Transcript: State of the University

Well, good afternoon everybody. I’m glad you’re all here. It’s been three years. It’s been a little while, so it’s nice that we finally get to gather again — back together in this spot. I want to note that a key contributor to this talk — you’re going to see lots of numbers — and anything that involves lots of numbers involves Larry Redlinger. And Larry, I don’t know if you’re in the room somewhere, but Larry has served four presidents — all but Bryce Jordan — in helping, you know, keep the data of this University. So I really want to tip my hat to Larry as we launch into this. So thank you very much.

So many of you, of course, have heard my stump speech, so as I’ve said, try to laugh in all the right spots. You know, pretend like you haven’t heard it before.

But this is an amazing graph. This is an incredible graph. We are consistently among the nation’s fastest growing universities. In my presidency, we’ve been anywhere from sixth to second in the nation and you can see it here. And so you — and a lot of this is David Daniel I might point out — and the work that people did on his watch as president. And you see a rare dip in Academic Year ’21, where we actually dropped by a thousand students from the prior year. Where — and of course every year — had been a record. Then we dropped by a thousand students and a lot of that was due to the fact that a lot of our graduate students simply couldn’t come into the country back then. Many of them were from India. So they wanted to come; they were admitted, but they couldn’t come into the country. A year ago we had gained it all back. We were all the way back to where we had been and I am told that we were one of only five public universities in the state of Texas that actually grew from the fall of ’20 to the fall of ’21. And then this last year we added another 2,000. So again, UTD is definitely on its way back and you see this by people voting with their feet.

I like to say in the stump speech that no one is obligated to send their tuition dollars to UTD. There are many good places where you could do that but, to an ever-increasing extent, people are choosing to come to UT Dallas. Here you see a bit of a breakout of the student body. You see we’re more male than female. This is actually a rare university that is that way. I’m an engineer by profession and we have a lot of engineering students and most of the engineers are men. And so this is reflected in that demographic.

We’re about one-third graduate to two-thirds undergraduate. That’s actually a very good ratio. That’s kind of where we like it to be, so that’s very strong. And you can also see the split between full-time and part-time. The student profile also shows that, needless to say, we attract a lot of students from Texas, especially north Texas. I might point out that with every passing year, though, we start to see a spread in that demand. We start to see more students from San Antonio and Houston and other places, and we see them from other states in the nation.

And of course, on the graduate side, we have a great many students from India and, you know, other countries are represented. By the way, our oldest student is 88 and I’m told that — let’s see if I can go back — that they are pursuing a doctorate in humanities, so wish them well.

So here’s another slide that means a lot to me. Again, you see the 31,000 students, but it’s that middle row that I want to draw your attention to. And again, when I speak to especially external audiences, people know that we have just a first-rate student body here. We have just a stunning student body. In fact, it was Hobson Wildenthal — who often said that our job one was to hire a faculty worthy of our students. And I think that’s a good way to look at it.

But look across that row. I’ll start in the middle. You see that two-thirds of our students receive some form of aid, either need-based or merit-based aid. So even though we have a relatively high tuition in the state of Texas — I don’t have a chart for this — but at the back end, our debt numbers are among the lowest in the state. And it’s because we do so much to help support our students when they’re here. To the left you see 42 percent are considered to be economically disadvantaged. This is by the Coordinating Board. It doesn’t mean that they’re poor, but it means that maybe they’ve had a hard road; maybe they’ve worked for a while — they’ve come back to school. But so in other words, it’s been a challenge. They’re not just the usual student, who after finishing high school, comes straight away into college. And over at the right, you see almost a third of our students are on Pell Grants and these grants — which are federal — do go to students from needy backgrounds. And I’m very proud of the fact that we support our students so handsomely.

Look also — one in five, almost one in five — is first generation and I can tell you that in a long career over multiple universities, probably the most precious thing that we do is to educate those first generation students because it completely changes their lives and it changes the lives of their own children and so on. I mean it’s hard to do something more meaningful than that.

Charging ahead, you get a sense of what the entering, first incoming students, are seeking. You see 36 percent are sort of aimed at engineering and computer science. JSOM also attracts a very sizable number. You know, mixed in all of this, you see a lot of programs like biology, healthcare studies, neuroscience, psychology. A lot of students who maybe are aiming toward a career in medicine or health care. Number one is computer science. They’ve been number one for a while. Ravi might know, but I think one in eight students is majoring in computer science, some stunning fraction — I might have that number wrong so don’t hold me to it.

If you also look to the left, we have a record number of freshmen this year and also 227 National Merit Scholars. So again, for my friends who have heard this joke, if you see the list of the top 20 schools that attract National Merit Scholars — and we usually stand around fifth — they’re either very elite private universities like Harvard or they’re public universities with ferocious football teams like Florida. All right. And so we don’t play football and we’re not private, so it’s kind of interesting that we break into this list. That these National Merit Scholars have found UTD and are choosing to come here.

