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President Kim addresses the General Faculty

Listen to the audio version of this speech (15.4mb, MP3)

October 26, 2009

I. Introduction

Thank you very much, Carol [Folt, Acting Provost]. I apologize first for my voice. I began losing my voice right before the inauguration, and I haven’t gotten it back yet. One thing that I didn’t know was how much you have to talk as president of Dartmouth College. I am so sick of hearing myself talk, and I beg your forgiveness. I am going to talk just a little bit more, but quickly we will get on to the point that I am really looking forward to, which is the discussion we will have.

When I arrived at Dartmouth on July 1, the first thing I did was to walk around the campus and visit art studios, rehearsal spaces, labs and classrooms where courses were in progress. That day was a turning point in my Dartmouth life, and the memories of it are still fresh. Among many encounters that made a deep impression, I especially remember stepping into the laboratory where Jon Kull, associate professor of chemistry, and his students were engaged in work focused on virulence regulators of the organism that causes cholera. Through sophisticated imaging techniques Professor Kull and his colleague Ron Taylor from Dartmouth Medical School were able to show that there was an unexpected fatty acid ligand in the binding pocket of Vibrio cholerae that plays an important role in virulence. We immediately began to talk about the potential practical implications of such a discovery. If this fatty acid could be added to, for example, oral rehydration solutions in the middle of cholera epidemics, could we reduce both the morbidity and mortality of the disease?

Having worked in areas where cholera remains a major killer, particularly of children, I know first-hand the disease’s devastating effects and the difficulties local communities and health officials face in controlling it. And now here I was, at Dartmouth, watching as a group of our students, guided by their committed scholar/teachers, pursue highly specialized basic science research that may ultimately reduce the burden of this disease, save lives, and strengthen economic development in some of the world’s poorest communities.

That laboratory was only one of many settings where, that day and since, I have gotten to see the transformative impact Dartmouth faculty are having on their students and on the world. I have seen how your teaching opens students’ minds, and how the effects of your research are extending out and connecting Dartmouth with a world where people are hungry for the solutions that your scholarship can bring.

I learned many things from my visits to art studios, laboratories, and classrooms that day, and from conversations with faculty and students since then. I learned about the exceptional strength, diversity and commitment of Dartmouth’s faculty across the institution. I learned about the way different parts of the College work together. Watching students and faculty interact that day in Jon Kull’s lab, in Professor Esme Thompson’s wonderful drawing class—one of the students in that class was one of the scholars in the football team this weekend that just won its first game—and so many other places since then, also confirmed the powerful synergy between cutting-edge faculty research and creative practice and the enhancement of students’ learning experience at Dartmouth.

I recently completed my first 100 days as President of the College. I’m still in learning mode. In fact, I intend to stay in that mode permanently —especially with faculty. You have already taught me much about Dartmouth’s strengths, and about how we can work together to take the College to even higher levels of achievement. I still have much more to learn from you. Your creative engagement will be vital to reaching our shared goals. I want you to know that I welcome your ideas, your questions and also your critical feedback. Maintaining an open flow of communication with faculty is of paramount importance for me. Our conversation this afternoon is a step in building that collaboration.

In that spirit, I hope we’ll spend most of our time today in conversation. My most important purpose in being here is to hear from you about the issues that concern you, the questions you have, and the solutions you’d like to put forward.

To set the stage for that discussion, in my short remarks, I want to do four things. First, I want to reflect briefly on some aspects of Dartmouth’s mission. Second, I want to share with you in a more personal way some of what I’ve begun to learn about the intellectual life of this community during my first 100 days. Third, I’d like to shine a light on some outstanding recent Dartmouth achievements that give us momentum for further progress. Finally, I want to update you on where we stand in analyzing and addressing the severe budget challenges that Dartmouth, along with our peer institutions, now confronts.

Before moving to the substance of these remarks, let me ask you to join with me in honoring Barry Scherr. I’d like to extend personal thanks to Barry for his distinguished service to Dartmouth in the role of provost, and to thank Dean Carol Folt for accepting the challenge of the interim provost role. We will be working with the COP to design a process for involving faculty in the selection of Barry’s permanent successor. For now, our recognition and gratitude go to Barry for his exemplary contributions to the College.

II. Dartmouth’s vocation

Let me begin with some thoughts on Dartmouth’s mission.

