2024 State of the University Address

Wednesday, September 18, 2024
Hogg Memorial Auditorium

President Hartzell presented his remarks after an introduction by Faculty Council Chair Dr. Stella Flores.

We really have a special moment here. It is a unique and special time in the history of our University. There are a lot of reasons why. I think the wind is at our back.

Among the reasons are the growth of Texas, the interest in Austin, and the way that world problems are shaping up relative to the strengths of this University. A great, broad, deep research University is uniquely positioned to make a contribution and impact in today’s environment.

If you look at the way the school year kicked off, it’s consistent with that. We set out 8,000 seats for our freshman class at Gone to Texas, the big kickoff event for the school year, and it was standing room only. We had the second-largest freshman class, 8,200 students. It’s an incredible class that has come here. We have the biggest student body in our history, almost 54,000.

We’ve opened up brand new graduate student housing. We haven’t opened a graduate student housing project in about 40 years. The fact that we now have 750 graduate students living just east of I‑35 and able to access campus in an easier way is a big deal.

You may have heard that one of our sports teams is currently ranked No. 1 in the country. People ask presidents, “How do you want to be remembered?” Depending how this goes, I may be remembered as the president who hired Sark.

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I want to talk about why I think this is a special time and why I think we have special things we can do with it. There are three big things.

First, we have a chance to think more deeply about what we mean by student success. We have made great strides in thinking about our students and positioning them to graduate on time and go out into the world, but there’s more we can do with this idea, the idea of how we can position our students for success.

Second, in the world we face today and the problems we face today, it’s a special time for broad and deep universities. I think we can do even more to harness the breadth and depth of this great research University.

And third, it’s a time we should relentlessly focus on getting elite talent to come here — supporting elite talent that is already here and getting more elite talent to come.

But first some more proof points about the moment we’re in.

As I mentioned, demand to be in our student body is at an all-time high, and we got about 73,000 applications to be part of the freshman class. This is the second year in a row of 10% growth, and the student body seems to get stronger and stronger every year.

Part of that is because we have a great reputation. It’s a great academic place. I don’t love rankings, but I like it when they go up, and ours have been trending up.

According to U.S. News & World Report, we have 42 graduate schools, programs and specialties ranked in the top 10. That shows our breadth and depth.

The student demand is so high we actually had to change the automatic admission cutoff, from the top 6% to top 5%. Over the last five years, the growth in the Texas high school population was 6.3%. If we’re going to have a fixed percentage of that, it’s going to grow at 6.3%, the growth in the academic admission applications to us is 11.3%. So, it’s not just that Texas is growing, which it is, but more and more of the very top students want to be here, and that’s a great problem to face. It’s a problem that we now are wrestling with, but it’s, again, part of the story of our student body and the interest they take in wanting to be here.

As I mentioned before, we’ve had this big focus on what happens when they’re here, and we have a lot to celebrate there.

More and more students are graduating on time with less debt, and they are going off and, as we say, changing the world. The four‑year graduation rate for the most recent cohort was 74.8%, up from 52%.

Great students want to be here, so now we have to think about how to attract more of them and how to support them and enable them to succeed here.

I want to spend time now talking about the student experience and thinking about the students’ journey from admission to alum and how we can support them along the way.

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Student Success

And as I mentioned, about a decade ago President Bill Powers threw down the gauntlet and said we’re going to do better with graduation rates. Why are graduation rates so important? Some reasons are more obvious, and some are more subtle. The more obvious reasons are: Students come here to get a degree that they should finish, so we want them to finish. If they finish on time, they’re likely to spend less money, lose less income by being in school, and they’re also likely to have less debt when they come out.

But it also makes more room. Partly why we have the second-biggest freshman class ever is we have more room. We have the ability to take more students.

Lots of great work was done by many people in this room, and we had a lot of really great outcomes there as we move that number from 50% to over 70%. What that shows is what we can do when we try. With the drive to help our students, we can make a difference in the outcomes of the students.

The effort has been so successful we have started to equate student success with graduation rates. But we need to take a broader view of student success.

We have a summer reading program and for the faculty in the room, if you haven’t done it, you should do it. It’s a commitment to read one book a summer, which has been helpful to me. This summer, I read “Range” by David Epstein, and it’s making an argument for the role of generalists. Epstein argues that society has been overly fixated on this idea that you leave the womb, and you know what you want to do when you grow up, and you go do it, and that’s the path to success.

