Rhode Island is a prime example of all this. Our tax base will not support elementary and secondary education as it has been traditionally offered, colleges and universities programs as they should be offered, health care and social services as they are required and a prison system the population seems to demand. To maintain quality, then, we are driven into an intensely competitive environment where we are charged, more and more, with paying our own way. In Rhode Island, however, we have not seen the relaxation of regulation that would help us to compete successfully in this new environment. Personnel and purchasing regulations are only the start, and each of you can point to many examples of a fear-driven bureaucracy that adds layers of costs to whatever we do. These policies must be changed at both conceptual and practical levels, and we await the results of the Governor’s Big Audit to begin that change process.

And that leads us into the third of the major themes about the future of the university. That theme is diversity. Everyone recognizes the accelerating shift in the demographics of the United States, especially in the large states of California, Texas and Florida. But Rhode Island in fact leads the pack in the percentage of the population who are immigrants to America. Providence, with the largest school district in the state, has 83% of its students coming from ethnic minority backgrounds. Colleges and universities continue to provide the gateway to economic success for these individuals and the communities in which they live and work, but we also have the responsibility to create models of multicultural and pluralistic communities for the nation and the world. This latter is finally what the Supreme Court said in deciding the University of Michigan case on affirmative action, an incredibly important decision for our nation.

In higher education, however, we need to go beyond providing access to those historically excluded from our Quad. We need to shift our paradigm from the essentially passive goal of equal access to the goal of success, of achieving educational objectives for all of our students. URI has a long and distinguished record of doing so with our Talent Development and Guaranteed Admission programs, not to mention a variety of smaller programs like College Readiness, LEAP, Bridges, and SMILE and a variety of collaborative programs with schools like the Times2 Academy and many more. Talent Development has grown from thirty students at its inception thirty years ago to nearly 800 this fall, and these students graduate at a higher rate than do the University’s students as a whole.

But it’s not enough. Too many high school students in Rhode Island graduate without the basic skills necessary to go to college. That’s one reason why the partnership with CCRI, with its proven skills in providing developmental education, is so important. I am grateful for the leadership of both Commissioner Warner and President Sepe, as well as Vice Provost John McCray and the faculty and staff at the Providence Campus, for stepping up to this challenge and making a difference.

And finally, we continue to see the transformation of research and scholarship. Traditional disciplines, most less than a hundred years old, are in a dynamic process of change, led first by physics and now by biology. The increased complexity of these areas of study simply overwhelms a reductionist approach to disciplines. What area of natural science, for example, is not dramatically impacted by considerations traditionally a part of the social sciences or humanities? Literally none. This is a concept URI pioneered years ago in the Coastal Resources Center, led by Steve Olson, where science and politics and ethics merged to help developing nations sort out environmental policy for fragile coastal regions. Scholarship and research have already moved from an isolated, individualized compartmentalization to collaborative teams across disciplines and shared facilities. Today’s researchers are supported by new information technology that makes collaboration much easier and quicker, but we will also have to work to make better use of laboratories and libraries that are not always ours.

For example, at URI we are working now on the design of a new "inner space center" on the Bay Campus, a concept introduced by Prof. Robert Ballard. It is the very model of the creation of a facility that can be used by scientists and scholars everywhere, through the most sophisticated information technology available. It brings together oceanographers, physicists, chemists, historians, art historians, archeologists, engineers, anthropologists and educators to make highly efficient use of explorations and discoveries for the purpose both of research and learning. The new BRIN lab in the College of Pharmacy is another example of this collaborative strategy. If we think futuristically, we can do the same with our planned CILT building—CILT stands for Center for Integrated Learning Technologies—and the new and renewed buildings planned for biological sciences and biotechnology. And these facilities support directly the new pedagogies and learning systems we want for our undergraduates. Duderstat points out that from Dewey to Montesorri to Piaget to Seymour Papert, these learning theorists have argued that students learn best through inquiry-based or constructionist learning.

The old Chinese proverb tells us that, "I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand."

So how do we continue on the path of change we have embarked, how can we continue to create, in the words of our vision statement, a "new culture for learning"? A key element is alignment of goals, the goals set by the nation and the state, those set by our Board, those set within the University as a whole and in the Colleges, Schools and Departments. We have much work to do in Washington and at Rhode Island’s state house, but I believe that we are well aligned with the goals of the Board of Governors. Both the overall goal of increased educational attainment in Rhode Island and the goal of collaborative use of resources between and among institutions are consistent with what we want to achieve at URI. Our three year strategic plan captures our overall goals for the near term, and it initiates processes that will help us focus our investments in a more effective manner. That plans calls for twenty new faculty lines over the next three years, beginning with six this year; more refurbished classrooms, with Ballentine Hall the model of what we want to do; the new Academic Enhancement Center in Roosevelt Hall, more investment in libraries ($1M more into the base over the next three years) and information systems, creative financial aid strategies which will improve transfers from CCRI and other community colleges and support retention efforts, and more.

Thank you again.