In my inaugural address, I spoke of Dartmouth’s vocation to unite passion and practicality. This double calling has been woven through Dartmouth’s history. I believe it explains much about how this institution has developed.

Dartmouth has always been driven simultaneously by a deep concern to understand what gives meaning, dignity and beauty to human life—and by a restless determination to translate that understanding into practical action.

This complex vocation has given rise to an institutional structure that is complex, yet which shows a deep coherence.

As has often been stressed, Dartmouth is not simply a liberal arts college. Nor does it fit the mold of a classic research university. Dartmouth has created its own institutional model. It allies cutting-edge scholarship and unrivalled undergraduate teaching in the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences with a select set of first-class graduate programs; a vibrant community of artists exploring the boundaries and depths of human meaning; and professional and graduate schools that are driving advanced research and training the next generation of leaders in business, engineering and the sciences. Research, teaching and learning in these fields at Dartmouth are deeply informed by their closeness to the liberal arts. While the professional disciplines in turn inform and influence how the liberal arts are taught and practiced, this unique alignment of resources and commitments makes Dartmouth a community of learning unlike any other.

Collegial ties, open communication and a remarkable unity of purpose connect faculty within the different branches of Dartmouth, even as each pursues its specific fields of excellence. Dartmouth’s intellectual communities are engaged in thinking together about the full range of problems and possibilities that condition human life and shape its ultimate meaning. Dartmouth colleagues are strikingly open to seeing and situating their specific areas of inquiry within a “big picture” understanding of the human condition. Dartmouth’s longstanding leadership in international education is an expression of the same mindset of openness to thinking and working across boundaries.

This applies not just to the Arts and Sciences, but at Tuck, at Thayer and in the Medical School. This expansive, humanistic approach is not a brake on the achievements of our graduate and professional programs. I would argue that it is a crucial component of their success.

Dartmouth’s willingness to see connections and nurture interdisciplinary linkages is all the more important because such strong pressures in contemporary intellectual life tend to push in the opposite direction: towards hyper-specialization, intellectual isolation and a loss of comprehensive, humane perspectives.

I think of the familiar reproach that is made to physicians specialized in one particular aspect of medicine or one particular organ system. That instead of seeing the patient as a person, the pulmonologist sees only a lung, the nephrologist only a kidney. Under these conditions, complex procedures may be carried out, and feats of medical virtuosity may be performed that succeed on their own terms, but don’t actually improve quality of life for the patient. In much of our intellectual work, and arguably in the broader life of our society, we increasingly risk replicating this dynamic. But, let me be clear, focused research on topics such as the virulence factors of cholera or any other highly specialized area of the arts, humanities or sciences are critically important in their own right and must always be supported here at Dartmouth. Indeed, focused research methods are precisely what has allowed our faculty members to bring so much to the interdisciplinary table. Yet, we must also be careful to never lose sight of the larger human context—the community, the country, the world of which we are a part, and in which our skills and discoveries must find their sense.

Dartmouth, through its historical commitment to a comprehensive vision of the liberal arts, has worked consciously and successfully to minimize the tendency to fragment along disciplinary lines. Dartmouth faculty are eminent authorities in their fields. But our faculty and students see the “whole patient,” the broad expanse of the human situation in its biological, social, historical, aesthetic and moral dimensions.

By helping students internalize these larger structures of meaning, a Dartmouth education equips students to organize the large amounts of information they take in from specialized fields. Dartmouth students go on to successful, often brilliant careers in specialized domains. But they do so equipped with the capacity to see how their more specialized activities connect with a broader web of human realities, needs and aspirations. What that means is that, from their mentors at Dartmouth, our students have learned to recognize, embrace and begin to bring order to complexity.

The integrative vision on which Dartmouth’s intellectual life rests has always been compelling. But today, embracing such an approach is becoming, I believe, a matter of survival for the global community. Fragmented, isolated, piecemeal solutions to our urgent problems are not working. We need a radically different approach, one capable of embracing and making sense of complexity, and acting judiciously to influence complex, multi-layered processes, locally, nationally and globally.

We face crises in the global environment, in health, and in the economy. But we also face a crisis in values, a crisis in the construction of shared understandings of how human communities can and ought to function and coexist. I am personally persuaded that we face a crisis in compassion and civility: in the ability and willingness to understand what other people are going through and how the world looks when viewed from their perspective. A profound deficit is visible in our collective ability and willingness to treat other human beings with respect—as ends, never as means, in Kant’s terms. Above all, perhaps, we confront a crisis in clear thinking.

