"State of the University" Conversation with President Steven Knapp October 3, 2009

Laura Taddeuci Downs: Good morning.

Collective Response: Good morning.

Laura Taddeuci Downs: It’s great to see you all here. My name is Laura Taddeuci Downs and I’m the president of your GW Alumni Association. It is great to see you here and welcome to Alumni Weekend 2009.

This morning, President Knapp will share his vision, vision goals and priorities for the university. President Knapp’s remarks are also being webcast across campus cable and will be available for viewing on our alumni website. The format for this morning’s presentation will take the form of an interview that will be conducted by our distinguished GW colleague, Richard Golden.

It is now my honor to introduce Richard Golden. Dick Golden joined the George Washington University staff as special assistant for broadcast operations and university events in March of 2005. As part of the events team, he has been involved in the planning and staging of three commencements, four U.S. presidential visits to the university, Chief Justice John Robert’s participation in the GW Law School Moot Court and an honorary degree ceremony for UN Secretary Kofi Annan.

As special assistant for broadcast operations, he serves as staff advisor to the student-run radio station, WRGW, and works on special GW radio and television projects. Dick also hosts two weekly XM satellite programs produced by GW; American Jazz heard on Sundays, on XM from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., and Beyond Category which airs three times each week on XM and is co-hosted by a 2001 GW honorary degree recipient, Tony Bennett. Dick has lectured at educational seminars for the Smithsonian Associates and hosted concerts for the Voice of America and the U.S. Service Bands in D.C. Dick is known campus-wide for his melodious voice, his love of jazz and his extensive radio career.

It is now my pleasure to also introduce President Steven Knapp. Steven Knapp is in his third year as president of the George Washington University. His priorities include enhancing the university’s partnerships with neighboring institutions, raising its preeminence in research, strengthening its world-wide community of alumni, expanding its students’ opportunities for public engagement and service and leading its transformation into a model of urban sustainability. A proponent of fostering close community ties, Dr. Knapp serves on the Board of Directors of the National Symphony Orchestra and the Greater Washington Urban League. He is a member of the executive committees of the Council on Competitiveness and the Federal City Council. He is also a member of the Economic Club of Washington and the Committee for Economic Development.

Prior to joining GW, Dr. Knapp taught at the University of California at Berkeley and served as dean of Arts and Sciences and then as provost of the Johns Hopkins University. He earned his doctorate and master’s degrees from Cornell University and his Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale University. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage Dick Golden and President Steven Knapp.

Richard Golden: Thank you, Laura. Thank you very much. Thank you very much Laura and thank all of you for being here in this beautiful October morning. We want to thank Adrienne Rulnick and her great staff and all the people here at Jack Morton Auditorium for accommodating us in this Saturday morning and welcome so many of our alumni back here to D.C. We’re going to expand for an hour on some of the things that are happening here, the dynamic initiatives of President Knapp and then toward the end of our conversation invite some of your opinions and questions and observations. So we want to remind you and instill in you and imbue you some of the great things that are going on here, but you remind us when you come back here each year or when you get in touch with the alumni office of the continuing distinction you bring this great university. And President Knapp just this past Thursday evening, the Alumni Achievement Awards kind of took place and I know you were so impressed with the recipients of the awards this year.

Steven Knapp: Yes. This was my third opportunity to participate in that ceremony but I have to say that I was really overwhelmed by the speeches that the recipients gave. First of all, the deans introduced them and that they did a very nice job of talking about their achievements over the course of their careers but then to have them get up one after the other and give these just spectacular speeches.

Vincent Gray, who is the chair of the D.C. Council, the city council here in our capital city, talked about coming here in the early ‘60s when having been a star athlete in high school, he was unable to get on an athletic team here as a baseball player because of the segregation of athletics here at that time at George Washington. And that gave him an entrée into talking about how the university had changed and he spoke very interestingly about the way in which we’re now engaged with the community, really not just in the city but really of the City of Washington. And I thought it was a very moving account of how his career had been shaped by that experience because he’s stuck with it and he was the first African-American student to become a fraternity member and ultimately the president of his fraternity.

We heard from Paul Anthony who is a graduate of both our medical school and our public health school and had just returned from his second combat tour. He was in Iraq and then he was in Afghanistan where he was helping our wounded soldiers there, also flying combat missions as a pilot and he’s an expert in public health so it is an extraordinary combination.

We heard from Liz McCartney who is a graduate of our education school who set up a nonprofit organization to build houses in Louisiana following Hurricane Katrina. She went down there and was moved by what she saw and went into that line of work.

One of our recent alumni, Andrew Brown, has set up an international language training program, a nonprofit that he created himself while he was still a student here that provides the language skills that members of non-government organizations and government relief workers need to go to into countries like Haiti and a variety of African countries. I think they’re teaching some 30 languages now in this program, and it’s a program that he created himself. So it was just an extraordinary set.

I’ll mention one, the last one, just because I’m still so excited about this one. Christina Puchalski created here a program in medicine and spirituality. She is actually a physician here and also an expert in spirituality. And that program is now a model for other universities around the country. They provide grants to start some of their programs literally around the country and it’s a way of encouraging physicians and giving them the skills to listen to the life stories of their patients. So she is having a direct impact through that program on the lives of countless people around the country.

So it was just an extraordinary collection of our alumni and it talks about the way alumni are the means by which we truly have an impact on the world around us.