You see the number of degrees that we’ve awarded by Academic Year. There are a couple of very interesting things. I’m going to start at the bottom — that’s the number of doctoral graduates that we turn out — PhDs and audiology doctorates. For the longest time that number stood right around 200. It was 190, 200, 201, back to 190, and then we really jumped it up. It went to 251, 228, 260, 257, etc. So this is very much in the direction where we’re trying to go. In fact, our Strategic Plan — which I’ll get to a little bit later — calls for us to get to about 275 on an annual basis and we’re pretty much getting there.

If you notice before Academic Year ’18, we tended to graduate about one master’s student for every bachelor’s student and that’s very unusual. There’s hardly a university where it’s kind of in a one-to-one ratio. And what you see is our undergraduate graduates have gone up, but the master’s numbers have really dropped down significantly. Some of this is due to a long-ranging trend that started back around 2016, where students from foreign countries were not coming to the United States in the same numbers that they had been. And that included UTD. And of course, then we had the COVID year, so that relatively low number of master’s graduates last year is about to turn and go back up again. I’m going to show you the enrollment numbers, but you will see that the master’s numbers will start going back up again.

We did something really nice this spring. We had an all-university commencement ceremony — probably for the first time at least in decades, maybe the last time was when we could all fit into one room and we had you know 20 graduates — so this was nice. This was held out on the circle just south of JSOM. It was lovely weather. It was a great event. There was music; there were fireworks. If you look carefully, you can see John Olajide, one of our most distinguished alumni giving a talk to the graduates. So it was just a really nice new tradition for UTD and one that we will continue going forward.

A couple other points that I want to make. We always rank very high on the support of active military and veterans, so this particular slide acknowledges a Gold Award. This is given by the state of Texas, but again, it’s to recognize excellent support of military, active military and veterans and we really do have a great center for them. And I don’t know if we have any veterans in the audience, but you mean a lot to us and we try to take good care of you.

So we play sports. We’re NCAA Division III. I think Gene Fitch is out there somewhere, and we’re in the American Southwest Conference. I think by student body, we’re probably equal to the entire rest of the conference put together and so they don’t like it very much. Now I would say that we play small, though. I mean we have a lot of graduate students and you know not everybody plays sports, but we do awfully well, and so we have wonderful sports teams.

These are great young men and women and you can see a number of championships there. This is just over the last year, but you’re also going to see some distinguished scholar awards, freshman of the year awards. You know these sorts of things — academic all-ASC, so it’s really nice. These are terrific members of our student body. And here you see a couple of others. You see Ramon Garza, who was a Division III All-American. This is an NCAA All-American. And here you see two tennis players Suzuka Nishino and Samantha Wong — who were also All-American in the Intercollegiate Tennis Association. So again these are national honors. Karen Alvarez — this is the NCAA Elite 90. So there are 90 championship sports held by the NCAA, and if you are a competitor in that, those of you who have the highest GPA win this award. So she’s won that two years running. So I’m just guessing she’s a 4.0 student, just to guess and she plays a mean game of golf.

We have a very fine track and field team. I’ve often pointed out that we unfortunately don’t have a track and we don’t have a field. But that minor inconvenience aside, we do rather well. So we’ve added both men’s and women track and field — both indoor and outdoor — and I think it takes our total to 17. We play at John Paul II High School, nearby so that that is where we find a track to run about. I like these photos they’re a little fuzzier than some of the others. I think it’s because they’re running so fast.

More in athletics. We also have esports. So we have a really fine esports team and they’re ranked in the top 10 as we speak and they’ve won two national championships in Super Smash Brothers Ultimate. Way to go, esports. I don’t know if we have any of our esports out in the audience but you guys are stars.

We also do our sports as in real sports and so this is kind of fun. So our cheerleaders and our mascot were in a national competition in Florida in Daytona Beach last May. And our Power Dancers finished second in their category and Temoc finished fourth. Now I’m trying to figure out who were the three that beat Temoc? I mean, obviously so, but in any event pretty good showing for Temoc and the Power Dancers. Way to go.

You heard just a short mention a while ago that we merged two schools. So Arts Technology and Emerging Communications and Arts and Humanities to form Arts, Humanities, and Technology. And I see our dean, Nils Roemer, sitting here in the front row. I am so excited by this. This brings together people who in fact have worked closely together for a long time and there’s just such an interesting intersection between the two former schools. I’d like to point out a lot of universities have very terrific arts and humanities and they have terrific technology, but you don’t see the AH and the T all put together. This is such a UT Dallas kind of thing to do, because you know, we pride ourselves in being nerdy, right? But when we do technology, we do it in a very artistic way, right? If you think about it, the arts and humanities should inform technology and vice versa. So we just have this beautiful new school. We’re sitting kind of in the midst of it, in the heart of it, and in fact, if you walk the building later, you’ll see some of that creativity right in front of you. So this is a very exciting new development for UTD.