Fraught political processes such as the upcoming Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change or the management of international peacekeeping missions highlight the complexity of the challenges, and the way in which scientific issues, social values, and historical-cultural interpretation are inextricably interwoven.

These multiple challenges cannot be solved in isolation. To address them demands rapid advances in the natural and social sciences, with a particular orientation to systems thinking. But also, and just as urgently, the search for solutions demands the rigor of philosophy, the lucidity of history, and intensified efforts in the arts and humanities: the bold artistic practices and the uncompromising scholarship that mirror to society its present condition and awaken our sense of how things might be different.

I believe Dartmouth, with its ability to unite passion and practicality, will have a major and increasing role to play in forming the leaders who can tackle these problems. And that the knowledge emerging from our faculty research will contribute directly and substantially to those solutions. This will entail, not radical new departures, but continuing to do what the College has always done exceptionally well, while taking that excellence to new levels and into new areas.

My goal here today is not to lay out a detailed, finished plan of how we’ll proceed to lift the College to that next level of excellence. What I want is to hear your ideas. And to begin a conversation that will bring us to that detailed plan and ensure that it reflects the passion and practicality of the whole Dartmouth community.

III. What I’m learning about the Dartmouth community

So now let me share with you some of what I’ve begun to learn about this community in my first 100 days at Dartmouth. I’ll repeat that, during this time, I have met with many members of the faculty, and I’m eager to multiply and deepen those exchanges in the months ahead.

Overall, perhaps my strongest impression has simply been of the vibrancy and breadth of the intellectual and creative life that flourishes on this campus. It’s one thing to know about this richness in the abstract, and a completely different experience to actually get inside the studios, practice rooms, classrooms and labs where the work is going on. Touring the visual arts studios in the Hop recently with Amy Lawrence, Brenda Garand and Peter Hackett was a case in point. I experienced the exuberant creativity of our students at close range. And I also noted how students were learning important lessons for their own projects by observing the creative process of accomplished faculty artists. Seeing more mature artists work, our students get a real taste of what the creative process entails and how skilled practitioners make the crucial choices that affect end results. For me, this again brought home key lessons about the value of faculty members’ own creative and scholarly work for effective teaching.

Rarely have I seen the spirit of interdisciplinary work as alive and widely embraced as here at Dartmouth. Again, the readiness to break down intellectual silos doesn’t just characterize our undergraduate liberal arts programs, where it might be more readily expected. Interdisciplinary thinking is actively fueled by our professional schools, research institutes and graduate programs. The reaccreditation committee that just visited Thayer commented specifically on the range and quality of interdisciplinary activities unfolding there. They noted that the commitment to interdisciplinary thinking has permeated the institutional culture and truly begun to shape how colleagues conceptualize their work.

And our interdisciplinary connections continue to expand. This year, for example, two new interdisciplinary tracks were created within our graduate programs: a new concentration in Quantitative Biomedical Science within the Genetics Graduate Program; and a new PhD/MBA Program that will create a streamlined path for PhD candidates to obtain an MBA degree at Tuck, after completing their doctoral studies. These programs will intensify dialogue across the College and produce new generations of graduates armed with multifaceted skill sets for tackling tough, real-world problems.

At a more encompassing level, I continue to be impressed by what I have referred to as Dartmouth’s culture of caring. In talking with faculty, I have been struck by the evidence of how deeply you care for and respect your students, as intellectual colleagues and as human beings. I have also noted the respect faculty members demonstrate for each other, in direct and more subtle ways. This culture of collegial generosity informs all aspects of Dartmouth’s intellectual life. I would also argue that the culture of caring shapes the way the College turns outward to the world, expressing care through concrete action. The DarDar program in Tanzania represents one of a wealth of examples. DarDar began as a partnership between Dartmouth Medical School and the Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences, in Dar es Salaam. The program has grown to encompass multiple dimensions of health, education and development cooperation. It engages the skills of partners from across Dartmouth, including Tuck, Thayer and the Dickey Center for International Understanding. While supporting the delivery of critical services and the development of local capacities in Tanzania, the programs also provide our students with international opportunities for study and service.

Let me also say that I am committed to supporting effective research and learning partnerships not only with institutions in other countries, but also closer to home. The Medical School has built an array of such partnerships through the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center. Strengthening this network is critical to taking DMS to the next level of excellence.