Richard Golden: Yes, and what great distinction you continue to bring GW every time we pick up a newspaper and see someone doing something noble and a graduate of the GW University in 1946 or 1973. And now for the alumni, we want to try and communicate to you some of the extraordinary things that have been going on over the last almost 800 days of your presidency here and I don’t think anyone on campus has been moved, more moved or aware of the issue of sustainability and in your tenure. You in your personal life, you have a focus on that and a consciousness about that. How as an institution have you responded to this issue?

Richard Golden: Well, we -- when I first arrived, this was back in August of 2007, one of the very first things I did was set up a taskforce on sustainability and I have to say that part of that was driven by my own interest in the issue but it was also a result of the passion of our students who are so committed to this issue now. I think it’s because as they look down the course of their lives and look at what the world could become because of the environmental challenges, whether you focus on climate change and whether you focus on energy security, and we have faculty and students who are interested in all those areas, it’s something that our students are really committed to and really passionate about. But the other factor here is we’re in a city here in Washington that really wants to become a model of urban sustainability and we have been partnering with the District of Columbia.

In fact, we’ve had two symposiums right here in this space. We had one last fall, last October and then in the Marvin Center across the street, we had a policy greenhouse in which we invited people to come and present their ideas to the D.C. leadership about ways in which the city could save energy, could reduce its climate impact and so on. We were actually the first university in the District of Columbia to sign the American College & University Presidents Climate Commitment and as a result of that we created an office of sustainability. This was also one of the recommendations of our taskforce. Our Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, the summer after I arrived, established a solar energy institute and right now, we’re building up a team of scientists and engineers on our Virginia Science and Technology campus. This is our campus, a 100-acre campus, just a few miles north of Dulles Airport where we’re doing cutting-edge work in developing alternative fuels.

So it’s really across the spectrum. We have a strong group in our law school that works on environmental law. We have an interest in global health and its relation to environment through our school of public health and health services. We have people working in medicine on this issue. It’s really across the whole university but I give a tremendous amount of credit to our students. And once we announce that we were involved in this activity, a lot of our alumni have approached us and expressed their interest so we actually created a green council of alumni to help advice us and make the kind of connections that would help us be leaders in this field.

Richard Golden: I think Ted Turner when he was here in I believe was this past April at the Institute for the Analysis of Solar Energy launched, he said that - and I’m quoting him now - “I’m excited that George Washington University is really thinking big about the issues of energy to be a leader in resources going forward and that solar energy could be a great resource.” And thanks to GW’s initiatives in this particular area, you look for continuing imprint from the Analysis of Solar Energy, correct?

Steven Knapp: Absolutely, right. Yes, and he was one of the contributors to our -- and that made it possible for us to establish the institute. I’ll say though that -- and there are two sides to this because we’re trying to have an impact on the field of sustainability through the work of our faculty in all these areas, including the Solar Energy Institute that you mentioned. But in addition to that, we’re trying to sort of practice what we preach by paying attention to what we’re doing right here on our campus. And we’ve just created -- I hope our alumni on campus this week and have a chance to see it. It’s a beautiful new residence hall. It’s called South Hall. It’s on F Street facing south and we expect that building -- we know it’s going to have at least a silver LEED rating. We’re hopeful. We’re sort of one point away at this stage as they go through a review of this, it looks like we may even get a gold standard for that building.

But in any case, it’s a -- there are bamboo materials in there. We had a student, an idea from a student which I’ll mention very briefly, which is that we discovered that if we added a filtered water system to that building, it would save 250,000 plastic bottles of water a year in that single residence hall. And that was an idea a student came up with.

Richard Golden: I know you mentioned that the Green @ Work event this past June, you and Diane, your wife walked around the campus and you were continually open to students or faculty or staff people coming up to you if they have a better idea like [cross-talking]

Steven Knapp: That’s right. Yes.

Richard Golden: You’ve created that sort of a culture.

Steven Knapp: Usually, the attraction is our small dog named Ruffles who is certainly the most popular member of our family and she does tend to draw a crowd and so we can talk about whatever we want once we’ve attracted people.

Richard Golden: And I think actually the Green @ Work event here on the campus in June, you mentioned she was a recyclable dog.

Steven Knapp: Entirely made of recycled materials. That’s right.

Richard Golden: I’d like to talk about another very important issue and that’s of course affordability. I think everyone is talking about expenses in every area of their life but especially affordability in higher education. In this past September you welcomed the class of 2013 to GW with 20,000 applications this past year. The 67 percent of the incoming freshmen that you welcomed in September at the Smith Center graduated in the top 10 percent of their class, a very admirable accomplishment I think but the question is affordability and how is GW responding to increased tuitions?

Richard Golden: Well, I think the word is finally getting out that we’re having a unique program here in which we not only do we have a fixed tuition for up to five years. If the students are in good standing, they never see an increase in their tuition after the first year they arrive at our institution. Not only that but we guarantee their scholarship aids so if a student is on financial aid, that scholarship never goes down over those five years so it’s a genuine guaranteed price for the entire up to five years.

