PROVOST MESSAGES

A welcome note from Provost Wolfe

Fellow faculty and staff in West Lafayette and Indianapolis,
 
Welcome to the start of an exciting academic year! We are ready to start anew and greatly appreciate your taking the time to give substantive feedback during this past academic year. Whether through the COACHE survey, research town halls or via coffee hours with me, we heard you — and we thank you. You want more, substantive communication, engagement and a clearer articulation of priorities from us. That’s fair and needed feedback. We are working to build better methods, starting now. We are here to support you and to make this year more vigorous, more productive and more satisfying for each of you.
With over 10,000 new undergraduate students and nearly 2,000 new graduate students moving in during a period of refreshingly mild weather, our campuses feel vibrant and look fantastic, in a way that makes us all proud to be here and excited to start the semester. Whether it’s the near-completion of our new Academic Success Building in Indianapolis, so clearly visible now from I-65, or the recent opening of South Hall with new Nursing, Pharmacy and Business buildings not far behind, change continues to be the only constant, on our campus and across higher education. 

Together we’ve weathered consecutive years of forces strongly buffeting our sector, and so I would like to extend a deeply felt thank you to each of you for your part in helping Purdue to navigate these forces with resilience and grace. Our successes come entirely because of the exceptional and diligent work you continue to do, and the many challenging twists and turns we’ve worked so well together to manage. Along with all these, you will also most likely have read about our Nation’s demographic cliff, with the number of 18- to 24-year-olds nationally starting to trend back down towards 2000-era levels, and seen direct evidence of the decreasing public trust in higher education across the board. Few institutions if any are as well positioned as Purdue — your public land-grant research university — to rebuild and regain that trust. As we grow year-on-year, students, parents and families prove time and again just how strongly they put their trust in us and the value of a Purdue education. It is our honor and responsibility to uphold that trust and to do our collective part to strengthen it.

Therewith, crucially, we continue to accelerate and enhance our land-grant impact, and to be a strong partner to our State. Strengthening and growing our academic presence in Indianapolis is a preeminent University priority, with a plan to double our Indianapolis student enrollment over the next 5 years (more on that from me in the near future). Our efforts to develop Indiana’s health and life sciences workforces are also getting a big boost — if you tuned in to our June Board of Trustees meeting you’ll have heard Dean Bret Marsh talk about our plans to train 50% more veterinarians than we do today, and you also may have seen our late May announcement of an envisioned Crossroads Academic Medical Institute, bringing together several diverse health systems across our State with Purdue’s clinical training and research expertise and Marian University’s Wood College of Medicine. I’d also like to especially acknowledge our colleagues in Purdue Extension and Engagement, whose transformational efforts led to Purdue’s continued recognition by way of our 2026 Carnegie Community Engagement Classification.

Among the many changes coming more fully into focus this year: Artificial Intelligence, and its impact on our research, our teaching, our curriculum design and the world at large. Thanks to your help we’ve been quick off the blocks in beginning to integrate AI appropriately into our research and teaching missions, our university operations and our daily workflows. Our ongoing efforts are self-evidently necessary, but also far from sufficient. Purdue has long been a national leader in emphasizing the importance of critical thinking, and the advent of AI is quickly proving beyond any shadow of a doubt just how crucial the ability to think critically will be for our students’ futures. Critical thinking will thus be a second priority for our academic enterprise this year and in the future. We expect to call upon our College of Liberal Arts and Purdue’s esteemed Cornerstone program more than ever before to help us instill and measure gains in critical thinking for the benefit our undergraduate students. I’m thrilled to look forward to an even more robust Liberal Arts integration across at Purdue, and one which will provide a more encompassing wraparound experience for all of our students.

A final priority this year will be strengthening the essence of our university as a community of scholars. This means strengthening our shared sense of community through our shared values, and at the same time amplifying our collective scholarly impact. Earlier this week, President Daniels and I had the honor of welcoming our 120+ new faculty members and lecturers to campus. Our message to our new and returning scholars alike is simple: We are here to put the wind at your backs and keep it there; to create a scholarly community where the best and brightest want to come and want to stay; and to ensure you have the greatest possible latitude and support to pursue your scholarly endeavors at the highest level and to disseminate your results in ways that create lasting impact in (and even well beyond) your chosen field. And so we’ll continue prioritizing leading scholarly impact through a focus on faculty recognition, external awards and a program to support academically rigorous book publication; through a robust, now-$1B+ research enterprise that helps connect our scholars to industry and government funding; and a university leadership team that staunchly defends your ability to debate and dissent through academic freedom and freedom of expression.

One final word about community: As an integral part of America’s world-leading system of higher education, we know firsthand how important it is to continue to attract and retain the best and brightest students and scholars from around the world, to study and work here and thereby to further American interests, culture and values. So many of us who have chosen to base our careers here at Purdue have lived, worked or studied in countries other than where we were born — and so we recognize just how many disruptive changes have impacted our community of international students and scholars in recent years. You can trust that our teams are working seven days a week to help us navigate these changes; we’ve been especially hard at work these past few months and I look forward to sharing more details with you on our efforts and results as the semester gets underway.

As we start anew this year, I’m excited to continue to bring you all in earlier, and more substantively, on what we’re working on. And so, while this letter outlines a few key items as we kick off the new academic year, you can also expect to hear more from me and my team in the weeks and months to come. Be on the lookout, too, for coffee sign-ups once again this semester, and I hope to see you soon, at a Presidential Lecture, a Purdue game or a Purdue musical event in Indianapolis.

With pride in supporting you all as we work together to make Purdue the uniquely special university that it is,

Patrick J. Wolfe
Provost & Miller Family Professor