Address to Alumni During 2017 Reunion Weekend

Good afternoon. I’m very pleased that we have reinstated the tradition of the reunion weekend presidential address. I welcome this opportunity to speak to you about this great university that we all love so much. I should point out that I’m speaking not only to those of you in this room, but we’re also live streaming this event so our alumni and friends around the world can “attend.” So greetings to everyone, even those who can’t physically be with us this weekend.    

One of my favorite authors is David Mitchell. There is a line in his book Cloud Atlas that I want to share:

“…. there ain’t no journey what don’t change you some.”

I am sure this applies to your college years, it applies to Lehigh, and it also applies to me as I near the end of my second year at Lehigh. So before I talk about where we want to take Lehigh in the years ahead, I’d like to give you some insights into what I’ve learned about Lehigh on my 690th day in the job. (But who’s counting?) In the fall of 2015 I embarked on what was dubbed the “Our Lehigh” tour of 10 different cities, to speak to and, more importantly, to listen to our alums.

The energy I encountered in those rooms was simply amazing, there’s no other way to put it. I came away deeply impressed by the passion you, our alumni, have for Lehigh, by the intense pride you feel as Lehigh graduates, and by your commitment to assuring a strong future for Lehigh. We are what we are because many of you have partnered with Lehigh to “make it happen”: you come back to campus to interact with the students and faculty; you attend events and then tell your friends, colleagues, fellow alums, and prospective students about the exciting things taking place here; you volunteer your time and your talent; you like us on Facebook and Instagram; you provide internships, externships, jobs, and career advice to current Lehigh students and other alumni; and you place Lehigh as a high priority in your charitable investments. I ask that you never underestimate the impact you have on today’s students – you are their inspiration. You demonstrate what is possible through earning a Lehigh degree.

I learned that we are an international university. About 9% of the class of 2020 are international students and come from 29 countries. Over 40% of Monday’s graduating class participated in an international experience during their time here. Our students take advantage of more than 250 study abroad programs in 74 countries. We are dedicated to further globalizing our mission through a systematic and sustained engagement between the Lehigh community and the world at large. We do this through programs such as the Iacocca International Internships; this summer, the sixth cohort of Iacocca Interns, a total of 101 Lehigh students, will go forth to 29 different countries to encounter life-changing experiences. Some 40% of our graduate and professional students are international and come from 51 countries. Speaking as an ex-research scientist, I can attest that research today is both interdisciplinary and global; some of the best work I was engaged in was as a member of a global research team, and many at Lehigh work in similar arenas.

Speaking of our students, there is much I’ve learned about them. Having a son in the class of 2019 provides me with a window into Lehigh student life. Our students are a truly outstanding group of young women and men. Despite the rigors of their academic coursework, they find the time to do … a lot! Here’s a very incomplete list: They are Patriot League Champions in football and softball … they work with South Bethlehem schoolchildren in after-school homework clubs … they organize blood drives and go on spring break service trips ... they run highly successful events like Dance Marathon and Relay for Life to raise money for good causes. The Wilbur Power House, our shops, and our arts studios are occupied at all hours with students creating sculptures, painting, 3D-printing invention prototypes, racing cars. Our choral arts, philharmonic and jazz orchestras, theater ensembles, and acapella groups are exceptional.

Our students are makers. They designed and built a prototype for the Hyperloop transportation system proposed by Elon Musk. The “HyperHawk,” a 3,300-pound, human-scale pod, is capable of accelerating to over 200 miles per hour. As one of 21 semi-finalists competing for the Shell Ocean Discovery XPrize (to build new technology to map the seafloor down to a resolution of just five meters), the Lehigh Tide team is creating a cost-effective autonomous underwater vehicle that can accurately scan the ocean bottom.

We’ve long known that our Marching 97 is unique among university bands – and now they’re being recognized for their excellence, as they will be traveling to England to march in the 2018 New Year’s Day Parade in London. The support for this trip from the band alumni has been fantastic. There was an amazing day earlier this year when the Lord Mayor of Westminster, Catherine Longworth, came over from England and invited the band to participate in the parade. Needless to say, the living room of the President’s House was loud as the band carried out a miniature version of their renowned “eco-flame.”

