As readers of this paper well know, in the early 1990s Northeastern’s leadership and the members of our governing boards set upon a new direction for our university, one that would transform Northeastern into a much more national, more selective and more competitive school. We would seek new resources that would enable us to invest in new residence halls, new research and recreational facilities and increased student financial aid. We would recruit nationally renowned scholars from some of the nation’s strongest campuses. To build a stronger student body, we would intensify student recruitment across the nation. We would, in time, set our sights on becoming one of the nation’s top 100 universities by the end of the current decade.
As detailed during the “State of the University” program two weeks ago, while challenges remain, all of the vision, investment and hard work since the early 1990s have combined to lift Northeastern to new heights, improving our competitiveness among the nation’s universities and our attractiveness to more and more students from coast-to-coast.
Today, each one of you is a member of the strongest student body in the history of the university. Each one of you studies on a campus where leading scholars are achieving notable intellectual advances that are contributing to the world’s social, economic or technological progress. Each one of you has the opportunity to enrich your growth and development through the nation’s highest-ranking cooperative education program and by participating in a rich array of student programs and activities.
And each one of you is an important part of the story unfolding on Huntington Avenue. It is your individual interests and ambitions that give us our primary rationale for the goals that we set and the work that we do to achieve them. It is your intellectual strength, your great diversity and your ability as “thinkers” as well as “doers,” that make Northeastern a truly unique academic community.
And it is through your achievements, supported by a distinguished faculty dedicated to teaching as well as scholarship, that this university will gain our rightful place as a top 100 school. Northeastern’s greatest legacy has been written by all those students whom, upon receiving their diploma, have gone on to found companies or engineer devices that created new opportunities for economic progress, or dedicated their lives to the causes of human improvement and social justice or realized a calling in the arts and humanities. This enormous legacy will be broadened by the work each one of you is engaged in, day-in and day-out, as you prepare for productive careers and meaningful lives.
The State of the University Address touched upon many topics, but most fundamentally it was about the steady progress we are making toward the goals we set more than a decade ago. The state of your university has never been stronger and through the projects we have planned and the new investments we are making Northeastern will be growing stronger still. As we move into the fall semester, I invite your interest and participation in the effort to realize Northeastern’s promise, and I wish you success in all your endeavors.
