Retrospective, renewal and re-invention are essential to the success of any organization. The marketplace is unforgiving to those who ignore them.

 

Are universities subject to the same forces? Perhaps not in past, quieter times, when a much longer horizon governed higher education.

 

However, today’s world is spawning change at an unprecedented rate, whether it is transformation on a technological, societal or global scale. And that change brings waves that break at the doorstep of academia with increasing frequency.

 

The Viterbi School’s strategic vision requires that we embrace that change. We have, and it shows.

 

The School has experienced exhilarating growth over the last several years, starting with its naming in 2004. Nearly every quality indicator has improved dramatically and compellingly, particularly in the key areas of student, faculty, research and scholarship.

 

Incoming freshman SAT scores have soared and the latest data for fall 2010 shows another 17-point increase. More than a third of all entering freshmen are women. The freshman return rate to engineering majors is now at an astounding 92%.

 

On the faculty front, the number of annual Ph.D. degrees awarded here has approached the number of our tenure-track faculty. We have hired a total of 31 new engineering faculty in the last five years, with an increase of more than 60% in diversity hiring (women, Hispanic and African-American faculty).

 

And our faculty continue to collect distinctions at rapid rates. Six have been elected to the various national academies, fourteen have received NSF Career Awards, two have received Presidential Early Career (PECASE) awards; and three female faculty were singled out in MIT’s TR35 annual review. All-time highs in research volume and research centers have demonstrated the research prowess of our faculty.

 

The vision that drove these accomplishments originated from the need to solidify our prominence in the context of a rapidly changing global, contextual and economic landscape, and to lead the quest for new paradigms in engineering education and research.

 

This vision is encapsulated by the statement that we should aim to make the Viterbi School:

 

 

As the university is moving into a new era, with new leadership, and as I have been humbly entrusted with another term to lead this remarkable school, the vision for our school is as clear as before.

 

I am adding a re-focusing dimension: Advancing and fulfilling the promise of engineering to empower society as the enabling discipline of our times — in what we call Engineering+™. 

 

Following this vision brings vistas of breathtaking views. We see an undergraduate educational experience enriched with innovation, entrepreneurship and communication skills, and enhanced with community and global outreach.

 

We continue to pursue the fundamental discovery of new laws, materials, processes and devices in collaboration with the sciences. We are forging new paths in interdisciplinary research and scholarship in close partnerships with medicine and health sciences, policy, communications, social sciences and the arts.

 

We are hammering out solutions to vexing problems, such as the NAE Grand Challenges, the promotion of which has been an unrelenting task of the Viterbi school along with its partners.

 

And we are imbuing a generation of new professionals with the skills and tools to implement these transformations and be the catalysts of change.

 

In the fall of 2010, this vision is as clear as 2020.