Messages

Dear Faculty, Students, and Staff, This summer, I hosted a small group of high school students from the Johns Hopkins Summer Jobs Program in my office, offering cookies and lemonade as, with typical teenage reserve, they shared stories about their internships and future ambitions. When they grew quiet, I asked what they found to be most surprising about Johns Hopkins. Without missing a beat, Jevaugh, a rising sophomore...

Dear Johns Hopkins community: In recent years, we—along with other colleges and universities across the country—have confronted and addressed a number of complex issues surrounding sexual assault and the steps we must take to protect our campuses. As a community, we have worked to determine how best to prevent sexual misconduct of all kinds. We have enlisted the help of experts in our response to incidents and...

Dear Faculty, Students and Staff:Ten goals. Four priorities. Conversations with more than 1,000 members of the Johns Hopkins community across 10 divisions, culminating in one ambitious vision for our university through 2020. Since we officially launched the Ten by Twenty in 2013, the conversation about our university’s future has inspired progress toward our goals, illuminated the work yet to do, and ignited...

Dear Johns Hopkins Community, This is an exciting moment for innovation and entrepreneurship at research universities, especially Johns Hopkins. Discovery and entrepreneurial endeavor are converging in unprecedented ways. Investigators are moving more easily along a spectrum between basic and applied research, and urban universities like ours are increasingly playing a role as igniters of economic growth...

Dear Faculty, Staff, and Students: Over the last year, the president, provost, and deans and directors of the university’s divisions have been working on an initiative designed to support the research and creative professional activities of our colleagues. We recognize, of course, the many challenges our colleagues face in securing support for their endeavors in an environment of declining federal research...

Dear Students, Faculty and Staff:, Student alcohol abuse – particularly “binge drinking” – has long stood as a critical challenge on college campuses, including our own. Its impacts are far-reaching, affecting not only the health, safety and academic success of our students, but also the overall quality of campus life. Last year, at the invitation of state leaders, Chancellor William E. Kirwan of the University...

Dear Faculty, Students and Staff, It has been more than two years since a universitywide committee began working on a comprehensive self-study of Johns Hopkins in preparation for its decennial reaccreditation evaluation. We are delighted to share the final report, a sweeping work that tells the story of one integrated university marshaling its distributed strengths to advance a common mission of discovery, research...

Dear Members of the Johns Hopkins Community, More than 20 years ago, a team of Johns Hopkins University researchers participated in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, an effort to assemble a photographic record of the night sky. The image data collected over the next eight years numbered hundreds of millions of objects and dwarfed the typical volume of data collected at that time. It was the beginning of a new era of scientific...

Dear Faculty, Students and Staff, This summer, I was touched by two acts of kindness by Johns Hopkins employees – not as a president, but as a father and spouse. Let me explain. In the first instance, my daughter, Ally, was driving around campus in her grandfather’s hand-me-down car when she misjudged a turn, hit the curb and blew a tire. As Ally cursed her bad luck – not for blowing the tire but for forgetting to charge...

Dear Faculty, Staff, and Students: From its earliest days, Johns Hopkins has been a place of remarkable, organic collaboration. The driving vision of our scholars and the commitment of our staff historically have lifted our work above and across disciplinary silos. At times, though – to outsiders and perhaps even to ourselves – we don’t project a shared identity or, more important, a shared set of values. That’s...