Steven Knapp: We’ve got a reputation of being a highly expensive university because the sticker price for that first year in which a student arrives does place us near the top of U.S. institutions, but if you take into account the total cost of an undergraduate degree, we’re not even in the top 20 in terms of expenses in the institutions. So I think it’s important to emphasize, because a lot of people aren’t aware of it, I think our families of our students are aware of it and I think especially in these turbulent economic times, to have that kind of predictability and to know exactly what you’re going to pay for the entire length of a student’s studies I think is a real benefit to families in a period of uncertainty.

But we haven’t stopped with that. We’ve also moderated the growth of tuition. I started an affordability initiative. Again, when I first arrived we moderated the growth of tuition. We kept it down inflation now for two years in a row. We expect to continue doing that.

Our greatest challenge as an institution when it comes to affordability and indeed to the resources we have to invest in our academic programs is that we have less philanthropic support for our scholarships, for our student aid than the institutions with which we compete. So that’s really I think an essential point to understand about our institution. In other words, we have less endowment for scholarships and less in the way of gifts for current use supporting scholarships. And that means we have to take our student aid out of our tuition revenues.

You get into this sort of vicious cycle where you increase your price to enable people to afford the price, and that’s something we have to work our way out of. And we’re doing that by moderating the growth of tuition, by continuing our fixed cost and guaranteed aid program and above all, by dramatically increasing through the efforts of all our deans - they’re all very much involved in this because it benefits every one of our schools - bringing in support for students, undergraduate as well as graduate students because that’s what’s really going to increase our competitiveness as an institution and reduce the burden on debt with which our students graduate and make it easier for families to contemplate coming to an expensive private university.

Richard Golden: You attended a briefing of the national seminar Chairman Ramsey conducted this past week. What was your assessment of that?

Steven Knapp: Just yesterday?

Richard Golden: Yes.

Steven Knapp: Well, it was a sobering presentation I think it’s very true -- Chairman Russ Ramsey as an investment expert who happens to be the chair of our board and is a 1981 alumnus; was a star baseball player when he was here. And he was rather brilliant that marshalling the facts about the economy. I’d say he’s rather bearish on the economy at the moment so I think a lot of people went back and checked their portfolios after listening to that presentation. But it’s a great program. This is part of a conference because of the course that he and his wife Norma launched here in which students in our business school actually get to manage some of the funds and the investment and they performed extraordinarily well. I mean they beat the market rather significantly in this past year.

And every year, there’s a conference in which experts are brought in to talk about the state of the economy in one aspect or another. This year, it was about asset allocation and agriculture. Those were the two focuses but this is an ongoing -- something we do every alumni weekend now. So I think it’s the third year this has been running.

Richard Golden: Of course one of the impediments to recovery seems to be the high end employment; it’s almost at 10 percent now.

Steven Knapp: Yes, he was suggesting the real number is closer to 16 percent but the official number is 9.8.

Richard Golden: Wow. And in some parts of the country, I heard in Detroit it was 29 percent. At the Great Depression, it was 30 percent. But it brings, call to mind how the alumni office and the career services people react to that and some of the wonderful programs they have here at GW to help people get started in their career. In fact, I know some of you may be heading over to room 310 over in the Marvin Center where you’ll be able to engage with career counselors and they offer students counseling on job opportunities and it’s a great resource I think for alumni at GW.

One of your ambitions and I think the presence of this group here today and the thousands who have come to George Washington University alumni this weekend is your efforts to build a worldwide lifelong community. You’ve done extensive traveling around the world. What do you hear from alumni as you make your way around the world talking to them?

Steven Knapp: Well, first of all, I just want to comment that the program that you talked about in which we’re reaching out to alumni just as we do for students to help identify career opportunities and help them undergo transitions if they need to into other careers, I think that’s a sign of the way in which your university needs to become more and more engaged in an ongoing way with the community of alumni because, frankly, our alumni, as I said at the beginning, it’s through our alumni that we really have our impact in the world and we need to maintain that connection. I’ve talk about how I want to make sure that alumni always continue to see our university, the George Washington University, as their home here in the nation’s capital. Many of them travel here from around the world.

I’ve gone around the world now actually to Asia three times, one Latin-American trip, I’ll probably be going to India in the spring, to the Middle East last spring, last March. And everywhere I go, there’s an extraordinary interest on the part of our alumni in connecting with the university and alumni frequently come to events and talk about the ways in which the engagement with a particular professor has changed his or her life and by opening the possibility of a career that they would never otherwise have contemplated and I really hear that everywhere.

We counted the number of alumni that I’ve met in one way or another in each of the two years that I’ve been doing this; there was 11,000 the first year; 13,000 the next year. I don’t promise I’m going to keep increasing that every year but we have 225,000 alumni around the world so it’s an extraordinarily large community. We have by the way a concentration here of some 70,000 just from the Greater Washington area and we have been very systematically building our staff in alumni relations to support the ongoing connection because I think that it’s one thing to go to a city and go to a reception and meet a lot of people and shake a lot of hands and give a speech, but if there isn’t the ongoing connection through technology, through a robust Web presence, through identifying and keeping in touch with our alumni then we really can’t sustain that community which is such an important part of what it means to be an institution like this.

Richard Golden: Well, even this event here is being Webcast live to alumni all around the world. It will be available on the Web site as Laura mentioned earlier in the weeks to come, and there have been many updates. We have a beautiful new webpage I think.

Steven Knapp: Yes.

Richard Golden: The page is terrific.

