Chancellor's Messages
Dr. Rodney D. BennettChancellor
In this historic year, we are mapping our bold future
This year we are celebrating how far we’ve come as a university in our first 150 years since our charter on February 15, 1869. Admittedly as a student of history in general and our university’s in particular, I am enthralled by the opportunity to examine our proud and ambitious past. Even so, I am doubly invigorated by our vision for the future.
That vision, announced last month at our State of the University address, is a clarion call for us to be a transformative, world-leading, 21st century mission-integrated, land-grant university without walls.
Specifically, we aim to have in place by 2025:
- Experiential cohort-based interdisciplinary learning for nearly 29,000 undergraduate, graduate, and professional students with an incoming first-year class of 6,500 eager students unimpeded by financial accessibility under a new tuition model.
- A research and creative activity enterprise approaching $450 million prioritized and resource-enhanced around deepening commitment to solve Wicked Problems and Challenges important to Nebraska. It will be an enterprise seamlessly tied to every student’s education experience.
- A completely integrated engagement mission as a Carnegie Community Engagement-designated leading university, where every community across Nebraska is viewed as a key part of the university’s extended campus and engagement is a fundamental part of every UNL community member’s ethos.
- We will be a place where every person and every interaction matters and our university community will have deep appreciation for diversity, inclusive excellence, and the contributions of each individual – faculty, staff and student – to the greater good.
- University operations and infrastructure dynamically aligned and optimized without walls in support of the transformative integrated three-part mission, with policies and programs that ensure UNL continues to be the best place to work in higher education.
This vision defines where we want to be as a university in the future. If this were the plan for an expedition, at this point it would mean we have selected our destination. Now comes the work of mapping a route to get there and making strategic choices about transportation and supplies.
During our upcoming Charter Week, I will be drawing together an “N150 Strategy Team” to roll up their sleeves to develop the initial five-year implementation of the N150 Vision. I will ask the team to draft a “N|2025 Strategy Blueprint” by August 15th for broad vetting across the campus in the fall semester to enable the 2020-2025 plan to be implemented January 1, 2020.
We know who and where we want to be. Now – together – it is time to determine how to get there. I sense that the UNL community is extraordinarily eager for the challenge. In Our Grit, Our Glory!