But there are many of us who found our way later. My guess is many of you didn’t expect to be doing exactly what you’re doing now back when you were 17, applying to college.

There’s something there for us as a University, thinking about what our role is to not only produce specialists, which we’re going to do — everybody with a Ph.D. in some way is a specialist — but how we also can think about producing generalists. How can we expose students to different ideas from the breadth of this great University and enable them to solve hard problems?

Epstein talks about two famous athletes, Tiger Woods and Roger Federer. We probably should use Scottie Scheffler and Peyton Stearns. Tiger came out and was bred to be a professional golfer. On the other hand, Federer played a lot of sports and later found his passion was tennis. Both can be world class, the very best at what they do. It doesn’t always have to be the person who moves first.

So, what does that mean for us as a University? It means we have a way to expose our students to all the greatness in this University and help them find what they love. We can help train students not only to have a deep area of expertise but also to be generalists and be able to think across broad domains.

Epstein argues that it’s important in part because in a world where there’s more uncertainty, students, people — we — need to be more adaptable. We don’t have pattern recognition because there are things that we have not seen before. How do we cope with things we have not encountered before? It’s broad skills, critical thinking, communication, those things that we teach here every day.

How can we do more of that and help our students embrace and experience some of that?

First, encourage them to get out of their silos. Encourage them to experience the rest of campus. Think about taking a minor. Take a fun class. Take something outside your comfort zone. Take advantage of what it means to be in a world-class, broad University.

It’s also important for us to relentlessly focus on what skills we’re teaching, and how we teach them — not only what the topics are, but how to learn, how to think and communicate. Those are things here that many of our faculty do at such a great level.

Next, we also have to worry about things I would characterize as foundational needs: What are the basic things we must provide our students for them to be successful?

Among those things are affordability and accessibility, and we’ve made great strides there. Our tuition is low anyway, about $12,000 a year. Many remember when it was $300. I get it. But $12,000 is a great deal. But if you look at the net price that our students pay to attend — tuition minus the tuition that we provide, that net price is down to $4,152. Four years ago, when I first looked at the data, that number was $5,815. So, we’ve driven it down by almost 29% in four years, and that’s not controlling for inflation or cost of living.

Part of this story is the incredible program we’ve done with the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation called Dell UT for Me. That program is really pushing on how we best support students with the most financial need to go out and succeed. This last cycle, we had 1,300 in that program walk the stage as the first cohort. That’s important work. We’re making it possible for more and more students to come here and get out with less debt and be successful.

The next part is housing. We all know that being proximate to our campus matters, and students who live closer to campus have better experiences. They’re more likely to get engaged, belong to things, join, spend time with each other, have a better sense of community, get better grades, graduate and the like. We have to continue to focus on that, and it’s more challenging in a city like Austin, where it’s growing and prices are rising.

I mentioned earlier the opening of our graduate student housing project. I was very proud of that.

Phase 2 is being designed and worked on as well. We’re not done there.

If you’ve driven up north of Dean Keeton Street off of Whitis Avenue, you have noticed the construction fence there. We’re taking down about 200 beds to build 1,000, so by the time that’s done, we’ll have 800 more beds.

We’ve continued to focus on how to provide a safe environment. We’ve heard our Board of Regents say it over and over. This is the top priority for the University, and the Board has been extremely supportive of this. We started a program called the West Campus Ambassadors, where we have people working in West Campus, where some 25,000 of our students live. The ambassadors are there to keep it cleaner, safer, provide an escort, clean up trash, be a friendly face and presence in the neighborhood. Everything I’ve heard from parents, students, people in the community, is that it’s made a difference.

So, we’re going to extend it indefinitely and deepen the level of service all the way down to Lamar Boulevard. I want to say thanks to Senior Vice President Jim Davis and his team for making this all happen. It’s a big win, an important win, for campus and the community and the environment.

The last thing I’ll mention in terms of foundational needs is it’s important to talk about health and wellness. I don’t need to educate this crowd about concerns about our students’ health and especially mental health. There are things there that we’ve done that I’m quite proud of.

We launched something called Timely Care, which is a 24/7 virtual service to be able to provide mental health counseling.

But it can’t just be only the counseling and the care in that way. We have to also talk about the culture. How do we make this a place where people can talk about mental health, be open to it, have those conversations?

We launched something called Longhorn Listens. It’s a way to prepare students to have conversations and intervene if needed around acute mental health challenges. It’s a way for people to be more comfortable in those spaces and be able to have the conversations they should have about mental health.