Steven Knapp: Yes. That’s something we’ve been working hard on. The main page itself is now finished and we now have to make sure that that’s connected to everything we’re doing in the university. That’s going to be an ongoing process of continuing to perfect that but it’s something that I really did make that a priority because I think people have to be able have a user-friendly way of getting in touch with us. When I first arrived here, you couldn’t. I would try to find something on the Web just to see if you could do it and more often than not, it just turned out you couldn’t do it. So that’s something I thought we really needed to work on.

But yes, there’s an international dimension to this. There’s a technological dimension to it. I just want to mention one thing on the international front which is that we’re having our first ever global forum for alumni and other members of our worldwide community that will be held in Hong Kong this coming November 13th and 14th. I’d like to see as many possible of our viewers and attendees here today.

If you’re traveling internationally, a lot of roads cross in Hong Kong and if you happen to be out there, we’re going to be having a number of our experts, including our alumni who are experts on a variety of fields are going to be leading that effort, including Susan Schwab who is the recent U.S. Trade Representative; she’s one of our keynote speakers for that event. We’ll be having a lot of our faculty and staff who’ll be there to engage with people, so it’s going to be a great forum. It’s an experiment to see if we can in effect take our show on the road internationally and really I think connect, reconnect our alumni with the intellectual excitement of being part of the university community.

Richard Golden: That’s amazing. What a time you’ll be going there. China this past week celebrating its 60th anniversary and it’s probably one of the most important relationships in the 21st century; it’s this country and Asia. So you’ll be in Hong Kong in November.

Steven Knapp: Yes. China now sends more students to our university than any other country which is a recent trend. That was not true until just a few yeas ago but it’s true now.

Richard Golden: You mentioned traveling around the world and all over the country, too. I know you’re going to New York later this month to meet with alumni, but that sense of community is something that you’ve tried to cultivate here on campus with your residency, F Street House. You and Diane are very hospitable, host to many, many events. Can you talk about some of that?

Steven Knapp: Yes. Well, the first, we opened the house for public events last October and from then until the end of that academic year, we had 60 different events. The largest was a reception for the Congressional Black Caucus on the eve of the presidential inauguration. We had 250 people in the house. The next day, we had a luncheon there. We hosted a luncheon there for the Joint Chiefs of Staff which was made possible because of one our alumni, Admiral Thad Allen who is the Coast Guard Commandant. There’s a tradition that on every -- the day of every inauguration, the joint chiefs get together for lunch somewhere. We happened to have Ulysses S. Grant’s dining room furniture in the F Street House so it seemed an appropriate setting for that luncheon, so 7 o’clock in the morning the honor guard, Coast Guard honor guard, was lined up on our steps and the generals and admirals went -- and four wives and one daughter marched up there. And they had an entourage of about 40 lesser generals and admirals with them who had a boxed lunch in our conservatory while we sat around Grant’s table eating lunch, so.

Richard Golden: That’s terrific.

Steven Knapp: But we’ve also had multiple -- we’ve had coffees for faculty, dinners for students there. We just had a dinner for about 60 students last week. And we’ve had a barbeque for our university police department. We had another barbeque for housekeeping and grounds keeping staff. We’ve had many alumni gatherings there. We’ve had open houses for the neighbors, for the community. I think they were sort of surprised the first time we did that but now, that has become an annual event; we expect to continue that tradition.

So we really have used the house I think as a way of locating ourselves very much at the heart of the campus. We’re right across the street from one of the university’s most famous institutions which is Thurston Hall. I think that means something to some people. And it has been a real benefit to be able to be right there in the heart of campus.

Richard Golden: Someone told me recently about an event at the house that I thought was just terrific. I wish I could’ve witnessed this. You had the smallest residents of Foggy Bottom as guests for cookies and milk.

Steven Knapp: Yes, that was an unusual one. It turns out there are within a block or two of the house, there are three different daycare centers so we had about 150 children of all ages in three different shifts come over for what we called Milk and Cookies, and a lot of our students -- it wouldn’t have been possible if didn’t have students who were eager to help out in that event, I must tell you. But the first group showed up in kind of a long plastic train of linked together strollers because this was the smallest group. These were 18-month-old children. And then we had - it was up to age five, so. Yes, that was unusual kind of university event but they’re all part of the community. In fact, many of them are children of our faculty and staff.

Richard Golden: And they certainly brightened up the community, too, when you see them strolling around here.

Steven Knapp: Yes, yes. Just tie them together or on these trains or whatever it might be, right.

Richard Golden: Another theme I would like to introduce because it has taken over the last year such prominence is a theme that has been here for years, it’s part of the George Washington University tradition but it really -- there was a moment that illuminated me to how deeply the words service and GW are synonymous when last December 3rd at Betts auditorium you introduced Bill Gates who was here to speak on campus. And among the things he said after being introduced by President Knapp was this direct quote from Bill Gates, “GW is a top school in many areas; public policy, the arts, politics and scientific research. There are two additional facts about GW that impress me. First, you rank number one among private universities in the number of students who become Peace Corps volunteers and second, the largest employer of GW students last year was Teach for America. If young people in America make the kinds of choices that students are making here at GW, we’re in for a great future.”

