Good afternoon. It’s great to see everybody. I’m glad to be here. I look forward to working with all of you in this body.

This is, as you are aware, my first Senate meeting in this new role, and I do want to start with some gratitude.

I want to thank everyone who was part of last week’s celebration, and more than the celebration, very specifically, all of those who took part in the Academic Summit the day before. At that summit, I think the full breadth of this university’s academic achievement, research, scholarship—all of it—was on display in the Schine Center and in our schools and colleges.

The feedback was tremendous. It was an inspiring day. It really reaffirmed for me, and, I think, for our students, our staff, our faculty, alumni, all the great pride that we share in this institution and in this community.

Tomorrow marks one month since the start of the new academic year. I’m happy to share that we have welcomed to our Orange family nearly 3,600 new undergraduate first-year and transfer students. They came to us from 45 states, 55 countries and 19 indigenous nations. We also welcomed just over 1,750 new graduate students, law students, and doctoral students.

I visited five classrooms the first week of school, including courses in two of our newest academic programs, the iSchool’s new major in Integrative Artificial Intelligence, and also, of course, in our new Creator Economy minor. And not surprisingly, I was very impressed by the caliber of the faculty teaching those courses, and very proud to see students engaged the way they were on that first day of class.

We’ve also welcomed 55 new full-time faculty and 64 part-time faculty to our campus. I’ve also had the opportunity to meet many of them already. And I’m certain with the right mentorship and the right support, this cohort is going to do great things here at Syracuse University.

Over the past few days, I did give considerable thought in terms of how to use my time today in my first meeting with this group. What I concluded was, rather than proceed based on the past template of numbers and administrative updates, instead what’s probably most relevant, again, given my first Senate meeting in this new role, is for me to spend a little time sharing candidly how I hope to work with the Senate and also my hope for what that work will do moving forward.

First, right out of the gate, I want to make clear without any qualification that I believe that authentic and honest shared governance is how universities make their best decisions. And even more than that, an authentic and an honest commitment to shared governance is how administrators earn the right to execute on those decisions.

For that reason, while I am the chancellor, I will insist that my team engage with faculty and staff and students early and seriously on academic priorities, on standards, on policy and on the trade-offs that we might have to make over time related to all of those things.

Second, you should expect from me, and hopefully you’ve experienced from me to date, for me to be forthright and for me to be honest with you, even when being honest is hard. I think all of you deserve that. And more than just deserving it, based on my 20-plus years here on this campus, I have experienced firsthand what this community can build when we’re all pulling in the same direction.

I am someone who doesn’t believe that we can build together if we can’t share openly and honestly and in a way that builds trust. I think that’s critically important.

Third, and here’s where some edge will come into my remarks a little bit. I’ve been clear from the outset that from where I sit, the best and possibly the only strategy for Syracuse University to thrive in the face of these unprecedented challenges that all of higher education is experiencing is for us to commit to advance and to elevate the rigor and the competitiveness and the uniqueness of our academic enterprise very specifically.

A necessary condition for us to execute on that strategy is to position the experience of learning here and of living here for all of us, but particularly for our students, to be an experience that candidly is more meaningful than it is today and more rigorous than it is today and more worthy of the trust that families confer to all of us when they send us their children.

I share that because I think that lens, my lens, is important to understand because it should offer all of you some insight into my aspirations and my expectations associated with this body and shared governance more broadly.

Let me explain and expand a little bit of what I mean. At Friday’s ceremony, I asked faculty to reach across disciplinary and ideological boundaries with grace and civility and generosity. I’m going to ask that here again today, respectfully, in the context of this body and ask us all to recommit to modeling that here.

We ask our students, row three there all lined up, we ask them to engage across differences every single day. I am asking that we model the civil discourse that we demand of them, right here in this room. Because it is troubling to me the statistic that Heather shared, that more than half, around 50% of the senators that represent this body, don’t feel like they can share in this room. That should be troubling to all of us. And it should be more troubling at a time where regents and trustees at some of our peer institutions are taking active steps to dismantle shared governance.

I would respectfully submit to all of you that for this body to have real authority and real credibility and real influence and an authentic voice in all of the change that is ahead, and there is change ahead, we must all commit to collaborative and collegial and respectful discourse. Importantly, that discourse can’t be limited to the loudest voices or just a few voices, as Heather mentioned.

In addition, I think to earn that real authority, that real credibility, that authentic voice, I believe it’s also the case that we must prioritize first the issues and the themes and the dialogue most closely align with our core mission and our shared obligation, which is teaching and learning and discovery in support of an exceptional academic experience for all of us, but again, particularly for our students.

I share that because I spent considerable time over the summer and then again last week reading an entire year’s worth of meeting minutes from this body and from several of the standing committees. After that review, I found, being honest, that review was somewhat concerning to me. The concern was what was absent from those minutes was evidence of a specific and purposeful focus on advancing academic excellence and the competitiveness of our academic enterprise.

In fact, like a prior presenter, I went a step further and decided to ask Claude for help. I stripped out the provost presentation from all of those minutes and put them all into Claude. And I asked Claude to summarize, based on those minutes, the major issues and themes that dominated the work of the Senate last year. And Claude told me, based on those minutes, that the issues and themes that dominated the work of the Senate last year were employee rights, pay and benefits, employee workload, governance, and procedural policies, and speech rights. Notably missing from what Claude shared with me was a focus on our students.

To be very clear, I am not sharing this to suggest that any of those other things are not important or that there’s not a place for those things in the context of our discourse. But instead, I’m sharing that finding to make clear that my aspiration for the year ahead is for the focus and substance of the work of this body first to be about advancing discovery, academic excellence and serving the learning and wellness needs of our students.

I say that because, given the existential threats to this place and so much that we value here, those themes will be my focus every single day. If we can’t be focused on those things together, on all of those things that we need to do to navigate this moment, battles over parking and bylaws and workload will too soon be irrelevant conversations.

You already know the headline: we missed our enrollment goal this year. When almost 70% of the annual operating revenue that pays for everything we do at this university—every salary in this room—comes from one single source, student tuition and fees, missing an enrollment goal has real consequences.

Here’s the hard part about transparency. We missed our enrollment goal because too many families had higher expectations for the academic experience that their child would receive here than they felt we could deliver.

That’s why I’m going to focus my time and my energy and my attention on the competitiveness and the quality and the uniqueness of our academic enterprise. I’m going to focus on improving our four- and six-year graduation rates, which today are meaningfully below our peers. I’m going to focus on improving our first- and second-year retention rates, which today are meaningfully below our peers. I’m going to focus on addressing why close to 30% of our students on this campus right now report to the university that they don’t feel like they belong or they don’t feel connected. And I want to ensure that we just don’t fix that problem, but that we’re not the cause of that problem.

I want to ensure that changes in federal policy related to financial aid don’t make it impossible for a student to come here and enroll here and study here.

I truly, authentically, want to do this work together. I want to do this work not as adversaries, but as partners in what should be the most important work of this university.

So, again, I’m happy to answer questions after [Provost] Lois [Agnew] goes about any of the administrative stuff that you’re used to hearing in this first update, but I think that the best use of my time today was to share that perspective.

I look forward to working with you and thank you very much.