You can think of these programs as posters for the main subject of my speech. Today I want to invite you to join with me in a conversation about the future—a conversation that will lead us toward a collective sense of the UW’s strategic opportunities and responsibilities in a changing world. It must be an open conversation involving all elements of the University community, on and beyond our campuses.

This is the right time for a conversation about the future.

It is the right time because we are ready to build on what we have already done to promote change at the University of Washington. And it is the right time because there is a growing interest in many quarters in having a clear, bright, ambitious picture of what the UW will be in the 21^st century.

We have laid the groundwork for the future:

It would be impossible to sum up succinctly the results of these changes, but two directions stand out: the massive integration of our core missions of teaching, research, and service, giving a sense of direction to the entire institution; and the development of a much greater outward orientation toward the larger communities of which our University is a part.

So I want to acknowledge all the hard, thoughtful work of the past few years in making changes and taking new directions. These are real, tangible achievements, not just a checklist of things we would like to do. The Regents recently affirmed their confidence in these directions and their pride in our accomplishments. Everyone here can feel good about the University of Washington and about what we have done together to advance its goals. These achievements have positioned us well to look to the future.

Throughout the state, wherever I go, people are asking about our future:

So let me tell you in more detail what I have in mind for this conversation about the future—its characteristics and purposes, the process by which we might carry it out, and the hoped-for outcomes.

First the characteristics:

So if these are some of the characteristics of the conversation, what would its purposes be?

A conversation about the future will break down barriers across disciplines; reduce the alienation and isolation felt by some faculty, staff, and students; and build new ties within our community. Just having the conversation will be a good thing for the UW. We draw from our enormous intellectual strength and our unique position in society—without the pressures of a “bottom line” and with the opportunities for study and reflection that are basic within a university. The UW cannot make good decisions for the years ahead unless we take advantage of these strengths to think hard together about what the future will bring.

Another purpose is to identify core values we share across the disciplines. Although we go about our work in very different ways around the campus, there are some common reasons we chose to do this work of teaching, research, and service. The values that lie behind those reasons are worth identifying and expressing. In the process, we’ll discover there are tensions between some of our shared values, and those tensions are also worth acknowledging.

Facing the future together will also contribute to further changes within the University. As the conversation goes forward, departments and programs will learn from one another and identify directions they hadn’t recognized before. People will want to change and align themselves with future-oriented opportunities.

Turning outward, there are at least two more big purposes that will be served by a conversation about the future:

It will assist us in articulating how the UW can contribute to the larger society, beginning with our own students and reaching out across the state and around the world. Let me practice my own discipline of history for a moment in order to explain what I mean. When the history of our century, now drawing to a close, is written, four developments will be regarded as among its signature accomplishments: winning the Cold War; expanding educational opportunities for those who previously didn’t have them; improving human health and longevity; and promoting economic development. There’s no way to tell the story of those 20^th century accomplishments without linking them to the work of research universities and yes, to this University. The record is there.

So we want to make sure that the UW is just as ambitiously connected to the most important human goals of the 21^st century as it has been in the 20^th. No one can predict exactly what those goals and challenges will be. But we can consciously position ourselves for this role by thinking about the future together and by articulating how our University’s intellectual strengths enable us to contribute to the larger world.

Finally, a conversation about the future can help us improve external communications. Having the conversation will enable us to say more clearly to citizens, donors, legislators, to everyone with an interest—who we are, what we’re about, and what we plan for the years ahead. As president, I will be able to do a better job of explaining the UW’s goals and needs and seeking support for them—and so will each of you—after we have had this conversation.

So those are some of the purposes. They are ambitious goals, with real prospects for bettering our University. The next question is how should we conduct this conversation about the future? What would the process be? Here are some qualities I believe our process ought to have.

The process should be engaging intellectually. It must be something that everybody wants to take part in, because it’s exciting and stimulating.

It must be an open conversation and must be perceived and felt to be open. Nothing is prejudged and nobody is excluded.

It has to occur within departments and programs and schools and colleges, but also across them. It must truly embrace the whole university.

Finally it must include external as well as internal constituencies. We want to invite everyone into this look at the future, listen hard to what they say, and give them some ownership of the results.

So what exactly should we do? How can we get everyone involved? Here are some suggestions that have emerged in recent discussions involving Regents, Faculty Senate leaders, and deans. They are starting points. Many other voices need to be heard, including faculty, staff, and students. This speech is itself part of the process—an effort to invite you into the conversation.

Here are some of the possibilities:

There should be many processes, organized by any and every constituency and using every medium of communication—face-to-face meetings, written statements, and electronic communications. Participants should include Regents, faculty, departments, the Faculty Senate, students, staff, alumni, visiting committees, advisory boards: everyone with an interest in the future and in the strategic opportunities before the University of Washington. I will propose a list of events to launch the conversation. Everyone is invited to add to the list.

