Memos

Dear Colleagues,

At convocation, Chancellor Gray-Little invited the KU community to envision our future as a shared journey.

As we plan the itinerary, key destinations will include increased retention and graduation, heightened research stature, and the resources needed to ensure that we arrive at our goals. And as we move into this academic year, we will engage as a community in various conversations about these goals and the milestones that we will use to measure progress along the way.

Working with the Chancellor, one of my priorities in the upcoming weeks is to facilitate these conversations. Some of these conversations will be formal, occurring in task forces and other groups convened to chart various legs of the journey. Others will be informal, and will take place in offices, classrooms and labs, and in gatherings all over the university.

Input from campus leaders, faculty members, university staff, students, and members of the community is crucial as we set a path for KU. And while the milestones we will identify are important, the conversations themselves are fundamental.

As an institution, KU is large and complex; we are sometimes more aware of the differences among our specializations than our similarities. These conversations will allow us to bridge gaps among different departments, disciplines, and operational sectors; they will bring forth the collective story of our aspirations as a public research university.

KU is an institution with great variety, and one of our goals is to be certain that we have effective ways to tell our story. We are often modest in speaking of our accomplishments. But there is urgency to convey our story in more detail and to underscore KU’s contributions, be that the more than 6,000 graduates we send into the world each year, the research we conduct in a wide range of fields, or the services we provide every day.

For example, this past week the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences hosted a “Celebration of the Arts” to recognize the community of faculty and students in the School of the Arts. The School of Music showcased student talent in the Collage Concert. And soon KU will have a “roof raising” in Wichita to mark expansion of the School of Pharmacy and a groundbreaking in Lawrence for the Bioscience and Technology Business Center to serve start-up companies based on KU research. These are just a few of the many important stories to tell.

In the upcoming months, KU will be reporting to the Board of Regents, the governor, and Kansans about our aspirations for the journey forward. The motto on the state seal acknowledges the reality of difficulties, yet it also emphasizes high aspirations – “to the stars.”

As we contribute to the statewide conversation about higher education, I hope the conversations we have inside KU will bring us closer together as an institution and better enable us to achieve the aspirations we have for ourselves, our students and our university.

Sincerely,

Danny Anderson
Interim Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor