Purdue President France Córdova delivered the following speech April 11 during the presidential inauguration at Elliott Hall of Music

France Córdova's Presidential Inauguration Speech

• Welcome to my colleague Marye Anne Fox, Chancellor of the University of California, San Diego, and Dan Goldin, former Administrator at NASA who gave me the incredible opportunity to work with him as Chief Scientist for the space agency.

• Welcome to our delegates, who in this venerable tradition that goes back hundreds of years join us in this rite of passage, in this new beginning. Scholars representing universities from all over the world join us in this historic moment.

• As Chairman McGinley said, this event marks a transition for Purdue. Thus I am thrilled that three of this University's past presidents, each of whom has led such a transition, are with us to mark the occasion. Arthur Hansen, Steven Beering, and Martin Jischke: those are legendary names in the annals of Purdue. What Purdue has accomplished in the last 40 years has been done with their firm, guiding hand. Borrowing from Shakespeare's Prospero, they "are such stuff as dreams are made on."

• Our trustees, all of whom are with us today, are entrusted with the stewardship of Purdue, and with enabling it to continually reach "one brick higher." They have delegated me with the authority to lead Purdue. I am humbled by their trust and resolved to listen, to learn, and to lead well.

• It is a great privilege to be at a university noted for the distinction of its administrative leadership, faculty, staff, and students. The past several months have been wonderful ones for my husband, Chris, and me, as we've come to know the great Purdue family. It's small wonder that Purdue has such committed alumni (400,000 of them!) and friends. The experience that students enjoy here is terrific. They are enabled by the best staff, and taught by a superb faculty.

• I'm often asked what I do for "fun." I respond that it's all fun, and it's true.

• On the stage, supporting me as he has over the last 24 years, is my husband Chris Foster. He is my rock, the person I always turn to for affirmation, and for honest and helpful appraisal. He is completely dedicated to students, and made that commitment very early when he became a science teacher right out of college. Today he directs our Discovery Park's efforts to engage K-12 students and their teachers in pursuing careers in science, technology, engineering, and math.

• Our children, Anne-Catherine and Stephen, are with us today, sitting in front and smiling broadly at me right now! Last night they made the long flight from California, where they both attend college. Like Chris and I, Anne, too, is committed to teaching, and Steve is engaged in engineering and management studies. They've made many moves over the years, and "adapt" has become their middle name. They are the shining stars in our firmament.

 • I come from a large, happy family: 12 siblings; a few of them are here today (Lisa, Lu, Declan, Tom, my niece Amy).

• Guiding us steadily through years filled with both joys and challenges -- and appreciating full well that it's really not cheaper by the dozen -- have been our parents, Joan and Fred Cordova. My mother is in the front row. She is, for me, the phenomenally, phenomenal woman" described by the poet Maya Angelou. Long before I earned a graduate degree I sat in our family living room among young science classmates and teachers, and it was Mom who asked the profoundest of questions about the origin of the universe, echoing the questions of Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus, both of whom she read voraciously. Her questions about the relation of faith and reason, about the mysteries of nature, stimulated me to think critically, and to question.

• I was about 17 when the Beatles came to the United States. They had a song with the line: "I get by with a little help from my friends." Let me take this moment to thank my friends, who have given me insight and encouragement to persevere. Some of my long-time friends are here in the audience; many more are here in spirit. They are making a profound impact all over the world now -- and a few have their instruments and dreams orbiting other worlds -- tasting the brew concocted by far away moons, receiving and interpreting the bursts and belches of dying stars. My friends, your example and your reach have sustained me; as an old rock climber I say, thanks for the belay.

• A common question that I was asked as I interviewed for this position as President of Purdue, and as I later made my way around the campus, was this: "At the end of your tenure as President, what would you like to have accomplished?" That kind of question makes one think ahead, and then rewind to the present to see if one is on course to realize that vision.