Also after the pandemic, we finally started to march ahead on Education Abroad. As you can imagine it was impossible, over two years. So we had a kind of fledgling program that we started in Switzerland and France. I think the number of students — there were 37 students — is on the slide. This is great. I’m a big believer in this. It’s very important. I think it just does so much to open people’s eyes as to the value of knowing what’s going on in other parts of the world. So we have intention to greatly expand this to include — I’ve got a list here of some of the countries — Ghana, Guyana, Morocco, Ecuador, Mexico, Japan, France, Italy, Netherlands, Belgium, Spain and Switzerland. And I also want especially for our students in the audience to know we greatly subsidize the cost of these trips. We know that many students are somewhat nervous about it. They think they can’t afford it; but, in fact we have some great programs in place to support it. And I kind of like the fact that we’ve got some photos here of people doing the Whoosh, at Giza, Pisa, Paris and Shanghai. I’ve been at three of those places. I didn’t have the good sense to do a Whoosh, though, when I was there.

As we think back on the COVID pandemic, you know it was a tough couple of years and our students in particular really needed help, so we got some money through the Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund. It actually came in three phases, but I just want to remind you that we put over a million dollars into the hands of our students who really needed it. Maybe they lost a job, maybe one of their parents lost a job, maybe they had food insecurity, maybe they needed to buy technology that they didn’t have as we all moved online. So we made sure that we did the best possible that we could. We also created our own homegrown fund, the Student Emergency Fund and my understanding is that that’s from you — that didn’t come from the federal government. This is money that we all contributed to. And it’s close to $600,000 that we were able to bring together, again to help support our students in need. I know many in the audience contributed to that fund, so thank you very much.

A couple other things. Of course we’ve been moving rapidly to using greater technology. This is maybe almost a routine thing now, but we have a very fine mobile app. If you haven’t gotten it, I recommend it. No surprise our students tend to be early adopters compared to faculty and staff, but again we have a very good mobile app, which can pretty much tell you everything you need to know about your life at UTD.

I’ve mentioned that we’ve made a few changes so I want to just touch on a few leadership changes. On the left, you see Juan González, our dean of graduate education. But he’s also now the vice provost for global engagement and as I mentioned, this is an important new thrust for us. And Nils, who was the director of the Holocaust Center, is now the dean — the inaugural dean — of Arts, Humanities, and Technology. And here you see Steven Spiro, vice provost for faculty affairs; Ingrid London, assistant provost for admissions and enrollment operations; Karen Huxtable-Jester, director — a new director of the Center of Teaching and Learning; and Robert Clarke, senior director of financial aid. Thank you all for your service, your new service.

Maybe I won’t read off all of the names here, but we do awfully well with things like NSF Career Awards, Young Investigator Awards, NIH Career Awards. Here you see some of the young faculty members — I think they’re young — who have come to UTD in recent years, most of them by definition would have been just a few years past their own PhD. It is just such a nice thing to see these talented individuals who’ve chosen to continue their degree, their career at UTD when they could go pretty much any place. Let me assure you — and they’re here and I got a couple of deans sitting in front of me — so you’ve played a major role in making this the place of choice for these fine faculty members. Thank you very much, and when you see those research graphs going up, it’s a lot of these recent hires that we’ve made who are really contributing to it.

Our provost had a great year in hiring new faculty last year, so 43 new tenure to tenure track faculty. We get very good support from UT System, by the way. Where you see a star, this is an individual working in the STEM disciplines, and if you work in one of the STEM disciplines, UT System stands ready to put some money into helping you develop your laboratory, if you will. The blue star is for a mid-career existing faculty member and a rising star would be someone at the front end of their career. We’ve done very, very well in being able to attract some additional support from UT System and by the way, this is competitive. We don’t get it just for asking; we have to convince the folks at UT System that these are among the best of the best. But again, every name on that list is a great value to UTD and we’re so glad that they’ve chosen to come here.

President’s Teaching Excellence Awards — again just wonderful individuals. I know some of them to varying degrees — John Zweck and Selena Brody honored for undergraduate education; Shalini Prasad — I think I saw Shalini out there somewhere — for graduate instruction; Carrie King for blended instruction; and Siri Wilder, a teaching assistant. I want to tip my hand to all of the TAs who are out there. You are an important part of the teaching mission here at UTD.

