2024 State of the Campus Transcript

Welcome to the 2024 State of the Campus Presentation for KU Lawrence and Edwards campuses. 

Thanks to all of you for making the time to be here and thanks for those who are joining us online, we've got a lot of ground to cover. Jill only gave me 11 pages of talking points. You think I'm exaggerating and I'm not, but that is a remarkable testament to what we've done actually and what we're going to talk about and what we have to celebrate today.

Last year, at the state of the campus address, I said as I was going through all of our accomplishments that our success is going to be determined by, not only what we do, but by the spirit with which we do it.

And I want to begin today by picking up on that theme, and talking a little bit about our values and not just because HLC is coming. Working with our Governance leaders over the last couple years, last fall we introduced our IRISE values with the culture charter attached, which had some behavioral statements in terms of what it was that that we wanted to be as a community and our agreements with each other. As we did that work, we talked a fair amount about the IRISE Values and we talked about Integrity and Respect and Innovation and Stewardship and Excellence. We talked a lot about that we need to be intentional in terms of how we show up and exhibiting these values for ourselves and for each other. And I've noticed in the past year or so, that people are referring to those values more to guide our work and our decision-making. 

And it's important, because we hear in our constituent surveys that we don't have the culture that we want, that our constituents and our community members ask of us. But the deal is that culture is each one of our responsibilities. It's in each interaction that we engage in, it's in everything that we do, and it's one relationship and one connection at a time.

This is how we become a place where we create the sense of belonging and the opportunities for respectful self-expression, and to create that place where we all feel like we're supported. As I talk today about where we're going, what we've done, where we've been more importantly, and where we're headed, I just want to note that there's so much great work that's happening. But really, what's been the most amazing part for me to see as we've been moving forward is that intentionality about creating the space that we want to be in as a community and our commitments to each other, and I appreciate so much all that everybody's done to pick up on that theme because it's the attention to our culture. 

That's critical to create that environment where we talk about being an exceptional learning community that lifts each member and advances society. Because we learn best when we feel that we're in a place that cares and respects us, and that's something we learn one lesson at a time. One person at a time. One interaction at a time. Changing ourselves before changing everything else. And, historically, we've been a gatekeeper – all of higher education has been a gatekeeper. That's the model that it was built on, and that was “if you're not here, if you can't make it here – it's because you're not good enough,” not about the fact that we didn't create an environment that best supported you. 

We're at a moment in time where the value of higher education is being questioned. Where our world and our country are facing truly existential threats. And we need to become those groundskeepers that lift each person, and that support each person's success to create a better culture, to create a better university, to support success, for each one of us and for all of our beliefs.

… What I want you to know, what we need to be thinking about and what you can see, as I go through and I list the amazing number of accomplishments that we've achieved together, that I can tell that we're all bringing that intentionality by asking over and over again, in every transition, in every transformation, in every initiative, and every change. “What do we need to be doing? What can I do? How do I act? Help. How can I make this place be a better place for myself and for others?” And that's critical because given the needs of the state of Kansas, the greater Kansas City region, for Innovation, for economic development, for good jobs, for a workforce, KU needs to be a place where we're all committed to creating this space. And we talk about that maybe in different words than we used last year or the year before. 

But, KU has always been about access. We have to be about access. We're in the heartland of America. We have first-generation college-going students. We have low SES students, we have minority students who need this experience in order to have a better life and sometimes even the same kind of life that their parents have had. That question of access is critical because it begs us to examine whether our work is bringing people to the table and offering opportunities for all. 

We have to be committed to belonging. We have to be committed to becoming a place, being a place, where our programming fosters a sense of belonging for each participant. Each Community member who is here. We have to do that in an environment of respectful interaction and expression. We have to ask ourselves, “do our activities and our, and our interactions Foster respect for others regardless of their beliefs, or their backgrounds?” And ultimately, we have to provide the opportunity for success. Does our work further the success of each individual that we impact? 

