Letter from the President

There is a rhythm to running that has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. Early in the morning, I lace up my shoes and head out the door. Rain does not deter me, neither does snow, nor cold, nor darkness. I have run with my father, my son, my sister and my dogs. With each footfall, conversation flows from one topic to the next and like the run, you never know where the road might lead you. I have been injured while running, or more accurately, as a result of falling, and learned to pick myself up and run again. My father noticed his health was slipping during a run, and a year later, I grieved his death by running a marathon in his honor. For me, running has always been about two things — life and family.

In the last two years, life has changed. We wear masks, talk about vaccines and variants, isolation and quarantine, and spend more time avoiding the crowded spaces we used to inhabit. There are new threats to our existence both as people and as institutions. If you sit too long, it is easy to lose sight of a world that is still moving, step-by-step, from fall into winter. The pandemic has changed some things, but the seasons of life still come and go. Summer heat will eventually dissipate into the cool mornings of fall and the chill of winter, just as students who enroll in the fall will eventually walk away from us a few springs later.

As I write these words, we have just slipped past midterms, it is homecoming week, and the life of the college is in full flow. Some classes are online, but most of our faculty and students are meeting face-to-face. Football, cross-country, soccer, volleyball, bowling and archery are in full swing, while basketball is getting ready to lace up their shoes for the season opener. Medicine and optometry are preparing for their third block exams and some students are thinking more about residency applications than their current rotations. These are the moments of our run, of our lives, together. What began as a sprint in August, has transitioned into the marathon of our lives on this hilly campus we call home.

This issue of the UPIKE magazine highlights family. As usual, we will celebrate our successes, we will laugh together and occasionally weep together. Like most families, the UPIKE family is imperfect and life can be messy, but we always work to make both life and family better — we run together.

The future is impossible to know, just as the past is impossible to change. With each turn in this race we call life, we only have a few things we can influence; the things we carry, the direction we go and the family with whom we run.

Striving to serve,

Burton J. Webb, Ph.D. President