Office of the University Chancellor

Introduction and acknowledgements

Thank you, Professor (Diane) Henshel, for that kind introduction.

It is a great pleasure to present to my fellow faculty members and colleagues, and to the broader university community, my 13th annual State of the University address which of course, comes during our celebration of one of the most momentous milestones in IU's history, the 200th anniversary of Indiana University’s founding on January 20, 1820.

I am delighted to welcome a number of special guests who have joined us this afternoon.

First, I am very pleased to welcome a member of the Indiana University Board of Trustees who is with us today. Trustee Jim Morris of Indianapolis is here with his wife, Jackie. Please join me in welcoming them.

Also with us are President Emeritus of Indiana University Tom Ehrlich, and former IU First Lady, Ellen Ehrlich. On Friday, President Ehrlich will take part in a panel discussion on the Indianapolis campus about IU’s history of community service in celebration of the establishment of the National Service Archive, a collection that will tell the stories of civic service and volunteerism in America, and which President Ehrlich was instrumental in helping to bring to IU. Please join me in welcoming Tom and Ellen Ehrlich.

Also with us today are the former First Lady of Indiana University, and Emerita Associate Professor of Philosophy on the IUPUI campus, Dr. Peg Brand Weiser, and her and Myles Brand's son, Josh Brand, who serves as Vice President of External Relations at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts. Please join me in welcoming Peg Brand Weiser and Josh Brand.

Prepared for the next century

We are now in our Bicentennial Year. Due to the outstanding work of the Director of the Bicentennial Kelly Kish, her staff, and thousands of others in IU and beyond, this year will see a dazzling and reflective series of over 400 events which will celebrate this truly unique year.

In my previous 12 State of the University addresses, I have reported on recent progress or discussed new initiatives. But nearly all of them referenced the looming Bicentennial and its importance. A constant theme was "Preparing for the Bicentennial." We took a major step forward in my 2013 address with the announcement of the beginning of the development of the IU Bicentennial Strategic Plan, approved by the Trustees the next year. This has guided much of the effort for the last five years and a final report on its success and accomplishments will be given next June at the end of the Bicentennial Year.

However, the dominating theme of so much we have done over the last 12 years has been focused on preparing IU to meet the challenges of its third century and to complete these preparations by the Bicentennial.

So, my Bicentennial State of the University address will discuss some of the overwhelmingly successfully results of this preparation. I have focused on nine key areas but there is much of major importance that, in the interests of time, I have had to leave out.

Ensuring affordability, accessibility, and student success

Indiana University enters its third century highly affordable with among the lowest tuition among their peers for our various campuses. Tuition increases have been below higher education inflation levels the last five years. It will be essential to ensure they remain this way on all of our campuses, especially in a climate of increasing competition caused by demographic pressures and stagnant personal income for many Hoosiers. This will not be easy in an environment of rising costs as measured by the Higher Education Price Index, and declining state support as a percentage of IU's total operating budget.

It has taken—and will continue to take—constant attention to ways of keeping IU affordable. For example, IU has adopted banded, or flat-rate, tuition for undergraduate students and many graduate and professional programs, on all of our campuses. Banded tuition locks in one price for students taking anywhere from 12 to 18 credit hours per semester. This enables students to take all of the credits they need for on-time graduation at the same, predictable cost. IUPUI and the regional campuses had a 24 percent increase in full-time undergraduates taking at least 15 credit hours between 2012 and 2017. 

Generous philanthropic support for scholarships and fellowships will continue to be a vital component of affordability. Such support in recent years has allowed IU to dramatically increase the amount of financial aid it provides to students. IU financial assistance for resident undergraduate students has increased by a remarkable 227 percent since 2007. More broadly, 63 percent of degree-seeking undergraduate students received gift aid in 2017-18 from federal, state, institutional, or private sources, up from 57 percent five years prior.

The impact of all of this has been to ensure, for example, that IU Bloomington’s net cost of attendance is the second lowest in the Big Ten. This has also helped ensure that an IU education remains popular. This year saw a record freshman class across all IU campuses of 16,162, including records at IU Bloomington and IUPUI. The total number of students served by IU has stayed stable at around 110,000 with around 90,000 degree-seeking students. Students are graduating in record numbers as well, and the last academic year saw a new record of 21,500 graduate from all IU campuses.

It has been particularly gratifying this year to see yet another record for minority student enrolment across all IU campuses underscoring IU’s accessibility as well. For the third consecutive year, IU’s minority student body has exceeded 20,000, this year being a record 22,068. IU Bloomington has seen record numbers of Hispanic/Latino, African American and Asian American students, with a total now of over 9,000 minority students—the most of any IU campus and representing a doubling of this number since 2007. The minority composition of domestic IU students now closely approximates that of the state. In this and many other ways, we are truly the people’s university.

At the same time, we must keep focusing constantly on student debt. IU’s path-breaking work in this area has already made it a national leader. For example, our “student loan letter”—in which students are clearly informed each year of the value and full consequences of their borrowing—has reduced student indebtedness by 19 percent since 2011-12. Annual student loan borrowing dropped by $126.4 million (19 percent) over the past six years. Indiana resident undergraduate annual loan volume is down $101.3 million (31 percent) for the same period. In 2015, the State of Indiana adopted legislation to require all public universities to issue "debt letters" to all students who have loan debt. Since then, another 13 states have also mandated such letters.

