Hi, let me welcome you to another new year at the University of Washington. I 
certainly hope your holiday was as relaxing and enjoyable as mine was. This is a 
new experiment, this video that we’re making today. We’re going to try over the 
coming years to make some videos that allow me to communicate to the 
university community what’s going on in the University, a little bit of 
retrospective about the past and then maybe talk about the future and where 
we’re going as an institution.

The holidays gave us all a chance to reflect on the year past. 2006 was, by any 
estimation, a wonderful year for the University of Washington. We saw a number 
of new programs introduced like Husky Promise and Students First that’s going 
to provide our students in the future with great access and affordability to the 
University. We saw terrific accomplishments of our faculty and our students 
winning the highest academic awards they possibly can. We even won a national 
championship in volleyball along the way.

So as we reflect on 2006 and look into the future I’m very excited and proud. 
What’s going forward now, I think, is even more exciting for the University. We 
just saw before the Christmas break the governor roll out one of the most exciting 
budget proposals that the University of Washington has ever seen. She’s 
proposing new investments in our infrastructure, access for more students, the 
ability to pay our faculty and staff more, all of the things that we’d been working 
on are proposed in that first budget as a step toward meeting our global 
challenge. 

Together the University community has proposed to the governor, to the 
legislature and to our community a set of dynamic, energetic ideas that will over 
a multi-year period of time allow the University of Washington to have the 
resources it needs to provide our students, our community and our citizens with 
all of the things that a world class University has to provide them with: smaller 
classes, more access to faculty, better advising, more technology, more staff in 
the places that we want and of course competitive pay for all of our people. The 
proposal that the governor's got on the table with the support of the business 
community, with the support of legislative leaders and with the good hard work 
of all of you, I think is going to change the way this University looks and feels 
and operate for years and years to come.

You may remember that more than a year ago we launched the leadership 
community values initiative across the whole University. In that process we got a 
chance to receive feedback from all of you about the things that we’re doing well 
and some things that we need to make improvements on as a community. One of 
those was the need for greater transparency, to have better communication with 
the leadership of the institution, to know what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, 
how we’re making decisions. This video process is, in fact, one attempt to 
improve that communication. I certainly hope you’ll take time also to send me 
your email thoughts to communicate with me directly and anyway that you see fit 
so that we can continue this conversation. In future videotapes, I’d love to 
address the issues you want to hear about, and talk about the things that are of 
greatest importance to you and the rest of the UW community. 

Thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day to have a look at this video. I 
hope you don’t consider it just more spam in you email box. We’re certainly 
going to try and make these interesting and engaging and useful to you.