 I am deeply honored by the opportunity to serve in this leadership capacity for such a great university. Berkeley has been one of the great institutions of higher learning ever since it was established over a hundred years ago. And to have the chancellorship of that great university now attached to my name still, of course, in a designate role is just a huge honor for me. We all know about the excellence of Berkeley. But it also is a university that by virtue of its being public, by virtue of recent decisions that have stressed diversity, that have built in the middle class access program, that have absolutely took on board the need to recruit as many Pell Grant students as possible, has a public mission that is completely in concert with its research and scholarly excellence. So the first thing I want to do is help to celebrate and preserve those aspirations and to be as committed as I possibly can to advancing both the excellence and the commitment to access that is part of the DNA of the University of California, Berkeley. I joined with the people of this state to celebrate what the University of California is but also to commit myself, not just to preserving the university and all of its excellence, but also in trying to find new ways to make the university relevant to the kinds of problems we face as a society. All universities say they have three prongs. They have research, teaching and public responsibilities. I think at the University of California, Berkeley, we start with the public mission. And then we go to research and then we go to education. But in fact we see them of course as continuous, as all connected to each other and as mutually interdependent in terms of establishing the importance of the work that's being done in the university. If we fail to provide the kind of opportunities for education that the University of California provides, we will be impoverishing the public sector, we will be impoverishing the public sphere and ultimately we will be eroding the basis on which democracy can and must work.