This week at a senior staff meeting, we started talking about how our teams were doing and what we were doing to support them. In this conversation we realized that all our teams had experienced extraordinarily difficult semesters. We had an amazingly high number of deaths of loved ones, incredibly high numbers of hospitalizations, surgeries and ER visits for ourselves and loved ones, and more sick kids and snot than I can count.

From the assistant dean for student success assessment and strategic initiatives

I moved into administration after nearly 20 years in university classrooms, and I brought with me certain assumptions about how and why students persist and eventually graduate from schools like MSU. After more than four years in my current position, I have learned how mistaken I was in holding some of those beliefs, especially my assumptions about why students leave college before they completed their degrees.

From the desk of the associate provost