Additional teaching awards — you see Milind Dawande, graduate research mentoring; Jason Slinker for undergraduate research mentoring; Carol Cirulli Lanham, who’s been elected to the UT System Academy of Distinguished Teachers. And I might point out, you don’t get into that academy if you haven’t previously won a ROTA award, which is a good segue to this year’s ROTA Awards or Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award. So congratulations to Selena Brody and Mustapha Ishak-Boushaki, two of our most recent teachers honored at the system level. Again, this is an honor where people are nominated from every campus in the UT System.

Back to research a little bit more. I actually mentioned the federal research expenditures in an earlier slide, and I would just remind you again, it’s up 68 since Fiscal Year ’17 If you look at the lower graph. The point I like to make here is that this is the hardest money to get. This is highly, highly competitive. We’re getting money from the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, NIH, you name it. There’s other pretty fine faculty members at places like Caltech and Stanford and MIT and the like, and they would like that money, too. So, to an ever-increasing extent, we are proving successful in attracting these research funds to come to UTD.

And another thing that you might note there is that there is no COVID dip. Joe Pancrazio is sitting here — he and his entire Research and Innovation team really did a fantastic job throughout the pandemic. We kept our labs going — you know some of them have living creatures in them, so we kept the labs up and running. Maybe only one-third of the people were there at any one time, but we could still write proposals; we could still work up our results. And so our research just continues to grow at a really nice clip.

The total research expenditures did show a COVID dip and, interestingly enough, I think it’s entirely due to lack of travel. We just didn’t fly to faraway places or pay conference fees the way we used to. But you can see that we’re back up now to another record level. So research is a very strong element right now at UTD. In fact, throughout the pandemic — and I have witnesses who know I said it — but it was a bright spot. When things were really grim, the fact that our research was moving ahead just really brought a lot of joy.

We also say in our strategic plan that we’re going to be an economic engine for the region. One of the most important things that we’ve done recently is to partner with the City of Richardson in what they call the Richardson Innovation Quarter or Richardson IQ. This is in some repurposed space not far from here, about five miles out toward 75. And we have moved six laboratories over there, but not just any six. These are six that work very much at the intersection with industry partners and also in a domain where you’re pretty close to commercialization. In other words you can see that some good work will come out of it, and the whole point there is to really focus as much on the “I” — the innovation — as the research. We just cut the ribbon on that, maybe about a month back, maybe it was two months back, but this is very exciting. This is again a really nice way in which the impact of UTD goes to a broader level. And forging some new collaborations. This again comes out of the Office of Research and Innovation. We had an inaugural research day — it was held over at the Alumni Center. We pretty much filled that ballroom area. It was lovely and a lot of our faculty were presenting their work. Really nice.

There are two things, and for the sake of time I won’t dig into it, but the LEAP Manufacturing Next-Generation Battery Workshop is kind of important because battery technology is really important to the future, whether it’s if you’re going to drive an EV car or even just your own electronics, and also just for power delivery. You know, the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow, so this nation really needs a great push forward in battery technology. We have some expert people here working in that field, and they’re going to partner in that area.

We’re also doing work in semiconductors. In fact, we’re doing a lot of work in semiconductors, but one in particular area is the Center for Harsh Environments Electronics. And so this is a way to harden electronics against both natural and man-made assaults, if you will. Again, you want to make sure that your devices work, even in the worst of circumstances. Again, we have great talent there continuing down that area of research and innovation.

We had the state of Texas’ first Blackstone LaunchPad. We were one of three — so UT Austin and Texas A&M were among the set that was in 2016. I remember, I was transitioning in. We now are sort of the node point for Blackstone investment across UT System, so I think we have a total of 10 of the UT System campuses that are now engaged with Blackstone. But again, we’re at the node point of that.

I also want to point out the Venture Development Center, which does such incredibly good work. We’ve spun out a great many new companies. And a lot of them get a real boost, a real leg up by working with the Venture Development Center and it includes things like fume hoods and dry and wet labs. I mean we really make it possible for people with a great technological idea to sort of get through that zone, which is hard for many to get it to a commercial standpoint. So again, the Venture Development Center is a big asset for us.

And as we look here, too, we also see that we collaborate with the Capital Factory. This is actually a world-renowned entrepreneurial center. It’s headquartered in Austin, and I think we’re the only University that actually sits on their Innovation Council. It’s interesting the Capital Factory has figured out that there’s some pretty good work going on here in Dallas — most notably here at UT Dallas. Again, you can see some of the projects that come by way of that, and the Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship is the heart of that. I mean that’s what gives us that connection. So out of this work we’ve had any number of successes. In fact, I’ve learned that over 500 new companies have been started over the last five years. But maybe more notably is that we’ve had five major acquisitions in just the last year and a half.