I want to return to David Mitchell and specifically his book The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet:

“A great teacher attains immortality in his students.”

We have a great faculty at Lehigh – they are among the nation’s best teachers and researchers. I am confident many of you remember specific faculty members and the impact they made on your life. As administrators, we use our resources to support the outstanding teaching and research of our faculty; it is through these activities that we provide excellence in education. One informs the other; we should never think of teaching and research as separate activities.

Back to David Mitchell and his book The Bone Clocks:

“If life didn’t change, it wouldn’t be life, it’d be a photograph.”

This also applies to the lives of institutions. We must understand where we came from, the shoulders upon which we stand, so that we can strategically become what we need to be. Lehigh must never become a photograph. During my installation speech, which seems like it was yesterday, I commented that in the life of any institution, there are certain key moments in time that present themselves, moments when the institution collectively arrives at a crossroads. I think of these moments as “pivot points,” because how the institution reacts to them, the decisions made and the courses charted, have reverberations (positive or negative) for years to come.

Lehigh has experienced several such pivot points throughout its life. In fact, at its beginning, the institution pivoted away from the conventional approach to education. At the end of the Civil War, Asa Packer saw an urgent need for educated people who would rebuild the country. In 1865, he donated 57 acres of land on South Mountain and $500,000 – the largest gift to any educational facility at the time – to establish Lehigh University.

Packer changed the notion of what a university could look like, of what higher education could be like. At Lehigh, you did not choose between studying the classics and studying technology. Lehigh fused them together, to provide an education that was purposeful in its intent and wide-ranging in its application.

Packer was personally responsible for the abolition of tuition in 1871, which made Lehigh accessible to all who were qualified; he subsequently paid the bills that tuition would have covered. Today we honor that legacy through our need-blind admissions and meeting demonstrated need policies – an outcome that has been made possible because of donations in support of scholarships and financial aid. Packer also made the decision to build a library to merge all of the departments’ collections, against the advice of others who argued that it was not yet needed – but Asa was confident it would be needed. So he funded Linderman Library in 1873 (following the death of his daughter Lucy Packer Linderman). The library, which was built in memory of his daughter, officially opened in April 1878. Today, Linderman Library is one of Lehigh’s treasures. The year before he died, Packer met with a group of young alumni who asked that Lehigh be transformed into a strictly technical institution. Packer quietly observed that the university seemed to be getting along fine as it was – securing its path to becoming the intellectually rich university that it is today. Following World War II, the debate was whether Lehigh should remain primarily an undergraduate school or whether, to achieve excellence, the institution needed to enhance research and graduate education.

At that pivot point in the university’s life, President Martin Dewey Whitaker made a bold decision. He asked the trustees for permission to use nearly half of the university’s reserve fund of $600,000 to purchase research equipment; the trustees agreed. In tandem with a newly revitalized Institute of Research, the die was cast: Lehigh had made the decision to become a research university. This turned out to be a defining moment in the school’s life; during Whitaker’s tenure, Lehigh’s assets nearly tripled, the endowment more than doubled; many buildings were renovated, and the Dravo and M&M residence halls were built. The number of professors increased by 75%, and the first distinguished professorships were established. Later, in subsequent administrations, would come a similar realization that Lehigh had opportunities to excel in the humanities, social sciences, arts, education, and business – and that these opportunities needed to be seized, or the possibility would be lost.

Now we stand at another critical juncture in the life of this great university. Today’s pivot point results from the confluence of economics, technology, demographics, global hot spots, and changing societal expectations. Society demands that we educate this generation with the skills and experiences they will need to navigate an ever-changing world, all at an affordable cost.

