Provost's Speeches

Provost Paul N. Courant's Remarks at the Inauguration of President Mary Sue Coleman

We inaugurate a President of our University today, at a time when both the President and the University face extraordinary opportunities and the challenges that invariably come with opportunities.

American higher education is one of the great accomplishments of the twentieth century. Universities in the United States, and the University of Michigan in particular, are THE places where new knowledge is created, where students of the greatest potential discover how to use that potential, where arts and sciences, practical and pure, come together. We seek nothing less than to chronicle, to understand, and to shape all of human knowledge and expression.

It is no exaggeration to say that the world is beating a path to our door.

At the same time, we are faced with challenges from within and from without. Universities face increasing demands for accountability and productivity, and public universities across the country find their traditional funding sources to be under great stress. Our value to society is manifestly apparent to us and to our students, but our ability to provide that value is in jeopardy.

Changes in digital technologies and the ubiquitous use of multimedia pose challenges of a different type. Our students, who are as bright as ever, have come to learn and to think in an environment where text, and sustained argument in the form of text, are often but a small part of the picture (a picture accompanied by soundtrack.) These changes bring great opportunity, but it is yet unclear how we will come to exploit that opportunity, and the challenge is especially great for the (slightly) older generation of faculty that is so well represented on this platform and in this audience.

We also face the challenge, equally great, that research methods in both the arts and sciences are changing rapidly as it becomes possible to store, code and copy unthinkably large amounts of data. We must somehow make the latest technologies available to our faculty and students (which is costly) And we must somehow learn how to deal with the ultimate constraint that even as the amount of information available to us grows at an extraordinary pace, the human time and cognitive power to process all of this information is not growing. There is only so much time in the day, and here at Michigan we already use it all.

To face these challenges and many others, we are fortunate to have as our President an extraordinarily accomplished and experienced leader. Mary Sue Coleman is a scientist, with a scientist's passion to understand the will and inclination to use that understanding to make things happen. She also has a scientist's appreciation—also a passion—for the beauty in nature and in the arts and also a passion for the University of Michigan. It shows in her understanding of our distinctive commitments to collaborative work. It shows in her ambition that we build upon what have to create a university that is even greater. And it shows, visibly, in her engagement with Michigan's athletic teams. To watch a Michigan football game with Mary Sue Coleman is... intense.

I began my academic career at a time when there were few women in graduate school, and it was unusual indeed to find women in positions of senior leadership in the academy. Over the years both my work and the quality of my professional life have benefited greatly from collaborations with women students, scholars, and academic leaders. I cannot tell you how much it pleases me today to preside over the inauguration of the first woman to serve as President of the University of Michigan.

PROVOST'S SPEECHES