PROVOST MESSAGES

A welcome note from Provost Wolfe

Staff and faculty colleagues across Purdue’s main campus,
 
Welcome back — to West Lafayette, Indianapolis and a new semester! Thank you for making this academic year such a resounding success so far, and (as President Chiang said in his New Year’s message) for all that you do to help keep our campus thriving. The past few years have seen many stresses and strains on campuses nationwide, and we know just how hard each of you works every day to keep Purdue steady, sturdy and strategic in the face of buffeting winds. A special thank you is due to so many of you who focus on our campus’s safe and reliable operations on a daily basis — rain or shine, weekday or weekend, 24/7/365. New entryway screening magnetometers for athletic and other campus events are just one visible example of our shared, continual efforts to improve campus operations.
 
Working with our university senate and other representative groups of Purdue staff and faculty, we are addressing key issues that matter to you as Purdue employees. Thanks to the help of our senate playing a coordinating role in its advisory capacity, two primary issues that have seen much focus are employee benefits and artificial intelligence. First, with your feedback and input, we continue to refine, revise and update our employee benefits and prescription plans to achieve the best possible balance of coverage and costs. I am personally grateful for your input in this regard, received through groups including our senate, CSSAC and MaPSAC, and I am eager to continue working together on this and other matters through the semester.

Second, with these groups and our undergraduate and graduate student governments, we are working in earnest to understand the implications of, and then to harness fully, new artificial intelligence technologies for the benefit of our campus and our students. Our recently announced AI working competency graduation requirement  comes into full effect next fall, but already this semester we will rapidly be offering new AI tools and training to our soon-to-graduate seniors to help them as they prepare to enter the job market or to continue their studies. Strategic partnerships with Google and with Lilly Endowment will further underpin our efforts to ensure AI is helping our students succeed in their education and in the workforce, and to help make our own workforce more effective. The rapid rise of these technologies can feel exhilarating but also at times overwhelming, and we will work with you every step of the way to ensure that, together, we take full advantage of all that AI has to offer in ways that are thoughtful and considered.
 
For those of you on the tenure track, this semester brings our annual round of tenure and promotion considerations, as well as discussions with our university senate of needed refinements to our longstanding policy of post-tenure review. Tenure is an extraordinary privilege that affords and protects our intellectual freedom to study, to teach and to write. With this privilege comes, of course, extraordinary responsibility: stewardship — of curriculum, of culture and of place — and a shared responsibility to safeguard the intellectual integrity of the university and its research, teaching, and creative work, holding these always to the highest standards. I look forward to shared discussions as we continue to strengthen the ranks of our tenured faculty to be among those preeminent in the world.
 
Reflecting on the achievements of last semester and those to come, I’m particularly excited for and about our College of Liberal Arts. Under the new leadership of philosophy professor, von Humboldt fellow and seasoned Purdue leader Chris Yeomans, Purdue Liberal Arts is poised to accelerate its impact on and centrality to our campus and all its academic disciplines. Critical thinking, for example, is a cornerstone of effective AI usage and one where we have an enormous national head start through our Cornerstone program. From new connections forged by our annual Jazz Festival to Indiana Avenue and its musical legends, to the impact of AI on creative work and endeavors, a newly reenergized College of Liberal Arts is poised to bring new intellectual vibrancy to our entire main campus, inside the classroom and out.
 
In closing, we are eager to continue to gather your feedback and to focus on continual improvement in all things. Your hard work continues to ensure the success of our students — from better housing, dining and classroom & research facilities to improved academic performance, graduation rates and employment outcomes for our students, we all have key parts to play in Purdue’s continued success. We need you, your feedback and your best ideas, and I look forward to receiving these gratefully as the semester progresses.
 
With all best wishes for an invigorating semester ahead, 

Patrick J. Wolfe
Provost