February 2024: Aligning Student and Faculty Success

Dear Faculty,

Last week I traveled to Washington, D.C. to co-present a conference session with Janelle Kilgore (vice provost for strategic enrollment management) and Karyn Plumm (vice provost for undergraduate studies and student success) at the National Association for Financial Aid Administrators (NAFSAA) conference. We’d been invited to present a session on the relationship between student success, recruitment, and retention and faculty success, recruitment, and retention at UND. As vice provosts, we often discuss shared challenges to student and faculty success, recruitment, and retention alike such as UND’s rural (and cold) locale, issues of mental health and wellbeing, and today’s divided political climate.

Over time, we’ve collaborated to align our various faculty and student initiatives around place, community, inclusiveness, belongingness, and purpose. UND’s student enrollment and retention continue to increase, and this fall we welcomed one of UND’s largest cohorts of new faculty—thanks to the strong faculty recruitment efforts in the colleges and departments. This growth reflects the hard work of many units and dedicated faculty and staff throughout the university. I’m grateful to work at an institution where collaboration is valued, and where student success and faculty success are regarded as mutually beneficial and reinforcing, rather than mutually exclusive.

Before our return flight to Grand Forks, I managed to pull my fellow vice provosts away from their laptops and work email for a visit to the National Portrait Gallery, to view the stunning new portrait of Oprah. And if you noticed that this newsletter is arriving to your inbox a few days late, it is because I read on the plane home rather than work on Faculty Notes. I started The Lies of the Land: Seeing Rural America for What It Is—and Isn’t by Steven Conn and almost finished Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano, a retelling of a novel I taught for many years, Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. If you’ve read either of these books, I’d love to hear your thoughts!

I hope your semester is going well–

Randi Tanglen,                                                                                                                     

Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs