September 15, 2026

Dear Colleagues,

I hope your semester is going well, with students energized and fully engaged with our classes, services, and experiences. The start of an academic year is always a reminder of both the challenges and rewards of the cyclical nature of our work. On the surface, we get the comfort of the familiar—our routines, our discipline, our expertise. On the other hand, we have the unique opportunity to start afresh every year with a new set of students with different expectations, different aspirations, and different assets.

As faculty, we are anchored in our area of expertise, which gives us the foundation from which we operate and the resources we draw on. As scholars and researchers, we are trained to question assumptions, test received wisdom, and revise our thinking when evidence tells us we should. We are intellectually restless about our disciplines. What would happen if we applied that same restlessness to the institution itself? The conditions under which we built the 

contemporary university are changing. We cannot assume that the structures, offerings, and relationships that made sense in the past will necessarily serve today's and tomorrow's learners. Our scholarly disposition: curiosity, questioning assumptions, experimenting, learning, needs to be applied to the university itself.

If the world and our students are changing, how must the university itself change?

I want to focus here on three core areas that will benefit from our collective energy and innovation:

By mission and by design, Montclair has long served a diverse student population, and over time we have deliberately expanded the range of learners we seek to serve, expanding access to excellent education both for traditional student populations and for segments of learners who have not historically been well served. While serving changing learners in a changing environment has been at the core of our efforts, demographic change gives us an external reason to examine assumptions that we have already been willing to question. This changing landscape accelerates our efforts and gives them additional urgency.

What We Offer: What Educational Portfolio Best Serves Those Learners?

Students come to us with the expectation that they leave with a degree that earns them a living and with a reasonable return on investment. For more than half a century, the traditional bachelor's degree has provided a relatively standardized pathway: typically 120 credits over four years, with assumptions about students' preparation and circumstances. A structure can be sensible and successful for a long time and still become a poor fit when the population and circumstances change. We have an opportunity and obligation to examine the assumptions and structures in place. Some questions become particularly relevant and timely: Must every student follow the same temporal pathway? Must every program be organized around the same calendar? Can we reduce time and cost without reducing educational quality? What should remain constant even as the structures around it change? Where might shorter credentials, certificates, accelerated degrees, or bachelor's-to-master's pathways make sense? What does year-round education make possible, and how best can we implement it?

How We Work with Others: From Institutions to Ecosystems

We don't need to think of education as a collection of institutions competing for students. We can think of ourselves as part of an educational ecosystem in which institutions have different strengths and can work together to create better pathways for learners. Our unification with Bloomfield illustrates that. Our upcoming summit with community colleges illustrates that.

The Mechanism: The University Design Studio

The questions posed here are an invitation to practice what it means to be a learning organization: to rethink the underlying design of the institution

Join Us for the Workday Student Town Hall on September 23

Join University leadership and the Workday Student Project Team for a Town Hall on Wednesday, September 23, from 2-3 p.m. in CCM's Presentation Hall to learn more about Montclair's transition to Workday Student.

Attend in person in Presentation Hall, watch the livestream from Van Fossen Theater (Bloomfield campus) or join online via YouTube. A reception will follow beginning at 3 p.m. Submit your questions and reserve your seat!

Montclair to Host International Conference on AI and Intelligent Systems

Montclair State University will host the 2026 IEEE Conference on Intelligent Systems and Interdisciplinary Applications (ISAIA) on October 9-10, with faculty and colleagues across the College of Science and Mathematics helping lead and organize the conference. Montclair faculty and students can register at a special rate using their University email address by Wednesday, September 23.