This has always been what KU's been about since its founding. It's what our commitments are today, and it's what we need to do to create the KU that we need to be for the future. So let's take a minute and think back about 100 years ago, let's talk a little bit about our Centennial season because there's been a lot of hundred-year celebrations this fall. There's been the 100-year celebration of the opening of Watson Library. There's been the 100-year celebration of establishing the School of Business. There's been the 100-year celebration of singing our first ever Vespers. 

What we've been doing is building on that Legacy of 100 and 160 years ago. And that what we've been building is heralding the next hundred years of KU. With all the work that we do and all the demands placed upon us by external forces, it can, sometimes be difficult to see the challenges we've already addressed and the progress that we've made. It's really, really hard for me to actually even account in my brain for the fact that I am soon approaching completing my fourth year, moving into my fifth year – 2020, 2021, 2022 2023 2024 – that's five years. That is hard for me to believe that I've been serving in the role as Provost. And when I think about that, I want to just take you back, really quickly, for kind of a quick overview of where we've been, because our transformation on the Lawrence and Edwards campuses has truly been nothing short of remarkable.

So let's talk real briefly about 2020. It's hard to … I get a little bit … Just goose bumps, not in a good way, thinking about 2020. We were touched by COVID, obviously, and our energies were on staying alive and staying afloat on this campus. Everybody was experiencing COVID, but we'd also learn that Lawrence and Edwards had a $50 million dollar structural deficit. We knew that we were kind of on the edge with the AAU. We knew that our HLC mid-cycle evaluation had told us that we were lacking in continuous quality improvement of our academic programs. We had lower enrollment than we wanted. We had a retention gap, especially among Pell eligible first generation and minority students. And on February 9 of 2020 – my fifth day here – with the chancellor, we rolled out Jayhawks Rising.

That was a plan. That was the blueprint. COVID kind of took us off course a little bit. You can maybe remember design teams about how do we keep moving forward in the in the moment of COVID, but we didn't waver, we didn't falter on that. We kept moving. So we were going through 2020 and getting our bearings and adjusting to the reality that we faced. 

In 2021, we knew what the problems were and the situations we had to address and we had ideas of how to move forward. And we knew that we were going to be using new financial reporting structures and monitoring processes. 

We were returning to the classroom environment and we were learning how to engage in human interaction and communication and be in a social contract between faculty and students all over again, now, with a new level of technology expectation in the middle of all that. We began laying the framework for the COACHE Faculty Job Satisfaction Survey.

We'd framed our HLC Quality Initiative to put us in better standing for continuous quality improvement to get ready for our reaffirmation of accreditation. Not unimportantly, we had our first ever Wellness Week of paid leave between Christmas and New Year's holidays. So thank you Chancellor, for advocating for that for us.

By summer of 2022, we'd focused on an amazing number of expectations of our constituents, their needs and our accountabilities. By 2022, we were well on our way of focusing on those accreditation requirements. We were also trying to do that from the lens of thinking about the broader communities we serve. We were well into the ACE Internationalization Lab with unprecedented numbers of people coming together talking about, what does it mean for KU to be a global, truly, a global university. We had refocused our DEIB office to serve students and our communities better at that time. We had degree pathways in the works to help our students get through and make sure that they were on course to finish in four years. We were building Jayhawk Global.

Research Rising, between the gifts from the Endowment Association and campus Investments had put about $18 million dollars into our research environment and into our faculty, into us, and the COACHE survey results were coming back letting us know there were concerns we needed to address. We engaged in a reconfiguration and a refocusing of our relationship between the Lawrence and Edwards campuses.

And we started strategic alignment meetings with the Deans and provost direct reports to help us all start to have a better sense of seeing how the goals of each unit align with campus-wide objectives and initiatives and to start to identify budgetary needs that the units had to have addressed in order to be successful, in alignment with the campus needs so that we could spend every one of our dollars as effectively as possible while we tried to continue reducing our debt. 