Controlling costs will remain absolutely essential in the coming years to keeping tuition low and we must not let our focus on this ever waver. IU has sought to reduce costs but without sacrificing quality or reducing the high level of services that students expect of us. Key to this has been leveraging our scale to, for example, obtain prices for software, books, finance and accounting, and consumables across all campuses that individual units could not possibly obtain. In areas like IT, we have pursued this strategy aggressively for decades.

Transforming the univerity's academic structure for the 21st century

Nearly ten years ago, in my 2010 State of the University Address, I noted the vital importance of preserving and enhancing what I called the “academic core of the university”—the major schools based on the IU Bloomington and Indianapolis campuses, some with presences on both. I went on to note that there had been little major change in this core for many decades until the establishment of the School of Informatics by President Myles Brand 20 years ago in 1999.

In my address, I announced that I was establishing the "New Academic Directions Committee" to carry out a broad-ranging review of the academic core of the university and to ask:

Are we offering the right kinds of degrees and educational opportunities for our students?

Do the structure and organization of the academic units at IU allow this to happen in the most effective way?

Are there areas in which we should be considering new schools or other units?

Should some of our present schools be transformed in ways that allow them to take better advantage of local, national, and international trends and opportunities?

This committee presented its report to me in early 2011, and was endorsed by the Board of Trustees in April of that year. From this report, a period of academic transformation followed with the outstanding leadership of Provost Lauren Robel, Chancellor Nasser Paydar, and Executive Vice President John Applegate. It represents change of a kind not seen for 100 years, when many of the major schools of the university were first established under President William Lowe Bryan. During this short period, we have seen the establishment of:

• the School of Public Health Bloomington and Fairbanks School of Public Health at IUPUI—the first two schools of public health in Indiana, sorely needed in a state with some of the worst public health statistics of any state in the nation;
• The Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at IUPUI—the first of its kind in the country;
• The Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Affairs named in honor of two of Indiana and the nation’s most distinguished and respected statesmen;
• The Media School, based in this magnificently renovated building;
• The Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture and Design, which we will officially name next month, and which includes the J. Irwin Miller Architecture Program based in Columbus;
• The Schools of Education at Bloomington and at IUPUI, now configured and organized to better address their distinctive missions;
• and the School of Health and Human Sciences at IUPUI, now home to many professional health science programs.

But in many ways, the school whose establishment led the way for all this change was the School of Informatics, which was founded in 1999, for it showed that change of this kind was possible. The driving force and visionary behind its establishment was President Myles Brand, and I had the honor to work with him on it. He saw clearly that IU Bloomington had suffered from not having a strong presence in technology, which it had been denied. It meant that there were fewer avenues for finding ways to apply and make practical use of innovations coming from basic research. To him, informatics was a way to establish that presence. The School rapidly grew, with the Department of Computer Science at IU Bloomington joining it in 2005, and the merger with the School of Library and Information Science in 2013. Finally, in 2015 the Intelligent Systems Engineering Program was established in the school and it became the School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering, now one of the campuses largest and most popular schools. It is the final realization of President Brand's dream.

The establishment of the school was approved by the IU Trustees 20 years ago just a few months ago. Trustee Jim Morris, who I am honored is here today, was on the Board then when it was approved. And sadly, 10 years ago this month, President Brand passed away. So, I am very pleased to announce, with Peg Brand Weiser and their son Josh Brand with us today, that the Trustees have approved the naming of the building on the corner of 10th and Woodlawn, Myles Brand Hall, which will honor both these anniversaries. It is a fitting way to remember the pathbreaking contributions that President Brand made to the academic core of this university and his many other enormous contributions.

In my charge to the New Academic Direction Committee, I said that this would be "… one of the most important exercises of this kind ever carried at Indiana University." And so it has proved, having brought unprecedented academic change. It has also decisively refuted the oft-repeated claim that universities and faculty are impervious to change. For though the university and campus administrations were involved in all this change, it was fundamentally driven by the strenuous efforts of hundreds and hundreds of faculty, staff and students to whom we are all immensely grateful. Because of this work we are now very well structured with new academic directions and programs added to all IU's other highly ranked schools and programs in Bloomington and Indianapolis, and the new programs and new degrees on all of IU’s regional campuses, to meet the challenges of IU's third century.

IU Online: Delivering an authentically IU education since 2012

The last decade has seen a fraught and overwrought debate about the merits and impact of online education. Some have argued in almost apocalyptic terms that it would spell the end of the traditional model of education. We resisted this tsunami of extravagant claims, and instead argued that the history of previous approaches to online education going back 40 years or so, the nature of the changes in technology and the costs involved, would instead see not a replacement of the traditional model, but rather its merging with online education into a hybrid model.

We established a program in this area in 2012 called IU Online based on our prediction as to what the successful model of online education would be. It has been enormously successful and this year a record 31,254 students are doing at least one IU Online course—representing more than a third of this year's student body. This is a more than four percent increase from fall semester 2018. We also saw an increase in the number of IU students who are taking only online courses. This number grew to 8,768 students, who now make up nearly a tenth of IU's total enrollment and provide a tenth of our tuition revenue. Through IU Online, the university has firmly cemented itself as the state's online education powerhouse for four-year and graduate online education.

