE FOX
THURSDAY, MARCH 3, 2005

“TOGETHER WE ACHIEVE THE EXTRAORDINARY”

Regent Parsky, Presidents Dynes and Atkinson; Fellow UC Chancellors, especially Chancellor Emeritus York and Chancellor Cicerone; Distinguished members of the platform party; Esteemed faculty colleagues, students, and staff; Honored guests; and Family:

The Idea of UCSD: An Extraordinary Sense of Place

It was Albert Einstein who said “You don’t need to think more; you need to think differently.” This is compelling advice, the sort of inspiration that led Roger Revelle, Herb York and the many other founders of UCSD to pursue a unique concept in establishing a University of California campus in San Diego, at this magical place.

UCSD, from its origin, has always had a sense of excellence, of what constitutes the first-rate. The founders conceived of a very special, indeed, an extraordinary public research university. They found a way to honor established academic traditions, while living in a present that provided as well a highly personal undergraduate education through small colleges imbedded within the larger institution. They established a place for exceptional scholarship accomplished in collaboration with brilliant graduate students and colleagues. They recruited and supported a fabulously inventive faculty – scientists, artists, engineers, physicians, humanists – who understood well that research must span the entire range of inquiry, from discovery through application and translation. They built on the outstanding achievements of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Above all, they focused on academic excellence.

As they worked to build an inclusive campus community, they recognized the beauty of the local environment, and supplemented that natural beauty with an ambitious outdoor art acquisition plan. They provided recreational, social, and cultural opportunities for students, faculty, and staff. They established intercollegiate athletics at a level compatible with top quality intellectual pursuits. They reached out to the neighboring community to improve the quality of life through access to the best in intellectual discourse, health care, and the performing and visual arts. They recognized the importance of the truly educated person, one whose expertise is deep within a discipline but also broad across all of the arts and humanities. They believed in the importance of educating graduates who bear what Beverly Sills once called “the signature of civilization.” They helped mold students who could, in the words of the great educator, James B. Conant, “cope with books yet to be written and with science yet to be discovered.” And in doing so, they transformed lives and they built a new knowledge-based San Diego.

Acknowledged Support

Some forty years later, with the guidance of a series of extraordinary leaders, most recently from Dick Atkinson and Bob Dynes, their vision has been fully realized. Recent evaluators as different as the London Times and the Shanghai Jiao Tong University have ranked UCSD, their creation, respectively as fourth and second, among US public research universities and among the top 25 of all universities anywhere in the world. This is astonishing recognition for so young an institution, but quite consistent with our claim to be “the youngest of the best.”

You can well imagine both the pride and humility I feel in stepping into the leadership sequence established by these giants of higher education. I thank them sincerely for their insight and friendship during this transition. Dick Atkinson once said, “We are just stewards of this place. The founding dream was powerful and worthy of all our best efforts.” I pledge my own best efforts in joining this wonderful group.

I also thank all the members of the organizing committee, especially its chair Dean Paul Drake and the honorary chair of this event, Ellen Revelle, for the hard work of planning and managing the logistics of today’s celebration. On a personal level, I also owe special thanks to each member of my own family and all who have provided patience, encouragement, and support throughout varying stages of my career.

In accepting this position as your 7th chancellor, and as the first permanent female chancellor of UCSD, I recognize that I may be regarded as a role model for young women and members of under-represented groups. It is a responsibility that I take seriously. I am reminded of a comment by my former Texas colleague Barbara Jordan, who said that her position as an African-American Congresswoman was but “one additional piece of evidence that the American Dream need not forever be denied.” If we can inspire even a single student today to think this way, then this inaugural event will have been fully worthwhile.

