Chancellor Michael Drake’s Inaugural Address

April 7, 2006

President Dynes, Chairman Parsky, regents, honored guests, faculty, staff, students and friends.

Thank you.

It has been my great privilege to work at the University of California for three decades. When the university was founded in 1868, California was the land of opportunity and the path to the future for the United States. A century and a half later, California still leads the way. Principle reasons for this are the establishment, growth, and success of the University of California.

It is our opportunity and obligation to continue to lead this university, and by extension Orange County, the nation, and beyond. We have that opportunity here and now, and we have the great chance to lead in a fashion that continuously reaffirms our commitment to exemplify the values that must drive our every decision. We know that if we do that, we will continue to thrive.

When appointed chancellor last spring, I said that I was looking forward to working with four constituencies: students, faculty, staff, and the community. I have been stimulated by the people I’ve met. I’ll mention a few.

Our students are academic stars. One recent example deserves mention. Each year USA Today selects 20 “First Team Academic All-stars” from across the nation to receive a special scholarship. There are over a million college students in this country. This year, Vivek Mehta, a pre-medical student here at the University of California, Irvine, was so honored. He was the only honoree west of Missouri. Congratulations.

Community service is an important part of the experience as well.

The University of California, Irvine has more than 360 student organizations and clubs, many represented here today. Our students engage in a wide variety of community service projects from academic partnerships and tutoring to – just last week – “alternative” spring break activities that include restoring habitat in Arizona and providing relief to Gulf Coast hurricane victims. Closer to home we have the #1 ranked men’s volleyball team in the nation.

We have an incredible faculty. In addition to our Nobel laureates and our two recent National Medal of Science winners, we have dozens of members of the National Academies and the other respective academies. More than 50 outstanding teachers and scholars will join us this fall.

As most of you know, faculty diversity is essential to our future success. I am very pleased that we are making real progress. We must continue to actively recruit faculty and students from underrepresented communities to harness the potential of California’s future. Underrepresented citizens are also underutilized. We need their power and their passion. We will continue to work toward our carefully articulated goal of inclusive excellence.

Faculty productivity continues to soar. Grants for faculty research have already topped $215 million for this fiscal year; nearly 30 percent ahead of last year at this time, and last year was our record.

We have an incredible staff, dedicated to education and service. At a recent staff appreciation day, after I had toured our exciting hospital project – which is on-time and on-budget as it enters its second year – I was proud to announce that oncology nurse Julie Boyle is one of this year’s UCI Medal recipients. Julie is the first staff member to win the medal – our highest honor – and I know she will not be the last.

Students, faculty, staff and our community; at a time when the faint-hearted would retreat, our community supporters have stepped up in record numbers: 19,000 gifts this year already, compared to 14,000 year-to-date last year. This year we raised our annual fund-raising goal from $65 million to $80 million. I am excited to say that with three months left to go, we have roared past our annual goal with gifts to date totaling $82 million.

Most of this money comes from people who have adopted us. Our alumni are young; minivans and soccer practice dominate their lives. Nevertheless, I am thrilled to announce that our alumni have responded this year in record numbers. The number of alumni gifts has more than doubled, from 3,700 to 8,100 so far this year. This is a wonderful achievement for our development office, and heralds a trend we expect to continue for the next decade.

All of these achievements and countless others reflect the power of our campus. The contributions we make to the community are much broader than the estimated $3 billion the campus enterprise contributes annually to the Orange County.

Despite all of these achievements however, higher education, particularly our public university system, currently finds itself under siege. The press, the legislature and members of the general public approach us with skepticism rather than confidence; they look askance at our achievements rather than celebrate them.

So what do we do?

One choice is preemptive capitulation: Turtles do this, but not bears and certainly not Anteaters! The other choice is to move forward boldly. We will move forward boldly. Not simply with business as usual. We need to reaffirm our commitment to live according to our values. We need to work to reestablish ourselves as a values-based organization. This begins at the top and extends throughout the campus: to every employee and faculty member, to every student and campus leader.

University of California alumnus Arthur Ashe, who made his mark on the tennis court but leaves as his legacy his humanity and courage, has a quote that I like:

The quote is: “Start where you are, use what you have, do what you can.”

“Start where you are.”