These figures are especially noteworthy and important as they demonstrate IU's strong contribution to the state's ongoing efforts to help more Hoosiers earn their college degrees and ensure that more students graduate on time.

Our online platform now includes 135 IU degree and certificate programs and over 2,500 IU courses on our seven campuses, all taught and developed by IU faculty.

While other universities have struggled in finding the best way to implement online education, in some cases, taking approaches that some would say provide online qualifications of lesser quality than their core programs, at IU, we have emphasized that our programs should provide a quality “authentically IU experience” and that online courses will be treated like any other courses for progression, transfer, general education, or for any other purpose. The result has been an online experience that is a true extension of IU's faculty and curriculum, and that builds on the best of traditional classroom instruction.

IU Online offers opportunities for those Hoosiers who may have started their college education but not finished because they now have jobs or families. Similarly, it provides a solution for more traditional students who want to earn their degrees more quickly or have more convenient access to courses given their class or work schedules. IU’s regional campuses have been particularly active leaders, innovators and adopters in this field.

But we can expect in IU's next century that cost, technology, and cultural pressures will continue to spawn new ideas for how education should be carried out. Some will be good, possibly transformative. We will need to continue to analyze these ideas coolly and dispassionately, based on our deep pedagogical and technology expertise, and firmly rooted in the values of the academy, and not be swayed by extravagant claims or media hysteria.

Catalyzing research at the bicentennial

As IU begins a new century, its research enterprise is strong and well-placed to meet the challenges this century will bring. Fundamental to this strength are faculty of excellence and outstanding ability whose research and scholarship blaze new paths of knowledge for the enlightenment and betterment of humankind.

But IU begins a new century with a major transition underway among its faculty. The baby-boom generation, on whom so much of IU’s postwar reputation for research excellence is based, is gradually retiring, and a new generation is taking its place. Of the roughly 5,000 tenured, tenure track, and clinical faculty at IU, almost exactly half have joined IU since 2007, and of these, nearly half are women. It is this generation who will lead IU’s research enterprise into its next century.

And as we enter that century, the excellence of IU’s research faculty grows unabated. Last year saw the largest ever total for externally funded research in the university’s history—a record $680.2 million that was awarded for over 2,800 proposals. This represents an increase of nearly two thirds of the total for the 2007 academic year, and since that year, nearly $7 billion in externally funded research has been awarded to IU. 

Such success emphatically underscores the excellence and importance of IU faculty research and scholarship in a funding environment that continues to grow increasingly more competitive. It is a testament to the thousands of IU faculty, staff, and students who form the teams that develop the research proposals and whose ideas and work are judged to be of the highest quality by their peers around the nation and world at a time when only the most promising research proposals are securing support. The outstanding research being conducted by IU faculty, staff, and students expands knowledge, drives innovation, creates new industries and jobs, leads to new treatments and cures for illness and disease, spurs economic growth, and supports a high standard of living. I want to especially single out and congratulate the School of Medicine for their remarkable part of this total of a record $434 million.

This record places IU around fifth in the Big Ten in terms of external research funding. And as IU Bloomington’s engineering program grows in its next century, this figure can be expected to grow even more, since a lack of a program in this area on the campus has held IU back from becoming a “complete university” in President Bryan’s fine phrase. This record success is also a result of the extensive investments IU has made over the last decade:

• in new and renovated facilities now totaling over $2.6 billion;
• in new equipment, research infrastructure, and technology, such as supercomputing systems and massive data storage;
• and in new programs and services that support research that are the product of an extensive restructuring of research administration.

And, of course, it also shows the growing impact of the university’s investment of nearly $300 million in its three major multidisciplinary Grand Challenge projects focused:

• on medical treatments precisely targeted to an individual’s genetic makeup;
• on developing programs and policies aimed on adapting to environmental change;
• and on a wholistic approach to addressing the scourge of drug addiction devastating so many Midwest communities.

The excellence of our research faculty can also be seen in their recognition by some of the most prestigious academic organizations in the world. Of all the IU faculty ever elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, over a third have been elected since 2007; and around a quarter of all those elected to the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine and to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, have been elected since that time. But we have many faculty whose achievements make them more than worthy of election to these great organizations. Ensuring this happens is, and will remain, a major priority of the academic leadership of Indiana University into the future.

Indiana University's collections

Indiana University's collections are among its most precious educational, research, and scholarly resources. Collectively, they represent IU’s commitment to that third mission of great universities—the preservation of knowledge, which, along with the creation of knowledge and the dissemination of knowledge, have been the three fundamental missions of universities since they emerged in human cultures over 25 centuries ago.

In my 2017 State of the University Address, I noted that "Great universities are known for their great collections as well. University collections are vital tools for scholars and scientists from nearly all disciplines. They inspire students and are vital parts of their learning and understanding. And they draw people from beyond the university to view and study them. They have been accumulated, in some cases, for centuries, and can contain unique and irreplaceable material of enormous value. Though not always thought of in these terms, they can be among an institution's most valuable resources."

