For nearly 100 years, since our founding in 1907, this university, your university, has been the central agent of change in our society, providing economic opportunity and social justice as our faculty and staff have transformed students' lives, have given them the ingredients needed for success, and have prepared them to change the world.

Today UH counts more than 190,000 living alumni, with 140,000 residing in Hawai'i. Each week, 80,000 individuals — one in every 12 adults in this state — pursue credit or noncredit work on one of our 10 campuses. Hawai'i's workforce? Many of those on the job in Hawai'i were educated and trained at UH. Sustainable economic development and diversification? UH is by far Hawai'i's largest technology company. Dreams of a better life? For many, as Wai'anae community leaders Kaipo Pomaikai and William Aila reminded me recently, UH represents the hope that those dreams can come true.

That's why I am honored to have the opportunity to lead our university, my professional home for the last 15 years, into its second century. UH can and indeed must be the transformational agent of change, the beacon of hope, for our society in the years ahead.

To fulfill this promise in the complex world of tomorrow, UH will have to accelerate our recent efforts to transform ourselves, becoming more comfortable with risk and innovation. At the same time, we must hold fast to the values — in particular freedom of inquiry and expression, for ideas both popular and unpopular — that make this university such a valuable place in our Island society.

UH's first steps toward becoming a responsive, flexible and adaptive organization — one unlike all the other departments in the executive branch — came in the mid-1980s when we were granted a measure of financial flexibility, and in the mid-1990s when we received authority to keep our tuition. In November 2000, voters dramatically endorsed our self-reliance by approving an amendment to the state Constitution that gave UH a significant degree of autonomy.

Building on this momentum, our 2002-2010 strategic plan raised hopes about what UH could become. Now that our financial situation has improved on a number of fronts, we're beginning to finance those hopes. We've stepped up to address an enrollment surge and a booming economy's workforce needs, and we've launched several public-private partnerships to leverage our scarce resources in the construction of new facilities. The accreditors of our campuses, both baccalaureate and community colleges, have complimented us on our progress. But we know that there's more — much more — to be done.

As we celebrate our centennial, our campuses will begin to prepare their strategic plans for the second decade of the 21st century, the years 2011 to 2020. To jump-start the process, a few months ago I launched the Second Decade initiative, aimed at answering some important questions about the role of public higher education in our state: How much higher education does Hawai'i need? Of that amount, how much should be publicly provided? In what amounts and in what locations and with what technologies? How will such a level of public higher education be financed?

Most importantly, how far should we go in the movement to create an autonomous, accountable, flexible and entrepreneurial public system of higher education?

My vision for the university in answer to this last question is unambiguous: We should go as far as our imagination, our competence and our capacity can take us.

That means empowering our campuses and their chancellors and supporting their efforts to contribute to the state's higher education agenda while accomplishing their respective missions for the benefit of their students. And that means redoubling our efforts to raise private funds to complement the precious resources entrusted to us by taxpayers and by students and their parents, to provide the margin of excellence we all want.

The stakes for our society are high. As Hawai'i's system of public higher education, we have been remarkably effective at providing access to a community college or baccalaureate education, a necessity in today's "flat" global economy where the skills and knowledge one needs for college are the same as those one needs in the workplace. Hawai'i now ranks 24th out of 50 states in the performance of our public and private higher education institutions, measured in a variety of outcomes achieved per dollars spent per full-time-equivalent student, and we're 18th in the nation in the performance of our public university research sector.

However, as a state we've been markedly less successful in insuring that access to higher education turns into success, defined as completing a course of study in a reasonable time.

We on the University of Hawai'i's 10 campuses must focus our limited resources more sharply so that the students who pass through our doors taking courses for credit can reach their degree goals. And we must continue to reach out to partner with K-12 and early-childhood education providers, supporting their efforts and, where appropriate, collaborating with them in developing innovative ways of providing instruction; the result will be better-prepared students matriculating to our campuses.

It's of special importance that this "access with success" initiative yields positive results for our native Hawaiian community, the descendants of the first people to populate these islands. We will need to devote additional resources, above and beyond those already committed, to achieve this goal. One means to this end is the rethinking of the obligation that arises from the location of some of our campuses on ceded lands.

The university's progress on this road of transformation during the last 21 months owes much to the encouragement of the community at large, as well as to the efforts of a dedicated and talented cadre of vice presidents, chancellors, faculty and staff, our regents and of course our students, who indeed are the reason we are all here. I look forward with enthusiasm to working with the entire UH 'ohana to provide opportunity and excellence, on behalf of the remarkable people of these rare and beautiful islands.