Opening statement by William R. Brody

Thank you, Morris [Offit, chairman of the board of trustees]. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for that wonderful and very warm welcome.

Members of the Hopkins community, including those of you who are linked by video at the Applied Physics Laboratory, I am pleased to be here today as the president-elect of The Johns Hopkins University. The opportunity to lead one of the nation's great, premier research universities into the 21st century is an extraordinary one, indeed, and I am honored to have been selected by the search committee and the board of trustees.

I'd like to acknowledge several people again. To follow [interim president] Dan Nathans is probably one of the most difficult challenges in life, after all you have a man who is an extraordinary scientist, a Nobel laureate, a wonderful individual of the highest ethical standards, and Dan, we owe you a debt of gratitude for putting aside one of your great loves in life, your research, to serve this wonderful university in a very important transition period, and I am personally indebted to you and hope that I can draw upon your experience to help me in the transition.

I look forward to working with you, Michael [Bloomberg, chairman-elect of the board of trustees and chairman of the Johns Hopkins Initiative fund-raising campaign]. You have, obviously, done a lot for this university. You've led the campaign, now you'll be leading the board of trustees and I know that we'll have some interesting and exciting and challenging and, hopefully, some fun times working together.

Morris, I've known you. I guess about six years ago we met in the previous presidential search. Here is a man who has devoted the past six years to Johns Hopkins, an extraordinary time commitment. He has chaired two presidential search committees, not one, and he said this is the last search committee he's ever going to head and I said, "Wait a minute, Morris, I've got another assignment for you." But Morris, I don't know, I think very few people recognize how much time and effort Morris puts in for Johns Hopkins. You're down here probably one or two days a week, I would guess, at least judging from the times I've tried to track you down, just in the last few weeks. We owe you a tremendous debt of gratitude for your service, for your loyalty, for your support to the university in many, many ways and I want to thank you personally for your support and friendship and guidance in this process. Maybe we can give Morris ... [applause].

I, too, see my mentor and colleague, Dick Ross [dean emeritus of the School of Medicine], in the audience. Dick, you were responsible for bringing me to Johns Hopkins and ... you welcomed us into the Baltimore community. It's been a terrific, terrific time.

I've had the opportunity to read the papers and I see a lot of things written about me. And I've been described in the past week or so, or two weeks, in a number of ways. Let's see, I'm somebody who is going to or has eliminated tenure, I'm somebody who has never taught, I'm a concert pianist and I can beat Vernon Mountcastle [professor emeritus of neuroscience] at tennis. Vernon, you can assure them that all of those are false.

I am excited to be here; there is a lot that I have to learn about this wonderful university. I'd just like to say a few words, perhaps, about what attracted me back and what attracted me to return to Johns Hopkins and what my agenda is likely to be for the university.

Having had the opportunity to serve Hopkins for seven years, not only as a faculty member in both the medical school and Whiting School of Engineering, but as a chair of the Committee for the 21st century, I've certainly had an appreciation for the uniqueness of Johns Hopkins.

Yes, we are a world-class research university with many exciting programs. And certainly we do well by whatever means one wishes to measure the university against its peers, including that well-renowned publication, U.S. News & World Report.

But what distinguishes Hopkins, I believe, is the tremendous loyalty and dedication of its renowned and talented faculty, its superb staff, its alumni and community supporters who give generously of their time and precious resources, to further the mission of Hopkins. The Hopkins community is a very special one. The breadth of our programs from Peabody to Public Health gives the university a very unique signature. The fact that we are well-positioned in international studies and continuing studies, for example, creates significant competitive advantages as we look forward to the next century. And our decentralized structure gives us the ability to take advantages of new opportunities wherever and whenever they arise. To be sure, the challenges in the coming years are going to be daunting. Foremost among them are the financial stresses that come from declining external resources and the need to control or even to reduce our costs. Improving our resource base is our highest priority. Thanks to the efforts of Mr. Bloomberg and many people working with him [on the Johns Hopkins Initiative], Hopkins is well on its way. Terrific progress has really been made in the campaign to raise endowments and gifts. We are about 61 percent of our goal overall, and 70 percent of the endowment ... and facilities sub- goal has already been achieved. That's a remarkable accomplishment in a very short time, but there's still a lot of work to go and I expect as president to devote a significant amount of my time to this important effort. This is an effort that will impact all parts of the university.