So we have begun our second 150 years with what we are calling our Path to Prominence. Our aim is to build a more dynamic, powerful, and eminent academic community. The Path to Prominence includes the following goals:

We will add 100 new faculty members, with a focus on recruiting highly respected and ambitious researchers who can further bolster Lehigh’s reputation as a leading research institution. This will serve to increase the impact of our intellectual footprint. About half of this growth with be associated with a new college focused on health. This college, Lehigh’s fifth, will build on our core strengths and allow us to prepare students for success in the thriving and ever-growing health care sector.

We will increase our enrollment, over a period of several years, by 1,000 undergraduate students and 500 to 800 full-time graduate students. Growing the student population will, in turn, add to the vitality of our campus and foster a more dynamic community of teaching, learning, and research.

We will build new residential communities to accommodate the growth in enrollment. We are currently looking at an apartment-style residence hall on the Brodhead parking lot that could house about 400 students. And we are looking at the area where Trembley Park Apartment Complex currently stands (these were built as temporary structures in 1975) for creation of a community we are calling “Bridge West” that could house up to 800 students; the design and implementation of this residential village would be linked to renovations that will transform the iconic University Center into a modern and more functional space for our students. Not to worry, the façade will remain intact! Our aim is to give all of our students a residential experience that is second to none.

We are planning a new science and research building and important upgrades to research spaces and facilities across Lehigh, including the continued renovations at Mountaintop for key academic initiatives.

Of course, we could not dream big like this if it weren’t for the support of you, our alumni. So I thank you on behalf of our students, who benefit the most from your continued generosity.

Nor can we do everything we want to do on our own. It takes key partnerships with like-minded individuals and organizations. And it takes “outside the box” thinking so that we can, in the words of Provost Farrell, “prepare our students for a future we never thought of.”

One such partnership is occurring up on the Mountaintop. Summer 2017 will mark the second consecutive summer that Lehigh students will work alongside students from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, the premier design-focused university. In addition to the Pratt students who will participate in Bethlehem this summer, for the first time as part of this partnership, Lehigh students will travel to New York to work with Pratt students and faculty at the Brooklyn Fashion + Design Accelerator, where they will work to pioneer the technology of wearable fabrics.

We recently launched what we affectionately refer to as “our West Coast living room,” Lehigh@NasdaqCenter, which is a partnership between Lehigh University and the Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center in San Francisco. This semester, one of our current parents, Tom Gillis, led the teaching of a course from the Nasdaq Center to students here at Lehigh. We partnered with the Center, affiliating Lehigh student groups with entrepreneurs identified by Nasdaq’s milestone maker program. We have several summer programs taking place in San Francisco over the next few months; for example, students working in LaunchBay C – a Student Idea Accelerator – will be doing their work in the Center this coming June, giving them access to the entrepreneurial ecosystem of Silicon Valley.

As we look to the future, what about our student body? We know we will experience even greater competition for the most talented students because of changing demographics and economic trends. More students will come from areas beyond Lehigh’s traditional regions. More students will be coming to us with financial needs. In addition, more young women and men will be from underrepresented populations, and more will be first-generation college students. With this in mind, Lehigh was one of the initial 30 colleges and universities, both public and private, that made a commitment to the American Talent Initiative, an initiative supported by the Aspen Institute and Bloomberg Philanthropies. This is a partnership designed to increase the number of talented lower- and moderate-income students attending those U.S. institutions with the highest graduation rates.

I’ll conclude by returning to David Mitchell – Cloud Atlas:

 “A life spent shaping a world I want Jackson (my son) to inherit, not one I fear Jackson shall inherit, this strikes me as a life worth the living.”

With your help, we will continue to innovate at Lehigh, to assure that our future alumni, like you, receive an outstanding education so that they can make a difference in their world. I’ll leave you with the lyrics of Eugene Raskin put to an old Russian romance song composed by Boris Fomin, and made famous by Mary Hopkin in 1968.

“Those were the days my friend
We thought they’d never end
We’d sing and dance forever and a day
We’d live the life we choose
We’d fight and never lose
For we were young and sure to have our way.
Those were the days, oh yes, those were the days.”

Enjoy your reunion and your time on campus. Now I would like to invite some of the members of Lehigh’s senior leadership team to join me on stage for questions.