The one that we’re featuring right here is CerSci Therapeutics and you see the co-founders — Lucas Rodriguez is a recent PhD graduate; his mentors are Ted Price — also a UTD alum — and Greg Dussor. What’s notable here is that they treat pain, but without opioids, and as you know, we have a terrible crisis in the U.S. with opioid addiction. These folks are doing some incredibly important work and this is one of the most important spin-outs that we’ve had.

All right, let me continue with on update on diversity, equity and inclusion. Here you see Yvette Pearson, our relatively new VP for ODEI, along with Raul Hinojosa, as they move into new space over in the Administration Building. I think you’re out there somewhere. Calvin Jamison’s also smiling in the picture, along with me. We’ve been able to bring together a lot of the different offices that have been part of this extended effort that were in very scattered places and really now it’s been all located in the Administration Building. This has been a nice, nice new development for us.

One of the things I really appreciated and I think Vice President Pearson deserves an awful lot of credit for this, but if you look here you see a lot of external initiatives — competitive initiatives — where we’ve been able to go to other agencies. You see that we became a charter member of the SEA Change initiative, which is part of the American Association for the Advancement of Science or AAAS. You see down below an S-STEM Grant, which benefits our Johnson School of Engineering and Computer Science. Again, this is a competitive NSF-funded project, and I know that Dr. Pearson has also initiated regular conferences or meetings with the other chief diversity officers all around the UT System. So again, this is just a great way that keeps us connected with a broader community, and we have some very strong programs that have been in place for any number of years.

The Multicultural Center in particular has a long and wonderful record of achievement. But here you see a couple factoids such as the number of Diversity Scholars and how well that they are doing at UTD. You also see outreach initiatives like the Young Women in Science and Engineering Investigators program. These are really fine programs that help build outreach to other communities, but also make sure that people are successful once they get here.

Other initiatives — DiversAbility Summit, coffee with veterans and a veterans annual lunch, Native American Heritage Month, Employee Resource Groups — this is a Drum Café, and I understand people played drums — but the ERGs — the Employee Research Groups — are also very important. These are communities of individuals with shared interests, and it’s really important to help build a kind of camaraderie, if you will, and a sense of belonging. So the ERGs are very important to us. We also have the Diversity Awards Dinner, which is just a lovely event every year.

The Galerstein Gender Center, now led by Matt Winser-Johns, who was then recognized — was recently recognized — by Mayor Voelker of the City of Richardson during Pride Month. Way to go, Matt. And we’re considered to be Texas’s most LGBT-friendly campus, which we’re very proud of, very proud of.

Let me transition now into the numbers part, so again, Larry Redlinger, if you’re out there, this is your zone. This — all of it comes out of our Strategic Plan. It goes back to 2018, when we first wrote the plan. We then updated it in 2021 and, I like to point out, that when we look at these numbers, they’re important, but they’re not the only things that are important, right. Not everything that’s important to this University can be measured in some of this data. But you’ll see pretty much that we’re doing a good job.

So in this first chart you see that our target is for — we’re trying to get to — about 33,000-35,000 students by Academic Year 2025. And so we’re moving forward very, very well with the number of undergrads. The graduate chart is really interesting. So again, you see it declining after Academic Year ’16. This predates the pandemic. I don’t want to spend a lot of time on it, but there were a lot of graduate students who were thinking maybe the U.S. isn’t such a welcoming place to go for higher education. And so we saw some decline in numbers; they were starting to turn around when COVID hit. So you can see in Academic Year ’21, we just lost a boatload of those students. They simply couldn’t come into the country, but they were coming back by Academic Year ’22. And now look at Academic Year ’23; it’s a record.

I mentioned earlier in this talk that the number of master’s degrees that we had awarded had dropped. But with these numbers, we’re going to see that start to go back up again. Most master’s students are going to be here for about two years maybe, maybe a little less. So, doctoral graduates. Again as I mentioned earlier, we were doing right around 200 for the longest time, but we’ve really stepped it up. We’re in a good spot now, and we will hit that target of 275 by Academic Year ’25. First-time-in-college, freshman cohort. You see good numbers. Our target was 3,900; we reached it by ’20, dropped below it in ’21. Same story, back above. We’re attracting those first-year students that we mean to have here.

Academic space. So Calvin Jamison is out in the audience — we’re moving forward on this one. We’re trying to get to 2.4 million square feet of assignable space and we’re making pretty good progress on that. For the sake of time, I won’t tell you what’s coming next, because that’s later in my talk. But some good things are coming down the pike.