Tuition cannot grow in excess of inflation as it has over the past three ... decades. It's been estimated that if you had a child in kindergarten today, if tuition were to continue to rise at the same rate over the next 18 years as it has over the past 18 years, that you would be paying a tuition bill in excess of $350,000. So, clearly, something has to be done to control the rate of growth of costs, to provide the access that we need to all students who are qualified to come to Hopkins, to have a diverse student body, a talented student body and one that provides a mix of interests and background that couple very well with those wonderful programs that we offer.

Federal research funding will be more difficult to obtain, necessitating an even greater vigilance to assure excellence of all our programs.

And we must recognize that competitors to research and education are becoming global, rather than national, and that information technology is going to change the importance that we have traditionally placed on these ivy-covered brick buildings as the primary site for the delivery of education.

For our undergraduate students, improvements to the Homewood campus are important, particularly plans for the student art center and the recreation center. Finding the money to make these projects a reality is a big priority.

We also have opportunities to enhance the curriculum in a number of ways, as suggested in the Committee for the 21st Century report, including international dimensions, rewarding excellence in teaching and so forth.

Hopkins is a part of Baltimore and Baltimore is a part of Hopkins. And both benefit synergistically from one another. Not only must we keep Hopkins strong, but we must do more to make the city of Baltimore vital by encouraging and adding to the many partnership activities already under way.

Although I am in many ways an insider, there's still much I have to learn about this wonderful university. Wendy and I look forward to rejoining the Hopkins community and working together with all of you to make Hopkins an even better place to be.

Thank you very much. [Applause] I'd be pleased to take a few questions, as long as they're easy ones. ... You're not as tough as the media was earlier.

[Question, not captured on tape, about undergraduate life at the Homewood campus]

Brody: The question was what do I think is the greatest challenge facing the Hopkins undergraduates at the Homewood campus?

I met with a small group of students and I am not sure whether they represent a good statistical sample of student opinion, but, clearly, I think Hopkins has made a lot of progress in improving the environment for the students. But there is a lot of work to be done and I would see that as a major priority.

It's not sufficient to compete for students any more to have just outstanding classroom programs. I think the entire campus and cultural environment is an important part of attracting the best and brightest students. And in the Committee for the 21st Century, we focused on the undergraduate program, because it sets the standard of excellence for all of our programs. And if we don't have a strong undergraduate program, we can't have strong graduate programs. And I think that things such as the student art center, the recreation center, making the environment around the campus more of a campus-like academic environment, are all things that would do a lot to improve our ability to attract and retain the best and brightest students and to provide an experience that all of you who graduate from Hopkins remember fondly and warmly.

[Question, not captured on tape, about university collaboration with private industry]

Brody: Yes. Professor [Gerald] Masson [chair of the Department of Computer Science in the Whiting School of Engineering] asked whether we would be doing more work with private industry.

I think there is certainly an opportunity to do more collaborative work with industry and I have always been a supporter of that. But at the same time, I don't believe that private industry is prepared to replace the federal research dollars for the basic science and much of the applied work that we do. And clearly there is an opportunity to grow the industrial base of funding and we should do that, but we must pay attention to remaining competitive for the research dollar and also maintaining a presence in Washington in conjunction with other research universities to make the case for research.

As has been said, America knows best how to do research, but somehow America has forgotten why we do research. And I think we need to continue to make a case for funding of federal research at a basic level as well as an applied level.

So I think the two are synergistic, but the one will not replace the other.

[Question, not captured on tape, about the contributions staff can make to the advancement of the university]

Brody: Yes, I think that the comment was made -- I don't know whether those of you by video can hear the questions -- the comment was made about trying to include everybody in the community in solving problems, not just the faculty. And I was at a meeting at the University of Minnesota the other day where one of my staff people, who is just a superbly talented administrator, told me he came back from a group of faculty meeting and it was like he was completely excluded from the discussions, even though the discussions centered around financial and administrative issues. It had nothing to do with academic issues, and I think that we have too often in academia, because the faculty drive the academic programs, have forgotten that there are major contributions to be made by all in the community. The corollary of that is we should make certain business decisions for business reasons. Not everything has to be made on academic basis and I think there is no reason why a university cannot be efficiently run. That means that we need to rely very heavily on our administrative staff to craft solutions that will help us run more efficiently.

[Question, not captured on tape, about the selection of the next provost]

Brody: Can I take the Fifth Amendment? [laughter] That will clearly be one of my highest priorities, is to sit down and talk with the deans and the senior staff. And we will obviously have a provost and the provost's background certainly should be one that complements mine. And beyond that I am really not at liberty to say anything, because we have had no discussion and have had little time to think about it.

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