 My grandma always said, and I learned this, always thank people and mean them. I want to take a moment of personal privilege. Two years ago, on Rupri's 25th anniversary, our national leadership, many of them are in the room for our Diverse Rupri National Policy Scholarship, came together to say, what would we be working on in the next 25 years to advance a real way of life? That leadership team came up with two things. Next generation, rural succession, and the critical role of arts and culture in the future of expressing to an urban nation the importance of its rural countryside. Last night I mentioned when I introduced Sukuri, and by the way, I know a lot of you didn't get in here. Nick Sligh had an absolutely awesome performance by the river. I mentioned introducing Su that there are three people that are primarily responsible for us being in this room today. She was one of those. I'm honored now to introduce the second, and that's the University of Iowa Provost, Barry Butler. He trusted Rupri with the freedom to use new resources to express an initiative when we arrived on campus that would advance Iowa. And I decided with a world-class College of Public Health and which our health panel and our research center are located, and the amazing excellence in arts, culture, and humanities here aligned with Rupri's national presence in rural policy and other sectors that we should be building this collaboration with the art of the rural. That took two years and a lot of resources, and we are here today because of the visionary to give a very warm welcome to the Provost of the University of Iowa. Sometimes you do things when you know they're right, and this certainly was right. I want to welcome all of you here to the University of Iowa. It's a great, great group. I had 30 states down on my original notes, and I was told earlier it's 38, so I don't know where the other 12 are, but we got most of you here. And I was looking through the program and you represented a wide, wide range of different types of activities, which I think is critical in a conference like this. I saw all different sectors, education, health, transportation, of course the arts and cultural folks here as well, but just a nice range of things that take what it, really what it takes to be sort of a system when you're looking at the focus of what you're trying to do, and I think that's really important. We are also very honored to have Secretary Tom Bilsack, our former governor, Secretary of Agriculture now, to be endorsing and supporting this. I think he's maybe showing up a little later. We're still trying to figure out the schedule, as you could imagine. The schedules for officials this time of the year is sort of hitting this every morning, I'm sure, but he's been a very, very strong supporter of this, and so I want to mention that as well. I know many of you had a chance to go through Hancher earlier this morning, and if you went through, and it was led by the director, Chuck Swanson, I think the probably best way to describe him is a little giddy at this point. He's pretty excited about the place we all are, and it's more than just a facility, and I want to talk a little bit about that, because it ties in with what you're trying to do as well here, but I think many of you know the story that this campus was devastated eight years ago by a major flood, and the very unfortunate part of it is that the arts campus, which lined the river, was devastated, quite honestly, the Performing Arts Center, School of Music, our art museum theater, I can go on and on. We were hit hard. All total, it was about $750 million in damage, and just beyond belief, and so for us to be giddy at this time is acceptable, I think. We're at a point where over eight years of rebuilding, people have worked hard in many, many different ways to get us back to where we are, I want to just touch on a few of those. Hancher in particular, you know, while it's a breathtaking space, I mean, you could probably spend hours touring it, it really has a deeper, deeper culture in the state of Iowa than just that building, because we know that obviously the building is stationary, you know, we're not going to be moving it around, but what Chuck and his team have done over the years, even pre-flood, was to get out into the state of Iowa with performances, and that got exaggerated after the flood. In other words, we went on the road quite a bit, and we went on the road to a lot of places around the state, and it was very, very important to do that, and it was the right thing to do as well. It was exactly why you're here. It's to take art, take culture out into areas beyond your own comfort zone, your own backyard, so to speak, and Chuck was able to do that with his team and a lot of very, very talented performers. One part of Hancher that you didn't see, because it's hidden, is a steel beam that was signed by over 1,000 community members, and we had it about halfway through the construction, right about the time they were putting the fire and retardant on it to kind of seal it up, and it was an opportunity to set out here in this big field and had an opportunity to get people to come out and express their thanks for the arts and culture, and on that beam are not just signatures, but stories, stories that go back generations, people saying they brought their grandkids to the campus to do things, they love the arts, they love the culture