Tenure system faculty. Now this is an interesting chart. We haven’t gained that much. Last year was a good year. COVID of course was tough, but we’re trying to get to 625 by Academic Year ’25. That’s real essentially two years from now, and this is going to be a challenge. So to the deans in the audience and a few others — on Friday, I put out a memo declaring that we are going to hire 50 additional faculty lines over and above any replacement — over and above any aggressive hiring that we are currently doing. And we are. This has gained a lot of support. As I look at some of my deans, you know we’re really looking to you for great ideas here; and this is a rare opportunity to do things that normally you couldn’t do, when you can only add two or three. Now you can add more like seven or eight, and you could actually start a cluster hire across schools; you could maybe start new degree programs and even new departments. Let’s think along those lines and get aggressive. We have the support. I think Terry Pankratz is in the room, but you know we’ve managed our budgets pretty well. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the University’s budget in better shape than it is right now. Now we can do it and we’re going to do it.

Expenditures. I’ve been talking about this quite a lot. I don’t need to say it again, but you see great growth in the federal research expenditures.

Four- and six-year graduation rates. We’ve pretty much hit our targets, so I’m really happy with that. This is a very hard data point to move because what happens, by definition, you have to look back four years to see what’s happening now, in terms of four-year graduation rate. You have to look back six years in terms of what is the six-year graduation rate. We know that a lot of the attrition occurs right after the first year, so if you don’t make it from that freshman year to the sophomore year, you can’t really recover those individuals. We’re doing a very good job — we have great mentoring programs in place. I haven’t talked about things like Orbit and the like, but again, we have very good programs in place that especially are aimed at helping those students who are in their first year. And that’s not just freshmen. That could be new transfer students; it could be new graduate students. We also want to make sure that new international students also get a special level of mentoring to make sure that they make it through the toughest year — the first year.

Our endowment. This is going in a great direction. Kyle Edgington and company are doing great work. The big jump up in ’22 — we can thank the stock market for that and the loss in ’23, we can again thank the stock market for that. You know the stock market gives and it takes away. By the way, it’s going back up again. We’re in great shape. We’ll hit the 800 target in part because of the New Dimensions comprehensive campaign that’s underway and, again, I have a slide on that, so let’s continue going forward.

This last year, we did an Employee Climate Survey. And you can see the fraction of individuals who responded — it was 42 percent staff and 58 faculty. And you can see that staff were more inclined to write comments than were the faculty, and it was about a 50 maybe 60 percent response rate. So in other words, roughly half of the individuals who were asked to return the survey did so. But again, there’s still a lot of people and it helps us understand where we’re going as a university and where we can improve. We had an overall engagement score of 70 percent. That’s good, but it’s not great, to be candid. And this is a reflection of people answering the questions: “how happy are you at UTD?” and “would you recommend UTD as a great place to work?” I also point out that this did occur during COVID, when people were really under a lot of stress. It’s going to be an interesting benchmark as we go forward. And we will do longitudinal studies on this, just to make sure that the trends are going where we want them to go. You also see here lists of strengths and improvements. This is University-wide. I hasten to add, having been through many of these surveys you know as a department head and as a dean and now as a president, these things vary significantly from one unit to another. So I have to be careful in drawing conclusions for that University average. We’re not doing great. What would matter to me back when I was a dean or department head is I wanted to know what was happening in my unit. And we have that data and so we’ve shared it.

In fact that takes me to my next slide. We actually had a Campus Climate Survey Committee go through all of this, including synthesizing the written comments, and to give sort of a path of action, if you will. This is targeted again for specific units, so we are looking to see responses as needed in the various areas. We’re going to stay on top of this and make sure that we make UTD always a better place to work.

Amanda Rockow’s in the room. We’re looking ahead now to the next legislative session, the 88th. Again, for the sake of time, I won’t dig too deeply into this, but you see our four main priorities. First and foremost, always, is formula funding — so you know that the state gives money to the public universities based on the number of students that they have, based on what they’re studying, whether they are grad students, undergrad, etc. And as one of the nation’s fastest growing universities, we tend to do rather well on formula funding. But much depends on whether the state in general is doing well, if they put enough into the pot. So even if our piece of the pie — I’m mixing my metaphors — even if our piece of the pie gets wider, if the pie gets smaller, well you know, all bets are off. But this is a good year financially for the State of Texas, so we’re hoping that with our enrollment growth and the state doing well, we should do okay there.

And we have two programs that really augment what we’re doing as a tier one research university: the Texas Research Incentive Program is a scheme where, if people give money through philanthropic means to support our research, the state will match it, or at least up to a one-to-one match; and the National Research University Fund is, in essence, an endowment and, if you meet certain metrics to prove to the state that you truly are of a national level in research, then you can draw on that endowment. There’s only four schools that have met that level for NRUF and it’s Houston, Texas Tech, ourselves and now UT Arlington. We’re one of only four schools in the state that can draw on that. We also have a major request — $54 million to advance key initiatives, which in the past would have been called special items.

