UW-Green Bay Chancellor Alexander Shares Open Letter

Chancellor Alexander shared this open letter with the UW-Green Bay campus community and the region today (18 January 2024), highlighting the accomplishments of the last few years amidst a time of unrelenting change and turmoil in higher education in Wisconsin and the U.S., along with a call to action to do more:

“People inside and outside of UW-Green Bay often ask me how I feel about the future of our institution, including how I see the overall higher education landscape changing and affecting us.  On July 10, 2020, a few months after I began my role as chancellor and in the midst of the pandemic, I wrote this open letter to the communities of Green Bay, Manitowoc, Marinette, and Sheboygan.  The pandemic accelerated the evolution that was already happening in higher education. Now, we are fully experiencing the pressures of rapid change in an industry that has not typically handled change well.  Yet, I remain incredibly optimistic about our future.  It is clear that our future and the future of Northeast Wisconsin demands us to be bold.  There are a lot of loud voices saying what you do is not important or valuable. But it is. Today, I still feel what I wrote in 2020 is true in that, ‘We are positioned well to deal with whatever challenges emerge in the coming year, but it is not enough.  We must do much more.’   

To do more, we will fully embrace the same skills we are teaching our students.  We will be leaders in our individual disciplines, we will be great communicators, and we will individually and collectively become increasingly relevant to the common good of the region we serve. Using these skills, we will shape our own distinct future as a university.  We need to continue to unite our region in the belief that access to education for all who want to learn makes our families and communities stronger.  Education creates bridges between people and our bridge must be built on the strength of…

Read the Entire Letter HERE.