2025 State of the University
Good morning!
I begin with heartfelt gratitude to every member of the VCU community. A university IS its people – and VCU has extraordinary people.
Words can’t capture the depth of my feelings of gratitude for our dedicated VCU teams — thousands of people caring for other people — for their compassion and resilience LIKE when we lost water a few weeks ago. The well-being of our students, patients and care providers once again came first.
A warm welcome to our Board of Visitors members, Rector Haymore, and Health System board members. Thank you for your support, generosity, and dedication to a mission critical to Virginia’s future.
Our conscientious and caring faculty, staff and students made 2024 another year of exceptional growth and progress in achieving our complex mission as a public research university.
Our 2023 freshman class was our largest on record – building on that, fall 2024 enrollment was also in the top tier, and these students are succeeding at VCU. We’re attracting more motivated, hard-working students, who are on track to complete their degrees on time. Our master’s, out-of-state, and international enrollments are also on the rise.
All of this is because of our dedicated VCU faculty and staff who are delivering on our mission to support the success of ALL students– with engaging teaching and learning experiences, professional mentoring and advising, expanding research and experiential learning, and creating a positive and supportive college experience. It’s also because of donors who gave VCU another banner year of giving, much of which supported more student scholarships.
First-generation and Pell student enrollments are on the rise – proudly making VCU rare among research universities.
Thanks to VCU, people from every background are achieving the American dream at a research university. What makes this country unique is invention, innovation and entrepreneurship. VCU is made for hard-working, motivated people driven to succeed, creating the next greatest generation of world citizens.
I was struck by an interview with New York Times columnist David Brooks. He said that while IQ matters, it’s not everything – not even the most important thing. He said:
“What really matters in a person is are they curious? Are they good teammates? Do they have a passion that will allow them to drive through difficulty and achieve their goals?”
Brooks is right – behind most success is motivation, ability to work together with other people, curiosity and passion. And THAT is what VCU students have in abundance.
2024 was a strong year in many ways.
Our Provost and our innovative faculty led academic repositioning that continues into 2025 to help strengthen and better align our academic units.
They also led the effort that resulted in VCU succeeding in our re-accreditation with no recommendations for improvement. Thank you to the many people at VCU who made this possible.
In 2024, we broke ground on the Athletic Village. Collegiate athletics continues to be a window through which people look, that raises awareness of the impact of the academic enterprise on society. Congratulations to our VCU teams for winning six conference Championships – AND— our student-athletes posted our best semester GPA in history.
We also broke ground on the VCU CoStar Center for Arts and Innovation–needed space for our nationally-ranked School of the Arts. Thanks to the state, CoStar and vice-rector Andy Florance for their generous support. And thank you to our CFO and her teams for a successful launch.
VCU Health had another record year – strong bond ratings, putting us in the top 20 percent of rated healthcare systems nationwide. Our combination of complex care and research sets us apart. Thanks to our healthcare leadership team for moving our health enterprise forward.
VCU was chartered as a major public research university, with a mission to support the success of ALL of our students.
So, how are we preparing for a future that is changing so fast?
Which changes are we getting ahead of? How are these changes affecting how we prepare students to be critical thinkers, thoughtful contributors, and problem solvers as they face new challenges of the future?
These are long-term shifts that have been in motion for years. I recognize that people’s minds are on possible changes we’re hearing about at the federal level.
A team of university leaders, led by the Provost, is overseeing our review of those changes. When we get more clarity about verified impacts to the university, we will communicate that information.
Last year, the World Economic Forum published a timeline of human technological advancements. There was the invention of the wheel, and the first known forms of writing, and the first evidence of agriculture. A handful of technological innovations over thousands of years.
But in the past couple of centuries, innovations have come faster and faster – and many of the most life-changing inventions have come from universities. The first retractable, locking seat belt. The first small battery-powered pacemaker. The polio vaccine, penicillin, the discovery of DNA, and the Internet – all within the past century.
The pace of human technological innovation has increased dramatically. Our ancestors could live their entire short lives using the same kinds of tools and technology that were available when they were born, and when their grandparents were born.
Not today. Many of us in this room were alive before the Internet and cell phones became popular, and now they’ve changed our world. What will change by the time a child born today becomes old enough to go to college? And what will change by the time this year’s freshmen graduate?
VCU is adapting to changes — and even creating the changes we see in our society and our technology. We’ve got three major areas of impact:
- How our research drives innovation.
- How students get professional experiences that help prepare them for their careers.
- And how VCU is preparing students for a world driven by emerging technologies, in all kinds of ways.
As a major public research university, we do research that helps advance the changes we need and see in society. The impact of that research on people’s lives and society is what gives it meaning.
We’re committed to that mission across the entire enterprise, most certainly including research in the Arts and Humanities. The arts and humanities are key to shaping our understanding of each other and of the world. And often, the value of scientific research is interpreted best, to the broadest audience, through arts design and humanities.
Because of our research commitment and our faculty – 11 of whom are in the global top 50 in their fields – VCU is ranked in the top 50 of public research universities and our sponsored funding has set milestones every year.
I also acknowledge our postdocs, who are an essential part of our research engine. Our research leads to discoveries with impact on people’s lives – like nerve tape to reconnect severed nerves, invented by a VCU researcher and now being used in surgeries around the country. The impact of our faculty-led discoveries is at an all-time high.
