From the President - Winter 2021

The calendar has turned and spring semester is underway, again with classes held mostly online and only a portion of the students who would normally be on campus currently living here.

It was a challenging 2020, and I can’t give enough credit to the students, faculty and staff whose resilience has allowed the university to maintain forward momentum through the year. Likewise, our devoted alumni have continued to show support for MSU with financial gifts, as advisers and mentors and in many other ways as the year unfolded.

Our broad and diverse MSU community has put its collective shoulder behind high-priority initiatives, including our strategic planning process; a thorough diversity, equity and inclusion assessment; our relationship violence and sexual misconduct prevention and response planning; a multicultural center feasibility study; and searches to fill key leadership posts. All these and more have moved steadily ahead and position MSU for continued achievement for years to come in our scholarship, research, instruction, outreach and service.

Something else that has continued without pause is our focus on innovation, as you’ll read about in the pages ahead. From the beginning, Michigan State was an educational experiment that quickly became a model for the nation’s land-grant colleges, opening access to opportunities to everyday people in a period of rapid growth and change.

Today, we’re proud of the research, development and creative endeavors being pursued across the university and how we’re working to transfer and translate the fruits of that work into outcomes for our many stakeholders. Our entrepreneurship education program is ranked among the top 15 in the nation by the Princeton Review, and our fast-growing minor in entrepreneurship and innovation spans the university with more than 700 students enrolled.

As we enter the third decade of the 21st century, we are challenged to perform at the accelerated speed of society’s most urgent needs and most hopeful expectations. Our awareness and engagement, imagination and innovation, and knowledge and discovery all matter more than ever —and all are part of what makes us Spartans. Go Green!

Samuel L. Stanley Jr., M.D.
PRESIDENT, MSU