Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs & Provost
February 28, 2008
Dear Faculty, Staff, and Students,
I have some important news that I’m pleased to share with you today:
Regents Professor Lecture Series
To highlight the work of the University’s most distinguished faculty, I am initiating the Regents Professor Lecture Series, featuring public talks by newly-appointed Regents Professors. The first lecture will be held on March 4, 2008, 11:30 a.m.-1 p.m., in Cowles Auditorium at the Humphrey Center. Dr. Frank Bates, Regents Professor and head of chemical engineering and materials science, will speak. His lecture is titled, “Forty Years Later the Answer Is Still ‘Plastics.’” All faculty, staff, and students are invited to attend.
Welcome Week 2008 (August 28-September 1)
We are undertaking a number of initiatives aimed at increasing our retention and graduation rates for undergraduate students. One such initiative, Welcome Week, will debut this August.
Welcome Week is required for all new, first-year full-time students on the Twin Cities campus. The six-day experience will include academic programs, social events, and community-building activities. The goals of Welcome Week are to help students adjust to campus life; learn about resources and opportunities available at the U; develop the skills necessary for a successful first-year experience; learn what it means to be a member of the University of Minnesota community; develop friendships with other first-year students; and make important connections with the University’s faculty and staff. Visit the Welcome Week web site for additional information about how Welcome Week impacts you.
St. Paul Campus Strategic Plan
If we are to achieve our goal of becoming a top three public research university, then we must think strategically about the St. Paul campus and the role it must play. On that note, I charged a working group to develop a strategic plan for the campus.
I invite faculty, staff, students, external constituents, and residents of the local community to take part in public forums to discuss the St. Paul campus’s strategic plan. For details, go to http://www.academic.umn.edu/provost/reports/st_paul_planning.html
Centers, Institutes, and Interdisciplinary Graduate Programs
The provost’s office recently has launched a searchable Web site that will help you learn about, locate, and access the University’s 250 centers, institutes, and interdisciplinary graduate programs. http://www.research.umn.edu/cip/index.htm
Scholarship Support
Scholarship support plays an important role in making the University financially accessible to students from less-advantaged financial backgrounds. I am pleased to let you know that the Promise of Tomorrow Scholarship Drive has collected over $210 million in donations, and we are still going strong. As a result of this drive and other donations, we currently offer 36 percent of our Twin Cities undergraduates an average of over $4,000 per year in University scholarship assistance. These are not loans that need to be repaid; this is direct scholarship assistance that decreases the cost of tuition. If we include federal, state, and agency grants in addition to University grants, 48 percent of our students receive financial assistance that does not need to be repaid.
The Founders Free Tuition Program is our guarantee to all low-income Minnesota students (those eligible for federal Pell grants or, roughly, those with family incomes of $50,000 per year or less) that we will cover their entire tuition-and-fees bill. We were the second university in the country, and by far the largest, to make this guarantee. By next year, the program will provide $22 million in benefits each year for 4,700 students. This means that 12 percent of the undergraduate student body will attend the University free of tuition and fees. We will continue to address the important issues of affordability and access to educational excellence.
I hope you are having a productive spring semester. Take time to enjoy the lengthening daylight hours as you prepare for mid-semester exams, for scholarship and grant deadlines, and as you begin to plan for the next academic year.
Best wishes,
Tom Sullivan
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