John L. Hennessy

Thank you President Coleman.  Well, I think I have to start by saying a tremendous 
thank you to our colleagues in the University of Michigan.  Not only for starting 
the National Election Studies more than fifty years ago but for their splendid 
stewardship and efforts in nurturing this valuable national service, and service 
to all of our colleagues who do research on the election system for more than fifty 
years, it really is a tremendous legacy.  We're delighted to have the honor to share 
this opportunity with you, and to be able to engage in this important research in a 
collaborative way.  This is after all, the internet age, and we should be able to do 
this research in a new way that exploits all the tremendous advances in technology.  
Now you can imagine trying to do a collaboration like this involving massive data 
sets fifty years ago.  If we were lucky we would have been able to have magnetic 
tape drives and we could have sent them back and forth across the country to do this 
kind of work.  Today with the technical infrastructure that's there we can collaborate 
in a way we could have never collaborated before.  We're also delighted to see that 
this investment we've made here in the new Institute for Research and Social Sciences 
is already bearing fruit.  I think we started this institute with the observation that 
research in the social sciences was undergoing a fundamental transformation.  With the 
use of large datasets and the ability to analyze those data sets we've become 
absolutely crucial to answering fundamental questions in the social sciences about our 
society, how we vote, why we vote, what the electorate is looking for.  So this new 
center will provide us the opportunity to really demonstrate what we can do in this 
critical area of national election studies.  

Were delighted to be celebrating today together with our colleagues at Michigan, and 
I certainly with President Coleman, look forward to wonderful results coming out of 
this.

I will now introduce my colleague Karen Cook, the Director of the Institute for 
Research and Social Sciences.  

Karen…