NARRATOR: Welcome to “Conversations with President Destler”—the first in a series of videocast messages from the president’s office. Bill Destler became president of Rochester Institute of Technology on July 1. He is the ninth president in the university’s 178-year history.

PRESIDENT DESTLER: I would like to begin by saying thank you for the invitation to serve as RIT’s 9th president. I am honored and humbled, and my wife, Rebecca, and I have quickly found a real sense of community at RIT among the faculty, staff, students, trustees and alumni. I look forward to starting a conversation about how we might, working together, take RIT to the next level.

This wonderful institution has evolved under the leadership of President Simone and his predecessors into one of the nation’s best and most unique universities. RIT is truly becoming a “Category of One University” and can be positioned to be a national treasure.

So what attracted us to RIT? It is not just the career-orientation of RIT that makes the university so unusual. It is the extraordinary focus of its academic programs around science and technology, business, and design and the arts, combined with the outstanding programs of the National Technical Institute for the Deaf that lead me to believe that RIT can be moved to a position of even greater prominence in international higher education. These focus areas, working together, can be leveraged as few others can, to the benefit of the University and the nation.

So let’s dream a little about what we can accomplish together:

Imagine a “Category Of One” university that not only educates its students for productive careers, but also reinforces America’s greatest competitive advantage by expecting creativity, invention and innovation of every student before graduation. Imagine a university that teaches scientists and engineers how artists envision and create new works. Imagine a university that uses diversity as a creative engine in this process and where the barriers between the hearing and the deaf dissolve in the face of this innovative energy. What do you think of having the first innovation center on the RIT campus and an innovation festival each year at RIT at which these efforts, thousands of them, would be showcased? Imagine RIT, not as a “research university” or a “teaching university,” but as the first “innovation university.”

Imagine, with your help, a university with close ties to the corporate sector that decides to make its faculty and staff, graduate and undergraduate students, and facilities available to companies to carry out corporate research and development projects at a low cost and without the usual intellectual property fights that usually derail such efforts. What would you think of “Corporate R&D at RIT”?

These ideas are conversation starters. Now, I need your feedback and help. RIT alumni—our ambassadors—are now 100,000 strong! Our alumni must play a role in moving the university forward to further national prominence. We can have fun working together to make RIT the university that captures the new high ground in higher education.

Rebecca and I are so grateful to all of you for giving us the opportunity to think big about what we can accomplish together. We are honored to join the RIT family.

NARRATOR: Please visit President Destler’s Web site at http://www.rit.edu/president for more information and an opportunity to provide feedback.