In 2023, we started seeing some of the results and the benefits of all of that work, leading to better outcomes. We achieved record enrollment of our first-year students. We launched the KU People First initiative to update how we handle our human resource needs and started using the language about recognizing that what we are is about Talent Development here, and that we are a people-focused, people-centric enterprise. We started working more intentionally in leadership and teamwork together between the Deans and the Vice Provosts on our campus. We started to work on Faculty Affairs re-envisioning with a focus on service and talent development and we developed the framework for the campus master plan, with literally thousands of people providing input on that work.

We focused under new KUEA leadership on Lawrence's place in the Ever Onward campaign and the goals and the needs. We held COACHE survey and Docking survey community forums to develop action plans for improvement based on the concerns of our faculty and staff.

We revamped advising and Academic Success, completely, to address inequities across the units, to give our advising staffs better career trajectories and to make sure that we had the right ratios of student and advisor loads and to make sure that we had clear and coherent messages for all of our student advisees. We looked more closely at OCR and Title IX, and the role it can play to continue our efforts in Access, Belonging, Respect and Success, for all the members of our community. We reorganize and restructured at that point in time, and made that have a stronger place in the Chancellor's level portfolio. Our faculty began forming a union to ensure better work experience across the campus and that we'd engage in the conversations we need to have. 

We began a strategic plan focusing on information technology critical to our scholarly and academic growth, as well as our institutional security. We worked with University Governance to develop the IRISE Culture Charter that I've mentioned, and we crafted the campus Strategic Alignment Master calendar so that every unit leader could see and understand how the decisions made in each unit flow together over the course of the year to create a coherent plan, a coherent whole and coherent actions among all of our offices and functions.

We created the Constituent Survey Implementation Team to take the results of COACHE and Docking Institute and Nessie (NSSE) and GSES and make sure that we took that work seriously and we were transparent about what we can do, be honest about what we can't do, what we'll get to later, and make sure the entire campus understood that we have a commitment to continuous quality improvement across the entire campus, in every way we can possibly do that work.

So that brings us to 2024. 

You can kind of tell we've laid a foundation. I'm, I'm a little tired, just thinking about it, and I know you all are too but think about what we've done. Think about the transformation that's occurred over those last four years and what we've been building on, because it truly is a remarkable foundation for the 21st century.

We truly are becoming that model public research university that we've said we aspire to be. And this year, we're about One KU. We're laying a foundation that's happening, been quietly, and in the background all year long. We've started to make announcements about that. We've started to make decisions. We started to move pieces around.

We're bringing the power of the Lawrence campus and the Edwards campus, and the Med Center, and even the University of Kansas Health System, together to be the most powerful research and education service environment that we can possibly be with the resources we have and to better tell our story as we work together. We’ve have had wage increases, admittedly modest ones, for the past three years, but that's been unprecedented in quite some time and as we do the work, they'll continue to get better.

We've engaged our leaders in collaborative decision-making through a new concept that we brought to campus called Matrix Management. We're specifically looking at potential impact on how we work through our strategic plan so that we can reduce the crazy-making pace that we've been on, and the process that we've imposed on people who are doing the work at the ground level and all the heavy lifting. Through Jayhawks Elevate – as a shout out to Jeff DeWitt and Craig Alexander – we're finding new fiscal savings and new efficiencies based on recommendations from community members so they can see that we, again, are taking seriously their ideas and their expectations. We've had record enrollment, again. And that's our first-year students, but now we have record overall enrollments for the entire university. This year, we're starting to build agreements for the future of our faculty management relationships with UAKU. And our partners in athletics have begun the work on the Booth Memorial Stadium renovation in partnership with alumni and endowment and so many others in a project that uses no tuition or state general fund dollars and has significant impact on our recruiting, our student experience and our alumni connection on the campus. 

And we continue to make progress on our structural deficit, and I believe there will be a day this year when we will declare that we are done, if all goes well. But that doesn't mean that we need to stop putting an emphasis and our focus on graduating our students, continuing strong recruiting, making sure that we help our students persist to completion, developing programs that our students need and employers need for the workforce of Kansas City and the State of Kansas, successfully marketing those programs so that we can have capacity – especially master's programs that we know are in demand, but where our enrollments haven't kept pace – and to get continue to be smart with all things finance and procurement. 

Let’s just for a few minutes, take a deeper, look at some of the achievements and advances this year, so we can give the kudos that are in order, because there's been so much that's been done just in this year and some remarkable accomplishments. We have to give a shout out – I want to give a shout out – to Jen Roberts and her leadership in HLC initiatives. That is completely thankless work.

So, thank you.

(AUDIENCE CLAPPING)

Her leadership has been critical, but everybody's participation has been absolutely necessary and important to getting that done. And again, that's not just work for the sake of bureaucracy. That's not just work for the sake of an accreditor. That's an accreditor who represents the student voice. The federal government's expectations and has a clear definition of what quality education is.

So I appreciate that actually, in that work, there have been so many things that we've seen that have made changes to KU for the better that have helped our students to be actually more successful. And you can see that even in the retention and completion rates that the numbers that have changed just in the last couple years as we've done, that work. That transformation between, where we've started and where we are now truly is remarkable. I also want to thank Tammara Durham and our Student Affairs team. 

(AUDIENCE CLAPPING)

OK, I will say, you can't clap every time I say something because we will be here for an hour-and-a-half. So let's save all the claps for the end, if you don't mind.

OK. But as for Tamara and the Student Affairs team for all their work in student affairs. They've been through a series of NASPA reviews over the spring and in the summer that gave us guidance for how we need to think about innovating and places where we actually are more Innovative than other institutions in the support of our students.

But to the team, we've done remarkable work and rethinking the (student) Unions and the programming here, dining and the entire menus, and how we deliver housing changes and transportation to meet these record enrollment classes. It's been an incredibly busy year, and that's just what we know about. And I most importantly want to say, I appreciate all the behind-the-scenes work that that team has done over the course of the year to keep our students safe.

So thank you. 

I want to give a shout out to our DEIB team, to Nicole as she's helped with the transition. I want to note that we are now talking about the Impact and Belonging Team. We've moved that into OCR Title IX, which has actually elevated their protections and their status. And there's so much work that's been done to make sure that we find areas for taking things that we know need to be improved and creating programming that actually supports those improvements. So we're not simply writing reports. We're responding to what we learn. 

I want to give a shout out to Callie Long and Mark Reiske and all the Operations Team for the work on the Lawrence Campus Master Plan. We have such a respect for the commitment and sustainability of reducing our footprint at a moment in time where we have still $750 million dollars worth of maintenance and repair on this campus, and we know that we have historical structures that we've got to protect, but we also have to prepare with flexibility for the future and that is no easy thing.

And again, a shout out because KU Lawrence was recognized by the Society of College and University Planners as having the most excellent campus master plan this year, because we took seriously sustainability, environmental change and the size of our campus and our footprint. 

I want to thank Corinne Bannon and Amy Mendenhall and all of AIRE and Faculty Affairs and our governance leaders for all the work of actually taking the COACHE survey and all the constituent survey processes and setting a standard for how we will keep tabs on that and track of that.

And we won't be saying 10 years from now, “Wait, when's the last time we did that survey and what came of it and why didn't we do anything about it?” We are committed to ever-onward moving forward with that data and making sure that we take action and making sure we're transparent about what we're doing.

I also want to thank AIRE leadership for all the data-informed, strategic-alignment work. All the briefing books that I think our Deans and our Vice Provosts actually, really get sick of seeing. No, but I know they appreciate knowing the data and understanding where we are, because that's a heavy lift that's pretty invisible to people as well.

To give a shout out to Ed Hudson and the KU IT group for this new strategic plan. You can see a poster in the back (of the room) about what their priorities are. People might not realize it, but I think it's the first time in history that we've had an IT strategic plan for the Lawrence and Edwards campuses. And that's such an important aspect, while we reduce our physical footprint, to think about what we need to increase in terms of IT support, in a moment when the security of IT is probably one of the most challenging vulnerabilities that we have to face.

