Hello. I’m Sarah Mangelsdorf, president of the University of Rochester.
Normally, I would deliver a State of the University
address to you in person as part of Meliora Weekend celebration.
But as we all know, these are not normal times.
We’re not holding an in-person Meliora Weekend
this year because of COVID-19.
But our Advancement and Alumni Relations teams have come up with a slate of programs that
will take place throughout the month of October – a Meliora Month!
We’ll have a link to that website at the
end of this video – I hope you will take part in many of the events that we have planned.
Now, I doubt any of you wants to sit through
an hour-long screen session, so I’ll just focus on a few highlights here.
But you can find out more by staying in touch
through our website and newsletters, and by following us on Social Media. We’ll provide
links to some key sites at the end of this video.
Our River Campus and Eastman have reopened, I’m sitting here
in the Welles-Brown Room of Rush Rhees Library.
Because I’m on campus, I am following social distancing guidelines.
And when I'm around others, I always have my mask.
There were many parts of the University, notably our Medical Center, that never saw a shut
down, even during the height of our pandemic restrictions.
We’re grateful for our doctors and nurses
and all of our essential service workers who were on the job even when Monroe County and
the Finger Lakes region was largely shut down.
And we’re grateful for our faculty, who suddenly found themselves in a drastically
changed educational environment, and rose to meet the challenges of online and hybrid
teaching models.
Restarting the rest of the University and preparing the campus for the arrival of most
of our students this fall brought experts together from both sides of Elmwood Avenue to make
our campus reopening go smoothly.
There are literally hundreds of examples of the extraordinary efforts of faculty and staff
working as one university to support our restart activities.
With five weeks of classes now behind us,
we have received generally positive feedback from students, faculty, and staff about how
our hybrid education model is working.
To ensure a healthy teaching and learning environment, we added resources including
classroom technology support for faculty.
We tested airflow in classroom buildings and residence halls, and modified student rooms
and study rooms to ensure proper social distancing.
And although the news is full of stories about colleges and universities across the country
who brought students back but then had to revert to all-online instruction, or ask students
to return home, that is not the case at the University of Rochester.
Our undergraduates have demonstrated that
they really want to be here! I am incredibly impressed with how responsible and thoughtful
they have been about keeping our campus and community safe.
They’re following masking and social distancing
guidelines and submitting daily symptom checklists through an app we developed called Dr. Chatbot.
Faculty and staff who plan on being on campus
complete the Dr. Chatbot screening, too, just as I did today.
And to monitor the overall health of the student body, we’re testing 400 randomly selected
students each week.
Everyone at the University has made a COVID-19 Community Commitment to staying healthy – and
keeping other members of our community healthy, too.
Our students, faculty, and staff, and the overall health of our region do provide us with some
good news.
But challenges do remain.
We exceeded our enrollment expectations for reopening, but our academic divisions, which
rely heavily on tuition, are still projecting a 27 million dollar budget deficit for the
fiscal year.
And although patient volumes in the hospital and clinics and the corresponding
revenues are nearing pre-COVID levels, our preliminary budget estimate of clinical margins
for this fiscal year is 49 million dollars lower than last year.
I want to assure you that we are continuing
to monitor financial metrics and are working aggressively to manage and contain costs.
And I’m certain that we will weather this challenge.
One source for optimism is that the University's endowment remains healthy.
Our endowment provides significant annual
income for our operations, including student scholarships, professorships, academic
programming and facilities, and has consistently outperformed its benchmarks. Our goal is
to continue to grow and protect this valuable resource now and for the future.
Moving to other important topics, last month, we all experienced shock and grief after seeing
police body-cam footage of the arrest of Daniel Prude.
Mr. Prude was evaluated at our Strong Memorial
Hospital before the incidents portrayed on the video. A thorough internal investigation
found that his treatment was appropriate, but we are also cooperating fully with ongoing
external investigations.
I believe this tragic event underscores the fact that there has never been a more urgent
time for the University to confront the disparities inherent in our economic, healthcare, and
social systems, and to work towards eradicating them.
The University has both the stature and the obligation to demonstrate leadership and to
take action to work towards eliminating these disparities in our community.
Our University-wide Office of Equity and Inclusion,
or OEI, is leading this effort.
OEI is also engaged with the newly-formed Committee on Community Engagement for Racial
Justice. Local leaders and a network of community organizations are joining University faculty,
staff, and students to work on real solutions to long-standing
social, economic, and educational issues.
To signal our University’s commitment, in
June, I joined Mark Taubman, the dean of the School of Medicine and Dentistry and the CEO
of the University of Rochester Medical Center, in publicly affirming that racism is a public
health crisis.
And in September I joined with many community leaders and local employers in signing the
Rochester-Monroe Anti-Poverty Initiative’s Employer Pledge.
This commits our University to working with
RMAPI to focus on workplace culture, hiring, and retention, and to provide some of our
poorest citizens with opportunities for gainful employment and growth
at the University of Rochester.
