Dear Students, Staff, and Faculty,
Watch Interim Chancellor Kathy Ankerson's Welcome Video
It is my pleasure to welcome you to our campus for a new academic year filled with possibility, growth, and achievement.
To those of you joining us for the first time — new students, faculty, and staff — we have spent the summer getting ready for you, and we are glad you chose us. To those of you coming back: welcome home! The start of the academic year is a time of renewal and excitement.
I want to share a reflection of where I think we stand, what we are launching this month, and what I am asking of each of you.
Reflecting on a remarkable American institution.
As the United States marks its 250th anniversary this year, it is worth pausing on an institution that helped make the country possible: American higher education.
Some of our nation’s colleges are older than the nation itself, chartered more than a century before 1776. Several are older than any corporation operating in America today. Others were founded by the very men who declared independence — of the 56 signers of the Declaration, about half attended college. The republic and its universities grew up together.
What this country has asked of its colleges and universities, and what they have in turn achieved, borders on the impossible. Educate anyone willing to do the work. Feed a growing world. Cure disease. Settle arguments with evidence. The important work we do is critical, collaborative, and community based.
Universities like ours are engines of national progress. We teach students how to think rather than what to think. We incubate innovation. We improve and save lives through research. And we build community, giving students the chance to experiment, to fail, to try again, and to lead boldly and courageously with purpose greater than ourselves. Institutions like this one are vital to the future success of our nation.
That is not a nostalgic claim. It is a description of what happens every day at Nebraska’s Big Ten land-grant university.
Reflecting on what our mission asks of us.
Through its core missions of teaching, research, Extension, and service, the university serves as the state’s leading importer of talent and its premier intellectual center, providing leadership through high-quality education, groundbreaking research and the generation of new knowledge. This mission comes with obligations, and I want to name them plainly.
We owe Nebraskans our rigor. A degree from this university should signify something specific and demanding, and that standard must endure in an era when AI and other technologies make shortcuts easier than ever.
We owe students access and affordability. A young person from any county in this state should be able to come here to find a future, and should leave equipped to build one. That promise is what has drawn students here from well beyond our borders, too.
We owe our community a place where ideas actually collide. A university where students encounter only arguments they already agree with is not preparing them for citizenship. Learning to sit with a serious argument you question, to understand it well enough to answer it with empirical evidence, is among the most durable things we teach. That requires a campus where respectful open inquiry is protected in practice, not just in policy.
Our research shows up in Nebraska’s fields, clinics, businesses, and classrooms. Our graduates fill the jobs this state urgently needs. Our Extension presence in all 93 counties makes us a truly 500-mile campus. And the work done here ripples far beyond our state, connecting Nebraska to the nation and the world through our partnerships, our discoveries, and the people we send out into both.
Those obligations run in both directions. Nebraskans built this university in 1869 as a deliberate public act — deciding that the education of their children and the productivity of their land were worth funding together. That decision has paid for itself many times over: every dollar the state invests here returns roughly ten in economic and social value, and every dollar invested in our research returns an estimated $16. Public investment in public higher education is not charity extended to an institution. It is how a state compounds its own advantages, generation after generation.
Our Bold Path Forward.
This month we launch Our Bold Path Forward, the university’s new three-year strategic framework, which will guide our efforts through the 2028–29 academic year and align with the University of Nebraska System’s Odyssey to Extraordinary.
This framework is the result of thousands of contributions — roundtables, web submissions, conversations, and a summer leadership retreat where more than 100 faculty, staff, and student leaders spent an entire day working across our strategic pillars: teaching and learning, research and creative activity, partnerships and engagement, culture and environment, stewardship and effectiveness, and student experience.
A framework like this does two things. It gives us a shared sense of direction, so that a decision made in one college is legible to every other. It also reaffirms focuson what matters most: teaching, research, Extension, and service to the state of Nebraska and beyond.
You will hear much more about Our Bold Path Forward in the weeks ahead — in your college, in your unit, and in the work itself. What I want you to know now is that this framework belongs to you and the people who built it.
Every person and every interaction matters.
One theme surfaced repeatedly as we co-created the framework, and it did not come from leadership. It came from you.
Every person and every interaction matters. This mantra emerged from the N2025 strategic plan, and our community made clear it was not simply a chapter to be closed. Today, we carry it forward as the ethos at the heart of Our Bold Path Forward.
I want to be precise about what it means, because it is easy to hear as a tagline. It is an instruction, and it is demanding.
It means the advisor who notices a student has gone quiet is doing central work, not peripheral work. It means the person who answers the phone in an office on a Tuesday afternoon is, for that caller, the entire University of Nebraska–Lincoln. It means the graduate student teaching her first section and the custodian who keeps a building running are both part of how a discovery eventually gets made. A university’s reputation is built by thousands of small exchanges that no one records.
That belief is also, I think, our best answer to a national conversation about whether institutions like ours still deserve public confidence. We will not restore trust with a statement. We will restore it the way it was earned in the first place — one student, one experiment, and one interaction at a time.
To the year ahead.
We begin this year with real momentum.
Earlier in 2026, we celebrated the largest graduating class in the history of this university — 3,885 degrees, awarded to graduates from 61 countries, 45 states and the District of Columbia, and more than 230 Nebraska communities. Over the past decade, research expenditures across UNL, the University of Nebraska Medical Center, and the system’s Office of the President have grown 57.5 percent, reaching $657 million in fiscal year 2024. And for the eighth consecutive year, the University of Nebraska system ranks among the world’s top 100 academic institutions for U.S. utility patents — most recently at No. 49.
None of that happened on its own. It happened because of the people reading this message.
To our new students: ask for help earlier than you think you need it. The people here want you to succeed, and almost every one of them was once exactly where you are. Join something. Try the thing you might be bad at. This is the rare stretch of life where failing at something is part of the design.
To our new faculty and staff: you have arrived at a moment when the direction is set but the work of getting there is wide open. You can shape this. Please do.
And to everyone returning: thank you. You have carried this university through several hard years with a steadiness that has not always been visible from outside, and it is the reason we have something worth building on.
We are Nebraska’s university. That is a serious inheritance in a serious year. Let’s be worthy of it.
There truly is no place like Nebraska. Welcome, and welcome back.
Go Big Red!
Katherine S. Ankerson
Interim Chancellor, University of Nebraska–Lincoln