As of today, it is estimated that there are over 120 IU collections, from the very large to the very small, with over 50 million objects. And this list may not yet be complete. Links to some of these can be found at collections.iu.edu. However, as I went on to note in my 2017 address, many of IU’s collections were—and remain—"… under-developed, under-appreciated, under-utilized, and in need of more professional curation and maintenance."

Collections are of immense value to humanity. Their destruction represents losses that are incalculable. This has been grimly underscored by three tragic events that have occurred in the two short years since I spoke on this topic in 2017:

• The almost complete destruction in September 2018 of the National Museum of Brazil, said to have had “… one of the largest collections of natural history and anthropological artifacts in the world” as well as extensive other unique material.
• The fire in April this year that destroyed parts of the original medieval core of the iconic Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and which damaged or destroyed many priceless works of art there.
• The destruction of hundreds of thousands of master recordings and other audio and video material in a fire at Universal Studios, revealed by The New York Times in June of this year but which happened in 2008. The Times called it “the biggest disaster in the history of the music business."

There could be no better examples than these tragedies of the enormous importance of IU’s collections and the need for a coherent university-wide approach as to how they are managed, organized, and housed in the best way to ensure both their most effective use in research and teaching within and without IU, and to ensure they have the specific care and preservation each requires.

In my 2017 address, I announced that I was charging the Office of the Vice President for Research with the responsibility of developing this university-wide approach to IU’s collections in consultation with campus academic leadership, and with a goal of making major progress by the Bicentennial. Much progress has been made—including the appointment of the first-ever Executive Director of IU Collections, Heather Calloway—but much remains to be done. Let me review here some key developments.

We can think of collections as comprising three fundamental types of objects:

• material objects, both 2-dimensional (books, papers, paintings, etc.) and 3-dimensional (just about everything else);
• time-based media objects (audio, video and film);
• and digital objects which are of two types—those born digital and those originally derived from physical counterparts.

Time-based media object collections

I first addressed the issues involved in our time-based media objects collections in my 2013 State of the University Address. Here, I announced the establishment of the first phase of the $15 million Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative (MDPI). Its hugely ambitious goal was to digitize over 300,000 of IU’s most valuable, and in many cases irreplaceable and unique, time-based audio and video objects as recommended by the faculty, and to do this by the Bicentennial. By digitizing it, of course, it would be preserved potentially forever, and become accessible, subject to copyright, of course, not only within IU but to the whole world.

The challenge, of course, was that nearly all of this vast amount of material was difficult to access. Much had been recorded in what are now obsolete or obscure formats for which few playback devices remain in existence. And as is tragically too often the case, some of this material was at risk of deterioration or was already deteriorating. This represents material accumulated at great cost over more than a century and is today, of even greater value.

MDPI has been a wild success! Now in this, IU’s Bicentennial Year, 99 percent of these time-based media objects—over 320,000—have been digitized!

In June, 2017, I announced the second, in some ways even more complex phase of MDPI—a $12 million project to digitize, and hence preserve, 25,000 of the most important films in IU’s extensive film collection again as recommended by the faculty, and to do this by the end of 2020. This has also been wildly successful and is now 50 percent complete. Details of progress on both these phases can be found on MDPI's excellent Website—mdpi.iu.edu.

Together, the two phases of MDPI are the largest, most ambitious, most systematic, and most comprehensive such project at any university in the United States. When both phases of MDPI are complete, hundreds of thousands of hours of priceless and irreplaceable audio and video recordings and films will be preserved for all times and made publicly available for all people.

Material object collections

Some of IU's material object collections are, of course, at the very heart of IU’s daily endeavors, such as the Herman B Wells Library and the other campus libraries, and they are thriving. But many other material object collections have had a lack of attention, interest, and investment for many years.

Thankfully, since my 2017 address, this situation has started to improve. We will see the grand re-opening of the Eskenazi Museum of Art next month after a truly dazzling and comprehensive $40 million renovation that will allow more of its collection to be displayed in optimal conditions and with greatly expanded facilities for the teaching, research, and curation of its remarkable collections. It will take its rightful place again as one of this country's great university art museums.

And at the end of 2019, the Lilly Rare Books Library, one of the finest in the country, will close for its first ever renovation on the 60th anniversary of its opening, thanks to a generous $11 million gift from the Lilly Endowment. This sorely needed, long overdue, and comprehensive renovation will roughly double the amount of space available for classes and research based on the Library’s priceless collections, and make it fully accessible. Since 1992, it has seen a remarkable increase of over 200 percent in the number of courses held there, with an associated increase of over 400 percent in the number of students in these courses. This renovation will also replace and update all the mechanical systems and infrastructure in the Library and it will reopen again in 2021.

And today, I am very pleased to announce a further major development that will greatly enhance a number of IU's other important collections.

Indiana University will be establishing a new Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology to be formed from the present rich collections of the Glenn Black Laboratory of Archaeology and the Mathers Museum of World Culture. A principal focus of new museum will be on the pre-Columbian Native American civilizations of the American Midwest and beyond. Central to this will be Indiana University’s unique collection of—and engagement with—artifacts from the Mississippian civilization site in Angel Mounds near Evansville, dating from 1000 to 1450 C.E.—one of the nation’s most significant pre-Columbian archaeological sites and Indiana’s largest, as well as other notable sites in Indiana and the Midwest.

