Agenda and Meeting Notes

Council of Academic Leaders – Nov. 13, 2025

  • Provost transition and current events
  • Strategic and effective communication at the university level
  • Scholarship awarding 

Meeting Notes

Provost transition and current events 

The Provost discussed her decision to step down and referred council members to the 2025 State of the Campus presentation for more context. The Provost has been in a provost or academic administrator role for over 30 years and now feels like she can add value, at a faculty level, to innovation in academic programming and helping structure competency-based education. During her time as Provost, the university overcame a large structural deficit, revived its standing with the AAU and worked on preliminary HLC findings to address innovation challenges ahead of the reaccreditation process. The Provost mentioned that part of her decision to step down at the end of this semester was to have a new Provost in place before the conclusion of two dean searches. 

Strategic and effective communication at the university level

Cinnamon Blair, Chief Strategic Communication Officer and Vice Chancellor met with the Council to introduce herself and speak a little about her background, share some of her ideas in this role and take questions from the Council. Blair shared her focus on alignment of strategic communications and developing a workflow for cascading communications as well as open and honest communications that maintain and build the university’s reputation. Questions and suggestions from the Council involved having a better understanding of mass internal communications and who they are going to, considerations for programs at the Edwards campus, and a reminder that the School of Journalism and Mass Communication is a resource.  

Scholarship awarding

Nick Stevens, Vice Provost of Enrollment Management and Allison Long, Senior Vice President of KU Endowment presented KU’s scholarship awarding plan. Long provided background information on donor funds and best ways to utilize those resources. Stevens provided information on scholarship utilization trends of academic units, goals for units to achieve, and an explanation of how scholarship awarding works at the undergraduate level. Now that this plan is in place at the undergraduate level, the goal is to take a similar approach to graduate student scholarships.