I have spoken some about where we are; entering our 41st year, we stand as one of the nation’s most distinguished centers of higher education and a member of the world’s leading university system.

“Use what you have.”

This great university is not the bricks and mortar and labs and fields that define our physical space. This university is the people – the hearts and minds and creativity and values that fill this room.

“Do what you can.”

That is the task before us, and what I’d like to devote the balance of my time to discussing.

Our business is higher education and public service. Higher education at the research university includes teaching, but also demands creating new knowledge: new facts, new data, new expressions of art, new interpretations of science, new thinking about the interaction between us as individuals and cultures – and more. Public service includes volunteerism, our health sciences enterprise, and also our implicit obligation as a public university to produce knowledge and products that serve society.

Former UC President Clark Kerr said it well when he opined that “Knowledge makes the world go round, and the university is still the best source of new knowledge.”

Our particular challenge here at the University of California, Irvine, is to compete with better-endowed private institutions for excellence in students, faculty, staff and discovery, while maintaining an affordable, excellent education.

Through the work of many here today, we have developed an extensive strategic plan that illuminates goals for the campus over the coming five years: the addition of new schools in the health sciences and law; growth in the student body and in the proportion of graduate academic students; completion of the New University Hospital and other building projects.

I am excited at what the addition of the new professional schools will bring. In the health sciences, we are currently recruiting a new vice chancellor for health affairs. This person will oversee programs in medicine, nursing, pharmaceutical sciences and public health that will be national models of interprofessional education and will more fully integrate modern theories of health maintenance and disease prevention into our training.

When coupled with the growth in other professional areas, most notably law, our contributions to the local community and national dialogue will soar to a new level.

How do we do it? How do we go about the task?

At convocation – in this room seven months ago – I shared part of my vision for the campus. I pledged to work on completing campus growth plans, and said that I wanted us to exemplify a values-based community. A place where we celebrated and lived by the values that define us.

At the time, my comments were directed mostly toward freshmen and their parents. They were meant to set a standard that we would all strive to emulate. The values I enumerated were these:

• Respect for ourselves and for others;
• Intellectual Curiosity, the joy of learning, discovery, creating and teaching;
• Commitment and rigor, doing a job well;
• Integrity and veracity, telling the truth, establishing and maintaining trust;
• Empathy, seeing, understanding and feeling the circumstances of those around us;
• Appreciation, the evolved version of tolerance: non-hierarchical, devoid of condescension; and
• Fun.

How good we feel when we are with people who live those values, how proud and enriching we are when we ourselves live them.

Our task going forward is simple. Not simple as in easy, but rather simple as in straightforward. In dozens, even hundreds of decisions we each make daily, we have the opportunity to advance ourselves and our community by making those decisions according to our values. We know the values. We agree with them. The task is making sure we create an entity that lives by those values, and I pledge to do everything I can to help make that dream a reality.

I will close with two poems that mean a great deal to me. The first deals with the painful process of learning life’s lessons. It is by Aeschylus.

While we are sleeping, sadness that cannot forget, falls,
Drop by drop upon the heart, until,
In our own despair,
And against our will comes wisdom,
Through the awful grace of God

Life’s lessons can be tough, greatness lies in how we implement what we learn.

The second poem, which has certainly guided me for years, and reflects the transcendent example set for me by my father, and as a special blessing by Brenda’s father, is by Tagore. I recited it on my first day on campus.

I slept and Dreamt of Joy. I awoke to find a life of service. I acted, and behold: Service is Joy.

Working in this place – at this university – is a privilege. When we conduct this work according to our values, it is joy. I am committed to working with you to do our collective best, to get it right. The university’s motto “Let there be light” was aptly chosen to reflect the brilliance of the activity that has taken place, is taking place, and will continue to take place on our campus, and in our communities.

I see that light in the faces of our students, and in the reflected glow from their parents, I see it in the eyes of our faculty in their laboratories, emanating from performers on our stages. I see it in the colleagues surrounding me on this stage as they allow themselves to dream, and fight for the realization of their dreams, to see this, our greatest of universities contribute in new and more powerful ways each day. I see it in all of you here as you walk with us in this enterprise.

I am proud and honored to walk with you. Thank you very much, Fiat Lux.

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