IU's Angel Mounds collection is truly unique—there is nothing like it anywhere else in the world. Angel Mounds also provides a window into the broader Pre-Columbian history of the Americas. The new museum will also feature holdings from the Mathers Collection from civilizations in other parts of the world or that otherwise help place IU’s pre-Columbian collections in a richer, more relevant context.

The present collections are housed in a building, the first part of which was opened about 50 years ago, and the second part about 10 years later. Unfortunately, like the Lilly Library, no renovation has taken place since then. As part of launching IU’s new Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, we will be embarking on a sweeping renovation to:

• convert the two inefficient separate spaces into one;
• increase the visibility of, and access to, its collections through innovative exhibits and the extensive use of technology, including 3-D digital scanning and exhibition tools developed at IU;
• provide enhanced facilities for research and education programs based on these collections;
• expand and develop loan and exhibit exchange programs with important museums elsewhere in the country and world that complement its goals;
• and replace and modernize all the mechanical and other infrastructure.

The result will be a world-class museum whose collections and research resources, dynamic exhibits, engaging and accessible programming, and other outreach efforts will serve IU’s education and research missions and make it a leading destination for scholars, students, and the public. 

This renovation is being funded through the capital appropriation made to Indiana University in the last state budget and other state funds totaling $11 million. We are extremely grateful to the Legislature and Governor Eric Holcomb for their support of this project vital to the state's history. And I also want to thank Ed Herrmann, from IU’s Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, who will oversee the effort to create this new museum and serve as its first director.

In all of these activities, Ed and his colleagues will work in close partnership with the Indiana State Museum and Historic Sites, of which the Angel Mounds site is a part. The Museum will also collaborate closely with North American Native American and archaeological communities and other stakeholders to ensure the ethical stewardship of these collections including compliance with NAGPRA and other laws, and adherence to best curatorial practices.

Digital objects collections

Digitization is, of course, the way to both preserve and make universally available the material in IU's material objects collections, that is, generating high-quality digital images of them that, as I said, will be preserved for all times and made publicly available for all people.

In the case of IU's 2-D material objects collections, the university has or participates in major digitization projects which go back to 30 years. This is an area with mature and well-funded approaches to this problem and where extensive work has been done.

But the digitization of 3-D material objects is much less mature and even more difficult. However, the rapidly growing availability of inexpensive digitization software, cameras, and virtual reality viewing systems is helping fueling a rapid growth in the digitization of 3-D objects. IU has some important projects in this area—for example, our collaboration with Florence’s famed Uffizi Gallery, led by Professor Bernie Frischer, to digitize all their Greco-Roman sculptures and the digitization of important parts of IU’s herbarium and paleontology collections. A more systematic MDPI-like digitization approach to all IU’s 3-D material objects collections is, in many ways, the final frontier for us. Of course, digitizing all of these is neither necessary nor realistic, and as with MDPI it will be for the faculty to recommend what is truly important to digitize and what the priorities should be.

The digitization of material objects and time-based media objects as ways to both preserve and make these objects universally accessible, together with collections of born digital objects either collected digitally from experiments or generated by simulation, now makes the digital storage infrastructure for these objects of critical and central importance to IU. For they now hold all of our digital objects, all of our digitized material; all our many millions of digitized books, papers, audio and video tapes, films, 3-D visualizations, and all of even vaster amounts of born-digital objects from experiments and simulation. Clearly then, they are among our most precious and valuable assets which must be treated accordingly.

Digital storage infrastructure

Thankfully, we have understood, maybe longer than most, how essential this digital storage infrastructure is and how even more essential it would become. In 2004, when I was vice president for research and information technology, I commissioned a taskforce to examine our future cyberinfrastructure needs. It had some of our most distinguished faculty as members and was chaired by now Vice President Brad Wheeler. It recommended emphatically the need to invest in a major expansion of our digital infrastructure and our support for it. We immediately began to do so. Today, IU's digital storage infrastructure—called our Scholarly Data Archive—provides over 70 PetaBytes of storage for collections and research data, along with another 20 PetaBytes of high-performance storage for simulations and other needs. To put this in perspective, this is the equivalent of the digitized contents of over 200 Wells Libraries.

So, all this represents great progress but there is still much to do. Vice President for Research Fred Cate, Heather Calloway, and their colleagues, in conjunction with other academic units in the university, are now working on a developing IU’s first ever strategic plan for its collections. This will bring for the first time, a coherent and coordinated university-wide approach to the management, operations, housing and preservation of IU’s superb and priceless collections. It will be complete by the end of this calendar year. All this then will ensure that IU will enter its next century with its collections at the heart of its academic enterprise.

IU's physical infrastructure and heritage

In previous State of the University addresses, I have constantly stressed the importance to IU's research and education enterprise of its physical infrastructure. I have regularly quoted from a report I commissioned as Vice President for Research in 2004, that said shortage of space was "possibly the biggest single impediment to IU reaching its full potential as a research university."

We faced, at that time, a difficult situation—a severe shortage of new or renovated research and teaching space, dilapidated student residences, around $1 billion in deferred maintenance, and no systematic plan for addressing these issues.