The American Public Research University

We also gather today to celebrate the contributions of the American public research university which, in my view, is one of the wonders of the modern world. It is a place where discovery is fully integrated with student learning, where scholars focus on intellectual advancement, mentoring, public service, and/or economic development as a personal calling. Like all US public research-focused schools, UCSD fills many roles: as an articulate spokesman for truth; a model for inclusion and civic engagement; an economic engine driving the creation of wealth and jobs; a moral agent tasked with shaping the public good and improving public health; and a vehicle for merit-based upward mobility for citizen leaders.

Indeed, three quarters of Americans holding bachelors or advanced degrees have been educated at public research universities. Although only 14% of our budget came from state appropriation last year, the state investment is crucial. Without it, the intimidation of perceived college costs may well drive away many talented students, especially from under-represented groups, who might otherwise be the next Francis Crick, Clive Grainger, or Robert Engle.

American research ingenuity, expressed through extraordinary graduate research, created global networking and other telecommunication marvels as well as a new biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry. Without the intellectual power of our public research universities, and without the technology transferred to industry through well-prepared graduates, none of these achievements would likely have been possible. American public research universities, like UCSD, are precious jewels that deserve the full protection and support of the state and of the American people.

Diversity and Community

One significant global competitive advantage for the US is its tolerance and encouragement of divergent ideas formulated by diverse peoples. Our campus community embraces scholars and co-workers irrespective of secondary identifiers like race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or nationality. As our Principles of Community so clearly state, we seek to deal with each other with honesty and respect; passionately to pursue excellence and new knowledge; and to embrace accountability for the public investment in our endeavors. Given the challenges to achieving full inclusion posed by court rulings and California law, full proportional participation by all groups may seem difficult to attain. But as Thomas Edison once said, “If we did all the things we’re capable of doing, we would astound ourselves.”

This stunning range of fascinating people makes UCSD a special place for serious students. It is no surprise therefore that annually we receive literally ten times more student applications than we can enroll, some 41,000 applicants in Fall 2004. And no surprise that UCSD has one of the nation’s highest graduation rates among our public national peers (84% in the most recent class). With vigorous programs to reach out to secondary schools, we can continue to inspire our future students by helping to prepare them for academic rigor.

University Vision: Innovative, Interdisciplinary, International

As we continue to build a supportive and inclusive campus community, what vision, what over-reaching goals, should we pursue? Quite simply, I believe we should promulgate world-wide consensus to the reality of UCSD as one of the world’s best, and that we continue to do so as we pursue an aggressive increase in enrollment, to accommodate 30,000 students by 2012.

To do so, I challenge our faculty to work with staff and administrators so that every major discipline at UCSD will be recognized as a top 10 program among American peers. Those many departments already within the top 10 should further aspire to exceptional, best-in-the-world status. The specific implementation strategy for that transition is iteratively spelled out in each unit’s “Charting the Course” academic plan. Every faculty member in each unit should know what that document says and should be ready to act on it. Ambitious? Yes, of course. That is the UCSD tradition.

A major priority is extending our scholarship to include an international reach. Indeed, President Bush said in his second inaugural address that “the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.” Globalization has narrowed distances separating us, and each day we are reminded of our common humanity, across many cultural and demographic differences. As American commerce becomes increasingly global, we anticipate that the world’s best universities, like UCSD, will offer increasingly robust exchange, collaboration, and competition with international partners.

I also challenge all of us to define new ways to collaborate with the private sector, with whom innovative, interdisciplinary, often international partnerships represent the only realistic route to increased investment. We know well is that UCSD faculty will capture the imaginations of our students and our generous patrons, because they have done so frequently in the past. Think of how UCSD discoveries over the years have changed the world: from Roger Revelle’s pioneering work in first defining global warming or Walter Munk’s first accurate modeling of a tsunami in 1947 to Sally Ride’s photos from space to the recent work of Mark Tuszynski and Larry Goldstein in devising gene therapies based on stem cell research or to the collaborations being led by Mario Molina to formulate science-based improvements in air and water quality in the US and Mexico. Together we can effectively focus on knowledge creation and economic development to complement the many programs that have traditionally enriched our students’ education.