I am also learning much more about the internal diversity and complexity of the Dartmouth community—and about the College’s ability to reconcile complexity with the fundamental coherence of its values. Dartmouth has succeeded in preserving its institutional identity and its high intellectual standards not by imposing uniformity of thought or social background, but on the contrary by opening itself ever more fully to the diversity and complexity of the society and the world around it.

Finally, I continue to learn about the enduring affective bonds that unite members of the Dartmouth community to the College. The depth of the connection, whose effects I see almost daily in my conversations with alumni, continues to surprise and move me. For so many of those who have experienced the Dartmouth fellowship, their ties to Dartmouth mentors and friends remain defining relationships for a lifetime.

This is why Dartmouth alumni remain so fiercely loyal to the College, so passionately concerned with its welfare, and so willing to invest financial resources, but also their time and skills in an active effort to sustain it. I am grateful to our alumni for that ongoing commitment. And I am grateful to you for maintaining, day after day and year after year, the standards of intellectual excellence that justify their faith in Dartmouth.

These first few months have begun to give me a sense of the way our faculty works. As a result, it’s clearer to me than ever why US News and World Report ranked Dartmouth number 1 in commitment to undergraduate teaching. We have not wavered from the model of engaged top scholars teaching our students. And now I know it works the same way in our graduate and professional schools.

IV. Recent progress and opportunities for further achievement

Because of the budget challenge, I’ve had to adopt priorities during the first months of my presidency that are very different from those I would have preferred. However, in many ways I feel fortunate. As we work to chart a course for Dartmouth’s development, we build on a long series of achievements that have prepared the College to overcome immediate challenges and advance a vision for excellence.

Across a range of areas critical to the life of the College, the past years have seen a trajectory of rapid progress. Economic instability has reduced the slope of this upward curve, but has not changed its direction.

Our faculty has never been stronger. The commitment to expand faculty numbers has borne fruit and reinforced our capacities in critical areas, including both established core disciplines and exciting new fields of inquiry. The expansion of faculty strength in Arts and Sciences under the leadership of Jim Wright and Carol Folt stands as a truly remarkable achievement. The increase from 380 to 439 FTEs over a decade, while the undergraduate student-faculty ratio was reduced from 10 to 1 down to 8 to 1, leaves the College poised to reach new levels of excellence in research and teaching.

Faculty strength in our professional schools has also expanded in critical areas. Growth of the faculty at Tuck, Thayer and the Medical School has been guided by strategic plans crafted to focus investment in areas of competitive advantage and strategic opportunity. The results have been remarkable, and bear tribute to the leadership of Deans Danos, Helble, and Green.

Sponsored funding in the Arts and Sciences, DMS, and Thayer doubled over the decade 1998-2008. What this says clearly is that our faculty is growing not just in numbers but in achievement. This upward trend was visible again in Fiscal Year 2009: Total sponsored awards for Fiscal Year 2009 reached $168.4 million, a 2.5 percent increase over the previous year.

Dartmouth faculty have achieved remarkable successes in obtaining highly competitive research grants. The number of grant proposals submitted increased 30 percent in FY 2009, compared to FY 2008. Faculty were extremely active in submitting proposals in response to federal stimulus funding announcements such as the NIH Challenge grants. To date, our faculty have been awarded approximately $37 million under the stimulus grants programs. We congratulate you on these efforts and encourage you to continue them.

Our faculty are publishing more, and with increasing impact. While we all understand the limitations of such metrics, I have been impressed to see the high ranking Dartmouth has now achieved in citations per faculty member—well ahead of many large research institutions. This is a further tribute to the value your peers find in your original research.

The quality of students’ learning experience at Dartmouth has also improved as our faculty has added strength. We see this directly reflected in our surveys of student satisfaction. Students’ evaluation of your teaching and mentorship are glowing—up from the already remarkable levels of even a few years ago.

Excellence in research and teaching are mutually reinforcing dimensions of Dartmouth’s mission. Even in a context of budget constraints, we will pursue all reasonable options to further strengthen faculty research, in the Arts and Sciences and our professional schools. We will also look to bolster research opportunities for our students.

There are many ways to support faculty research, profile its results and enhance its impact. I will work closely with the appropriate faculty bodies to identify the best ways of doing that in the near and longer term.