We owe it to all of the people who benefit from our research to push to the next level.
That means focusing and prioritizing appropriate resources for our research mission – supporting our faculty’s role in research, innovation, and creativity, and conscientiously attracting more top researchers to VCU.
And we all know that our staff keep this place moving for all of us. To our more than 20,000 staff members throughout all parts of VCU—-thank you!
Positioning our research for the future will mean creating more interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary teams that can really dig into multiple contexts of the problems that are most vexing to society and helping to understand and solve them. Many thanks to my colleagues engaged in convergence labs in key areas to support transdisciplinary research while ALSO forging experiential learning opportunities for students. It’s really important that we integrate students at ALL levels in our research mission.
Through the “Every Ram’s a Researcher” initiative, we now have about 5,500 undergraduates and 2,250 graduate students participating in research at some level. But that’s a starting point.
I have enjoyed opportunities to talk with some of our students about how they view research and its impact on their education. Let’s hear what they had to say:
Research experience benefits students in many aspects of their careers. We’re developing the next generation of skilled thinkers, inventors, innovators and problem solvers that our country and our world need.
We all care deeply about our students. It’s why we’ve dedicated our lives to their success . It’s why we now have to think beyond graduation toward their professional careers.
It’s becoming clear students who have professional experiences while they’re in college are more likely to get jobs in their fields after graduation.
Our transformative learning initiative has now reached the goal of requiring all VCU students to have at least one learning experience – working in an internship, a faculty-led research project or problem-solving with industry partners – by the time they graduate. Students leave VCU with their degree AND relevant experience to help them get jobs appropriate for a college graduate.
Let’s listen to what some of our students said about the impact of internships.
Students WANT internships and career and professional experiences. They know it’s important. But it’s not always easy to find all of the opportunities that exist. And while it appears that there aren’t enough opportunities, I hear from employers that there do not appear to be enough students for internships or even jobs!
This calls on us to help ensure greater alignment between our institutions and employers.
Going forward, we’ll use VCU’s position in the state and beyond to connect with employers of all sizes and engage them in supporting professional experiences for our students.
Many of our students are very interested in entrepreneurship and love getting experience and guidance on how to build their own brands. Through our world class Da Vinci Center and other paths, this is an area where VCU has a lot of experience – and our students can benefit from that experience as part of VCU’s own brand.
This wouldn’t be complete without talking about artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence is here, and it will continue to evolve. As a research institution, we have the ability to help drive this new technology and be part of the process as it grows.
Additionally, we have a responsibility to help our students understand its impact, and give them the tools they need. And, finally, we have lots to learn from our students about AI, and that’s happening in many corners of the university.
I asked a few students what they think about AI. Let’s listen:
Thanks to many of our colleagues, VCU launched a new minor in artificial intelligence. We wanted to make sure that ANY student, no matter their level or major, could get the coursework and experience they need to understand AI.
Many of our students may never need to write code or understand the mechanics that underlie AI programs. But they’ll live and work with it, which means they’ll need to understand how AI can be helpful by automating tasks, and the challenges they need to understand about it.
That’s why our minor includes a philosophy class on the Ethics of AI, teaching students to assess a system and pinpoint ethical questions. It’s so popular, professors Jamie Fritz and Frank Ferris had to open more sections.
And Erdem Topsakal, who teaches Practical Artificial Intelligence, says that out of 150 students in the course last fall, 85 percent weren’t engineering students – they were from the arts, humanities, music, psychology, anything you could imagine.
VCU faculty are using and talking about AI in all kinds of courses. William Song, who runs the medical physics program, uses AI to develop algorithms to solve specific problems in medicine, like generating medical treatment plans.
Earlier I mentioned convergence labs as a means to bring expertise together across disciplines to focus on any single issue. We’re creating a convergence lab around AI for the public good, to launch this spring.
And while VCU students will be prepared for the changing technologies of the future, our alumni should be included as well. We’re committed to serving our students not just while they’re here, but after they graduate.
So this summer, we’ll launch a new initiative called Ram Recharge Unlimited – a free online module for alumni. Our first class will be on ethics and artificial intelligence.
When the provost’s office put out a call last year to help create the new AI minor, about 140 faculty members responded, from all across the university. Thanks to ALL of you.
Shortly I will invite two of my colleagues to join me in a conversation about not just what VCU is doing to prepare students for AI, but why.
But first, thanks to everyone for being with us today. 2025 will be a year of focus on our core missions:
- Student success at every level. This includes recruiting, preparation for a changing future, graduating on time, and launching our students into their careers.
- Supporting and recruiting faculty to advance more research that impacts people’s lives;
- Providing complex care driven by our advanced research and innovation that allows us to save and improve lives, and promote human health;
- And preparing the VCU community for ongoing changes and challenges throughout their lives.
VCU is uncommon – a major public research university that is made for people from all backgrounds who are motivated to do the work that leads to success. People driven to innovate and invent, to use their ingenuity and passion to achieve their goals. People who never stop being curious. As Brooks said, those are the things that really matter.
That’s who we are at VCU. My heartfelt gratitude to all of the faculty, staff, students, alumni, partners, and supporters who make this the innovative, exciting, forward-looking and caring university that it is.
Thank you.
Now I invite Elaine Reeder and Frank Faries to join me.