Please let me begin by saying once again, what a pleasure it is to welcome you to Princeton.
Today, is one of my favorite days of the calendar.
It's our New Year's Day, a moment when Princeton starts fresh.
Though most of you attending this afternoon are incoming undergraduate students, the ceremony also welcomes graduate students, colleagues on the faculty, and staff, and everybody who returns to campus to begin another academic year.
Indeed, while undergraduate education is essential to Princeton's mission, Princeton is more than an undergraduate college.
Graduate education and research are equally important to this university's mission.
This combination is by no means inevitable.
In fact, Princeton had no graduate school and only a modest research profile for the first 150 years or so of its existence during which time it was called the College of New Jersey.
At the modern Princeton however, we regard teaching and research as inseparable from one another.
That is partly because we know that world class researchers will be able to provide accurate state-of-the-art accounts of the subjects they teach.