Though I had felt that intuitively about the university, to hear it from a citizen of the world, citizens Bill and Melinda Gates, I thought it was quite a revealing moment for all of us. And you have taken that word service, you invoked it at the freshman convocation in September urging these students who were beginning their historical trek of the next four years with this wonderful experience of GW on the weekend that Ted Kennedy was being buried and you mentioned the life of service that he gave to his country, and urged them whatever else they do in the four years here to take time to perform some public service. And within the couple of days, we had our First Annual Freshman Day of Service. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Steven Knapp: Yes. With the Freshman Day of Service, it was the way we chose to commemorate the tragedy of September 11th this year, so it happened on that Friday of September 11th, and we had 1,400 freshmen who fanned out across the whole city here performing community service. And two of those freshmen ended up going with President and Mrs. Obama to a house they were painting in one of our neighborhoods here in Washington. And on that occasion, the First Lady issued a challenge to the university, she said that if we perform 100,000 hours of public service as a university - faculty, students and staff - this year, she will be our commencement speaker on the Mall this coming May. So we thought that was a very nice kind of climax of the day as our First Freshman Day of Service.

And I can tell you we are going to do those 100,000 hours and if we hit April and we haven’t reached the quota, I’m going to be cleaning up your park in Washington, D.C. But no, it’s a hallmark of our -- it’s something, again, that our students are passionate about. Students are drawn here -- whatever their interests are, whether they’re interested in the arts, whether they’re interested in engineering, whether they want to go into medicine or law, into public policy, into foreign policy, they’re drawn to this city because this is a university in which we really do engage with the world from our position here in the nation’s capital. And I think it’s what inspires the kind of passionate engagement of our students who come to us now from all 50 states and from 150 countries around the world.

We, I think, take every opportunity that we can to make it possible. We’re not -- this isn’t something we’re imposing on our students. It’s something we’re enabling them to do but they already have a passionate commitment to doing.

Richard Golden: I don’t know if there was a category in the Guinness Book of Records for earliest announced commencement speaker, but if there isn’t there will be now and George Washington University will --

Steven Knapp: Well, you can imagine as a university president, it’s a bit of a relief to have that have taken care of in the first two weeks of the semester.

Richard Golden: It’s pretty -- I thought it was revealing, too, that when the Washington Post ran the story the following morning they said, they mentioned the First Lady’s challenge and then in parenthesis it said, “The Community Service Office reported last year GW did 60,000 hours of community service.” So the bar is already pretty high.

Steven Knapp: Right. Well, that’s what makes us confident that we’ll be able to do this.

Richard Golden: One of the things I think that is important that I have observed in my time here at GW is this whole subject of service and really values isn’t something formalized in a classroom that you have to really teach this by example and I think of the many, many examples GW plays as a good neighbor here in the District of Columbia. Move-in day, for instance, the first contact people have of service is you and Diane leading thousands of people from the staff and faculty and administration in move-in day so they get really a close touch with the service from the university. Can you talk about some of the other initiatives? We’re a partner with the Duke Ellington School, with the Trachtenberg scholarships.

Steven Knapp: Well, in fact, yes, I can mention some of those scholarships. One that just had a new boost this year was our partnership with School Without Walls which is a D.C. public school located right on our campus - it’s on G Street just a couple of blocks from here. That was an interesting example of a public-private partnership because we had an arrangement with the city where we would help them renovate a historic school building, the home of the School Without Walls, and in return they would provide that parking lot behind the school that became the sight of South Hall, the sustainable new residence hall that I described earlier in our discussion.

We’ve created a new program there. It’s called Early College Program which will enable 14 of the students in that high school to spend their last two years of high school enrolled in our university and so when they graduate they will have both an associate’s degree from GW and a high school diploma from The School Without Walls. I think that’s an extraordinary program. That’s on top of the usually nine or so a year Trachtenberg scholarships that we provide to graduating seniors from public schools around the District to whom we provide a free full scholarship. So we’re talking about now covering 25 or so, 24 or 25, students a year with full support from our university, and these are students in the District of Columbia public schools. So I think that’s a pretty extraordinary program.

The first of those I inherit -- the Trachtenberg I inherited and this new one we just created but I think we’ve now established a tradition and a kind of reputation within the city for being a real community partner with the public schools, which of course it’s a challenge for every university to find ways of contributing to the local community which have challenges, particularly in areas like public education. So I think that’s a pretty good example of citizenship.

Richard Golden: Very impressive, sure, in our district. I’d like to talk a little bit now about your vision of the George Washington University as a preeminent research institution and you’ve taken some very concrete steps in that direction. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Steven Knapp: Yes. I mean I think first to put it in context, George Washington really did envision a world-class university would exist in the nation’s capital, was in his last will and testament when he died in 1799. And at that time, what he had in mind was a university in which you would bring together individuals from all 13 states, former colonies, so that they could together live and work together and forge a common national identity instead of just having the regional biases that they acquired by growing up in one of the other colonies. So that was a deliberate vision on his part. That was something he chose to announce as a goal for the new nation.

Well, today, to be a world-class university in the heart of this nation’s capital means to have an impact not just on your local community and not just to have an impact through the students you educate but really to make a contribution to addressing pressing national and global problems. And you do that by becoming a fully recognized, highly distinguished and powerful research university.

So to fulfill that vision today, what it means today to be the University of George Washington and the vision is to be a world-class research university and we are on the path to do that. We made tremendous progress - you said something about this earlier - increasing the selectivity of our undergraduate class. We built up our undergraduate program. We now have a residential undergraduate program. In former decades, we progressed from being a night school to a community school to now a fully residential university campus with 10,000 undergraduates, most of whom live right here on our campus. They’re now drawn as I said from all 50 states, from 150 countries. Every year, their SAT scores and their class rankings go up.

