Engagement Might Be At an All-Time High

The start of a semester can be deceiving. There is an energy level in the first couple of weeks that rarely sustains itself throughout the semester as the newness of the school year wears off and the reality of the hard work that lies ahead sets in.

That said, I thought this week might be the most engaging I have witnessed in my nine years as dean. Faculty were glad to be back on campus. Students were filling classrooms and engaging in chatter. Civility reigned.

Welcome to the Majors was especially well attended, and students seemed more receptive to our messages than in past years. The college’s Outreach & Engagement team did its usual stellar job in pulling off multiple events in the same week, and students got the opportunity to connect with the resources they need to succeed here.

All told, I thought the college shined. Thanks to all of you for engaging in the current “new normal.” Let’s hope we can get back to something even more normal soon. In the interim, let’s do what we can to make sure that we can continue to learn and grow together throughout the fall semester while keeping the virus away.

Charge On.

Welcome Back

It has been almost 18 months since we have had all our students back in the building.

Everyone is both excited and nervous. Excited because learning is a social exercise. We learn best from each other. Business is also inherently social. It’s about building relationships and delivering on promises so that those relationships continue to flourish.

Nervous because we are all being asked to learn to live with a virus that stubbornly refuses to go away and has learned to spread more quickly. Not everyone agrees on the best response to this surge, but everyone in the building today chose being here over staying away.

I ask that each of you do what will best promote learning and build relationships while you are in the building so that we can continue to engage in these social activities we all value and move forward.

Welcome back. Let’s all work together to make sure we get to stay.

Standing with Your People

This week might be the most important week I have ever had with my colleagues in the business school. It has been 17 months since we have been together in anything like a face-to-face meeting and 70,000 students are about to descend on us. Starting today, I have face-to-face meetings with new faculty, senior faculty and all faculty.

They are going to have more questions than I will have answers. Virus questions, class management questions, budget questions, staff questions, questions about our new President, questions about the college’s strategy going forward, questions about where they can get help and questions about why they must come to work. Those are the most obvious; I’m sure there will be others.

The most important thing I can tell them is that I will stand with them. I’ll be visiting some classes to welcome students back, observing what is going on in our REAL courses and trying to learn more about what they are going through so we can respond better to their needs. It won’t be perfect, but the plan is to learn so we can get better each day and week.

I suspect managers at grocery stores and other essential services learned these lessons more than a year ago. It is our turn to learn how to do the good work of the college, engage our students on campus and keep moving forward.

The Return to a Full Campus

Faculty return to campus today and students start classes on the 23rd. The fall 2021 schedule looks like the fall 2019 schedule, meaning campus will look like it’s pre-COVID self. Everybody has an expectation, a plan of sorts, on how they want this to go.

The problem is that things don’t go according to plan. They never do. Sometimes the deviation is minor, sometimes it is major. But the key point is that the world really isn’t interested in your plan, it has its own ideas. The best any of us can do is graciously adjust to what is thrown at us.

Universities are the guardians of reason, inquiry and philosophical openness. They are meant to be places where truth matters, civility reigns and it is safe for people to disagree. As faculty, we have a special obligation in these unsettling times to uphold these values and ensure that science, civility and reason prevail. Try to meet fear with reassurance, frustration with patience and irresponsibility with accountability.

This is perhaps our most teachable moment. Let’s all rise to the occasion.

There is much to do

Saturday is summer graduation. It is a completely different job market than a year ago and many students are leaving with a job in hand. Employers need people because there is so much to do. Supply chains need rebuilding, people need to be reintegrated into the workplace, consumer demand is shifting from goods to experiences, the virus is mutating, and building a more just society is on the front burner. This is just to name a few things on the “to do” list. It has been a while (maybe since the 1960s) that we have had so much going on all at once.

I told you when you first came to the College that we are about doing, not being. Being is a form of identity “I am a finance major”, but that doesn’t really get anything done. Employers pay to get things done, to solve problems and make the world a better place.

Opportunity abounds at the moment. There is no excuse for inaction. Go out there and get important things done. We are depending on you.