 • I remember when I was in my early twenties I asked myself the same question. I had an undergraduate degree in English -- a degree that has served me well in all of my endeavors (a degree that made me love Shakespeare as well as quote him). I wondered what I would be doing by the time I was thirty. I looked around me; I listened to the pulse of the times that were, as Bob Dylan sang, "a-changin." On my little black and white TV I saw that our nation was launching people and experiments into space, that the sky was not the limit. I wanted to be a part of that grand adventure. I imagined that at the age of thirty I would be a physicist; and -- I was.

• What an extraordinary privilege -- to have the opportunity to see into matter at the smallest scales of the subatomic, and the largest scales of the universe's network of galaxies. Pursuing an understanding of the universe and its workings connected me with the poetic yearnings I embraced as a young girl, the yearning so remarkably phrased by Edna St. Vincent Millay in her poem "Renascence." For her the sky was a metaphor for reaching upward, for transformation; for me, it was the real thing when humans could walk in space and our spacecrafts carry human songs and clues about us through and beyond our system of nine -- no, make that eight -- planets. (Poor Pluto!) At NASA I was privileged to be a part of a plan to search beyond Earth for the signature of life.

• Today at Purdue the adventure for me continues, but this time my horizon has changed. Looking ahead several years, what would I like to have seen accomplished?

 • It takes the entire Purdue village to answer this question. As you heard from Chairman McGinley -- the campus faculty, staff, and students have put in a lot of work over the last few months to chart our course going forward. And now the roadmap is taking shape.

Throughout history, humankind has made symbols for its ventures. Think about flags on the ships of sailing vessels. Think about the signs and symbols that dot our vast network of roadways. Think about the astronaut patches that represent flight missions.

Behind the platform party on this stage is signage that suggests Purdue's new course. It aggregates the varied themes that have emerged from listening to our faculty, staff, and students over the last six months into one simple representation: a symbol whose design suggests momentum, whose words convey succinctly the ideas that will move us into the future.

We are still discussing where we will take our university during the next several years, and the final decision will emerge from a united community. But I'd like to give you a brief glimpse of where we are going, and I'll use this symbol to do so.

I'll start with the phrase along the bottom of this emblem: "Launching Tomorrow's Leaders." The focus of a university is the development of students. Our commitment to their access and ultimate success, both as students today and leaders tomorrow, is our paramount goal.

We understand access. How do we define student success? The group of Purdue planners who led our thinking about this in recent months defines it thusly: Student success is: "an intentional experience that leads to … intellectual and personal growth, and prepares a student for life and a career in a dynamic and diverse global society."

Going forward, we have numerous goals for student success, including enhancing academic preparedness for college in K-12 schools with the development of talented science and math teachers and promoting more rigorous high school standards.

Our planning has led us to favor a more concentrated campus design that brings students, faculty, and staff closer together. This plan would have the campus be a "living laboratory" for sustainability, which would be “the touchstone for all that we do, ecologically, socially and economically."  It would preserve and enhance the abundant open space that surrounds our campus. The vision is for a campus community that values quality of life, including artistic, cultural, social, and recreational life. We will engage our local communities to partner with us. 

I'll touch on a few other highlights from our plan for student success:

A priority is to enhance the experiences of undergraduate students during their first two years through shared intellectual learning experiences upon entry; centralize services and resources in a student "hub" that fosters academic excellence and diversity, and student life and leadership; and promote and reward innovation in teaching.

 A goal is to abandon over time the large classes in which students sit passively in favor of smaller classes that engage students in experiential learning. We hope to transform some or all of our "gateway" classes that currently seat hundreds of students -- and ultimately defeat large numbers of them -- into exciting venues for learning. A role model is our College of Engineering that is transforming its classrooms with 450 freshman students into a five-module, hands-on design experience called Ideas to Innovation. I recently toured the new Neil Armstrong Hall of Engineering: its multiple small but open gathering places were full of students studying in small clusters. Our campus libraries, too, are creating environments in which students can learn collaboratively -- and even drink good coffee at Amelia's, named for famed aviatrix and Purdue counselor, Amelia Earhart.