So we are making and we will continue to make progress in building that undergraduate experience and increasing the selectivity of our undergraduate mission. In that way, we’re becoming stronger and stronger as an undergraduate instructional university. We have to do the same thing with our graduate programs where we have strengths in a number of areas. We could go around the university, I could point to very highly ranked individual programs but we need to develop that and become comprehensively a powerful research university to a much greater degree than has been our tradition because, traditionally, we were more of an instructionally based university.

Now, we have to bring together research and instruction, so we’re building up our School of Engineering. We’re contemplating the creation of a new science and engineering complex here on our campus. I mentioned our science and technology campus out in Northern Virginia in Ashburn, north of Dulles Airport. I mentioned the work we’re doing in sustainability. I could also point to extraordinary programs like our program in our School of Medicine addressing the neglected tropical diseases that afflict millions of people around the world and are not just the results of poverty but in many ways the causes of poverty because they’re so debilitating in their effects on -- sometimes the whole population of a village will be infected with hookworm or schistosomiasis or one of these terrible parasitic diseases. And we’re addressing that directly through the work of our faculty here in our School of Medicine.

We’re addressing disparities in health through our School of Public Health and Health Services. We’re working on health policy. We’re involved in the debate on all across the spectrum of that debate through the work of our faculty providing expert advice to the policymakers. And I could point to other things; we talked about our Solar Energy Institute which is another example. I could talk about our work on intellectual property in our School of Law, which is another one of the areas of strength; our work in international business where we’re making intellectual contributions as well as training students.

Across the university, you’ll find areas where we’re making a strong intellectual contribution to addressing the problems that are the most pressing challenges in the world today. And that’s what you do as a distinguished research university. And by growing into that vision, we will achieve what George Washington had in mind and what that means in the 21st century.

Richard Golden: I mentioned Bill Gates being here last December 3rd. Actually, he was here to applaud one of the faculty in the medical school and his work in tropical diseases.

Steven Knapp: Well, that’s Peter Hotez who is the head of that unit that I was talking about. He also is the head of the Sabin Foundation which is supported by the Gates Foundation to do that very important work. One example of many ways in which our faculty are contributing.

Richard Golden: If you had a crystal ball and you could gaze into that ball this morning, where would you see the George Washington University in this area and the others and, say, in the next eight to 10 years?

Steven Knapp: Well, I think there’s no question that, again, as we continue to recruit more and more students and more and more diverse body of students with all the talents and the skills that are reflected in those statistics that you mentioned, we have 20,000 applications for a little more than 2,000 undergraduates. Actually, our applications last year were up for all of our schools, all of our programs, graduate as well undergraduate, across the university. We’re going to continue to grow.

What we’re doing in Virginia, we are right now - and I think this may surprise a number of our alumni - we’re the largest private university in the Commonwealth of Virginia. We teach thousands of graduate students all up and down Virginia from that Ashburn campus all the way down to Hampton Roads. And I think you’ll see that presence continue to grow.

So I think we’re on a trajectory now that we’ll increasingly win recognition for being the most powerful and significant research university in one of the most significant regions of the world and in the heart of this nation’s capital.

Richard Golden: We’re going to take some questions and comments actually from our audience members. We’re going to have somebody come down in front here with a microphone and if you had some comments or some questions or observations you’d like to pose this morning, we invite you to line up and do that.

As you’re doing that, you’ve been here now almost 800 days as president. I know it’s a whirlwind for you, but I think this coming Monday at the university is sort of a typical day at George Washington University and I think you’ll agree in that our students will have a choice to go to Lisner Auditorium to hear Christiane Amanpour and Frank Sesno who is in our faculty interview Robert Gates and Hillary Clinton or they can go to the National Press Club and hear the publisher of the USA Today and several of the executive editors of the Washington Post on the Kalb Report and it just goes on and on like that here at George Washington University.

You have had some amazing moments in your time here. I’ve witnessed some of them, some on this stage. Can you talk about some of the people you’ve met and some impressions you’ve gathered from people you’ve met here?

Steven Knapp: Well, we do have an opportunity to convene important discussions on our campus and I think the one that you mentioned to start with, I don’t know of any other time where we’ve had a sitting secretary of state and a sitting secretary of defense together on a single stage to talk about the issues that are challenging our nation at this moment and to be interviewed by one of our faculty, Frank Sesno, who was recently appointed as the dean of our School of Media and Public Affairs, which is part of our Columbian College of Arts and Sciences. And Frank Sesno is still working as a reporter for CNN. This will be a CNN broadcast program. And it’s an example of what it means to have a location like this in which we can -- not just location but also strength in our faculty to bring together and to convene these conversations of the kind that you described.

One of the first events I attended that actually did take place in this stage was a History Makers’ event celebrating the career of Quincy Jones, an extraordinary artist and cultural figure, entrepreneur who I think has more gold albums than any other artist in history, including the best-selling album of all time, Thriller, which he produced. And all of you, everyone in the audience here has heard of his music that he has written and performed whether you know it or not because it has been going on now for some five decades that he has been a successful artist. And so it’s the arts as well as policy and politics.