I want to thank everyone in Faculty Affairs for the significant restructuring and refocus that we've done. I hear praises constantly for, not only the communications, but the faculty development programming, and how much faculty appreciate being able to get together and have behavioral experiences where they can learn how to do their jobs in ways that they'd never known before. 

I want to give a huge shout out to enrollment management; so much of the hard work that they've been doing in a changing environment. You can't open the Chronicle of Higher Education without seeing some report about FAFSA and the difficult season we had with the rollout. 

That's not even bothering to think about the changes in the U.S. Supreme Court rulings and in Kansas that impacted admissions and financial awards, and doing that and having the successes in Enrollment Management admissions and having our record-recruiting classes and our record first-time, full-time freshmen, while we're developing a campus-wide, detailed, strategic enrollment management plan that has a cascading effect on everything else that we do, and gives us all a reminder about why we're here and what we can be when we are fully operational and when we've got a huge Jayhawk community on our campus. I can’t thank enough about the rollout that that's led to in the hard work of our Orientation and Transition Programs, and Advising, and Housing, and the hard work, most importantly, of all of our faculty and academic staff in the units who have not simply helped recruit the students, but accommodate these growing classes, support the students once they're here and make sure that the quality of their education hasn't faltered a bit, while we've been having our growing experiences. 

I want to give a shout out to the School of Professional Studies and Dean Stuart Day for growing new programs that are meeting workforce development needs that have been long cried for in Kansas City in cybersecurity and data analytics, and operations management and criminal justice and meeting students needs in ways that give them opportunities for good paying work in Kansas City and Kansas and the greater region. 

Give a shout out to Neil Kingston and Michelle Carney and everybody who's worked on Jayhawk Global. We've been making headway on growing our online enrollments and creating the format and the institutional framework to deliver soon on competency-based education. 

I want to give a shout out to everybody in HR and Angie Loving for her leadership on KU People First and the team that's put together our developing Centers of Excellence within HR. This move to our HR Partners model that promises to provide all of our academic administrative units much more individualized attention, while making sure that we have the quality of HR best practices at your fingertips. That's a foundation again to everything that we do, regardless of what office, regardless of what department, your program, or your campus location, because, again, We're a talent development enterprise, and we can't be the best talent development enterprise that we can be, if we don't have the best HR function that we can have. So thanks for everybody who's done that lift. 

I've already thanked Jeff and Craig and Jason on our campus for Jayhawks Elevate work, and for engaging faculty, and staff in providing great ideas and opportunities for saving, KU money and time. Particularly for the huge lift that I know was Pay in 30, which so many people are so thankful that we are that we've been making progress on.

KU Libraries and Dean Carol Smith have basically been rethinking what is an academic library in the 21st century? How do we make sure that we comply to all the new open data and open-source expectations for research from the federal government? How do we make sure we engage our students and our faculty and staff together? And how do we build on the 100-year legacy of Watson? 

Thanks to Charlie Bankart and his team in International Affairs working to ensure that we provide safety for study abroad for our students and for our faculty, and those who join and to doing the hard work, when it's necessary. Thank you for ensuring that we remain a world-class institution.

I want to thank School of Journalism and Mass Communications and School of Business and several other academic units for leading with record enrollment and really creative new programming for both first-year students and overall. And again, just a shout out to the Academic Success team and Misty Chandler for taking all that energy and starting to think through how do we make that into something that people can understand having a Student Success Loss-Momentum framework, where we can all see where we fit. 

Thanks to the School of Law and Stephen Mazza for doing great work in terms of thinking about how we better serve our vets – receiving a $1.6 million dollar grant to establish free legal aid and clinics serving veterans. But also for just continuing to innovate in challenging and difficult times to get the kinds of numbers and the kinds of rankings that you get.

To the College and under Arash’s leadership and the Associate Deans and all the department chairs and faculty and staff: the new programs that you've been inventing and creating to support faculty research, to improve student persistence, to improve interdisciplinary connections, and to think through how do we address those pesky DFW rates and the challenges that we've had with historical gatekeeping models? 

