They are entrusted to us during what is, for many of them, one of the most critical and intellectually passionate periods of their lives. The process of education should help them focus their curiosity and enthusiasm and bring them into contact with the rigor and objectivity that are essential to the life of the mind. A research university, which is full of bright individuals with their own passionate commitments to learning, is a wonderful place in which to pursue such an education. Our undergraduates have the opportunity to engage in supervised research and to learn in an environment of discovery from professors who are on the cutting edge of new developments, many of them revolutionary in their implications. The University of California, for example, is the birthplace of the Internet, having created the first two nodes on the information superhighway at UCLA and UC Santa Barbara in the late 1960s.
Students have a broader range of academic options than students at many other kinds of institutions.
Every student who masters this grammar has the foundation on which future learning can be built. So the students who are graduating with such high hopes leave the University prepared not only for a career. They are prepared for a life. The question facing us as citizens is whether we are doing enough to ensure that the colleges and universities that have helped these talented young people succeed will be able to do the same for their children and grandchildren. Some of the economic clouds hanging over higher education have dispersed, but sunny skies have not yet come to California's public colleges and universities.