April 20, 2020

Happy Monday, Everyone,

I hope you had some time this weekend to get outside and enjoy the beautiful weather. You are doing so much to make everything work that I know it must be hard to find time to recharge. Like all of you, I was extremely busy this weekend but I managed to do two things I love: I spent some of Saturday and Sunday walking in the beautiful green spaces around Fort Collins, including campus; and, made time for reading articles on leadership and higher education during and after the pandemic. The result is that I have several things to share with all of you. I hope you have time to both read and walk outside this week—and that you can take that time for yourself.

For those of you who are in leadership and supervisory positions across our university community, I urge you to read this thought-provoking article from Gallup, which challenges leaders at all levels to be anchors of stability during this frightening time and to engage their employees and colleagues with compassion and understanding.

Many of you are already regular readers of CSU’s Diversity Newsletter, as I am. If you missed the April issue, which just came out last week, you can find it here. Many thanks and kudos to the communications team in our Office of the Vice President for Diversity for not just continuing to put out this newsletter during the pandemic, but for including so much wonderful content specifically focused on our community’s needs right now.

Finally, for students, faculty, advisors, and all those who work with and care about our students at CSU, I offer this sobering article from The Chronicle of Higher Education, which explores the ways that colleges and universities need to “step up” to help struggling students not just make it through this semester and this moment of crisis, but stay enrolled and progress successfully to graduation despite the roadblocks that the coronavirus has thrown into their paths.

And if you have time for a deeper dive into reading on this and related topics, I recommend the larger series of articles from The Chronicle that this one piece is a part of, entitled Broken Ladder: Higher Ed’s Role in Social Mobility.

Finally, I invite you all to tell me—what have you been reading? Has an online article, blog post, or other publication inspired or engaged you this past week that you think others at CSU should read?  Let me know by sending the link to presofc@colostate.edu.

Take care all,

Joyce