The Dean's Letter

August 26, 2024

Welcome and Looking Ahead

Dear AAP community —

As we begin a new semester and academic year, I want to take a moment to welcome our newest faculty, students, and staff to AAP — and welcome back all of you who are returning this fall. I hope the past few months afforded everyone time to rest and restore.

As many of you may know, this July, we saw a significant transition in university leadership as Interim President Michael Kotlikoff began his term and former Cornell President Martha Pollack retired after over seven years in her role. In President Kotlikoff's first message, "Moving Cornell Forward Together," he recalled some of the deepest roots of Cornell's academic mission, namely, our shared "belief in the power of education to bridge division, transcend boundaries, and advance societies." These pursuits require a collective commitment to open inquiry, respect for difference, and a shared understanding of the inextricable relationship between freedom and responsibility. 

At AAP, our classrooms, studios, labs, and commons are spaces for teaching, learning, discovery, and the production of new knowledge. As a college and community, we explore ideas, embrace a broad spectrum of perspectives, advance informed discourse, and seek different modes of creative and critical expression — enacting our collective care for one another and the world we share; making all we do every day not only possible, but meaningful.

The semester ahead is full of open invitations and opportunities to come together within and across our disciplines to inquire, engage, think, make, and do — and, to carry some of our most enduring values forward as we continue to create new possibilities that further AAP's collective mission to imagine and build better worlds, and to practice hopeful futures that — as ever, begin today.

Sincerely,
Meejin