Dear Faculty and Staff Colleagues,

We hope you all had an enjoyable Fourth of July holiday. It’s hard to imagine that fall is just around the corner and we are on the cusp—at long last!—of welcoming everyone back to campus.

Thank you for your good, selfless and heroic efforts to bring us to the point where we can once again offer an engaging and vibrant campus experience for our students, the broader community, and one another. Our students live, work and learn on campus, and every single one of us plays a critical role in their success. Over the past year, some of us have continued to work on campus, while others have been working remotely to help de-densify the campus and keep everyone who must be on campus safe. With appropriate health and safety protocols in place, including the vaccination requirement announced last week, we can look forward to being back in community together in the coming weeks. 

While our goal is a fully campus-centric experience, depending on the nature of individual staff work responsibilities, the needs of campus constituents, and divisional expectations, there may be opportunities for hybrid telework/on-campus arrangements for staff that can be explored through our telework policy. A message from Human Resources will follow shortly with information about how to explore and request a possible telework agreement effective with the fall semester. With students beginning to arrive for fall semester in early August, we are targeting to have approved telework agreements documented by Aug. 1.

Meanwhile, we look forward to reuniting our faculty and staff on campus, and to the series of events planned by the COVID-19 Management Group beginning today at noon in Diversions Café to help us celebrate and ease back into our work on campus together.

See you here on campus soon!

Isiaah
Isiaah Crawford, Ph.D. | President