Let me just talk a little bit. So here’s TRIP — some of the researchers that you saw have benefited from TRIP. Again, people have contributed to their research. The good news is the state stands ready — almost ready — to put money behind that to match the funds. But the bad news is they haven’t really been replenishing the pot at any good clip. So, in fact, the last matched gift was from September 2016. And that was before I gave my very first State of the University address. I was, I think, two months in on my job; so we’re trying very hard to get the state to wipe out that backlog. We have $60 million in the backlog, and so we’re hoping something good will come out of this session. And in terms of exceptional items or special items, we have four areas that we’re trying to put in front of the state for their support.

One is the North Texas Semiconductor R&D Hub. Again, I think you know that there’s a major, major problem in the United States with the supply of microprocessors and chips. There’s been a major national initiative in CHIPS for America. And you know we invented the darn thing — not we — but people here in North Texas — invented it. So there you see Jack Kilby, who got the Nobel Prize for this. How many universities have a statue of Jack Kilby on their campus? And of course a very fine cleanroom, which is — all joking aside — is not to be surpassed by any other university. So we stand ready to really contribute to this, so we hope that the state will help us in that effort. I mentioned earlier that we’re doing work in non-opioid pain treatment, so again we’re hoping maybe they’ll make a $10 million effort in that area.

Academic Bridge Program is an outreach effort which has been in place for quite some time now, mostly to DISD and other area schools, and it helps bring people from maybe lower-income households to UTD, and make sure that they have success. It’s a proven program; it works; it involves a lot of mentoring and it scales with however much money the state gives us. So we can have that many more students if we can get some additional money.

And the Crow Museum of Asian Art. I think you all know that we acquired the Crow Collection about almost three years ago now, and this is to help us with some of the educational initiatives that we would surround with that. We want to take this wonderful asset and be able to help teach people how to curate art, how to maintain the art. And so we’re hoping that the state might support us in that endeavor.

We also need infrastructure. I like to point out that we have a high student-to-everything ratio. We have a high student-to-teacher ratio, a high student-to-staff ratio and a high student-to-classroom seat ratio. So we’re trying to — even though the infrastructure has grown at a tremendous clip — we’re trying to get a few more additional facilities. So in the middle you see the multidisciplinary Science and Technology Building. Those of you who are familiar with the Bioengineering and Sciences Building or BSB — it would be like a duplicate of that. It’d be like another one of those, to a first approximation. Biomedical engineering and science is the fastest growing part of our research portfolio and more and more people are coming, including faculty, staff and students to work in this area. So we just simply have to have the facilities to support them.

Academic facilities and renovations projects. This is something that in some way is kind of new here. This University is so new that we don’t have much in the way of deferred maintenance. But as we do age, there are a lot of our buildings really need to be upgraded for modern work that we’re doing, the research work that we’re doing. And off to the left is the new Student Union. Let me click to the next slide. So our students — and you heard from our Student Government president — that students last week — or maybe was two weeks ago — voted in favor to increase their Student Union fee to a hundred dollars per semester, effective next year. And it would help fund this new Student Union that we would like to have.

So if you’re familiar with the current Student Union, it was designed for a student body one-third the current size and it was a very fine Student Union back then. It is not a fine Student Union now. I mean it’s just stressed and so we just simply have got to build a bigger facility to support this. So our next step is we have to get the Texas Legislature to approve — which means a bill has to be introduced in both the House and the Senate — to in fact build upon what the students voted to do. It’s not a trivial matter, so we’re working very hard now to get legislative approval. The Student Pub is being remodeled. I mentioned we have a great esports team, so we’re kind of building, we’re taking the Pub and really turning it into more of an esports gaming arena. But it can be used not just for esports, for other things like comedy acts or poetry slams, things like that. So that’s coming soon to the current Student Union.

And here you see the DART Silver Line. This is something kind of dear to my heart. On the north side of Northside is where the Silver Line will pass. we had a ribbon cutting — I guess we don’t have a picture of the ribbon cutting — but again if you know where Northside is, to the north side is where the train will come in. The station is already under construction, so we’re taking care of our end of the deal. Thank you, Calvin. We don’t exactly know when the train’s coming, so I hear variously — 2024 — but just this morning, from the DART president — it might be later in ’25. But in any event we want that train to come. It’ll go all the way out to the DFW airport and I’ve got to tell my joke. So when the train leaves it goes “whoosh.” Thank you for pretending that was funny.

Another major development for us, and again how many times have I said that biomedical, biomedical engineering science, is the fastest growing part of our portfolio, research portfolio? This is a shared building with UT Southwestern. It was quite a few years in the making. We teamed up because we really have a lot to contribute to one another. We don’t have a medical school but we know one — UT Southwestern. And they’re very, very good. They have I think six Nobel Prize laureates on their staff and, needless to say, they have the clinical data; they have the medical research expertise. But we’ve got the engineering and the science areas, like nanotechnology, big data imaging, and we’ve worked very well with them over quite a few years. So we already have a major area of overlap with UT Southwestern. Not everything that we do in biomedical science and engineering is done with Southwestern, but maybe half of it is, I mean. So a good chunk is.