A shout out to the Business School for all the work that went in partnership with Endowment and others for capturing that $50 million dollar anonymous donor gift, which is the largest in history and for all the great work that makes a donor so confident that that would be a good investment. 

To the School of Education and Human Sciences: You continue to lead the nation as one of the premier graduate schools in the world. Picking up on Rick's particular relationships with deans across the world to create innovative programming, leading in CBE. For the challenges that they are, the opportunity to make sure we do reach across the world, even in difficult, political times, in relationship with ZJNU, and all the work associated. Tied to that, the work between the School of Education and AAI and the Center for Educational Opportunity Programs, which is led by Ngondi Kamatuka, which this year received – and I really want to note this because it's remarkable – $21.8 million dollars to the Center for Educational Opportunity Programs to provide support for middle and high school students in the Kansas City metro area over the next seven years. That is  so, so remarkable.

Tricia Bergman and Economic Development and the work that they're doing to bring Panasonic to the region. And what a big lift that is, to continue to look at ways that we can connect and support the State of Kansas. And in partnership with the Business School, the work on launching the Entrepreneurship Hub.

The KU Debate Squad needs a shout out for all of that they do for establishing KU’s preeminence on a nationwide stage. They're off to a commanding presence this academic year, winning the Owen L. Coon Memorial debate tournament in September and beating more than 100 other teams throughout the country in that tournament. 

To give an individual shout out to Associate Professor of Anthropology Jennifer Raff in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, who received a Guggenheim Fellowship in April for her remarkable work on ancient genomes.

To the School of Pharmacy: They'll have a presence at the Wichita Biomedical Campus when it opens. And that gives us an opportunity to have outreach at a level and beyond what we've been able to do there previously. And thanks again to our KU Med Center partnerships and to the Chancellor for his leadership and helping to develop that opportunity for the School of Pharmacy.

KU has three AAAS fellows that are new this year, just recently inducted in Washington D.C., Donna Ginther, Bala Subramaniam and Kristen Bowman-James. They're bringing the total of our number of AAAS fellows to 30 at this point in time. And a shout out to Robin Lehman and all the great work that she's been doing to establish a true recognition pipeline, and an opportunity to bring recognition to the accolades of our faculty at a national level.

Let’s give a shout out to Distinguished Professor Mark Shiflett for his successful bid on the NSF Engineering Research Center, adopt $26 million dollars over the next five years is going to lead Environmentally Applied Refrigerant Technology Hub, or EARTH, for a sustainable and circular refrigerant economy. And if you ever get an opportunity to get just two minutes with Mark telling you the story behind that, you'll know that KU truly is at the forefront of solving our globe's greatest problems.

While we're talking about that at our capacities, we have 23 Fulbright Scholars from all over the world studying on our campus this year. 

The School of Architecture and Design is responding to space pressures with expansion of the school's footprint through a new learning and collaboration space known as the KUBE.

And successes and points of pride for the School of Music – one of our music professors, Christopher Johnson, received the top music researcher award from the National Association of Music Education and the school recently had a ribbon cutting for the Riedell Family Field used by the Marching Jayhawks, which is just so fun to go sit and eat dinner sometime if you want to listen to the band practice. 

Social Welfare has launched the Center for the Advancement of Health Equity that focuses on improving access to health care systems, with the goal of enhancing the health and quality of life for diverse populations. Thank you to Dean Michelle Carney for her leadership in that. And for her leadership and making sure Social Welfare has a presence throughout the entire state of Kansas and that rural communities know the great work that we do. 

I've mentioned a lot of people and there are so many more who deserve to be mentioned in name. There's no way that I can do justice to everything and all that everybody's done, but I just want you to know that  I know that YOU are why KU moves forward and why we continue to set the pace for the future, not only of this institution, but for the state of Kansas, the greater region that we serve, and really, for the nation and the world. So my gratitude to you is all incredibly great. I do want to thank you for your contributions to our growth, and our advancement, and for your dedication to learning, to disciplinary advancement, to our students, and to service to our greater communities.