I announced in my 2007 Inauguration Address that the time had come to address this problem. We set out to do this by developing new master plans to govern campus development and priorities for IU Bloomington in 2009, and for IUPUI in 2011—though the latter is presently undergoing a major revision to incorporate the new Academic Health Center in Indianapolis and related developments.

In addition, we developed a strategy for substantially reducing or even eliminating all deferred maintenance by the Bicentennial. Key to this strategy was an agreement we reached with the Legislature where they would fund major building renovations, like this building, and IU would fund new construction. In addition, they agreed to restore regular funding for what is called R&R—repair and rehabilitation—based on the State’s excellent formula to determine this. We argued that the taxpayers of Indiana had invested in buildings and other infrastructure at IU for over a century, which is now valued at over $8 billion, and that it was vital for the State to invest in ensuring that these buildings and infrastructure were functioning as efficiently and effectively as they could.

Now, over ten years later, under the leadership first of former Vice President Terry Clapacs and now of Vice President Tom Morrison, we can see the impact of this sustained investment and planning. IU has seen the biggest period of construction and renovation ever in its history. In many of my previous State of the University addresses, I used to regularly update you on our plans for renovation and new construction as well as progress with these plans. But in this, our Bicentennial year, I will simply summarize all that has been achieved by over a decade of intense activity.

• A total on all campuses of over $2.6 billion of renovation and new construction, about 30 percent funded by the State and 70 percent funded by IU or external sources;
• A total of 15,800,000 gross square feet of new or renovated space including 3,200,000 gross square feet under construction or in planning, the equivalent of over 30 Indiana Memorial Unions;
• Over 200 major new or renovated facilities;
• Reduction of outstanding deferred maintenance by the end of the Bicentennial Year to around $100 million.

There is much still to do, and many pressing problems and areas where still more research space is needed. But IU will begin its new century with outstanding new and renovated facilities able to be used efficiently and effectively, and will now be able to look forward to new investments in facilities and infrastructure for research and education, and not always be looking back trying to address the problems caused by the lack of investment in the past.

There was one area of renovation in particular that I highlighted in my 2007 Inauguration address, and that was the renovation of IU Bloomington's student residence halls. I announced then that we would begin a plan to renovate or replace all of these over the following 15 years. With that date almost upon us, the plan is almost complete.

However, we have recently modified it in one important respect. We are totally committed to ensuring that our student residences provide a safe and healthy living environment for our students. After receiving numerous complaints of mold last year in McNutt and Foster residence halls, immediate effort was focused on remediation of this problem. We also accelerated our plans to renovate both the McNutt and Foster student residences at a cost of $56 million. Both of those residences will be back in service for the 2020-2021 Academic Year, with greatly enhanced systems to help prevent the regrowth of mold. In addition, over the most recent summer months, the campus undertook a massive effort to inspect, clean, and remediate where necessary, and to provide greater humidity and temperature control in all remaining dorms. Those efforts involved hundreds of IU employees and countless outside contractors. All of these efforts are focused on reducing the conditions which promote mold growth, while recognizing that we cannot eliminate mold from our environment entirely, since it is ubiquitous. We are expending enormous effort and resources to provide a safe and healthy living environment for our students.

In addition, we will see the completion of the renovations of Teter in June of 2020, the construction of the new North Housing to start soon and to be completed by July 2021, and finally, the renovations of the Collins Living-Learning Center to start in May 2020 and be completed by July 2021 and Wright Quad to commence May 2021 and be completed July 2022.

So, this will represent the completion of the upgrade, renovation, or replacement of all major student residences by 2022. It will ensure that IU Bloomington students have the best possible living and learning environments so they can fully focus on and succeed in their studies and benefit in the fullest from their residential experience. It has been known for decades that residence halls are a vitally important part of students' academic and personal development. When all of this is complete, it will represent an investment of around half a billion dollars. However, there will be no standing still. This massive 15-year effort has only enabled us to catch up and eliminate the deferred maintenance of the past. But now, as IU enters its next century, IU can look forward in the way in the ways in which it develops and enhances its students residences and student residential life in the future.

Nor have we neglected projects that are of special importance to preserving the university’s heritage, history, and the beauty of its campuses. In my 2016 State of the University address I talked of the deep importance of these areas. I noted that Indiana University was "comprised of unchanging elements that endure across generations and decades—beautiful campuses, superb buildings and facilities, glorious art, unique scholarly collections. It is the story of the work, careers, and achievements of all the people who for almost two centuries have studied, worked and graduated from IU—in short, the remarkable and inspiring history that has made IU what it is today. And it is more hard-to-define, maybe more ephemeral things such as its great traditions and its matchless heritage. But it is all of this that has shaped the characters of millions of people who have passed through IU’s many gates since 1820. And all of this will shape the character of millions more in IU's next century."

The importance of heritage, history, and campus beauty has been an important theme in IU’s on-going programs of renovations and construction. To give just a few examples, since 2007 we have seen at IU Bloomington the renovation or construction of the IU Cinema, Alumni Hall, Presidents Hall—where we are today—and the majestic IU Metz Bicentennial Carillon, soon to be completed, while at IUPUI, Ball Gardens, the Rotary Building and the iconic Madam Walker Theater—also soon to be completed, as well as numerous smaller projects on these and other campuses.

