January 14, 2010

Message from Vice Provost and Dean Ed Taylor, January 2010

Dear UAA Colleagues,

We recently learned that the University of Washington is a Pac-10 leader for graduation rates of student athletes. According to the NCAA, the UW’s student athlete graduation rate of 84 percent is second-best in the West for a public university. For football student athletes, the UW ranks second only to Stanford in graduation rates. Here’s a link to the full article.

Additionally, more than 130 student athletes earned recognition as Pac-10 All-Academic, meaning their cumulative GPA is higher than 3.0 and they are a team starter or significant contributor. These student athletes play football, baseball, basketball, crew, cross-country, soccer, gymnastics and more and study sociology, molecular biology, accounting, international studies, informatics, digital arts and still more.

Congratulations to the academic support staff in Student Athlete Services, to Kim Durand, to so many faculty mentors, and to our coaches. These professionals support the many forms of student excellence we realize on this campus.

This quarter, I’ll be spending a good deal of time working with colleagues to help determine what constitutes our common goods and common principles, as we begin to adopt new a budget model called activity based budgeting (ABB). You can learn more about this model here.

I want to underscore that ABB is a budgeting model, a way to recognize and reward academic activities and create a more transparent budget process. While ABB supports the mission and values, the work of lining up to the mission and values is our work. The mission and values are driving the budget, not the other way around. Our commitment to the student experience, our commitment to access and quality experiences and to shaping student lives is work we do during the best of times and during the worst of budget times.

We are all aware that, as we were last year at this time, we are experiencing some budgetary ambiguity. I hold my UAA colleagues in high regard for the way you continued our work. Through unknowns you continued the work of serving students and deepening academic experiences. We’ll continue that good work this year as we plan for the immediate future and the future yet to come.

Sincerely,

Ed Taylor