Before I end let me just talk about a couple other things that are important so that you know that we're listening and that we are doing our part to represent and create a space where we're all engaged in continuous quality improvement to better serve you. So, let me take a moment, briefly, … to talk about campus constituent surveys, …

We have been working so hard to make sure people know that we hear your voices, to advancing change for you that you want to have happen and for our community through the campus constituent surveys and the Implementation Team. You've brought many ideas to us, and we brought many ideas to life at KU based on the input from our students, our staff, our faculty and our community members. 

Here's just a handful of improvements that I want to make sure you know we prioritized, we made happen, we delivered, because of your voices. 

We enhanced the new faculty orientation and onboarding. We increased targeted communications with information that faculty want about training and opportunities to connect. Our new Faculty Foundations Program for the first two years of a faculty member’s career was introduced. 

The State of the University and State of Campus presentations, which we are right now having and which the chancellor just recently had, are a request from the campus constituent surveys and from COACHE. We're now in year two of doing this. And, again, I continue to encourage all of our Deans to adopt this practice at the school level. 

We have a new wage increase structure for faculty who successfully navigate the promotion and tenure processes. In fact, I think we went even a little bit further than what was recommended in the COACHE surveys. 

We've increased opportunities for networking and campus connection through social events and programming like our Thank God It's Thursday, our Rapport events, sponsored by the Office of Civil Rights and Title IX, the Wellness Ambassador programs and our reception immediately following this presentation. 

Living wage adjustments for our lowest paid employees as a first step in our efforts to address market pay wages across all job categories, while we've been doing that incrementally as we could and as needs arise. 

Improved wellness activities and programs such as Crops to Campus and the JED campus certification in Student Affairs and expanded opportunities to access Hilltop and this fall with our infant care. 

Our collective efforts to address all of these things  have been quite remarkable and our last big push, the last time that I'm going to be standing in a speech like this, I hope for a while, to talk about HLC and our reaffirmation of accreditation.

It really does make us a stronger university. It really does make us on par with peers. It really does capture what our benchmarked expectations about good practice to support our academic mission and the success of our students. We've had multiple continuous Improvement practices in place that have come to us by using our constituent surveys and Jayhawks Elevate and the annual program review that are helping us with HLC. The mock site visit was largely successful. Although we do need to do a bit better in ensuring some transparency, and we've learned about how we need to improve talking about finance and budgeting decisions from top to bottom and we'll be working on that. 

More people know our mission than they might have known a few years ago, which by the way is to educate leaders, build healthy communities and make discoveries that change the world. And when the real review team comes, I will look forward to that rolling right off your tongues. We also know that more people are able to talk about the KU Lawrence and Edward's vision to be an exceptional learning community that lifts each member and advances society.

We have talked a lot about our IRISE values. It's living our values and showing evidence of how they how they manifest in our culture that we’ll continue to work on. And many of you know about the KU promise – our institutional learning goals. We talk a lot, and I've said in other contexts, I talk a lot to prospective parents and their students about why they would want to come to KU Lawrence campus versus any other institution in the state or any other Big XIIs, or even any other AAUs. And I talk a lot about the fact that we take seriously the enduring cognitive skills that you get. And that we promise that the students will come out and be able to engage in creative inquiry and discovery. They'll be effective communicators. They'll be able to engage in analytical reasoning. They will have a deep understanding of social awareness and cultural differences. They'll be able to make ethical decisions and take on professional responsibility and they'll be leaders and collaborators. That so excites our parents and students, because I tell them, if you have those skills, you will be forever relevant. I don't care how many career switches you'll make, how many different jobs you'll have; you will always be able to invent the future with that set of skills. And that’s what they’re looking for, and that's what they're excited about. And while that is only a small part, that may be some small part and engaging in that kind of conversation with them, that makes all of these students want to come to KU. 

