Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs & Provost
Welcome from Provost Tom Sullivan
As Senior Vice President and Provost, I provide academic leadership for the Twin Cities campus, with responsibilities related to academic policy, promotion and tenure, faculty recognition, and undergraduate, graduate, and professional education. Given the momentous changes ahead, we encourage you to consult regularly the range of information available on the University’s Transforming the U Web site. We appreciate your support as we move forward and welcome your comments and suggestions on how the Provost’s Office can help to fulfill the vision, mission, and values of the University of Minnesota.
The University of Minnesota is making enormous strides in the effort to transform itself into one of the top three public research universities in the world. Colleges, programs, and institutes have been launched to create new academic synergies that will lead the way to meet many of the challenges we will face in the 21st century. The results include three new colleges poised for greatness: the College of Design, the College of Education and Human Development, and the College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences; several new programs to enhance the undergraduate and graduate educational experience, including a new Department of Writing Studies; and four major interdisciplinary institutes positioned to tackle the questions of tomorrow.
On July 1, 2006, these three new colleges opened their doors, and are filled with faculty who are driven to discover answers to our most perplexing problems, driven to prepare students for the futures they will help shape, and driven to bring their research directly to our communities, across the state and around the globe.
We also are designing new programs that will enhance the undergraduate educational experience and add to its distinctiveness. During the winter, the University began expanding undergraduate research opportunities that will allow even more of our bachelor’s degree students to engage with faculty in conducting cutting-edge research. This summer, incoming undergraduate students learned about the new student learning and student success outcomes during orientation. In September, the University will implement the baccalaureate writing initiative that will touch every undergraduate on campus. Our office is in the midst of an intense effort to design a new campus-wide honors program, which will begin in Fall Semester 2008. Similarly, we are working on enhancing the graduate student experience through creating guaranteed multi-year financial packages and dissertation support groups.
To further our research agenda, preeminent scholars and scientists, from a wide range of disciplines, have come together to create a new world-class, interdisciplinary Institute on the Environment. A similar effort currently is underway to develop a new Institute for the Advancement of Science and Engineering to promote interdisciplinary research across science, engineering, and medicine. In addition, the Academic Health Center launched the Institute for Translational Neuroscience, which will foster applications of basic neuroscience research. These three institutes complement the Institute for Advanced Study, created in 2005, which focuses on advanced social sciences, humanities, and arts scholarship.
All of these efforts are part of the University’s bold strategic positioning initiative, and represent the first steps in the University’s continuing effort to transform itself. As the poet Archibald MacLeish once commented: “The rock on which the greatest universities are founded is the rock of change . . . The future will be won by those who are capable of creating the future, not by those who undertake to defend the present as it is." We embrace the path of change with its many challenges and profound opportunities, and will continue to create novel programs and expand current initiatives involving the faculty, instructional technology, undergraduate and graduate student teaching and learning, and many others.
As Senior Vice President and Provost, I provide academic leadership for the Twin Cities campus, with responsibilities related to academic policy, promotion and tenure, faculty recognition, and undergraduate, graduate, and professional education. Given the momentous changes ahead, we encourage you to consult regularly the range of information available on the University’s Transforming the U Web site. We appreciate your support as we move forward and welcome your comments and suggestions on how the Provost’s Office can help to fulfill the vision, mission, and values of the University of Minnesota.
E. Thomas Sullivan
Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost
Julius E. Davis Chair in Law