The bucolic Evanston campus is near to Chicago, allowing undergraduates to learn from the city's superb museums, to enjoy opera, an exciting symphony and a variety of theater performances as well as exhilarating sports events. This great metropolitan region attracts first rank students and faculty. An outstanding and diverse student body is able to attend Northwestern because we provide financial aid on the basis of demonstrated need. Our strong resource base and well maintained and attractive physical plant, both dependent on prudent financial management, are crucial to bringing and retaining a faculty of leading scholars and teachers. One of Northwestern University's strengths is its ongoing commitment to excellence in teaching, as demonstrated by the creation of the Searle Teaching Center, the establishment of imaginative new programs in Musical Theater and The Center for the Writing Arts, and the unique approach of the Integrated Science Program and the Program in Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences.
Innovative teaching is rewarded here.
We continue to create and develop new research centers in the life sciences and health policy, engineering, the social sciences and the humanities. We have recently established the Alice Berline Kaplan Center in the Humanities and also a new Center of International and Comparative Studies. The vision of former President Arnold Weber, now Chancellor of the University, the foresight of the Board of Trustees, under the leadership of Chairman Howard Trienens, have been powerful influences during the past decade. My friend William G. Bowen, from whom I have learned a great deal, has written perceptively about the dynamics of governance by boards of directors and trustees. The leaders of a great university necessarily favor the future.