We wish to engage students in the wider international community; the world is changing so fast that students need to witness it first hand. While there is great value in students spending an entire semester or more abroad, global experiences can be accomplished in even shorter time spans: even a brief visit to Xi'an, the UAE, or Mumbai will give a student a new appreciation of the magnitude of global change, and global research challenges -- not to mention, global competition! We will offer a more robust menu of global experiences, integrated more thoughtfully into the curricula of the various colleges – many funded through scholarships -- so that students have the option and the means to go abroad. Our goal is to encourage every student to think globally and learn how education can foster global understanding.

We want to offer every student the opportunity for a transformational experience -- in research, in service learning, an internship with a company, a multicultural experience. Talk to almost any academic or business CEO today and she will tell you that such an experience in college was key in her development.

A heady initiative has emerged from our campus planning, which is to engage the university senate and entire faculty in a discussion on the merits of moving toward a core curriculum that would enhance students' understanding and communication among the academic disciplines, and possibly create a University College that would serve as a first-year alternative to declaring a major immediately.

Thus far I've focused on the undergraduate experience. Purdue also has a diverse graduate student community that makes it a global institution in the Midwest. In our audience we have leaders of universities and companies -- both here and abroad -- who started at Purdue as graduate students. We hope to continue to recruit the best and brightest from the U.S. and around the world. To fulfill our goal of having outstanding graduate programs at Purdue we need to increase the stipends for our graduate students, and establish a support center devoted to their academic progress and personal wellbeing.

Allow me to return to the signature emblem behind me. Thus far I have been discussing the meaning of the phrase on the bottom of the symbol. Along the left side are the words Discovery with Delivery.

As a research university, Purdue's goal is to be at the forefront of discovering new knowledge. As a land grant university, Purdue's goal is to take the knowledge created by the faculty on campus to the larger world outside the university, where it can make a difference for society.

In agriculture our research may be delivered to individuals or to production farms, or to industries that insure the quality of food and its safety. Our electronics and communication research may benefit commercial enterprises in space or logistics on the ground.

In pharmacy our research may span the spectrum from drug design to advanced manufacturing. Linking life sciences and engineering research may produce new biomedical devices for  patient care.

Purdue is mindful of its responsibility for economic development in both metropolitan and rural Indiana, and is constantly seeking pathways to do this better and faster, in partnership with business and industries, foundations, the government, and the nonprofit sector.

The words discovery with delivery also convey the importance of attracting students into careers in science, technology, engineering, and math. Numerous studies emphasize the danger for the United States if it loses its competitive innovation edge to other countries.

The challenge for the United States? It is producing talented, trained people in science and technology. The developing world is a voracious maw for talent, and U.S. universities will need to work hard to attract students into these disciplines, and then mentor and support them so that they will be successful. We have an untapped pool of talent in women and minorities who have not historically selected these careers.

Going forward, Purdue will address these challenges by:

• Engaging and nurturing a diverse talent pool at every level of the academy: administrator, faculty, staff, and student.

• Enhancing the numbers of students who are credentialed in innovation and entrepreneurship. As one of our planning groups has noted, "To power economic development we need to create an entrepreneurial culture and attract and retain people, not just firms."

• Enhancing seed funding for blue-sky research that brings together people from different disciplines across the university into innovative initiatives.

• Engaging in large-scale research partnerships with other universities, nonprofits, the government and industry -- to address important challenges for society.

• Enhancing the infrastructure that would enable such partnerships, and would encourage more interdisciplinary research: we need to reduce barriers to working across sectors and across disciplines. A bold beginning is Purdue's Discovery Park, started only a few years ago. It localizes eleven interdisciplinary centers in five new buildings in the heart of the campus, and encourages partnerships among the centers and between the centers and outside agencies. The centers are focused on the nation's and the world's most pressing challenges and opportunities, including energy and the environment, nanotechnology and biosciences, cancer, advanced manufacturing, and the science of learning. Discovery Park is home to an Alfred Mann Institute for Biomedical Development whose purpose is to accelerate technology transfer and a Kaufmann Institute whose purpose is to stimulate entrepreneurship. The Park needs further investment to ensure continued discoveries.