I know we’re not done. How do we set the right cultural tone around health and wellness and find ways to help support our students?

So, call those foundational needs.

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The Physical Campus

You can think about the physical environment as foundational, that we have to have buildings and the like. It’s more than that. The physical space we inhabit much like this auditorium today [Hogg Memorial Auditorium] can be inspirational. And there’s nothing more inspirational to me than our Tower.

Go back to who decided to build that Tower in 1931 and think about being in the Great Depression and building the tallest building in Austin, taller than the Capitol, built to be a library that could house more books than we owned. You’re going to build a symbol for a great University at a time when we arguably weren’t quite great yet. I think of the brashness that Texans had then — we probably still have it.

It’s time for us to fix the Tower. You will see, in the next month or two, scaffolding go up and scrims going up outside of it. As we’ve been telling the students, get your pictures now.

The Tower is important. It’s a symbol. We’ve gone out and talked to students about what it means to them, and it makes your heart melt. They say when they first saw the Tower, they knew they’d made it. It says you’re now at a world-class research university. The Tower is a symbol of that achievement and of what’s possible.

I’m excited about the project, and I want to say thanks to everybody who has been involved in it and that we’re still open to new ideas and to checks. It’s not too late!

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Career Success

In the journey of students from admits to alumni, we get them to graduate, but how do we really support them on what happens next? This is an area where I think parts of the campus have done really well, but I think we as a campus need to do more.

I’m going to characterize this as career success. How do we help students find their passion, find out what they really want to do, and help position them for at least that first position after UT, whether that’s graduate school, nonprofit work, or for‑profit work? How do we do our very best to help position them that way?

With graduation rates, we’ve shown what’s possible when we collectively marshal our energy and talents. Now is the time for us to have that same focus and relentless push to do the same things for what happens after UT. As a campus, we can do this together. We can help students figure out what they really want to be, what they really want to do.

In the book “Range,” there’s a chapter about what economists call match quality, where the question is: How good of a fit is this activity or this thing with me? Those answers are obviously different for all of us.

We can help support students when we put them in positions to learn what they love. Maybe it’s not a specific industry or job, but it’s a kind of thing, a role, a way to use their skills or their talents that they really find joy in. Some people are calling this life design. It’s not just helping find an immediate career outcome; it’s helping design their lives. That’s something I want to see us focus on.

In the same way that we had a rallying cry around graduation rates, the rallying cry that my leadership team wants to put forward in careers is we think, in five years, 90% of our students will have that first planned outcome. Maybe it’s a job, maybe it’s graduate school, maybe it’s starting a company. Five years from now, we can look back and say we’ve moved from here to here, and now 90% of our students or more know what they’re going to do when they leave UT. That’s something we can all do together.

We have to make big investments to get there, but it’s also important to have a metric and goal. That will give us that framework to go forward.

One other way students are finding success is through entrepreneurial activities. We’re seeing more and more students come to UT already having this mindset of being an entrepreneur, whether they want to end up working in a company or starting their own thing. About a quarter of this year’s freshman class came in having already started a company, an organization or a nonprofit. Just like us in high school!

That fits us. We’re known for that. Think about Austin. Think about Texas. This is a place where we can make things happen. Students are coming to us with that kind of energy, and we’ve got incredible programs already helping tap into that spread out across the campus.

One of the great things about a broad, diverse, decentralized campus is innovation happens, but one of the hard things about that is students often struggle with how to find it all. So how can we as a campus collectively tell our story better and also help students find their way?

We’re creating a new position, and Mellie Price in the McCombs School of Business has been willing to take this on through great bribery and arm twisting. I don’t know what we’re going to call it yet, but what I’ve asked her to do is really coordinate what’s here. What are the gaps we have? What are the things we can fill in? How can we make this accessible as students find their way through campus?

We also have had great help on the faculty front. There, we’ve had a life design question too: How can we help faculty who really have something inside that maybe has a bit of entrepreneurial spark to it? How can we help them explore that, experience that and see if it’s something they want to run with?

We have a unit called Discovery to Impact that’s been working on that to great effect, and Mark Arnold is now the leader of it. It’s going to be a continued effort that we as a campus make. How do we position our faculty who want to explore the possibility of taking these things that they’ve invented, discovered or thought about and getting them out into the world and making an impact?

Another part that we continue to focus on: Obviously we’re a research University, and we’ve called out these three big areas where we want to continue to focus. The first of these is health and well‑being.