We went in together to try to get support from the state to build this building that you see on the slide. We were not successful with the state, but later UT System did step forward. So, using the Permanent University Fund or PUF, they contributed $90 million toward a $120 million building. The reason why you see the Texas Instruments name there is that they gave us a lead gift of $15 million to help make this building a reality, and we’ll walk through the doors around September of next year. So we’re less than a year away. It’s also going to be a future home to the Biodesign Center. So, again, this is very much a UTD kind of expertise. So we have talked about innovation and the like and commercialization. So this Biodesign Center is going to be an interesting element in this new building.

And something again very dear to my heart — the Athenaeum. So we again broke ground on the Athenaeum about half a year back and it’s now called the Edith and Peter O’Donnell Jr. Athenaeum, thanks to a $32 million gift that came from the O’Donnell Foundation. So, again, I think many of you in the room understand what this is. This is a complex of buildings, the first of which is for the visual arts and at the heart of it will be the Crow Museum of Asian Art, which is one of the great collections of Asian art in the country. And I always like to point out that there’s already a Crow Museum. It’s downtown in the Arts District in Dallas. If you’ve never been there, please go. It’s a jewel; it’s a gem; it’s just wonderful. But they can only display 15 percent of their art right now. They’ll be able to now display about 85 percent of the art after this facility opens. And this building will open in the spring of ’24, so maybe April, May, around that time frame of 2024. And following that will be a performance hall, a 600- to 800-seat performance hall.

So again, this is for the performing arts and again this is really important to us at UTD. I’d like to point out that we have a lot of folks majoring in STEM disciplines, but I speak as one who as an engineering student played a lot of music. I know that the arts is really important to our students — both to listen to it or see it, you know, to engage in it, but also to create it. And so this is going to be a significant new addition just to the whole environment of UTD. This is, I don’t know, this is as big as it gets. I mean this will completely change UT Dallas in a wonderful way.

A few other things. We have more students here, which means other things need to grow. So we have three more Comet Cruisers. Thank you. So if you need to get out and about. I’m in the home stretch now. You’ve got to eat, so we got a few more places to eat and we’ve sort of embedded the Tech Store now in the UT Dallas Bookstore. A little bit more in the way of dining options. We’re not showing our robots this time around. I’ve shown it in the past, but you know a robot will deliver your food if you like. Here’s Northside. This is awfully important to us. It was in my first year that we opened Phase One and we’ve now opened Phase Four. So I’ve made reference now to Northside several times. Before we had Northside there was no college town. I mean the surrounding areas maybe were undeveloped, or you know residential areas — all very nice, but this Northside community is a big deal. A lot of our students live there. There’s some shopping, you can get a beer if you want. It’s just a really nice area and you just walk across the street and you’re on campus. And as I mentioned — so all the way to the, to the top or the left — is where the Silver Line will pass through. So when that DART Rail passes through, it’s going to be a major development for Northside, but especially for UTD.

And I also want to tip my hand late in the talk to our Office of Information Technology. So we all had to do a crash course in shifting to online teaching and learning in the spring of 2020, and everybody stepped up. I mean everybody — our faculty, staff and students — all did. But OIT was so vital in all of this. These are the geeky people who know how it all works, and I can’t say enough about how well they served this University during that time. And just one little touch — here’s what they call the TechKnowledgy Bar. It’s in the Student Union; it’s a high traffic area. It’s just a drop-in site; so if you’ve got a problem with your computer and you just need someone to tell you how to fix it or maybe fix it themselves, you can just drop in there. I’ve walked by that place many times. It’s always busy there. There are always people there.

OK. So as I mentioned we have a capital campaign. We’re trying to do even more. You know we can only go so far with the amount of money that we can expect from the state and we can only ask our students to pay so much in tuition, so we have a capital campaign or a comprehensive campaign underway. The goal is $750 million. We’ve raised $317 million at this point. You see two very distinguished UTD graduates who are co-leading this campaign externally. So Ron Nash on the left and John Olajide on the right. And John was our commencement speaker last spring. Very dynamic, very accomplished individuals and they’re helping drive this campaign in a really good direction.

And I think that kind of does it. So for some of you who’ve been waiting a long time. Thank you. We always like to say “thank you” to you for your hard work and by asking you not to work on a particular day. And so Comets United Day is going to be Friday, Dec. 23. So it’s not a vacation day, yet. But now it is, now it is. So OK, that’s my talk. Thanks for listening.