April 6, 2023
At the state of the campus address this week, I outlined a series of steps we are taking at IUB this spring to improve the experience of all students—undergraduate, graduate, and professional—and increase student success—both during a student’s time at IU—and critically, throughout their lifetime.
Every day, tens of thousands of staff, faculty, and students dedicate their time and energy to the empowerment, fulfillment, and success of learners at IU Bloomington. As a university, we have used the most innovative practices of the day — and created new ones — to cultivate student success for more than 200 years.
Unquestionably, as our world’s connections and complexities multiply, we must continue to find innovative ways to work together to nurture student success, with ever greater adaptive resilience and attention to the interconnected factors influencing learners’ lives.
In that innovative spirit, and in collaboration with President Whitten and leaders across IU, new developments at IUB include the creation of a new Office of Student Life that brings existing units into closer collaboration, an implementation of undergraduate academic success initiatives to support all learners at IU, and increased visibility for the Hutton Honors College to expand its capacity to support student aspiration and ambition.
We are also undertaking new efforts to improve graduate student success, including reducing median time-to-degree, designing more flexible curricula, and offering mentorship training for faculty.
These efforts complement Project Inspire, a new multi-year commitment toward strategic renovation of instructional space at IUB.
Through closer collaboration with faculty and academic leaders, I am assured we can more fully bridge academic and campus life, better serve diverse student populations and groups, improve student health and well-being, engage with students more proactively, and foster stronger connections for students with each other and across the IU community.
The realization of these efforts, along with other forthcoming efforts through our emerging strategic plan, directly depends on the engagement of faculty, staff, students, and leaders across campus.
We will need every member of the IUB community — the whole of our collective expertise and experience — to reach new heights of student success.
Over the coming months, we will be extending conversations on how we best advance these vital efforts for students. I look forward to these next steps together, and as always, I greatly value all you do to enable student success — at IUB and far beyond.