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Health and Well-Being

Dell Med is a large part of that story, and it is doing extremely well. It’s important for us to make sure that we continue to tell that story.

They have 465 residents and fellows currently in place, and on an annual basis, they will provide about 900,000 hours of clinical care. Think about the care that’s available in Austin from the talented people coming here for Dell Med.

There was a patient from Belton, Texas, who was suffering from Marfan syndrome. This was a weakening of parts of the heart in her case, and she had had previous operations and was looking really for something that was going to be a life‑saving operation, given the condition she was in. In the old Austin, it wasn’t possible. Given what she was facing, she was trying to figure out if she could make it to Dallas or Houston to have that operation if there was someone to do it. Lo and behold, we have a professor here named George Arnaoutakis, and he specializes in that kind of work. So, she found, at Dell Med in Austin at UT, one of the experts in that kind of work. He saved her life. That’s pretty cool.

Another part of the story, a layer down, is why George came to UT from the University of Florida. It was because of a doctor named Charles Fraser. So, Chuck Fraser, star talent, attracted George Arnaoutakis, star talent. George Arnaoutakis helps save somebody’s life. That’s the kind of work we can do. That’s the work we are doing, and it’s the kind of work I want to see us continue to focus on and do more of.

Another story about research at a broad university: A group of scientists from many parts of campus came together and found an antibody that can work against the class of viruses that includes COVID. They found a generalized antibody that can go out and work against SARS‑CoV‑2. These faculty were in molecular science, chemical engineering, biomedical engineering and chemistry. Bringing faculty from those departments together to solve a hard problem — it’s that kind of work that a broad, deep, great university can do.

Now, Dean [Roger] Bonnecaze [in Engineering] did admit that his social media bet with a Michigan dean [about football] got more coverage than that did! That’s partly on us. We’ve got to make sure that society understands the importance of that work beyond just the other kinds of things we do.

I mentioned before the work that Mark Arnold is doing in Discovery to Impact — making investments in early-stage companies from our faculty. This is meant to provide an accelerant. How can we help them, propel them and get their idea farther along? It’s about showing we care, showing we’re going to invest alongside other investors to propel these ideas forward.

The most recent startup that the UT Seed Fund invested in is called Bright Skies Bio, by Ken Hsu, and it is trying to intervene in the process by which cancer attacks our cells in proteins through RNA. Again, a professor with a great idea, trying to get it out to market. How can our University do more to support that kind of activity?

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Technology and Society

The second big area has been around technology and society. We had a really good eight days this summer: We secured $457 million to continue to advance our supercomputer and maintain its edge. We have the world’s fastest academic supercomputer and a bunch of talented people who run it and make it accessible to so many around the world. It’s at UT’s Texas Advanced Computing Center, and that huge investment from the National Science Foundation will make sure it stays at the cutting edge.

About eight days later, we learned we had secured $840 million from DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] to produce chips for defense technology. It’s going to lead to incredible activity here. It’s not just us; it’s a consortium that many companies and universities will take part in, and it’s led by an incredible UT professor, S.V. Sreenivasan, who has labored night and day since we started pushing on this idea.

You can see what happens when really talented people pull together a great team and then we advance it forward.

And we’re not done. We think there’s more federal money to be had. We’re Texans — we want to win. These are early signs of incredible success and a great return on investment from the state, as well.

Those two awards came right in the middle of our Year of AI, a way to coalesce around what’s happening here, maybe tilt it a little bit more toward certain areas and help tell the story of the strengths and the breadth of the University.

The Year of AI has really put a spotlight on certain things that we’re doing so well. A year ago, we launched the first degree of its kind, a Master of Science degree in AI. That program, now in year two, has 1,300 people, which is pretty incredible.

Just this morning, we announced a new institute around CosmicAI. This is a partnership with the Simons Foundation and the NSF to build a new institute to think about the most fundamental questions: Why are we here? How did we get here? What are the origins of the universe? And do it from an AI perspective. It will be spearheaded by UT’s Oden Institute, but eight different departments are contributing faculty to it.

The year’s not done. You will see more in the months to come, but I think it’s been very successful.

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Energy and the Environment

The third area I want to talk about is energy and the environment. In Texas I don’t have to motivate people too much about why this is a crucial set of topics for us to be worried about.

The basic human condition relies on energy. If we think about how humans want to flourish and thrive around the world, it’s not just what happens in the U.S. Globally we need more energy, and we want to have more energy accessible to more people at a cheaper price point and in a clean way. So, what are the things our University can do to spur that on?