Now what of the content of the conversation about the future? Nothing has been decided, but because of who we are there are certain subjects we are likely to discuss. Please regard what I say as illustrative, rather than definitive.

One key component of the conversation is likely to be education itself, our core mission. Education is what everyone expects from us. But teaching and learning are being radically transformed by political, marketplace, and technological forces. In the years ahead, education is going to be provided in a new environment, in response to new needs, and through methods not dreamed of until very recently. There are suddenly many other educational providers besides institutions like ours. I believe that most students will still want to come to campuses like this for their higher education. But many of them will not be able to come here and even those who do will want to take advantage of learning opportunities offered elsewhere via the internet.

So I want to highlight two areas regarding the future of education itself. First are the possibilities presented by new applications of information technology. Second is the continued, radical expansion of our students’ opportunities to engage in research and other forms of experiential learning. The UW already offers a lot of education via the internet. There are dozens and dozens of courses and programs, and there will probably be a couple more by the time this speech is finished. One of the goals for me and the administration this year is to formulate and articulate UW strategies for the application of information technology to our core missions. I need your help to do that. We also need to continue to increase our students’ research, community-based learning, international education, and other forms of experiential learning. The UW has embarked heavily in this direction, and thousands of our students are already benefiting. This, too, is likely to be an important part of our conversation about the future.

A second subject I feel pretty sure we’ll want to talk about, besides education itself, are areas of opportunity where the UW can make a difference in the future. These will be fields where we are positioned by history, or expertise, geographic location, or other comparative advantages to contribute to the expansion of knowledge and, where appropriate, to applying that knowledge to human problems. I am referring, of course, to research, our other core mission besides education.

That is the mission that distinguishes universities like ours from most other institutions of higher education. It is important in its own right and not just because it may have practical benefits. But the UW has a long tradition of applying research results to real-world challenges. This goes on in every school and college within our University. Think of Nursing, Public Health, Ocean and Fishery Sciences, Engineering, Education, Forest Resources, and Social Work. Our colleagues in those schools and colleges have been addressing real, human problems ever since they were established.

So let’s use our conversation about the future to identify areas where the UW has historic, geographic, or comparative advantages, areas where we can make contributions because we have distinctive strengths or opportunities. I hesitate to give examples, but I will anyway because I want you to see what I mean. This list is intended to be illustrative, not exhaustive. It enumerates fields where the UW already has academic distinction, based on historic efforts and comparative advantages.

These are fields in which the UW has already exploited its comparative advantages to achieve excellence. Our conversation about the future should strive to identify other areas in which this University has special opportunities to excel during the years ahead.

So, in summary, I hope the conversation will touch on both of these important subjects—the ways in which we educate our students and the exploration of unique opportunities for intellectual distinction. Our process will be free and open, however, and the content will be determined through that process.

What tangible outcomes should we expect from the conversation I am proposing? How will we know if it was a success? One thing I do not expect is a single vision statement to which we would all subscribe and which might be perceived as a straitjacket for departments and programs.

But I do envision a series of documents that could emerge from this:

Here are some other signs by which we’ll know if this process was successful:

One of the most important outcomes of this conversation will be an improved ability to convince external audiences of the value of what we do here, and yes, to increase their material support for our University.

The challenge of communicating what we do in a research university is difficult. It will always be difficult. Still, we can count some successes in the last year.

In the 1999 legislative session, we made important headway on our highest-priority budget request, faculty and staff salaries. We are not yet where we need to be, but the governor and the legislature clearly heard our message, understood our problem, and responded to our strategy for fixing it. We also won expanded enrollment on all three campuses and some flexibility in setting tuition and using the revenues where we need them most. We’ll be able to renovate Suzzallo Library, build a new law school, and continue construction of our new campuses at Bothell and Tacoma. Perhaps one of the most satisfying outcomes of the 1999 legislative session is the recognition in Olympia of the value of research, as expressed through the Advanced Technology Initiative.

Among our most successful communications strategies in the past few years has been the use of faculty and students to carry our message. On my tours around the state, in visits with legislators and newspaper editorial boards, and on the new-faculty bus tour, faculty and students have been responsible for some real breakthroughs. They are especially good in communicating what’s happening at the University and what our work means to the people of the state. Nobody can say it better than our faculty and students. I don’t make these trips anymore without having some of them with me.

What we learn in those conversations around the state is that the public’s expectations for higher education are pretty basic and solid: quality, affordability, efficiency, and diversity. They want access to good education at a price ordinary people can afford. This core expectation must never be forgotten.

So citizens and communities across the state, and their representatives in the legislature, are important audiences. And there are others: students, parents, alumni, the business community, the media, national research agencies, and members of Congress. During the past year, support for research at the UW increased again, to an astonishing total of over $600 million. Most of the research funding came from the federal government, but some of it comes from the State of Washington and from partners in business and industry. Our faculty and staff can take a lot of pride in the continued excellence of UW research. That research is vitally important in its own right. It is also valuable because of the contributions it makes to our other missions of teaching and service.

