August 25, 2025
Dear colleagues,
Welcome to the start of the 2025-2026 academic year! As our classrooms, campus, and community fill with the energy of our students and the start of a new semester, I want to thank all of you who joined me for last week’s Convocation, whether in person or online. Your engagement is the bedrock of our university community.
For those who were unable to attend or wish to revisit the message, you can watch a recording of the address here: Generating Our Own Light: Building an Antifragile NAU
The core theme of my remarks was a concept I believe is essential for our time: antifragility. While resilience in today’s conversation often means the ability to bounce back from stress, I believe that definition doesn’t capture the full picture of what this moment requires. To truly thrive, we must embrace antifragility—a concept that revives the original, dynamic spirit of resilience as seen in ecosystems, where true strength is measured not by a return to the past, but by the capacity to transform and grow stronger from adversity.
In an era I described as an “age of blackouts”—defined by the relentless pressures of policy whiplash and technological surges—we must do more than just endure. We must harness these forces to build a more robust, dynamic, and mission-driven NAU. This year, we must focus on generating our own light and creating the conditions for an antifragile NAU to emerge.
To organize our work, we will focus our collective efforts on a clear, three-pillar plan:
Strategic Finance 2.0: A Foundation of Steel. To protect our mission and invest in you, our people, we must ensure our financial sustainability. This year, we will close a projected $8 million budget gap through a disciplined, redesign-first approach that prioritizes cutting non-mission-critical work, not people. We will strategically manage vacancies and non-personnel costs while aggressively pursuing new revenue through optimized enrollment, new ventures, and philanthropic support. As a tangible example of this disciplined approach, we have temporarily paused the development of our planned College of Medicine to protect our core academic programs, with the intent to move forward only when funding is clearly sustainable.
The Year of AI Empowerment: A Powerful Engine. We will harness the technological surge by becoming an AI-augmented institution. This is not the “Year of More Work,” but an investment in your vision. Our goal is to provide broad access, training, and applications for this new technology, helping automate tedious tasks so you can focus on the deeply human work of teaching, discovery, and service. We will support the brilliant AI innovation already happening throughout our university and scale these efforts through a new faculty-led Institute for Advancing Applications in Artificial Intelligence (IAAAI), the Northern Arizona AI Futures Alliance, and major investments in our digital infrastructure and training.
Mission Advocacy. In a polarized world, we must protect the values that make us exceptional. Our strategy is not to make the most noise, but to make the smartest moves. Through leadership at the national level and engagement in legal and regulatory arenas, we work to shape policy, not just react to it. This is how we ensure NAU remains a place where talent from every community can thrive.
I know that grand plans can be met with healthy skepticism. The question that matters most is whether this plan will make our institution stronger and provide lasting relief to the people doing the work. My answer is unequivocal: the two are inseparable. By building a stronger financial foundation, harnessing new technologies to enhance our work, and protecting our mission, we create sustainable conditions for you to excel.
The evidence of our antifragile spirit is already all around us—from achieving R1 status and record student retention and graduation rates during times of immense disruption to the unprecedented philanthropic belief in our mission. You have already proven we have the DNA to succeed. This year is about building the systems that match our determined dedication.
Thank you for all that you do for our students and for NAU.
In partnership,