I would argue there’s no university better positioned to help with those problems than UT. I think of us as “the energy University.” But I’m not sure the rest of the world gets that, so I think we can do more to tell that story. How can we, as a university, combine the strengths we have around energy and the environment and come forward with something that people understand and see what is one level back and understand the strengths of this great place?

Nobody can match the breadth of our expertise. Nobody can match what we have to offer in this place. We also have a pragmatic approach to the problem. We realize that it’s going to take multiple sources of energy to address the world’s needs. We’re not going to be dogmatic or religious about it; we’re going to try to solve a set of problems the world is facing, and we can do it differently than others can.

For those reasons, 2025 will be our Year of Energy. The idea is to coalesce the University in a common direction, much like we’ve done for AI, and see what we can do to address some of the world’s energy challenges.

Last year, we launched a lab called the Energy Emissions Modeling and Data Lab. This is a $50 million partnership between the Department of Energy and several private sector partners. The problem they’re trying to address is that of lost methane. If we could capture the methane lost in the industrial process, it could power 2 billion gas-powered cars and trucks on the road. It is a big problem.

Those are the kinds of things we should be tackling. Interdisciplinary and hard, requiring great depth and breadth of talent.

Our research stands out, but we’re also doing more for students there. One of the more recent startups that’s going very well is the Center for Global Sustainability.

This is a joint venture between the McCombs School of Business and the Moody College of Communication in which we’re really trying to focus on how we train students to think about the business side of sustainability, not just the science and technical side, but how you make a business case, because business is what it will need to make it sustainable.

The second part is how do we talk about it, communicate about it, how do we think about interacting with each other around questions of sustainability and the environment?

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Change Starts Here: The Strategic Plan

Since we launched our strategic plan, we’ve learned a lot of great things. We’ve learned when we focus on making changes, we drive things forward, and I’ve seen what we can accomplish in certain places. But we also realized that the plan and its structure could be streamlined. So, you’re going to see an evolution of the plan.

Going forward, we’re envisioning the plan as a more simplified tool for how we think about where we’re trying to head.

There are 10 priorities, and the one I want to focus on is the goal of attracting more elite talent. That needs to be a continued priority. What our new provost, Rachel Davis Mersey, the deans and all of us will be working on is how, across the entire academic enterprise, we attract more elite faculty and students. And I would say across the entire University, let’s include elite staff. How do we think about more elite students, faculty and staff across the breadth of the University?

It’s not all STEM; it’s people like Jacqueline Jones, who won the Pulitzer Prize this year. There are so many great stories of elite, world-class excellence at the University.

It’s not just research or creative work. It’s also teaching. Jay Banner won one of the biggest teaching prizes in the world, the Robert Foster Cherry Award. Again, elite talent from a faculty teaching and research perspective.

I think there’s more work we have to do there. We’ve got 18 members of the National Academy of Sciences, whom we’re really proud of. We have a ways to go to catch UC Berkeley and Michigan. If we’re going to get to where we need to be, we have to have a relentless focus on attracting the top talent at scale.

For so many of those touch points, we think about our faculty, but it’s also staff who enable all those things to happen. What we do to curate, attract and develop our staff is a top priority. How do we get more fantastic, elite staff to come here as well?

Elite faculty and elite staff attract elite students. We’re on the way. That freshman class that just arrived had more than 800 valedictorians and salutatorians. So, we’re getting our share already, but we want to do even more. We want to find more ways to have elite students really want to be here.

One way we do this is to build more world-class programs. A couple are really good case studies for what’s possible. First is a program we just announced a couple of weeks ago around robotics. This is something that builds on great faculty strength across a variety of departments. It’s interdisciplinary. It builds on great research culture. Texas Robotics has had huge wins and successes from a research standpoint, but now it opens up the opportunities of those same kinds of programs, faculty engagement and research to our students. It’s going to be done at an honors level, so think about this as kind of a curated cohort of really special students.

We think a disproportionate number of tomorrow’s entrepreneurs, tinkerers, innovators — people at the edge of where things are heading — are probably today in high school robotics programs. So, what can we do to get them to come to UT instead of Carnegie Mellon, Cal Tech? You can get them to wrap around a set of experiences, and to our knowledge, we’re the only university where freshmen can take advantage of this kind of opportunity.

