2 minute read
From the President's Desk
NEW YEAR, NEW HORIZONS
Happy New Year to our MBU family, and best wishes from Staunton for a healthy and prosperous start to 2022!
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As the page turns on 2021, I feel profoundly grateful for our close-knit community and how we continuously united to meet challenges and seek new opportunities these past months. This Mary Baldwin Magazine year-in-review issue chronicles many such stories. Together they exemplify the university’s unflagging commitment to its students — and the continued success of our mission to empower them to become agents of meaningful, inclusive change in their workplaces and communities.
Our cover story, for instance, showcases the student-centered work of the recently formed Coalition for Racial and Social Justice. It examines the group’s university-wide effort to transform MBU into a pinnacle of diversity, equity, and inclusion principles in action. Another feature celebrates the extraordinary dedication of alumni and donors to our students through philanthropy, and tracks the MBU Empowers Campaign as it enters an exciting new phase.
Much is on the horizon for the university in 2022. The coalition will continue to amplify its work around DEI. Exciting new partnerships will make an MBU education more accessible and affordable for countless students. Areas of focus include seamless transfers for community college graduates; boosted financial support for low-income high school students; and creating a pipeline for underserved urban communities. We are advancing a new structure for MBU Online, as we acknowledge that delivering our mission to online learners is a high priority.
MBU is also thinking of our alumni. We are rapidly expanding lifelong learning and credentialing programs to help them — and other adult learners — grow their careers and expertise. Planning is underway for the Women’s Leadership Symposium and Homecoming. Both will highlight avenues to help alumni experience MBU as their “university for life.”
I hope you will follow our progress on these and many more bold endeavors during the year ahead!
Pamela R. Fox, president
