Dear Friends,

My first year as president at the University of New Hampshire bears out the principle reason I wanted to come here: UNH is a distinguished public research university with its foundation firmly set in the land-grant tradition. UNH can (and does) boast about its national, and even international, reputation; no doubt, its importance in the world has benefited you in your careers and in your life experiences. Your individual and collective successes share the common denominator of having attended and graduated from the University of New Hampshire-whether you are an astronaut, a school volunteer, a scientist, an author. How UNH is viewed nationally, and indeed internationally, gives stature to the degrees you earned here.

UNH can be a serious consideration for high school juniors and seniors looking at colleges because the work of our faculty and students is known around the globe: polar scientists' research on the Greenland Ice Sheet; Murray Straus's ongoing studies of the effects of corporal punishment; UNH historian Jeff Bolster's research on African-American sailors (a recent book by him, titled Black Jacks, received astounding reviews in the Washington Post and New York Times). When Professor Dennis Meadows was named one of the 100 most influential futurists of all times, when Professor Berrien Moore assumed the chair of one of the most prestigious international global environmental research bodies, and when Professor Charles Simic was named finalist for the National Book Award, their names were prominent in the national media. Students from every state attend UNH and our international student population increases each year because of your alma mater's academic reputation.

Once enrolled, the experiences our students have around the state, the nation and the world enriches their learning experiences. Academic opportunities are available from the Isles of Shoals to more than 33 different countries around the world on every continent. These are experiences you may have had when you were enrolled here. If you did not, let me briefly share three examples.

In August, one of our seniors watched a satellite he worked on at the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space lift off from the Kennedy Space Center launch pad. A May graduate was in Brazil in September, presenting a research paper, co-authored with her business professor Marc Herold, at an international development conference. And a French and art history major has received a grant to research the life and work of French surrealist photographer Claude Cahun. She traveled to France this month to continue her work after being awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to teach English in a Paris high school.

A tremendous achievement of the faculty at UNH is their ability to strengthen the research mission in ways that, in turn, strengthen the teaching mission. The size of UNH facilitates interaction across disciplines, allowing for cutting-edge research and interactive studies commonly separated at other universities.

A new project, funded by FIPSE, is particularly exciting for our students and faculty. The grant will fund as many as 30 international research projects for teams of undergraduates, each team supervised by a UNH faculty member and an international researcher.

And of course we continue to affiliate ourselves with other institutions of higher education in this country and abroad. New agreements with Brazilian universities, for example, will lay the foundation for collaborative research and teaching in our College of Life Sciences and Agriculture, the Whittemore School of Business and Economics, and the Department of Education. We now offer two exchange programs in Budapest for students in engineering and in the social sciences.

And the world comes to us as well: NASA's Advisory Committee on Utilization of the Proposed Space Station, which includes Russian scientists, was meeting at UNH last June when -- as fate would have it -- the MIR space station collision occurred. It is hard to imagine how we could have been closer to the action without donning space suits. In June, we also had 500 participants at an International Conference on Family Violence. In September, UNH hosted the New England Regional Conference on Climate Change, a conference that included political leadership from Washington, as well as business leaders and scientists from around New England.

There are exciting times at your university; projects are underway that benefit the state of New Hampshire (of which 39,000 of you are citizens), the nation, and people around the globe. And all of you -- our graduates -- who have passed through the doors of our classrooms and laboratories, our student union, libraries, and research centers, have helped build a strong foundation for academic excellence and a national reputation that positions the University of New Hampshire well for its future.

Sincerely,