I am eager to enhance mechanisms for sharing and recognition of faculty research achievements within our own campus community. We want to learn in detail about the remarkable research work you are doing, and to honor your accomplishments. Forums for doing just that will enhance Dartmouth’s intellectual life. Let’s work together to envision and create platforms that can further enhance interdisciplinary dialogue on campus and recognize the research being conducted here.

We need to understand more fully the factors that make teaching at Dartmouth so effective. I want to put additional tools and resources at your disposal to support your pedagogical work; to foster sharing of knowledge and experiences among colleagues; and to document the remarkable results you achieve in educating our undergraduate, graduate and professional students.

In talking about strategies to further enhance pedagogy across Dartmouth, I have used the term “measurement.” I want to be clear what I mean by this.

As the educational psychologist Howard Gardner said to me recently, “Higher education rejects Taylorism” referring to F.W. Taylor, a pioneer in management science who believed that it was possible to find the “one best way” to do any job. A Dartmouth education is not an assembly line product. Instilling the knowledge and love of the liberal arts is itself an art form—practiced with great skill by those in this hall. Indeed, studies by researchers in the fields of psychology and education at the Gallup Institute found that “great teachers are alike in a key way—they use their natural talents to the utmost, whether they are aware of it or not. What’s more, great teachers don’t waste time on their weaknesses if those weaknesses don’t interfere with their teaching. When good teachers understand their talents, then build on those talents to create strengths, they become even better with students.”

Each of you in this room brings different talents to your classroom but as the researchers at the Gallup Institute have shown, that doesn’t mean we can’t learn systematic lessons about how great teachers achieve results. My sense is that you, as expert practitioners, know when your teaching is most successful. I want to rely on your mastery of the field to gain insights that can be more broadly applied.

How do you know when you have taught well? What are the signs that allow you to assess your own pedagogical work and discern new approaches that may prove even more fruitful? Making explicit this intuitive understanding among skilled practitioners is a key part of what I mean by measurement.

No single indicator will tell us all we need to know, and it’s not simply a matter of having students fill in more evaluation forms. We need a range of qualitative and quantitative approaches to build a richer picture of the quality of pedagogical work across this campus, and to better understand the choices and strategies our great teachers apply to get results.

Faculty input is crucial on the full range of issues and opportunities that concern the College. One specific place where I particularly encourage your engagement is the renewal of the Great Issues course. In earlier generations, this course played a key role in the intellectual life of the College. Many alumni have described it as a turning point in their intellectual development. The renewal of the Great Issues course represents an opportunity to build shared intellectual foundations for our undergraduates that will also help strengthen our community as a whole and open new directions for our work.

I would like to see the course premiered as soon as possible, but an enormous amount of work lies ahead. Some of you have already contributed valuable ideas for the design of the course. I hope this engagement will expand. Collaboration from faculty across disciplines and all of our schools will be crucial to success. This course, perhaps more than any other, should be “owned” by our whole faculty and reflect the full richness of Dartmouth’s intellectual life.

V. The budget challenge and its implications

Now, let me talk about the elephant in the room – Dartmouth’s financials.

In talking about this issue, I want to strike a balance between genuine optimism and deep concern. Both are justified, and we need to call on both to find effective solutions.

Simply said, our financials are out of balance. Our expenses are greater than our revenues. The leadership of the College has been aware of the general outlines of this problem for some time. The expense reductions introduced last February reflected that. Our work over this summer and early fall has clarified the extent of the structural imbalance. We now have a much sharper picture of the detrimental impact of the losses to our endowment. And we have a much better understanding of future commitments and liabilities. That said, the picture is not yet complete, and we are continuing to refine our analysis.

We have run numerous models on endowment returns. All of them assume growth at a rate equivalent to our past ten year average (8 percent) for the years 2012 and beyond. The models vary as to how quickly we get to those returns but some might argue that we are being too optimistic. After all, our performance over the last ten years placed us in the 95th percentile of all endowments. The Board has correctly asked that we also look at scenarios with negative returns, and we are doing that, as a precaution. We are focusing our planning efforts on the assumption that the economy will recover but, of course, no one is sure how or when that will happen in a way that will be fully reflected in our endowment returns.

To get to the punch line—every scenario we run has a deficit. And the deficits grow each year, as expenses continue to increase and revenues do not keep up—even with positive endowment returns.