Another important audience is made up of donors and potential donors. The University’s record-setting fund raising during the past year indicates that we’re communicating pretty well with this audience. But we can never rest on our laurels. Private philanthropy makes the difference between doing just OK and doing very, very well. Where there’s excellence at the UW, it is usually because of a combination of sources of support, including private gifts. One of my highest hopes for our conversation about the future is that it will position the UW to communicate even more effectively with potential donors. They understandably will ask: “Where is the University going in the years ahead? How can my gift make a difference to the achievement of important goals?” We must have answers to those questions.

No family in the history of the UW has been more generous or far-sighted in its support than the Gates family. Today I have the pleasure of announcing the newest gift from Bill and Melinda Gates, $3 million for two endowed chairs in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. This brings to $47 million the University’s total gifts from Bill and Melinda Gates. It will enlarge our already-strong CSE department’s capacity to recruit and retain outstanding faculty—a challenge that is also faced by many other UW departments. The Gates gift comes at a critical time for Computer Science and Engineering at the UW. Identifying support for its new building is the University’s top priority in capital fund raising.

All of these sources of support enable the UW to do the work for which it was established. As we communicate about our work, two areas will continue to be especially important and sensitive: the recruitment and retention of a diverse, as well as outstanding, student body and our partnerships with the K-12 schools.

The UW remains committed to having a student body that is as diverse as the population of our state. It is important to equalize educational opportunity. And everyone gets a better education in the company of people who are different from themselves. The decline of diversity in this year’s freshman class is deeply disappointing. There are 36 percent fewer African-American freshmen, 30 percent fewer Hispanic/Latino students, and 15 percent fewer Native Americans compared to the freshman class of 1998. I am determined to turn this around through new and expanded programs of outreach and recruitment in the middle schools and high schools. We are hopeful that because of these new programs the freshman class of 2000 will be more diverse. But make no mistake about it: this challenge of maintaining diversity will be with us for a long time to come, at least as long as any of us are here.

This brings me to the subject of the K-12 schools and especially the UW’s partnerships with them. If there ever were a time when universities could ignore the broader educational system, that time has passed. Citizens are working to move the public schools forward, and they expect our help. We can and should make a difference, in areas where we have strengths and expertise. And we are. This is a place where the University of Washington is contributing mightily to large social goals.

UW faculty, staff, and students have been engaged with the K-12 schools for many years. This is true in our College of Education, and it is also true around the campus. For a quarter century the Physics Education Group has enjoyed continuous NSF support for its six-week Summer Institute for teachers and for the associated academic year programs. Several of our physics colleagues are nationally recognized experts in preparing teachers to do inquiry-based science in their classrooms. The effort in physics is very special, but believe it or not at last count there were over 150 K-12 education programs based in more than 100 UW departments.

More recently the UW has undertaken some new K-12 projects in areas where we have some special expertise. We are not an all-purpose support agency for the schools, but it does make sense for us to try to make a difference where we have the ability to do so. Here are some of the newer programs:

These initiatives illustrate a theme you have heard before in this talk: the ability and indeed the obligation of our University to make a difference where there are human needs and where we have the expertise to help. And that, in turn, brings us back to the future—and the future we envision for the University of Washington.

Talking about the future is not easy. It can be scary. It can be difficult to get our arms around, especially in a University community as large and varied as ours. I believe, however, that here at the UW a willingness to look to the future represents our best chance to understand our special strengths and to identify areas where we can be excellent and where we can make a difference. Imagine if those who came before us had not aligned the University’s work with the greatest opportunities and challenges of the 20^th century—scientific research in the nation’s service, educational opportunity for thousands, healthy lives for men and women, economic progress in our land. We must connect our University to challenges just as great for the century ahead. Consciously facing the future together as a University community—that is the project to which I invite you.

This is the beginning of my fifth year as President of the University of Washington. Since I arrived here in 1995, much has changed. We have moved closer to a real integration of our three core missions, teaching, research, and service. We have deepened our communications and our connections with the larger communities of which we are a part. We have established the means for planning and enabling change in our departments and programs.

Having learned about the University’s distinguished past, having wrestled with its current challenges, and having thought so much about its future promise and perils, I have come to a deep sense of personal identification with this institution—all that it represents and all that it can be.

So in that spirit I want to close by recognizing my own responsibility to provide leadership for the University as it talks about the future. Together we can paint a bright, ambitious picture of the UW and its future opportunities. Success will depend on all of us, because only a picture that inspires wide assent will have the power to lead us forward. I pledge to give my best to that effort. I know you will give your best as well.

Thank you.