Welcome to a new academic year!
Dear Colleagues,
Welcome to the 2026-27 academic year! Your presence, energy, and distinctive strengths are what makes our campus special. It is because of your continuing commitment to excellence, collaboration, and care for each other that UNL is a unique place of limitless promise, innovation, and opportunity.
During the "quiet months" of summer, many of you have been connecting first-year and transfer students to campus resources, preparing graduate students for their research and creative endeavors, and assisting international students and scholars as they navigate our rapidly changing global environment. Your daily, collective actions are key to a successful start to their semester.
Many of you have also been diligently preparing for the final steps in our joint accreditation, integrating our flagship, Research 1, land-grant institution with the research and clinical expertise of UNMC. This is an exciting moment in our history — opening even more pathways for current and future learners, accelerating fundamental research and life-changing discoveries, and deepening our service and contributions to the people of Nebraska.
Thousands of you, literally, within the university and across the state have made thoughtful contributions to Our Bold Path Forward, which will guide our university over the next three years in alignment with the NU Odyssey to the Extraordinary, to bolster student access and success, advance outstanding research, scholarship, and creative endeavors, amplify our land-grant mission through Extension and engagement, and so much more.
In the coming days, we will embrace this strategic framework to “empower generations to lead boldly, courageously, and with purpose greater than ourselves.” I ask you to look for ways this year that you can lend your personal strengths and insights to this vision. This might mean contributing to the responsible and productive use of AI, creating and supporting innovative student experiences, building academic programs and credentials that open new pathways of life-long learning, or even sharing the impact of your service, scholarship, and outreach with others.
Regardless of how you contribute, your engagement in shaping the future of the university matters. As we continue to advance our institution through robust teaching, learning, and discovery, we must always keep in mind the importance of shared governance and academic freedom — two interdependent values that constitute the core of our academic enterprise and depend on each of us doing our part to contribute our unique expertise and perspectives to the improvement of our institution and to the advancement of new knowledge.
I wish you a great fall semester.
Mark E. Button, Ph.D.
Executive Vice Chancellor
and Chief Academic Officer
EVC Office