Excellence in the clinical and health sciences

The scale of IU's clinical and health sciences enterprise is vast. On IU's two main campuses, there are eight core clinical science schools in the areas of medicine, nursing, dentistry, social work, public health, optometry and health and human sciences. The clinical activities of these schools are coordinated by the IU Executive Vice President for University Clinical Affairs, Jay Hess, who is also Dean of the School of Medicine.

The School of Medicine is the largest in the nation, with nine medical education centers throughout the state on IU regional campuses and at other locations. The schools of Nursing, Dentistry, and Social Work have educational programs on a number of IU regional campuses. And all of these regional campuses, including IU Fort Wayne and IUPU Columbus, also have their own programs in the clinical and health sciences. As well, there are many other programs and centers across IU that are directly or indirectly involved in the clinical and health sciences.

Fundamental to the IU's clinical and health sciences programs are hospitals. They are where many of the students in these programs are trained. All the medical students train in hospitals as do many of the nursing students. IU’s School of Medicine was founded in Bloomington in 1903 and moved to Indianapolis in 1908, though it continued to have a program In Bloomington. IU’s first teaching hospital, Long Hospital, was opened in 1914, and University Hospital was opened in 1970. In 1997, University Hospital, the Riley Hospital for Children, and the Methodist Hospital were combined together by IU and the Methodist Health Group to form a joint enterprise now known as IU Health. It is the largest hospital system in the state, one of the largest in the country, and is now IU’s indispensable partner in the clinical and health sciences.

The next decade will see a massive investment in new hospitals in Bloomington and Indianapolis by IU Health that will be of enormous benefit to IU’s clinical and health sciences education and research programs, and, of course, to the people of Indiana and the nation.

In 2015, it was announced that the present aging and outdated IU Health Bloomington Hospital would be replaced by a new Regional Academic Health Center (RAHC) to be built on the IU Bloomington campus that would including a new IU Health hospital and a co-located Indiana University Academic Health Sciences Building that would house for the first time ever many of IUB's clinical and health science programs from the Schools of Medicine, Nursing and Social Work at IUB as well as the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences. This will substantially expand the opportunities for health sciences education and research at IU Bloomington, for innovative new programs in inter-professional education and for new clinical services at the new hospital.

Construction of this $550 million complex is well underway. The IU Academic Health Sciences Building will be completed by the end of 2020 and the hospital itself will open in Fall 2021. When complete, the RAHC will be the most comprehensive academic health campus in the state outside of Indianapolis, and will make major contributions to the improved health and well-being of all the people of this region.

An even larger project will commence during this academic year in Indianapolis. IU Health will be constructing a new Academic Health Center that will replace University Hospital and parts of Methodist Hospital. This will be a $1 billion plus project and will provide an outstanding new facility south of 16th street for highly advanced medical services and hospital care. It will also include a major new $200 million plus facility for the education and research programs of the School of Medicine.

This huge investment in new hospitals by IU Health, along with the associated IU buildings, will ensure that as IU enters its next century, IU's clinical and health sciences education and research programs will have access to superb modern state-of-the-art facilities to rival the best in the world. The benefit to the people of Indiana in years to come will be immense.

The future of international engagement

Much of what I have described in previous sections has been an account of numerous successes, all positioning IU superbly for even greater success in its next century. However, I want to address a more challenging topic, yet one where IU’s total engagement is vital. In a speech in 2016, I noted that "We live in increasingly difficult times, when strident voices would shut us off from the rest of the world just at a time when the need to understand it, engage with it, is at its most acute and urgent. Wars, both trade and real, crises, and the very collapse of civilizations and cultures can be the outcomes of devastating miscalculations based on international ignorance and xenophobic stereotypes."

I argued that American universities must play a central role in combatting this. That this was not the time to be shutting ourselves off from the world, but for embracing it in all its diversity and variety and for seeking to understand its immense complexities and challenges. As Governor Holcomb has said, there is no turning back. The world in which our students will live will require more, not less knowledge about the world. Hence, international literacy and experience rank at the very top of what should comprise an IU education. We must also encourage globally engaged faculty who can also bring multiple perspectives to bear on problems. And we must continue to be a center for the world’s leading scholars and practitioners in global and international studies. In short, we must remain a great international university as we have been for a century or more, fully engaged with the world.

We have endeavored to do this in multiple ways.

We require a mandatory international component for every student as part of the IU general education curriculum.

We have put major emphasis on the importance of study abroad. Since 2007 we have seen a doubling in the number of IU students who study abroad. IU Bloomington now has the sixth largest number of students who study abroad in the United States out of 1200 that are ranked. As well, about a third of IU Bloomington students have studied abroad by the time they have graduated and the number continues to grow. In addition, as part of the present IU fund-raising campaign, we are close to having raised $20 million to endow about 400 study abroad scholarships especially for students from low income or minority backgrounds. Because of these scholarships, the demographics of the student body who study abroad now approximates that of the full student body.

We continue to welcome a large and diverse international student body who now come from around 150 countries. They bring the world to IU. And when they return to their home countries, they become for the rest of their lives, as I have repeatedly seen, passionate alumni and staunchly pro-American. We now have 48 international chapters of IU’s Alumni Association on all inhabited continents. This number has doubled since 2007.

