President’s Page

The Class of 2019 will graduate this May. I still find myself exhilarated by these milestones after more than 40 years as a part of this community. Graduation marks a season of accomplishment and celebration. It also offers an opportunity for reflection.

As I’ve said many times over the last year and a half, I never expected to find myself in the position of leading this institution. When I stepped down as dean of the College two years ago, I was looking forward to a return to my career as a philosophy professor.

Instead, I was surprised—and humbled—to be asked to lead the University through an important period of transition. I am grateful to everyone who entrusted me with this honor and everyone who worked with me during this time. Though I have spent my academic career here, I now have a more deeply grounded understanding of Rochester and all it stands for. I have a much greater appreciation for the breadth and depth of our collective talents. Hearing from, meeting with, and learning more about so many of you has been a true pleasure.

Our motto Meliora frames a certain expectation for excellence. We are a community of scholars, students, researchers, teachers, staff members, artists, performers, and clinicians, who every day are making the surrounding world better. That work is often selfless and often unremarked on, but it grows ever stronger.

As president, I have been privileged to observe progress in all our academic programs, with all schools, units, and the Medical Center demonstrating success.

The Warner School of Education and Arts, Sciences & Engineering have welcomed outstanding new deans. The School of Nursing climbed five spots to 21st in the 2018 ranking of NIH–funded research. The MBA program at the Simon Business School was named the “Program of the Year” by the publication Poets & Quants.

The Eastman School of Music and the Medical Center have launched Eastman Performing Arts Medicine, a project aimed at wellness education and integration of performance in hospital and rehabilitation environments. The Medical Center, a national leader in research as well as care, is overseeing the largest long-term investigation of brain development and child health ever undertaken in the United States.

The River Campus Libraries is collaborating with AS&E to respond to the vibrant research occurring in augmented and virtual reality on a project called “Studio X”—Experience-Explore-Experiment.

The current first-year class in the College represents one of the most selective and academically qualified groups of students ever admitted to Rochester. While final figures won’t be available until later this year, we expect the Class of 2023 to be just as outstanding. Our faculty members are being widely recognized for their efforts to change the humanistic and scientific landscape worldwide.

In December, I had the opportunity to attend the Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm at the invitation of alumna Donna Strickland, who earned her PhD here in 1989 and made history as only the third woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Physics. She joins a cadre of Rochester alums such as Richard Thaler ’74 (PhD), former Secretary of Energy Steven Chu ’70, and Arthur Kornberg ’41M (MD), who have been recognized for their contributions to humanity and society.

Professor Strickland’s work at our Laboratory for Laser Energetics reflects Rochester’s mission as a top research university. Her study of chirped-pulse amplification has aided a broad range of innovations from cancer treatments to eye surgery to smartphone technology and how we understand energy at an atomic level.

Professor Strickland’s honor, and our pride in the shared affiliation, underscores that the spirit of Meliora is driven less by a desire for recognition and more by an ambition to leave our world, and the University community, better than we found it.

I anticipate that the Vision & Values Statement we adopted last year will continue to anchor our individual and collective interactions. We have refashioned policies and strengthened training programs. We have collaborated to make our practices and processes more understandable, and our resources more accessible. We have tried to be as transparent about our actions as possible. We are working to build and develop a new Office of Equity and Inclusion that will form the center for our ongoing efforts.

We will continue the hard work of building a culture in which everyone can thrive, where we respect and value the contributions of others. As a university, we are a laboratory of ideas. We embody a wide variety of thoughts and experiences. We often disagree, but some of the best ideas are born out of disagreement and explored through thoughtful discourse.

More than ever, it is critical for us to use our tradition of constructive dialogue as a foundation for strengthening our Culture of Respect, and to continue having difficult conversations that break down walls.

I am confident that the University, under the leadership of President Sarah Mangelsdorf, will continue to draw strength from our shared commitment to equity, inclusion, and the ideal of Meliora.

Having been vested with the responsibility of stewarding this institution through an interim period of growth and reflection, I hope that I will leave the institution better than I found it. I’m gratified by what we have been able to accomplish, and I look forward to an ever stronger future.