HAVING now concluded my fifth year as president of Columbia University, I am pleased to report that the state of the University is good—even excellent. During the course of the 1997-98 academic year, the 244th in Columbia's history, we continued our core strategy of identifying central strengths of the institution and then building on the comparative advantage they afford us.

Three such strengths stand out as crucial:

• the University's extraordinary academic quality—characterized by enormous intellectual intensity in undergraduate as well as graduate and professional programs and pioneering research conducted by outstanding scholars;
• our New York location, which offers unparalleled resources for students and faculty alike, in particular for putting into practice what has been learned in the classroom and through research; and
• the history of involvement in the international arena that has secured Columbia's reputation as one of the world's great educational institutions, both as a place where transnational influences intersect and as a generator of new discoveries with a global impact.

These priorities reflect and reinforce our guiding sense of Columbia as a university with a tradition of deep commitment to intellectual engagement, one that is all the more intense because we are a compact institution in one of the world's great cultural centers.

The pages that follow offer a survey of the University's progress over the past five years toward fulfilling its great educational mission. And, as noted in the concluding sections of the report, the effort to build on the University's core strengths has as its indispensable counterpart our commitment to a sound financial base. The steady growth of the endowment and the extraordinary success of the Campaign for Columbia have provided the resources needed to support even greater progress in the years ahead.

In looking back over the time since my arrival on campus in 1993, I am deeply grateful to the men and women who have worked together for the University at every level, including my distinguished colleagues on the faculty, our talented administrators and staff, Columbia's loyal and committed Trustees, and our dedicated alumni and friends. It is a pleasure to join with this host of co-workers for the benefit of this great institution that I am privileged to serve as president.