We have built strong and active partnerships with over 100 of the best foreign universities in the world, with numerous joint programs, degrees and research collaborations.

Nearly all of our faculty have some kind of global engagement, directly or indirectly, as nearly every area of research and scholarship from anthropology to zoology is truly global. It is the role of the university, especially through the Office of the Vice President for International Affairs, to support this engagement in a variety of ways.

We have established five IU Global Gateway Centers in Bangkok, Beijing, Berlin, Mexico City and New Delhi to coordinate and support our activities in key regions of the world. We hope to establish one in Africa soon as well.

And finally, of course, in 2012 we established what is now the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies which is rapidly becoming one of this country’s premier schools of this kind. IU teaches over 70 foreign languages a year, more than any other university in the country. IU also recently received the largest amount of funding under the Department of Education’s Title VI Program for area and language studies of nearly $20 million, most of it for projects in the Hamilton Lugar School.

This, then, is the international agenda of Indiana University. I outlined and described the importance of this agenda in my Inauguration address in a more globally confident time. However, since then, its importance has only but grown. Continuing to benefit from it, sustain it, and defend it will become one of our principal challenges in our next century.

The Bicentennial Campaign: providing for IU's future

The achievements I have described are extensive and far-reaching. All of them have played a major role in preparing IU for its third century. But vital to many of them has been, and will continue to be, philanthropy and the generosity of IU’s hundreds of thousands of alumni, friends, and supporters.

The enormous success to date of IU's Bicentennial Campaign is a testament to this philanthropy. The campaign originally had a goal of raising $2.5 billion by IU’s Bicentennial in support of the university's fundamental missions of education, research, and community engagement. That was ambitious enough. But the enthusiasm and energy it generated was overwhelming. This goal was quickly reached, and in Fall 2017, the goal was raised even higher to $3 billion. And in June of this year, I was delighted to announce that the Bicentennial Campaign had even passed this goal. It is now over $3.1 billion and a final goal of close to $3.5 billion may even be in sight.

This incredible achievement has been made possible by the enormous generosity of over 300,000 alumni, friends, and organizations, to whom we are all immensely grateful. So far, this generosity has translated into more financial aid for IU students. More than 4,700 new scholarships and fellowships have been endowed that mean that students from disadvantaged backgrounds who may not otherwise have been able to afford to pursue a degree now have the opportunity to come to IU. And it has translated into over 200 endowed chairs and professorships that enable us to recruit and retain some of the very best faculty in the world. These are quite extraordinary figures, as they represent increases of 37 percent and 43 percent, respectively, over the total number endowed over roughly the previous 190 years of the university's existence!

And as I am addressing the University Faculty Council, I again, as I have done in my recent State of the University addresses, want to make particular mention of the faculty and staff campaign that is part of the Bicentennial Campaign. Here, nearly $180 million has been given by more than 16,500 faculty and staff members. I know many people in this room have given to this campaign, and I want to thank them all most sincerely for their remarkable generosity, as well as thank, more generally, all of the alumni, friends, faculty, staff, students, parents, companies, foundations, and other organizations who have supported IU philanthropically in this campaign.

The overall level of support we have seen in the campaign has sent a loud and resounding signal to the world of how strongly committed IU alumni, friends and supporters are to the university's future success—as the Bicentennial Campaign will be one of only a very few campaigns at public universities to achieve success on this scale, among them being at Berkeley, UCLA, and the University of Michigan.

But, with just over nine months remaining in the campaign, we are not resting on our laurels. We will instead take the fullest advantage of this truly unique year to build even greater support for the university's fundamental missions. There are still talented students in need. There are still great educational programs to support. There are still life-changing research breakthroughs to be made. Indeed, we believe the dedication and commitment of the IU community to these missions will reach such heights of enthusiasm during our 200-year anniversary that the campaign will far exceed its original goal. We wish, in short, to make the Bicentennial Campaign one of the most successful campaigns ever seen at a public university in this country, with an impact at IU that will endure through the next century.

Building on 200 years of success

So, this is the State of the University at the Bicentennial—strong, vigorous, innovative, ever-adapting, ever committed to the fundamentals of an outstanding liberal and professional education.

As we survey the myriad achievements of recent years that have prepared us for our next century, I want to offer my most sincere thanks and those of the university, to many people and on all of our campuses.

• First to IU’s Trustees and the decisive role they played in many of the initiatives I have mentioned;
• To our faculty, who overwhelmingly embraced the need for change and made it happen;
• To our staff, who have so competently implemented and supported much of this change;
• To our student body, who have enthusiastically embraced so much of this change;
• To the outstanding senior leadership of the university—vice presidents, chancellors and deans;
• And my personal thanks to my own staff for their superb efforts under constantly demanding circumstances.

As we celebrate the Bicentennial, I am confident that Indiana University is well-positioned to leverage the strengths of its schools, its outstanding faculty, the dedication of its staff, its academic centers, its magnificent collections, indeed, all of its assets, so that the enormous success of IU’s fist 200 years can continue and be built upon.

As we enter our third century of service to the state, nation, and the world, we will remain steadfastly committed to the outstanding traditions of academic excellence that have been a hallmark of this great university in its first two centuries.

Thank you very much.