Start of a new year

What an exciting time of year! We are thrilled to welcome every one of our incredibly talented undergraduate freshman and transfer students, each of whom has worked tirelessly to achieve their dream of a world-class college education. Their UC Irvine journey starts now, marking one of the great adventures of their lives.

We are also proud to welcome new graduate and professional students who are taking the next steps in advancing their academic and professional aspirations, along with new faculty members who represent the best in their fields and have chosen UC Irvine as the place to make their greatest impact in higher education and their disciplines.

To each of you, welcome and welcome back!

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A new academic year reminds us that we cannot perform our distinctive mission in society without embracing and sustaining a scholarly culture committed to academic rigor, excellence and integrity. These norms and values anchor our activities and provide the foundation for public support of our work.

Scholarly culture differs across disciplines. But despite these differences, we all share a common belief: society benefits from the knowledge we provide precisely because we adopt specialized methods of understanding and have a professional commitment to the pursuit of truth.

More important than any particular approach to seeking truth is our commitment to traits that distinguish serious and fair-minded truth-seekers from ideologues, dogmatists, and extremists — traits such as curiosity, integrity, intellectual humility and tenacity. These are what we call “The Anteater Virtues”.

What should be true about a community of scholars? For me, it means:

• Fostering mutual respect.
• Exhibiting a willingness, even an eagerness, to listen to people with different backgrounds and opinions than our own, so that we might better understand the experiences and perspectives of others.
• Assessing others not on the basis of the viewpoints they express but on their mastery of the subject matter and the quality of their arguments and evidence.
• Welcoming the opportunity to have our views—even our most cherished beliefs—challenged and corrected.
• Treating every day as a chance to learn something new.

To that end, we encourage you to participate in key programs this year, such as Courageous Conversations and our Year of Scholarly Values, which offer opportunities for meaningful, respectful dialogue to foster healthy discourse, bridge divides, and help our community remain one where everyone feels valued and supported.

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By now you have also heard about the various messages regarding our commitment to free expression and our policies that govern time, place, and manner regulations. I am sure you understand the reasons for these messages.

Throughout my career, I have focused on the importance of free speech and academic freedom, advocating for these principles even in the face of significant pressures to restrict them. It is vital that universities protect the fundamental principle that every idea can be expressed on a campus without censorship or punishment.

Still, while everyone should have the opportunity to voice their opinions, this must be done with reasonable boundaries of time, place and manner – a standard that is widely understood. Moreover, having the freedom to express your views does not mean silencing or intimidating others, creating discriminatory learning environments, or disrupting university activities or programs because they promote views you oppose.

At a minimum, let us agree that in a diverse community like ours, differences of opinion must be tolerated. In a scholarly community committed to critically analyzing existing wisdom and to the generation of new knowledge, no idea is sacred – every idea can be open to challenge and scrutiny.

As we begin this year, we find ourselves in a world marked by terrible and even horrific circumstances and in a country where domestic politics remain bitterly divided. We cannot, and should not, be unaffected by these conditions or remain silent about them. Have your say. Advocate for what is important to you. But while doing so let us also keep in mind the primary and most fundamental reason we have gathered together to be part of this scholarly community: to serve humankind by pursuing, achieving, and sharing deeper knowledge.

I wish each of you an enlightening and productive year.

Fiat Lux,

Howard Gillman
Chancellor