Dear Colleagues:

I write to share with you the final report of the President’s Commission on the Undergraduate Experience.

I am deeply grateful for the Commission’s thoughtful engagement with the myriad issues arising from the undergraduate program. There are many important insights throughout the report. I want to extend a special thanks to commission chair and former Provost Nancy Cantor, who brought to this task her passionate commitment to undergraduate education.

I would like to emphasize two points at the outset.

The first is my belief that the very health of a university, broadly speaking, is connected to how it cares for its students, and perhaps especially its undergraduate students because of their special vulnerability to being neglected. This is not, in other words, just a matter of living up to our responsibilities for educating the next generation. It is that and more. Rather the point is that even the character and quality of the research emanating from the institution will depend upon the degree to which we feel a desire to nurture, educationally, students into the life of the mind. This was my underlying motive in establishing the Commission on the Undergraduate Experience.

The second point is simply a caution that we not ignore or fail to recognize the tremendous strides that have been taken in this University over the past two decades to refocus our efforts on undergraduate education. It is important to underscore the positive work that preceded the Commission’s efforts and that now provides the base for our efforts to improve still more. Praise is due, therefore, for what we already have accomplished: for example, the new ways of rewarding and recognizing teaching excellence, and highly successful new programs such as the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program. These are marks of distinction for Michigan.

But there is more we can do. The Commission’s report asks us to enhance a cross-university climate that encourages the richest possible intellectual life for our undergraduates. It observes that the present experience of too many students tends to be too disconnected from what is available. It asks us to explore new ways of achieving greater student-faculty interaction. The Commission proposes creating incentives to encourage program innovation and proposes consideration of everything from the use of public spaces to attendance at the University’s cultural events as underutilized learning opportunities. It is not easy to summarize the thoughts of the report, but I would identify three vital themes for the University’s attention:

• Navigation — The University needs to provide better “maps” and guides for students so they have increased access to the vast treasures — large and small — in our academic community. It is a profound (but easy to underestimate) idea, and calls our attention to just how difficult it can be for new students to take advantage of all we offer. And, as the Commission members said when we were together recently, it is not simply a matter of providing more information. We need to shape effective navigational tools that help students understand all the possibilities around them.
  
  
• Integration — In one of the report’s most powerful messages, the report identifies the essential need to weave together all parts of a student’s experience here at Michigan. Whether we are talking about a better connection between North and Central campus, or a stronger link between undergraduate educational and residential experiences, or the use of public spaces to draw students and faculty together, or the important connection between our classrooms and our communities, we must work harder at integrating the various parts of a student’s living and learning experience.
  
  
• Layering — The recommendations in this report build a densely layered environment that brings our students in closer proximity to one other, to their faculty, and to the community. This vision is a strong one – to provide a tightly interwoven and layered intergenerational experience where students learn from those ahead of them and those behind.

The recommendations are far-ranging, and I encourage the campus community to spend time discussing and considering the proposals. In the next few weeks, I will work with the Provost’s Office to appoint a steering committee to oversee a series of formal and informal campus discussions and provide some seed funding to assist faculty, students, and staff in the development of the most promising of the ideas.

Again, I am grateful to all those who contributed to this vital report.

Sincerely,

Lee C. Bollinger