How can I, as your Chancellor, help achieve this vision for UCSD? The answer is simple in principle, but complex in execution. Generally, I hope to lead the campus in continuing to identify and recruit smart people to our faculty and staff; to provide a structure that supports them in doing important things; and to get out of their way.

Clearly, we must step up to find innovative knowledge-based solutions to the common problems that plague mankind. Often this will require us to address compelling cultural, political, professional, and scientific problems that transcend disciplinary boundaries. Our community of scholars must address “grand challenges,” problems that are insoluble by a single investigator working in isolation: for example, the world population explosion, emerging and drug-resistant diseases, translational medical research, coastal and regional environmental sustainability, global climate change, challenges posed by immigration, the economics of globalization, equity and social justice, or maintaining peace during an age of global terrorism.

Our faculty and staff must rise to the task to innovate, to adopt completely new, highly imaginative means of learning and collaboration that do not now exist. Narrowly trained graduates will not be able to bring the leadership skills needed to solve these problems. In building these new relationships, we will always look to the future, following the advice of the former National Hockey League star, Wayne Gretsky, who wisely advised his teammates to “skate to where the puck is going to be,” not where it is at the moment.

Dream Catching

A Chancellor also bears responsibility as official dream catcher, as several Native American tribes have called it. To let in the “good dreams” that bring us closer toward real greatness and to exclude the nightmares. Allow me to share several of my current dreams for UCSD. They were formulated by listening to a wide swath of members of the campus community over the last several months. I truly believe that by working together we will achieve the extraordinary.

To that end, I’ve pledged to work with the Academic Senate to provide necessary support to establish and renew the Rady School of Management, the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and the Preuss School.

But we can do more. We will establish campus collaboratories across disciplinary boundaries that support clusters of graduate students from different academic disciplines. We will recognize particularly innovative leaders who focus on creating interdisciplinary centers of excellence. Like the economic discussion that takes place yearly at the Davos Forum or the Kyoto Symposium lecture taking place here this afternoon, we will host world class symposia that bring the world’s best minds together in La Jolla to confront world problems touched by our unique areas of expertise. We will forge new international agreements for exchange, collaboration, and understanding. We will reform our technology transfer activities to foster new levels of entrepreneurial partnership with the private sector. We will rejuvenate the campus to improve the undergraduate experience. We will redo the way we deliver K-12 teacher education and will provide completely new ways to assist promising students financially. We will provide assistance to our faculty who want to incorporate new learning techniques into their classroom and laboratory instruction, and we will share with local public schools our research-based expertise on how students learn. We will invite our emeritus faculty to return to campus to help us archive the UCSD story, to mentor students, and to help prepare them for international competition as Rhodes scholars, Truman fellows, etc. And, for our faculty, we will reduce bureaucratically created paperwork that distracts from their primary mission.

Achieving the Extraordinary

As with virtually all of our core activities, these proposals require financial support. Our endowment as a young public university is small, and our ability to offer a best-in-the-world education, producing leaders who will impact the future, depends greatly on a stream of generous contributions from the private sector. I can’t adequately express my sincere gratitude to all those who have helped us reach beyond the 2/3 mark for our $1 B capital campaign only 20 months after the initial public announcement of this effort. We hope we can continue to count on our friends and alumni as we go forward on this trajectory toward greatness.

I also ask for your continued support and collaboration as we pursue together the greatest of all scholarly goals: the search for truth. Every day when I served as Vice President for Research at the University of Texas in Austin, I entered through a door over which a Biblical statement was carved in stone: “Seek ye the truth, and the truth shall make ye free.” I always thought that was a wonderful statement of academic aspiration and of its relationship to society. But since moving to California, I have observed that the UC motto “Fiat Lux, Let there be Light” is also a valuable beacon in the search for truth. Someone must secure and light the candle of truth and knowledge for the public. Let us together work to shine that light on important problems. “Together, indeed, we achieve the extraordinary.”