March 20, 2025

Thank you again for joining us in what is becoming a semester of achievement and a year of opening opportunity.

For it is through access that we empower our students, through opportunity that we lift our University, and through achievement that we shape our society.

For instance, we recently established a new partnership with Open AI, one that will bring additional resources, research funding, and computing power to our community. This collaboration will include joint research projects between the University and OpenAI, which are focused on AI applications that broadly benefit society.

In addition, through our AI & Digital Health Innovation initiative, we are creating a unified network to accelerate healthcare-focused AI solutions across the University.

Our College of Pharmacy was recently given a prestigious award for demonstrating a major institutional commitment to addressing unmet community needs.

And, we recently launched a new alliance to promote hydrogen fuel for internal combustion engines.

Building on a strong foundation

As we achieve all of this, and so much more, it is vital that we continue to build upon our foundations of student opportunity, achievement, and excellence.

As the year progresses, this will include an expansion of services such as career counseling, mental health resources, and other essential supports, which meet the needs of our students. This also includes targeted investments such as:

• The expansion of the Go Blue Guarantee, which was enhanced earlier this academic year and now extends free tuition to in-state students from families with annual incomes of up to $125,000 and assets up to $125,000. This program breaks economic barriers and ensures that a life-changing University of Michigan education is available to students throughout Michigan, no matter their economic means.

• We will also develop a plan to enhance the Blavin Scholars Program, which offers a community of support – including mentors and coaches – for undergraduate students who have faced and are overcoming incredible challenges such as foster care or kinship care, or creating their dreams at the University of Michigan without the support of their parents or guardians.

Fundamental commitments

Through these measures, we are reaffirming our focus on student access and opportunity by ensuring our resources are pointed toward the people and programs, which directly impact the success of our community.

And as we do so, we will sustain and strengthen our highest traditions and aspirations as a university:

• Freedom of thought and inquiry;

• The creation of new knowledge and new breakthroughs through the support of basic research and applied R&D;

• The upholding of our democracy; and

• The opening of new horizons and new opportunities.

These are fundamental to our ethos and purpose as a great public university.

Following in the footsteps

This is not my opinion alone, but the consensus of great leaders and bipartisan policy makers over America’s centuries. To give just a couple of examples:

• The eminent Abraham Lincoln is the only U.S. president to earn a patent.

• In his seminal report to President Franklin Roosevelt, Science: The Endless Frontier, Vannevar Bush declared, “Without scientific progress no amount of achievement in other directions can insure our health, prosperity, and security as a nation in the modern world.”

• And, in his radio address to the nation on April 22, 1988, President Ronald Reagan observed, “The remarkable thing is that although basic research does not begin with a particular practical goal, when you look at the results over the years, it ends up being one of the most practical things government does.”

This is our tradition as a nation, an institution, and a university.

This is the strengthening of our competitiveness and the growth of our prosperity.

And this is our commitment — to do everything in our power to lift our society and ensure that every Wolverine will rise, achieve, and fulfill their dreams.