A student named Gabriel Moore chose us over Harvard, MIT and Cornell, which we think is obvious, but out there in the rest of the world, it may not be viewed that way. Part of why he did it is because he wanted to get experience in a research lab. He wanted to be in a place where undergraduates could have that experience, and Gabriel helped us design the new robotics program. We attracted a star student to come here, and he’s helping us figure out ways to attract more star students. That’s what I mean when I say we want to attract more elite students.

Another example is from our School of Civic Leadership. In this admission cycle, they have another degree program, a civics honors program. This is another interdisciplinary, broad program designed to help students wrestle with some very fundamental questions: What’s our country’s experience been like? How do we think about very basic questions of liberty, of freedom, of markets? What are the fundamental principles from a philosophical standpoint, from a political standpoint, that we should all be wrestling with as we go forward as a society?

We’re really excited it to see the first class come in that program next fall, but we’ve already had some proof points. Debbie Chu chose UT over Vanderbilt, partly because she was exposed to the Civitas Institute when it was a precursor to the new school, and she saw it as something that built a community that she wanted to be a part of.

We can do things in this broad, interdisciplinary way that create the kinds of experiences and opportunities that students can be a part of.

We’ve got amazing existing programs as well. Plan II and Turing Scholars — these are incredible. Part of how I’ve sold it to students is: If you want to go to Williams College but want to be part of a great city and great university, not be stuck in remote destinations, come do Plan II at UT. Or if you want to be in a world-class technical university like Cal Tech, but want to have a fuller college experience, we’ve got Turing Scholars.

We can take these kinds of opportunities, pull them together, and find a way to tell our story more forcefully and help more elite students want to be a part of it. We can also combine and create experiences for those students across programs. What happens if we get the great computer scientist with the great liberal arts students and see what happens?

You can imagine the social hour, right? Dean Rich Reddick [of Undergraduate Studies] and his team are working on this. We’re calling it Texas Honors for now.

There are ways that we think we can collectively work to that end as well.

Jenna Steele came from California and turned down a who’s who list of schools and chose us over Penn, UCLA and Dartmouth because she was exposed to the Canfield Business Honors Program. It was the academics but also a sense of community and a really special group of students she wanted to be a part of.

More of that is what I think we have a chance to do. We’ve got to figure out more ways to get elite talent. That will take resources. Many in the room have been very helpful to that end. I want to have one shout‑out as an example. Last month, I was on the road in Santa Fe and we went out and talked about the Forty Acres Scholars program. That’s our version of the full ride that would compete with the Morehead-Cain at North Carolina or the Jefferson Scholars at UVA. Think about that as our very top-level scholarship.

The goal from the Texas Exes, who run that for us, is to double the number. If we can double the number of the scholarships, we’ll be on a competitive basis with schools like North Carolina and Virginia and be able to compete for those students.

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Let me try to reiterate: We are at a special moment in time. It’s a great time to be a Longhorn. When I say that on social media, people say, it’s always a great time! I get it, it’s always a great time! This is an even better than great time.

It is a great time, but we’ve got to go. It’s our chance to move the University forward, to find more ways to move our students forward, get the knowledge out in the world.

I’ve articulated three ways to take advantage of this moment:

One is to think really broadly about how we support our students. We’ve done great work there. We’ve now changed the way we move students through this great University. Now it’s time for us to emphasize not only that, but what happens after UT.

How can we work together to help position our students to find what they want to do, find their passion and also find the kinds of opportunities, whether it’s graduate schools or jobs, that help launch that career into a meaningful and fulfilling existence they deserve?

Second, let’s find more ways to use the breadth of the University. How can we take advantage of the fact that we’ve got such strengths spread out across this great campus? How can we bring them together in novel ways, not only for students, new classes, courses of study, but for research? How do we bring really talented people together to solve really challenging problems? I think we have huge advantages there.

Third, focus on extremely talented people. I’ve tried to stay away from too many sports analogies, but think about these as five stars if you follow recruiting. We need more five stars. Why more five stars? They’re good. And five stars want to be around other five stars, and fours want to be around fives. If we can find more ways to get extremely talented people to be part of our community, more great things are going to happen.

I am honored to be in this role. I’m honored to be able to do this work with you, and I’m honored to be your colleague. And I truly believe that together, we’re on the path to be the world’s highest-impact public research university.

Thanks again, and Hook ’em!

What starts here changes the world.

[Note: President Hartzell delivered this address extemporaneously. These remarks have been lightly edited.]