November 20, 2019
Just over a year ago, I chose to come to the University in large part because of its growing national reputation and the respect it was earning as one of the most innovative universities in the world. Another reason was the opportunity to work alongside President Ana Mari Cauce, who is widely regarded as a visionary, passionate leader. The University, under our leadership, aims to be the number one public university in the world as measured by impact.
After my first year, I am happy to say the UW has turned out to be what I expected, and more. Keeping true to our values as a public University for Washington, we are leading innovation worldwide through research, teaching and public service. A few examples:
- The Population Health Initiative is much more than a building; it represents a new interdisciplinary paradigm for how the whole of a university can contribute to the health and welfare of people globally (including here in Washington and at the UW) by addressing human health, environmental resilience, and social and economic equity.
- The magnificent new Burke Museum is making science and history accessible by opening its labs to the public who can watch scientists at work.
- Through flexible spaces and the latest technology, a new Health Sciences Education Building will soon facilitate interdisciplinary and team-based teaching and learning for students in Dentistry, Medicine, Nursing, Public Health, Pharmacy and Social Work.
We know that the UW is making a significant economic impact on our state — $15.7 billion total economic impact in fiscal year 2018. Our economic impact has increased by 54.62 percent over the last decade after adjusting for inflation.
Amidst the excellence, however, lie institutional challenges and core needs. I am working in partnership with Ana Mari and many other UW leaders to prioritize and address them across our three campuses.
With “access and excellence” as our mantra, we are working hard to more effectively link our capital investments to our academic mission and priorities. When considering a building or major renovation project, we need to plan meticulously and ask hard questions: How would a new or renovated building or space best contribute to our mission of teaching, research and public service? How will we include modern classroom space, where students take courses that are the foundation for degree programs across the University? And we need to do a better job of securing funding from multiple sources — the state, our own tuition revenues, foundations and agencies, and generous donors — as well as providing for the ongoing maintenance and upgrades of capital infrastructure.
Another core institutional priority is the Finance Transformation Program, which will replace our 45-year-old financial systems, policies and processes with a cloud-based system. With the UW’s revenues now at $8 billion a year, we need a sophisticated, coordinated, transparent system to keep up and support our mission. This is a monumental challenge that requires restructuring existing processes, staffing and managerial habits, but one which will also provide new clarity and effectiveness in how we administer the entire university and medical system. We all recognize that making these changes will be very challenging; however, this modernization is imperative to moving the University forward.
We are also working to improve the student experience at the UW — including leadership activities, pathways to majors, research experience and mentoring. For all of our students, we need to improve access to health care, including mental health care. President Cauce and I are determined to make urgently needed improvements, including better leveraging our own UW Medicine health system. To this end, we expect to soon receive the recommendations of two campus task forces, one on the future of Hall Health and one focused on student mental health. We look forward to working with our student leaders as we implement improvements in the coming years.
As many of you know, I have also emphasized in my first year the need to provide better support for our graduate students — especially for our Ph.D. students, who form the backbone of our large research enterprise, and who also provide a vital component of teaching at the UW. Discretionary fellowships are crucial to recruiting graduate students in competition with the best universities here and abroad, and they are even more essential to recruiting more diverse graduate cohorts. With perhaps 30 to 40 percent of our own faculty retiring in the next decade, reflecting a national trend, fellowships are key to educating the next generation of scholars, researchers, teachers, leaders and innovators.
But recruiting and retaining the most promising students is a challenge. A significant gap exists between what we are able to provide in support for our graduate students and that of competing institutions, such as the University of Michigan and the University of California, and of course our private peers, which typically provide $20 million to $30 million a year in discretionary support for graduate students. Last year, I convened a task force composed of deans, faculty, students and Advancement professionals who recommended ways to better support graduate fellowships. The result is a new $5 million initiative to strengthen recruitment and support of Ph.D. students: $3 million a year through direct funding to departments and another $2 million a year in matching funds. With donor contributions, this will almost triple our current level of institutional graduate fellowship support.
With nearly 60,000 students, more than 4,300 faculty, and 26,000 staff, opportunity, creativity and innovation happen in every classroom, lab, studio, and clinical and research site. We cannot, however, take this success and our rising international prestige for granted. That is why we are making these core investments to support our academic programs. We are playing the long game to build a better university, and to secure a more stable foundation for serving our students and the state of Washington in the future.