Friends,
As summer draws to a close and we prepare for the start of the academic year, we are cautiously optimistic about the upcoming schoolyear, despite the recent resurgence of COVID. We are excited about the return of students to our classrooms and hallways, and we’re hopeful about in-person events to help provide the best learning and social experiences for our students. We continue to follow the university’s OU Together COVID protocols, including encouraging vaccinations, indoor masking in high-density settings, and testing. We are also preparing for potential contingencies by following OU’s faculty instructional continuity guidance for in-person courses. OU also recently launched its new Healthy Together app to make COVID-19 screening and reporting more convenient for the Norman campus.
Our first priority is to create spaces where students, faculty, and staff feel safe, and we will continue monitoring the changing landscape of pandemic protocols to help make Price College as safe as possible. We managed last year’s challenges extremely well, and I am confident we will do so again this academic year by working together and sharing information.
Coming Soon: A New Strategic Plan
I am especially excited to share the new strategic plan for Price College with you in the coming weeks. In late July, we wrapped up the third stage of the planning process with our strategic consultancy partner, Juniper. During the process, we engaged hundreds of members of the Price College community, including students, faculty, staff, alumni and other friends. Our final stage will be the rollout of the completed plan to our most important stakeholders – you – as well as the general public this fall. Please stay tuned over the next few weeks. I can’t wait for you to help us realize Price’s future together.
At Price College, we don’t simply react to and overcome challenges as they arise, we lead, even during extraordinary times. Our strategic planning effort is a perfect example. We could have concluded, quite reasonably, that dealing with a global pandemic would require too much time and attention to focus on the future of the College. But this would have come at the cost of ignoring the dramatic changes happening in our competitive environment. Instead of viewing the pandemic as a threat and being myopic in our response, we decided to treat it as an opportunity to focus on and prepare for the future. As Dean, I’m extremely fortunate to work with an executive leadership team and a community of faculty and staff who make this possible.
Balancing the competing demands of the urgent present with the importance of preparing for the future is a hallmark of good leadership. This is the mindset and skillset we seek to instill in our students. Our world is increasingly uncertain, complex and challenging. We need leaders like those we are developing at Price College who can simultaneously manage for the present and the future. It’s not a matter of doing one or the other well, it’s a matter of doing both.
In closing, I want to reiterate that your support, especially on the verge of our new strategic plan, is more important than ever. We are grateful for your partnership now and in the future. Thank you for sharing in our success, and please enjoy the latest news from Price College.
