| Dear colleagues, It’s here - spring semester finals week. I want to start by thanking all of you for a great academic year. I sure learned a lot this last year and was consistently inspired by our students, faculty, and staff. The energy, passion, and pure brilliance of this campus community is captivating. This Saturday, I am looking forward to presiding over my first commencement as UMD’s interim chancellor. We have over 2,000 students graduating this academic year and each of you helped play a role in supporting them in their success. Thank you. I am looking forward to an enjoyable, but busy summer as we continue to move important initiatives forward. I’ll take this time to note a few updates. Leadership Searches After careful consideration and in consultation with the search committee and consultant, I have decided to pause the search for UMD’s senior level culture and inclusion officer. A lot of great groundwork has been done and I plan to circle back to this process at the beginning of the fall semester when the campus can be fully involved. I want to thank search committee co-chairs Jeremy Leiferman and Lin Xiu for their leadership and I extend my gratitude to the search committee members. In late April, four strong finalists for the associate vice chancellor for enrollment management position visited campus. I’d like to thank search committee chair Praveen Aggarwal, members of the search committee, and the campus community for their active participation in this process. This is an important leadership role for campus and I know EVCAA Amy Hietapelto hopes to extend an offer to a finalist in the next month. In other leadership transition news, Mark Yuran, associate vice chancellor for human resources, has accepted the senior associate vice president of human resources and chief human resources officer position at the University of Toledo and will be leaving UMD around the middle of June. Mark has provided solid leadership to our Office of Human Resources since November 2018. Mark brought strategic insight to me and my leadership team and has been a strong UMD advocate with the U of M System. I wish Mark the best in his new role and I am grateful to him for all he’s done as a senior leader for this campus. I will provide more information on next steps as we work to ensure a smooth transition in this important role. Budget and Strategic Planning Over the summer, we will continue to move ahead with the budget and structural review plan as discussed in the town halls a couple of weeks ago. This will include implementing our near-term action items along with creating work groups to further design frameworks for the mid and long term plans. This summer, these groups will gather information and conduct analytical assessments which will then be shared with the campus community for input and further action in the fall semester. To help guide this work, we will continue to refer back to both the UMD strategic plan and the systemwide MPact 2025 plan. I am pleased to share our recently completed UMD strategic plan performance update which provides highlights and accomplishments towards our plan goals and initiatives. Please take some time to review the strategic plan performance update. While this plan is still a work in progress, we have made important progress and this update does a great job at highlighting a variety of them. Thanks to Jen Mencl, associate vice chancellor for academic affairs, for her leadership with our strategic plan and the performance update. While the to-do list is never done, this week let’s enjoy the conclusion of the academic year and celebrate the success of our students. I hope you have a good end to the academic year. Thanks for all you do for UMD and our students. Sincerely, |
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| Dave McMillan Interim Chancellor |
