or the past several years, each first-year class has topped the SAT scores and high school GPAs of the preceding class. The class of 2009 is the largest and most academically prepared freshman class ever.

We've been especially gratified to see a growing number of top-notch students vying for seats in our South Carolina Honors College. We are gradually increasing the size of the college from 1,200 students to 1,500, while maintaining the quality of the experience that makes the Honors College so attractive.

The international business program--both undergraduate and graduate--in the Moore School of Business continues to thrive and earn top marks in U.S. News & World Report's annual rankings. These and other highly regarded academic programs at the University of South Carolina are only as good as the faculty we are able to recruit and retain.

Universities across the country are replenishing their faculty ranks as professors hired in the great higher education boom of the late 1960s and early '70s begin to retire. USC expects as many as 350 of our current professors will retire by the end of the decade, providing an opportunity to infuse the faculty with new vision, fresh talent, and much promise. That project alone will mean that more than one-third of our tenure-track faculty in Columbia will be new faces by 2010.

But we haven't stopped there. Using a combination of educational funds and indirect costs recovered from research grants, we have launched two ambitious faculty recruitment plans to add 100 new research faculty (Centenary Plan), 150 new tenure-track positions (Faculty Excellence Initiative), and a total of 600 new faculty over the next six years.

These plans emphasize recruitment of groups of scholars working on related research but in separate fields. It is part of our vision to nurture the traditional strengths of this institution while building bridges and blurring boundaries between academic disciplines.

Already, we have appointed about half of the new Centenary Plan faculty members and more than one-third of the Faculty Excellence Initiative scholars. Some of these new faculty already have enabled us to develop and support a biomedical engineering program that will address the demands for both education and research in this important interface of medicine and technology.