12 ForOregonState.org/Stater Vo i c e s KARL MAASDAM ↑President Jayathi Murthy speaks at OSU’s 2023 Commencement. Follow her on Twitter, now known as X, at @OregonStatePres. OSU’S SPECIAL SAUCE PRESIDENT JAYATHI MURTHY ON AMBITIOUS GOALS AND LEANING INTO THE UNIVERSITY’S STRENGTHS. As told to Scholle McFarland You just attended your first Oregon State commencement. What stuck with you? As I walk through campus with leadership, on both sides of our path are our students dressed up in regalia. They’re wearing leis and looking absolutely beautiful with decorated hats. And they’re so happy to be done and ready to embrace their future lives. You get to see eye to eye because you’re so close. You walk this long path, and then it all opens up into Reser Stadium. You don’t know how big it is until you actually stand on the floor and look up. That mixture of scales — of the intimate and the enormous — was interesting and strange. The ceremony went like clockwork, and the energy and the fun and the hope — all of that was very happy-making for me. Commencement is the quintessential symbol of student success, but OSU’s other metric is first-year retention. Can you talk about that? One of the things that I’ve been zeroing in on is graduation rate.Wewant to hit 80% by 2030. We’re at 71%-ish now. It puts our heads on the block to have a number on it. That’s important because students are important. Obviously, you can’t get to a sixyear graduation rate of 80% unless you’ve got very strong first- and second-year retention rates. That is when people mainly drop out. Our strategic plans are in the making, but first there’s just the money question. We are lucky that the Oregon legislature increased the Oregon Opportunity Grant by nearly 50% this legislative session. That’s a really, really important contribution. We’ve got to think about students who come from socioeconomically challenged backgrounds.Howdowemakeiteasier on them to get through college without having to work extraordinary hours? But the most important thing is for us to understand that we can’t wait four yearstoseeifourideaswork.Wecan’t wait six years. We have to be looking at first-year retention, second-year retention, year-on-year retention. I’ve heard you say that more research money adds up to more student research opportunities. Why is that important? First off, we have to solidify our standing as a Research 1 university, for philosophical reasons, all right? There aren’t very many places in American society where long-term research gets to be done. Obviously , industry does research, but that’s very focused on particular products and on timelines far shorter than are required to answer some of the really big questions we need to answer about the world in which we live. Universities are tasked specifically with
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