We’re launched the jazz appreciation month here that took place in the first year I was here. Again it’s a terrific [cross-talking] in this auditorium.

Richard Golden: Ramsey Lewis was here.

Steven Knapp: We’ve had Stephen Hawking here for an event that was celebrating an anniversary, an important anniversary, for NASA. So we’ve had the director of NASA -- or the secretary, the administrator of NASA here on our campus. And we have a space policy program that made that connection possible. That’s part of our Elliott School of International Affairs.

We conferred an honorary degree on the president of Korea here over the summer whose name is Lee Myung-bak and spent -- regards himself as an alumnus of the university because he spent two years in our business school here at one point early in his career before he went on to become the mayor of Seoul and then was elected president two years ago in an inaugural ceremony that I had the privilege of attending in Korea.

So it’s international figures, it’s national leaders, it’s leading figures in the arts and the sciences, and we bring them all here because you know Washington is a crossroads of global interaction in all those fields. So we do this all the time.

Richard Golden: I remember the comments from the president of Korea when he stood here after you conferred a degree on him and he said, “I used to walk around Kogan Plaza while I was attending GW wondering what can I do for my country.” It was a pretty powerful statement from the sitting president.

If we have any comments or questions, please come forward. I’ll make one. This is a story that to me is a GW story and what happens here that’s so exciting. You mentioned Stephen Hawking. He was here a year ago on the 21st of April and a friend of mine who’s a scientist and on the faculty at BU called me on the 18th of April and I was in my office at Rice Hall and she said, “How did you get Steve Hawking?” I said, well, NASA is celebrating their 50th anniversary. The president of the United States, Steven Knapp, is going to introduce Stephen Hawking. She said, “But how did you do that? How were you able to get him? You’re not a science school. How did you get?” And I was trying to be -- I knew she was being very envious and I wanted to be diplomatic and all of a sudden, there was this cacophonous sound outside of motorcycles and police cars and she said, “What’s that?” I said wait a minute and I put the phone down and let the new -- and then it occurred to me what it was and I picked up the phone. She said, “What was that?” I said The Pope was just going by. I said really, he’s on the way to the White House -- a Friday morning at GW.

Please, would you give your name and --

Kristen Kario: Sure. Good morning. My name is Kristen Kario [phonetic]. I just wanted to ask. You had mentioned specifically about some of the draws for kind of a high caliber of student and you mentioned of some of the percentages and things. I was wondering if you would talk a little bit about some of the special programs. I was thinking of things like women in leadership, honors program, some of the things that really are a draw sort of beyond the specific schools and academic programs for students.

Steven Knapp: Well, the Women’s Leadership Program, this is I think a heritage. When we acquired the former Mount Vernon College, women’s college that is now our Mount Vernon Campus just above Georgetown and not too far from here - we sort of have Georgetown surrounded now because of our two campuses - we really made a commitment at that time to maintain the tradition of focusing on women’s leadership by maintaining that program on the campus. Actually, every year have. We bring extraordinary speakers whom we recognize on our Mount Vernon Campus who are women leaders to emphasize the importance of that program.

So you’re absolutely right. I think that is a draw for students. We’ve had an ongoing honors program. These are all programs that I inherited and am glad to see continue to flourish here. So we do have programs that I think provide opportunities for students that as you suggest go beyond the boundaries of our individual schools and programs. And in fact our students here are very flexible in the way they move across the boundaries of our schools so we have many students here because they are interested in leadership in all of its dimensions. We have students here who are combining business and international affairs or business and economics or music and history. It’s a common phenomenon here to have students who really do look for a larger perspective that crosses disciplinary boundaries here. We do have programs like the honors program and the women’s leadership program that enable them to do that. So I think these are important ways of meeting the interest of students and continuing to attract the kind of high caliber students that we are so successful now in attracting.

Richard Golden: Thank you. Your comment, please, or question.

Sarah Leforts: My name is Sarah Leforts [phonetic]. I think we’re all very excited about the announcement about Michelle Obama’s challenge to the students and I was glad to hear today that it involves the entire GW community, so I thought maybe you could expand upon that about how maybe there’ll be events planned to incorporate the faculty and the staff to specifically do some more service to help the students raise that.

Steven Knapp: Yes. We’re going to continue to announce opportunities for doing that. There are a number of events that are coming up. I’m going to be involved shortly in the neighborhood cleanup event personally and so we’ll be producing those. We established a Web site which is going to be advertising those. I’m looking -- I may need some help on what the name of the Web site is but we’ll get that out. We’ll get the word out to alumni about where you can go to get that.

We’re also developing a system for tracking the hours that count toward this total because we have to make sure that we can really give a number we’re confident about so that there aren’t -- we’re going to be very sincere and focused in the way in which we track and count and report those numbers so there isn’t any criticism that we’re just making the numbers up. They’re going to be auditable numbers that we’ll have. So we’ll get back to you on that.

Richard Golden: Thank you. And, yes, your observation or question?

Joel Ager: Hi. My name is Joel Ager [phonetic]. I’m a current graduate student in the Graduate School of Education and Human Development. I’m also a staff member in human resources here at the university. I have the pleasure of doing new employee orientation almost every Monday for the university and I’m always very pleased to see that alumni are always among the new employees that show up every Monday. To that end, I’d like you to speak on GW as a preeminent employer in the Metro D.C. area and what investments if any you’re making into human resources, understandably our strategic plan focuses more so on GW as a preeminent academic institution. But I wanted to know if you’re making any investments in human resources.

