Annual President’s Address
Join President Cauce for her annual address to the UW community about her priorities for her last year in office and the role of higher education in strengthening a democratic society through learning and discovery.
Tune in via livestream on Tuesday, Oct. 15
10:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m.
The start of every academic year is a special time for us all, representing both an opportunity for the renewal of work in progress and for new beginnings. Our community’s extraordinary capacity to transform our world for the better through learning, discovery, caregiving and creating opportunity has been, and continues to be a constant source of inspiration and wonder.
The University of Washington was built to endure, and the responsibility for sustaining and evolving our great public university falls to each new generation of students, faculty and staff. That responsibility now lies with us, and together, we can confront the many challenges our world faces including the deepening polarization throughout our society with empathy, collaboration and dialogue across our differences.
As I shared with our community last week, it’s important to understand that the UW is a part of society, and home to the same disagreements and conflicting perspectives as the rest of the world. What distinguishes our University is not that we are – or should be – insulated from challenging ideas, but that we come together to learn how to navigate those disagreements in productive ways. This means having both safe spaces, where people can be with those who are like-minded, and brave spaces, where we engage with each other across our differences in civil discourse on controversial topics. In doing so, all of us are expected to live up to our community’s standards and values by creating a culture that is welcoming, inclusive and respectful.
We are taking a number of actions to support a welcoming and inclusive environment that upholds our fundamental rights to free speech and expression, while making clear the time, place, and manner restrictions necessary to ensure that we can all pursue our primary missions of teaching and learning, discovery, health care delivery, and service to our communities. We will also be requiring all events using campus spaces to be registered under our Use of University Facilities policy in line with our safety planning. These expectations are being communicated to members of our community in orientation sessions throughout the week. These and other actions are part of our commitment to maintaining a safe, inclusive environment for every member of our community.
As I wrote last week, every member of the UW community was chosen from a pool of highly qualified applicants because each of us has important ideas and skills that can make our community and the world a better place. To fulfill that mission, we must be a community that is able to consider and evaluate different perspectives, opinions and beliefs, and listen to competing ideas. These skills are critical to the learning, scholarship, research, and community service and engagement that we came here to be part of. But it all begins with empathy and respect for our shared humanity.
Provost Tricia Serio has launched the UW Dialogue Initiative to promote learning environments that encourage curiosity, openness, critical thinking, active listening, productive dialogue and shared responsibility. And Dean of Undergraduate Affairs Ed Taylor is leading a new undergraduate course, “2024: Dialogue, Disagreement and Democracy,” to help students develop the skills to navigate differences and have productive conversations, because the same skills that lead to scientific breakthroughs, innovation and knowledge creation also support stronger democracies and bolster civil liberties.
We face big, complex challenges – from climate change and the rise of AI, to devastating wars and global threats to democracy, to inequities in health, wealth, educational access and more. All of us were drawn here because we share a conviction that we can make a difference in the world, and if we work together, we can and we will. I’ll be talking more about how we can reach those goals as an institution and a community at my Annual President’s Address on October 15.
I’m excited for the year ahead and looking forward to continuing our shared mission. Welcome to the new academic year – let’s do great work together.