Dear Campus Community,
Greetings and for those of you gone over the summer, welcome back to campus. I hope all of you had an enjoyable summer, and are as excited as I am for the school year to begin.
It has been an unusual and interesting last few months in many respects for NDSU, but as students and faculty return we are readying ourselves for what bodes to be an exciting, history-making year. As you know, the legislature passed a game-changing new higher education funding formula, which will for the first time in decades reward the hard work being done here. But that’s just the start of the exciting things I look forward to highlighting, and I say that for more reasons than I can fit in an email.
As an update to ongoing allegations that I deleted a massive number of emails to avoid public records requests, let me be clear, I did not “dump” my email, nor did anyone on my staff do so. All evidence shows us that the new auto-purge function of the NDUS IT did run on my account. Further, NDUS IT had a copy of my account that included the material that had been purged, so all open records requests for my email have been supplied. More recently, all presidents in North Dakota were asked for all emails dating from July 1, 2012, to April 29, 2013. We are fully complying with this request as well. Literally tens of thousands of pages of emails have been produced and legal staff are reviewing as required on an almost full time basis. Unfortunately, I won’t be surprised if this continues, but it will also continue to be fruitless. Let me reiterate, any allegations of wrong doing are simply false. I am as committed as I’ve ever been to honest, open, transparent leadership for the good of North Dakota State University.
On a more positive and productive note, I encourage you, more than ever, to attend the State of the University address, 11 a.m.-noon Thursday, Oct. 10, in Festival Concert Hall. I wouldn't normally be so brash as this, but I anticipate that the summary of our recent accomplishments and a wide variety of exciting news for the campus at large, but faculty and staff in academic affairs areas in particular, will be of great interest to you. Colleagues around the state will again have the option to observe via live webcast (details about that will be provided closer to the date).
I also encourage you to mark your calendars for some key events surrounding our new approach to Homecoming, designed to celebrate the breadth and depth of NDSU as a top 100 research university that enjoys life in a vibrant and supportive community. The biggest change to the schedule is moving the parade to downtown Fargo on Friday evening, October 11. That move will also allow us on Saturday morning to provide visitors a variety of open-house events in academic and academic support areas of campus so that they gain a better understanding of what we do. To allow as many of us as possible to be at the start of the Friday parade at 5:30 p.m., we will for that day revert to summer hours, 7:30 to 4 p.m. as appropriate and possible.
Best wishes for the start of your year!