I am deeply committed to this work, and proud that the University is taking a leadership
role in the Rochester community with these and other efforts.
Of course, community manifests itself in many ways.
At a time when many of us have been physically
distant, creating and sustaining the University’s alumni community has been one of our priorities.
The one-year “Together for Rochester”
campaign is designed to unite all of us in a common goal of helping the University thrive,
even under the current challenging circumstances.
Together for Rochester is a multi-faceted initiative:
To provide career-advancement support to current students and recent graduates;
To increase scholarship and financial aid
resources for our most deserving students;
To support our equity and inclusion efforts, including those to diversify our faculty;
And to support the research efforts that are
central to our mission and to our impact.
In addition to Together for Rochester, this year we are formally launching three alumni
affinity networks:
The Black Alumni Network,
the First Generation Network,
and the Women’s Network. All of these are designed to connect, support, and engage
alumni in the spirit of Meliora.
Another way we have been cultivating our community
during the pandemic is with the virtual event series, Experience Rochester.
Over 20 virtual lectures and panel discussions
from our renowned scholars and clinicians have been made available online with topics
ranging from democracy to music history to COVID research.
These presentations showcase the intellectual
leadership of our University. If you haven’t had a chance to take a look, we’ll provide
a link at the end of this video.
And speaking of intellectual leadership, even
with the restrictions caused by the pandemic, our faculty continue to fulfill the highest
purpose of our University:
To develop and enhance knowledge and artistic expression in order to improve the human condition.
We should never lose sight of the fact that
our faculty and our students are working on some of the most vexing challenges of our
times and innovating in important areas.
These are things that the University of Rochester does very well, and we can all be proud of this.
Time doesn’t permit me to highlight all of the extraordinary work of our faculty and
our students, but here are just a few examples.
First, our Medical Center is at the forefront of COVID-19 vaccine treatment, research,
and clinical trials.
We are one of only nine sites in the US designated for this purpose by the National Institutes of Health.
We are involved in testing four of the six potential COVID vaccines being developed worldwide.
This summer we opened UR Medicine’s Adult
Outpatient Mental Health Services center in downtown Rochester to provide city residents
with easier access to mental health services.
This continues our tradition of bringing quality healthcare to the Rochester area, including
efforts like the Eastman Dental Institute’s SmileMobile, and The Street Outreach Program.
Earlier this year, the Rochester City School Board voted to extend the partnership between
the Warner School and East High School for an additional five years, building on the
growing success of this unique school-university partnership.
Our work at East can be a model for other
urban school districts, and we are focusing on developing and disseminating research about
what we have learned.
Our new dean of the Warner School, Sarah Peyre, is committed to these efforts and we are delighted
to have her leadership at Warner.
In other recent developments, the University became the first institution in the United
States in over a dozen years to be designated an intellectual and developmental disabilities
research center by NIH.
We are one of only 13 such programs in the country.
Our Rochester Education Justice Initiative
received a Mellon Foundation grant to expand its work providing higher education opportunities
to incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people in the Rochester area.
The University is also now home to a new National
Science Foundation Physics Frontier Center.
This is a collaboration with MIT, Princeton, and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory,
among others.
And did you know that the University of Rochester is a world-recognized leader in the field
of Medieval Studies?
Recently, our Middle English Texts Series received new funding from the National Endowment
for the Humanities to continue its work.
The digitized texts in this series received over half a million website visits last year.
Simon Business School was ranked second in
a round-up of the 10 Biggest B-School Innovations of the Decade for its innovative work in pioneering
a STEM designation for its MBA.
With the appointment of Sevin Yeltekin from Carnegie Mellon University as the new dean,
the school is well positioned to build on its tradition of leadership.
And even when much of the world seems to be
on pause, the music continues at the Eastman School of Music through live-streamed concerts
and Eastman Connects. You’ll find links to both those at the end of this video.
And finally, looking ahead, the Memorial Art
Gallery and River Campus Libraries are jointly planning an exhibit for 2022 that will be
the first major exhibition devoted to the University’s extraordinary collection of
HIV/AIDS education posters, which may be the largest of its kind in the world.
These are just a few highlights from our faculty
and our programs.
The importance of the work we are doing can be demonstrated by the funding we’re receiving
from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the National
Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts,
the Mellon Foundation, and other prominent funding agencies.
In such turbulent times, it is easy to lose
sight of our continuing scholarly innovations but every one of these efforts benefits our
community – and our world.
Last year at this time, we were celebrating
my inauguration as president of this great university.
How the world has changed since then!
I hope that this message has assured you that despite the disruptions of the past months,
we can all be proud of the extraordinary things this University is still doing every day.
Certainly the world has changed, and the University
of Rochester is adapting to change with it.
And I believe that in these challenging times, we have not just an opportunity, but an obligation,
to make an impact.
Together, we can make the world ever better – ever smarter, ever healthier.
Ever more equitable and just.
Thank you for listening. I hope you and yours
remain healthy and safe, and I look forward to the day when we can join together again in person.
Meliora!