New Faculty and Academic Professional Orientation

I am pleased to welcome you to the faculty and staff of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The quality of persons this institution has attracted to its faculty and staff over many generations has been and continues to be enormously impressive. Our ability to recruit, year after year, people of exceptional talent and dedication is vital to maintaining the highest level of excellence in all that we do.

For a long time, Urbana-Champaign has been one of the handful of renowned public institutions that everyone who works in higher education knows something about. Illinois was one of the original group of thirty-three land-grant universities chartered under the Morrill Act signed by President Lincoln. It played a central role in defining the public research university throughout the twentieth century. This last year, it tied for first place in the annual quality rankings of research universities compiled by the Lombardi Center on Measuring University Performance; our peers were UC—Berkeley, UCLA, Michigan, Wisconsin, and North Carolina.

It is likely that, during the process of being recruited here, you encountered lots of information about our faculty, our scope, our signal achievements over the years, our programs, our buildings and laboratories, our library, and all the rest. So I don’t propose to talk about those things this morning. Instead, I’d like to spend a few minutes talking about what lies beneath all of that — the values, the beliefs, the aspirations, and the determination to achieve that make up the heart of the institution you are now joining.

I am still a bit of a newcomer myself. When I arrived on campus in 1998, I brought with me a newcomer’s curiosity to learn all that I could about the university. I walked about the campus and noticed especially the names on the buildings — Noyes, Adams, Bevier, Davenport, Loomis, and the others — giants in their fields whose shadows continue to fall on this place. Over time, I naturally heard, as you will hear, stories about notable faculty members, past and present. The stories were sometimes funny, sometimes moving, sometimes amazing, and always humbling. I began to notice some common threads interwoven among these stories, connecting the past to the present, threads that helped me begin to understand how Illinois was able to rise to such heights. It did not take me long to figure out that there was an ethos here that was different from other public universities with which I was familiar.

The story of this institution is the story of the remarkable people who fashioned it across the generations, across so many fields of learning, and of their successors — whom you now join — who continue to remake it in new ways. They exemplify, in different ways, the rare joining of determination, ability, commitment to excellence, and, sometimes, genius that marks the academy at its best. At its highest levels, excellence attracts excellence, people of extraordinary ability, students and faculty, who came to Illinois and still come for the chance to work with colleagues who were themselves extraordinary.

One of the qualities that marks the people whose legacy is now passed on to us is vision. From presidents of the university to deans to builders of departments to exceptional faculty and staff —the history of the university is found in how these visions overlap each other, complement each other, and sometimes collide with each other to shape an institution. As you learn about your new university, you may also be struck, as I was, by how often and in how many different ways this institution was willing to take risks at critical junctures—investing in new ideas, new directions, new fields whose promise was by no means certain. This courage and willingness to support innovation emerges throughout our history as a fundamental characteristic of the institution, one that I hope continues in the present day.

Moreover, the stories of our predecessors show how in every generation a uniquely American idea—the land-grant, public university—has provided the compass for guiding Illinois. From its beginnings in the Civil War era through the high aspirations built in the early twentieth century to its rise to prominence in the post-war era, the university has been shaped in profound ways by the land-grant commitments: to offer the very best education to each generation, to engage the most vexing problems of the day, to uplift the possibilities of the future, and to be a vital part of the society it serves.

So in welcoming you to Illinois, I invite you to take up the stewardship and the challenge of a long and rich legacy of excellence. The university provides much to enable you to bring your highest aspirations within reach. I’m told that we provide more institutional funds to support faculty research than any university in America. I know that we offer you the largest library in any public university in the world. We have built here a faculty member’s university, an institution that is ambitious and entrepreneurial, that organizes itself to help you get your work done, that strives to provide the finest staff and facilities to support our academic work, where you will encounter colleagues who are leading the way across the broad scope of traditional and emerging disciplines and fields of knowledge. And, you will encounter an institution that, in its soul, prizes excellence above all else.

We expect much in return. The legacy of your predecessors demands your very best. It challenges you to accept no comprises in the pursuit of excellence, to stand on the shoulders of giants, in Isaac Newton’s lovely phrase, to see over the horizon and take us to new heights we cannot yet imagine, and to join us in refashioning the ideal of the public research university to meet the challenges and fulfill the promises of the twenty-first century.

There is a nobility of purpose here, a world of heady opportunities. I welcome you to our great undertaking. I wish you every success. And, I look forward to what you will achieve and contribute, what you will add to our legacy in the years ahead.