• Enhancing pathways from discovery to development and delivery. Purdue has created, or is constructing, several commercial research parks around Indiana which today host 170 companies. Now we need to pump new discoveries into those parks. We need to facilitate all the science and engineering disciplines at Purdue to connect more aggressively with our research parks, to create more startup companies, and entice more national and global partners to site businesses at these parks.

• Purdue's West Lafayette Research Park has the ability to one day become as important to Indiana as Silicon Valley is to California; to ensure this we need to focus on content and impact.

• Two large proposals have come from our recent planning on this theme. One is for a cooperative "super project" that would partner our office of research with our office of engagement and our Purdue Research Park. The idea is to galvanize economic development and bold initiatives by developing a more robust and collaborative systems approach to innovation, engagement, and learning.

• The second is a proposal to establish an institute for public policy and global affairs. One way to augment and transfer new knowledge in engineering, physical and life sciences to the public is to engage social scientists and humanists, education and business faculty, in assessing the potential impact this knowledge would have on society. Our Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Engineering is just such a trans-disciplinary effort. To achieve this for a wider array of disciplines, a Purdue planning group has proposed the establishment of an institute that would bring together faculty and their students to examine the social, cultural, economic, and political aspects of discovery and innovation and its delivery to the marketplace.

Along the right side of our futuristic emblem reads Meeting Global Challenges. Everything I've said today either implicitly or explicitly involves our university's position as being both transmitter and receiver of global knowledge, global students and faculty, global advice, wisdom, and caution. We have contributed to the world's challenges, and vice versa. Now it's time to roll up our collective sleeve and attack these challenges, engaging partners globally to solve problems.

This effort will be led by our smart and creative faculty. It will engage our talented staff. And it should attract our students; this world will be theirs to embrace through global experience; the alternative is misunderstanding, and fear.

There is nothing that I've said today that is more important than enhancing a global awareness on the part of every member of our Purdue family -- an awareness that goes beyond knowing that your computer has a zillion parts, each manufactured in a different country. An awareness that goes beyond appreciating coffee from Colombia, or that Southeast Asia has some nice beaches.

Our planning group for Global Purdue said, "An unwavering commitment to leadership as a global university will be the most defining characteristic of Purdue for future generations." How we transform our missions of teaching, scholarship, research, and engagement "will define us and dictate our impact."

We felt strongly enough about this that we devoted yesterday's symposium to the theme of The Global University. Moderated by C-SPAN founder, Purdue alumnus and Presidential Medal of Freedom winner Brian Lamb, the panelists discussed the nature and imperatives of a truly global university, offering best practices as well as challenges.

Going forward we have many initiatives, which would advocate at Purdue an increasingly global mindset, transform our missions of research and teaching, and enhance our physical global presence. We are currently involved with other countries in developing such a presence. So stay tuned! Our plan is to partner where we can have impact in addressing global challenges like energy, the environment, sustainability, and improvement of the quality of life for everyone.

That's a glimpse of where Purdue is going over the next few years. It is not meant to limit us -- the world will change much, even in a few years, and we will be responsive to its changes. Yet it is empowering for us to chart an ambitious course.

Borrowing from Theodore Geisel, better loved as Dr. Seuss:

Oh, the places (we'll) go!

"Will (we) succeed?

"Yes, (we) will indeed

"(98 and 3/4 percent guaranteed)."

We have a lot of power behind our plan: about 90,000 engines in all -- one for each student, each staff member, and each faculty member of Purdue; a system wide budget of $1.8 billion; and a new $304 million student access and success fundraising campaign under way. We are focused; we are ready for launch.

Twenty-two Boilermakers have been chosen to slip "the surly bonds of earth" for travel into space. The rest of us are not far behind. In the poem I referenced earlier,  "Renascence," Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote:

"Above the world is stretched the sky,

No higher than the soul is high . . . "

We have set our soul on an exhilarating course. The sky is not the limit.

Go Boilers! And Hail Purdue!

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