So, we're doing so well in many areas, but we do have a couple things that I need to put on the radar as the work that I'm begging you to participate in as we move forward this year, we still have evidence we have to collect for our official site visit. We absolutely need syllabi in the syllabi repository and other documentation that we're asking you to submit as soon as you can. Those things are required by Department of Education and federal policy, and it's a compliance issue that could jeopardize our federal aid and risk fines for us as an institution.

If we don't get those documents into repositories, as we need to have. I will ask your participation in the official site visits, which are March 3rd through the 5th on 2025. So soon, coming. And to be able to tell your honest experience about what we're doing well, what we're not doing so well, and how we've changed and transformed over the recent past. 

Most importantly, I want to thank everybody for the ongoing work in Jayhawks Rising and the advances we've made for KU Lawrence and Edwards. I know, every year we cycle through and our leadership team, the Deans and the vice Provosts get together with governance leaders and we say, “What have we accomplished? What can we put away? What do we need to hold on to? And what do we need to put on and move forward?” 

But I want to acknowledge that advances through Jayhawks Rising have led to our increased enrollments. That's been a goal that we've had for four years. Our new Entrepreneurial Hub has been a goal that we've been working on for three years. Fiscal stewardship that strengthened our institutional position and provided regular wage increases, and improved step increases for promotion and tenure, and has allowed us to maintain a continued emphasis on market wages has been something that's been on our Jayhawks Rising plan for a number of years, and we'll keep working on that until we get where we need to be.

We've made great strides to assure the quality of our academic programs through degree maps through ongoing program assessment, through the learning outcomes statements for our students and through ongoing improvements for our retention and completion.

We have brought – over and over again, the expectations of our Board of Regents, the expectations of our creditors, and what we know is good for our students, our faculty and our staff – together to create our priorities for Jayhawks Rising. We've had new health and wellness programs, and support for any member of our community, whether it's a student, faculty and staff. We've created programs that support, our faculty, academic staff and research staff to help you achieve professional goals, recognizing that when you succeed, KU succeeds. And we have programs that celebrate, our faculty, academic staff, and research staff when you achieve career honors, and milestones: The University Teaching Awards, which we celebrated earlier this month, University Research Awards, which we celebrate each April, and Faculty Recognition and Awards Office, again, thanks to Robin, that helps KU researchers attain premier external accolades for their scholarship. 

We’ve achieved several of our previous Jayhawks Rising objectives and it's good to see these results, and it's been a huge lift and a lot of work for our senior leaders and for all of you who are participating and watching today. And while we won't stop our forward progress, we do see ways to change our Jayhawks Rising structure that should help us be more efficient and maybe less frenetic. So, in coming weeks, you're going to be hearing some announcements from me about how we're introducing the concepts of Matrix Management to take active steps to make our efforts more effective, and hopefully more efficient.

And in the weeks ahead, you'll see an updated implementation plan and some announcements from the implementation team, where we share news about how we have updated our goals to be more clear and reconstituted our teams so we can guide our efforts to be an exceptional learning community again to lift each other and to advance society.

We have made so much progress. We have made so much progress in the amount of time that we've been working on these things since COVID, and particularly in this last year, as momentum continues to increase. But I just want to remind you again, it's not just the work that we do. It’s the spirit with which we do the work. 

It can't be just the work. It's about the people. It's about how we treat each other. It's about remembering in a sense of humility that we're all learners, particularly at a moment in time where the world is changing, so drastically, and so quickly. And that we succeed by helping each other advance, one person at a time.

Our work makes a better world, one person at a time, and that's what KU Lawrence and Edwards have always been about. There's nothing we can't do together and truly – as you've seen what you thought was going to happen five years ago – we didn't quite imagine we would get all that done. We've demonstrated that anything is possible when we come together to do our work. 

So thank you for your great support and for your involvement in the University of Kansas. After hearing this, I hope you will join me back in the back for some refreshments. I hope if you have something that you want to say or some questions you want to ask, you can drop an email to Provost@ku.edu and let’s go celebrate. 

Thank you for all you do.