Over time, the use of Dartmouth’s endowment has shifted: from something that could be called on to smooth out the revenue gaps, to a situation where now endowment funding is the most volatile part of our revenue estimates. The proportion of the overall budget that comes from endowment distribution has also grown over time to 32 percent, leaving us even more susceptible to its volatility.

Some of you may say, well if the endowment was created for just these kinds of difficult situations, then let’s tap into this now.

This really won’t work. Even if it were fiscally prudent to do so (and we do not believe that it is), we can’t simply spend down more of the endowment, as only about 27 percent of it is in the form of public equities that are easily convertible to cash. It is this part of the endowment that we are drawing on to pay the endowment distribution, close to $200 million this year, and that our operating budget is dependent upon.

So it is precisely at the time of the recent market increase that we have had to decrease the segment of our endowment, the public equities, that are most likely to rise with the market.

The remainder of the endowment is in largely illiquid assets (for example, private equity and venture capital) that will eventually have returns, but are expected to significantly lag the market and cannot easily be converted to cash, even when offered for sale at a steep discount.

Thus, as of now, because of the asset mix of our endowment, while the market has gone up significantly in the past few months, we are looking at an endowment return of roughly 5 percent for the fiscal year.

As I said in my recent message to the community, there are three ways forward.

First, we have to reduce expenses. We will work collaboratively and creatively, engaging the whole community, to find solutions.

Second, we will aim to increase philanthropic giving to Dartmouth, in part by continuing to demonstrate to donors that we are using our resources efficiently and effectively.

Third, we must pursue new initiatives that can produce additional revenue by building on Dartmouth’s strengths, while reinforcing our educational mission and responding to needs in society.

This year we must lay out the plans and actions that will be implemented in the next 2-3 years but with a vision that encompasses at least the next five years. We are engaging the Faculty Committee on Priorities, other faculty committees and leaders to ensure active faculty participation in every stage of this process.

Clearly, the situation we face merits deep concern. But encompassing that concern and the hard choices it imposes is a deeper optimism and assurance. We will take the actions necessary to protect the roots of Dartmouth’s greatness and to take us boldly forward during this challenging time. We will succeed, and I believe the College will emerge strengthened from this test and the resulting changes.

Part of this optimism stems from my confidence in the ability of Dartmouth’s faculty to take a pro-active approach in creating solutions. Current challenges force us to think in new, entrepreneurial ways and devise new models. Business as usual is not an option. I take this as a spur to our creativity and our ambitions for Dartmouth. Faculty engagement will be crucial in defining and implementing strategies that can harness the enormous concentration of knowledge and talent at Dartmouth College.

VI. Conclusion

I’m anxious to begin taking your questions. But let me say a few words in conclusion before we open the floor for discussion.

As you’ve heard, the challenges we face are significant. We will overcome them, as Dartmouth always has. Our financial endowment has taken a blow, and we must manage the consequences responsibly. We’ll face hard trade-offs. But the most important resources of Dartmouth College are not only intact, they are stronger than ever. These resources are the intellectual power of Dartmouth’s faculty; the hunger for knowledge that drives its students; and the unfailing commitment of the global Dartmouth fellowship to see the school reach its highest potential.

These resources are secure—and they are the fuel that will take us forward to new levels of achievement.

The current global crisis again revealed the urgent need in our communities, our country, and the world for the balanced, humane knowledge—the passion and practicality—that Dartmouth embodies.

As the crisis multiplies human suffering and unmasks the flaws in key national and global systems, it confirms the importance of the work being done by Dartmouth faculty. And the potential for that work to change the world: through the solution of scientific problems, such as identifying new mechanisms to control disease; through social and historical analysis that helps us move towards a more just social order; through engineering and systems design that can deliver the basic inputs of human wellbeing more effectively to all; and through the humanistic, philosophical and artistic practices that probe the value dimension, and keep alive both our sense of human tragedy and our belief in human possibility.

In all of these areas, Dartmouth faculty are driving the work of change.

We’ll maintain and build on that momentum. Let me reiterate how important the active engagement of faculty will be to our success.

In ten years, Dartmouth will celebrate the 250th anniversary of its founding. As we work together to address the immediate effects of budget shortfalls, let’s also keep our eyes on that horizon and envision together the Dartmouth we want the world to see at that moment: an institution increasingly recognized for producing the knowledge the world needs, and more effective than ever in educating the leaders who will shape the world’s future.

Thank you very much.