Steven Knapp: Well, yes. Let me say first of all I think staff are a very critical part of our university community and we are maybe a little bit unusual in the extent to which current students as well as alumni do work in the university here. And part of that has to do with the fact that we have that concentration of 70,000 alumni here in the region so we have access to a lot of alumni who work here as volunteers but also come to work here as employees. I’ve been very interested in seeing us build up staff recognition events. We’ve actually put some resources into that.

We have a new head of human resources who’s coming I think next month, joining us in the university whose name is Louis Lemieux. He’s coming to us from Columbia University and I had a chance to talk to him just so we could exchange our views on our shared vision for ways of making this university which is already the largest private employer in the District of Columbia. We’d like the university to become the employer of choice for talented individuals who want to be part of a vital organization. So we have a lot of ideas about how to do that.

He has a lot of ideas about how to do that, and I certainly plan to support his work through the Executive Vice President and Treasurer Louis Katz. He is part of that organization but I’ve already had many conversations with Louis Katz about what we need to do to continue to build up and to support our HR programs when it comes to orientation, training, also opening career paths, making sure that when people come to this institution they have opportunities for advancement. And we support them as they develop their careers.

One of the things I feel very strongly is people often worry if employees leave an institution to get a job somewhere else. I actually don’t think that’s a bad thing. If we train people here who can go and sometimes get even higher positions in another institution, it’s another way in which we contribute to the many professions that we’re part of here. So it’s important that we become not just the largest employer but also the employer of choice for this whole region.

Richard Golden: Yes?

Matt Lindsay: Hi. I’m Matt Lindsay [phonetic]. I have a question. Just as you go out and meet alumni and talk with them, obviously many people have different ideas and probably come to you and propose separate ideas. Are there specific areas where you’re looking for alumni feedback or ideas? I mean in your opinion -- you probably hear lots of different ideas for partnerships or working with students, but are there specific things that jump out to you where you really feel alumni can share their voice and spark some new initiatives for the university?

Steven Knapp: Well, I think one of the important kinds of feedback we get from alumni is advice on how to communicate with alumni because we can’t take for granted that we necessarily know the best way to do that and that’s something I’ve really emphasized as I’ve gone to cities both within the United States and also around the world. What can we do better to meet your needs as an alumni community? And we’ve got a lot of feedback that I think has made a difference to the way in which we do that. Adrienne Rulnick is here; our associate vice president for alumni relations. And I think she has been very focused on and responsive to that kind of feedback we’re getting.

I met with a new African-American alumni advisory board just yesterday and they presented to me a full report with many different slides of a host of ideas that they have for ways in which we can improve our outreach, too, in connection with the African-American community. And that’s a vital kind of information feedback for us to get, and it will have a concrete impact on what we do.

I think another thing it’s good to hear from alumni is what are they interested in? If I go to a city and bring some faculty along as we’re now starting to do more and more to serve on a panel, to help engage alumni in the intellectual excitement of what’s going on in our university, what would they like to hear about? What are the subjects that they would be interested in hearing about? So that helps guide us in thinking about how we’re going to structure those events.

And we’ve had some great panels. We had one in Miami last year on Latin American issues. In each of these cases, we often have a dean and several members of the faculty who come along with us. And we did one in the region here last year on political campaigns, the use of technology in political campaigns, which was something that people were interested in hearing about.

I think the more of that we do, the more we’ll strengthen that connection and remind people, remind alumni of what it was like to be a student. And I think that’s an important way of reconnecting our alumni with the life at the university. So -- but again, it’s important I think that we get feedback from alumni themselves on the best ways of doing that and what they’d really like to receive from us.

We’ve also gotten advice on ways in which they can help us strengthen our career services that we provide for students as well as for alumni as we were talking about earlier. So in a host of ways, I think there are many things that our alumni are in touch with that are of benefit to us. I mentioned the Green Council because we have alumni who are out there in the industries that are really developing the new technologies and that are experts who are advising the policymakers. And so we benefit from alumni.

One of the first things when I had my inauguration events here back in November of 2007, we sort of turned the table. We had alumni come back and teach professors. That was sort of the idea. We had alumni panels and we had there faculty and so we had experts in a whole range of fields; finance, the arts, political campaigns. We had a whole series of panels and the faculty that taught those alumni when they were students were there listening to their ideas from the real world. So to have that reversed one, have that connection from back I think was very powerful. And I’d like to see more of that kind of connection being made.

Richard Golden: Well, it is 70 events, four days, one university, so we’re going to move on with the rest of our alumni week. And I think first and foremost, we want to thank all of you for coming to Washington this weekend and reconnect with this marvelous institution for your presence here this morning and to you President Knapp -- and Diane is off to a buffet breakfast I think at 11:30 this morning so she’ll be quite visible. She has added such a wonderful presence I think to our GW community. She’s always a great pleasure and such an enthusiastic supporter of everything we do. We want to thank you and congratulate you and thank you for your time this morning.

Steven Knapp: Well, it’s my pleasure. Please enjoy the weekend everyone. It’s a beautiful weekend here and a great time of the year to be in a very great university in a very great capital city. I know I’ll being seeing many of you around campus with the remainder of our 70 events.

Thanks.

Richard Golden: Thank you very much.