that's around here, and those stories are obviously all sealed up down inside the building. We hope never to see them again, but they're part of that building. The other part you might not have seen when you were in there, when you went in the front door, if you went to the very back, back by the practice hall and there's an outdoor amphitheater out here, there's a work of art that's on the wall. It's a mural that's probably about 10 or 15 feet long, about eight feet tall, and it's a map of Iowa, and on that map are basically images of children, and those images are actually written stories, so they're actually made up of characters, and what happened was they went around the state, I think seven or eight different communities, and they had children themselves through writing a story, and so those are all characters, if you look at it very closely, telling who they are, and that is permanently on display in the backside of that building, and so it's kind of a neat way to get out and not only share art, but also to get them to share what it means to them. The other part I want to mention here is that as we look down the river here, when those shades come up, if you look down the river, right across from that Frank Gehry building that's down there, that kind of odd-looking aluminum structure, across there is Grant Woods Studio, when he was on the faculty here at the University of Iowa, and it too was flooded, by the way, it hasn't been recovered, that's sort of down the road a little bit because the level of flooding wasn't at a certain level, but that was Grant Woods Studio, and as a part of that, we have established through my office, and in fact, back here is Linda Snepsler in the very back of the room, she's Associate Provost for Outreach and Engagement, so we've established a program thanks to a local benefactor and strong supporter of Grant Woods, we've created the art of the Grant Woods Fellows, and what we do is we bring four significant artists to campus for a really nice fellowship for one year, they have housing in a compound that's about a mile from here where Grant Woods had his home, it's part of the house plus surrounding smaller homes, so they live there and they teach a little bit on campus, but the most important part of that, and Linda was the one who really brought, was that we want those fellows to get out into the state, and so part of their requirement, by the way, they're not just reproducing American Gothic in a hundred different ways, they're dancers, they're musicians, they're artists, et cetera, and so part of what we expect of them is to get out into the state, so for their fellowship, they are expected to get out into Iowa, learn about Iowa, these are people coming from all over the country, and actually the world, we had something with Turkey last year, learn about Iowa, but learn about rural Iowa as well, so we have that as a integral part of that particular program, and I thank Linda for that, we also have a major program where we get out, it's called Art Share, so we get out to small communities, I think a national type program, where we do it throughout the state of Iowa, we touch on many, many different schools around the state of Iowa as well. We've also had some really nice programs where the culture and artists community here has coupled with the academic programs like Public Health, and in one in particular, there was a commission that we had last year where we had the School of Public Health working with theater and doing something called Out of Bounds, and basically this was on cyberbullying and you could imagine how important that is in schools, and when you're sitting in front of a group of young people and trying to lecture to them about bullying, you could imagine the distractions and the twiddling of the fingers and whatever, but when you do it in the form of theater, it's really, really special, and so to have experts in public health coupled with theater people, to get out and do it in schools is an incredibly powerful message, and I know from looking at the program, many of you are doing that in your respective parts of the country as well. We also had another one last year, my wife and I attended one down here in theater dealing with sexual misconduct, sexual assault, and it was based on the incidents in, I think it's Stuart Mill, Ohio that happened a few years ago in a high school and all of the intricacies of, and again, this is something that high school kids just don't want to sit and listen to, but when you put it in the form of theater, it's really, really powerful. I walked out of that, and I probably told 100 people to tell me 250 more today how powerful that of a message that was. In fact, I recommended it to my counterparts around the Big Ten to think about something like that in these very difficult areas that we're trying to educate kids in. How do you do it with using art? And the last example I want to share quickly is we are very, very lucky to have a wonderful museum of art. We don't have a museum of art building that was part of what was flooded. We have a significant art collection here, probably one of the most significant in the country for a university. And the sort of the cornerstone of that is Jackson Pollock's mural. It's been with us since the 1940s, I want to say. And post-flood, he used to sit in the art museum right down the river here. Post-flood, we have it over in Davenport in.