Office of the Chancellor

» back to Remarks and Speeches

UMass Amherst Alumni Association's Distinguished Alumni Awards

April 13, 2011

Good afternoon alumni, honored guests, and friends of UMass Amherst. I’d like to begin by congratulating our Distinguished Alumni Award recipients. It is with great admiration that I look upon your individual accomplishments and contributions to society. Your achievements as graduates of UMass Amherst help raise the profile and prestige of our flagship campus. Thank you for being our best ambassadors.

Since I’ve been Chancellor, one of the most rewarding aspects of the position has been the opportunity to get to know UMass Amherst alumni. I’ve met alumni throughout the country, including in Florida, California, New York, and Washington, D.C. Here in Massachusetts, it seems you can’t go anywhere without running into influential UMass Amherst graduates. In fact, we have 18 in the state legislature and many more on staff here in the State House. In Boston, our alumni enliven the city. We have several behind the scenes at the New England Aquarium and a couple on stage at the Improv Asylum. Others own sports bars and financial firms. One UMass Amherst grad has a very challenging job these days: She’s manager of media relations for the Red Sox. Thankfully, her job just got easier with the Red Sox first wins of the season. 
 
Our Distinguished Alumni award recipients, too, are from diverse disciplines and backgrounds, but collectively you represent a very important theme for us at UMass Amherst, and that is progress—advancing research, scholarship, and creative activity. Two years ago I put forth “A Framework for Excellence,” a plan to move UMass Amherst into the top tier of public research universities. I’d like to share with you some of the progress we’ve made toward this aspiration:  

• Our tenure-system faculty has increased by 66 in the last decade. Considering recent financial difficulties, the campus has done remarkably well in not only maintaining, but increasing its faculty numbers. We are on track to increase our tenure-stream faculty to around 1,200 by 2020.
• A central focus of my administration has been to enhance the status of research at the flagship campus. In 2010, we received $170 million in grants and contracts; a 24 percent increase from 2009.
• The average SAT scores of incoming students have increased by over 15 points since 2007 and their average high school GPA has risen to 3.61. Wherever I go, I find alumni who tell me they would have had a difficult time gaining admittance to UMass Amherst these days. This fall we had the best retention rate for first-year students and in just a few short weeks, we expect to grant a record number of baccalaureate degrees, topping the 4,851 we awarded in 2010.

• We’ve also made great strides in increasing diversity across campus with the number of minority students reaching 21.1% — the highest in the school’s history.

• Over the past several years we celebrated the opening of several important buildings: the Studio Arts Building, the Integrated Sciences Building, the Transit Facility, the New Power Plant, the Recreation Center, and the renovated Skinner Hall. And we will be completing the construction of the George N. Parks Minuteman Marching Band Building and the Police Station this spring. We have three major projects in various phases of design and construction: two laboratory science buildings located next to the Integrated Science Building; an academic classroom building at the north end of the pond; and a Commonwealth Honors College living-learning complex.
• Finally, an important component of fostering research, scholarship and creative activity is honoring our commitment to public service. The campus is a founding partner in a Green High Performance Computing Center that will soon be under construction in Holyoke. We are partnering with the City of Springfield to help revitalize regional business development and entrepreneurship, to name only two of our community initiatives.

I could certainly enumerate more achievements, but I think that these items give you an idea of what we have done. Of course of vital importance to our overall progress is our partnership with the Alumni Association. For 135 years, the Alumni Association has been a staunch advocate for the interests of the Amherst campus, while keeping alumni around the world informed and engaged through professional development, networking, volunteer, and life-long learning opportunities. Honoring the Distinguished Alumni Award recipients, as we are today, is a fine example of this. Our upward trajectory is as clear as our vision for the future. Working together, I am confident that no goal we have envisioned is out of reach.  Thank you and Go UMass!