Dear Orange Friends:
I met with the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences last week in the Hall of Languages. I expected a tough audience. This is a group that has faced some real challenges in recent years, including growth in student enrollment. They now face a dean search under a brand new Chancellor they hardly know. I have presided over hundreds of faculty meetings in the last 20 years, and this one logically should have been a challenge.
I wish everyone reading this letter could have been listening in that room. More than 30 faculty members, from almost every department, spoke. The common attribute of every comment was “It is not about me.” Each wanted us all to do a better job for our students and our research. They spoke passionately about making a great College central to our University.
This is not my typical experience with faculty, who after years in the trenches are sometimes focused first on saving their own skins. Not here. I heard faculty who genuinely want to help our College get even better. I did hear a bit of cynicism about central administrators. From long experience, I know that when an administrator says “I’m here to help,” faculty may rationally dive under the nearest table. The faculty here said they are less interested in the marketing of a big, centrally imposed idea, than in getting help in unleashing great ideas and great people from things that hold us back—including things that the administration manages.
That faculty meeting was sandwiched in between two trips, one to Florida to meet with the Board of Trustees and one to New York to address a Presidential Summit of the New York State Bar Association. In both places, Syracuse people were everywhere. In Florida, the president of the hotel explained that three members of his family are Syracuse graduates and he loves the place. In New York, the guy running all the sound and multi-media systems for the convention stopped me after my address to say he is a Syracuse graduate and he hoped we beat Duke. This happens to me all the time in this job, including in places you would not expect (like St. Louis).
If I have any big idea so far in stewarding this University, it is to somehow engage all the hundreds of thousands of alumni, students, parents, supporters, and fans of Syracuse into making this special place even better. I would like to have no lost alumni, no parents in the dark about what is happening, no networking opportunity for our current students missed. I would like there to be no degrees of separation between those who are part of Syracuse and those who are at Syracuse now. I am not sure how to do that, but I know we can do it even better.
Sincerely,
Chancellor Kent Syverud