Back to School

To: The W&L Campus Community
From: President Will Dudley
Date: Sept. 3, 2025

Welcome to the start of the 2025-26 academic year. This is my favorite season on campus, when the slower pace of summer gives way to the energy of arriving students, and faculty and staff eagerly anticipate the coming term. Law school classes started last week, with a cohort of 131 entering students who boast the strongest academic credentials in our history.  499 first-year undergraduates have just completed their orientation and will set foot in W&L classes for the first time tomorrow.

We formally kick off the academic year with Convocation this evening. Alexandra Brown, Fletcher Otey Thomas Professor of Bible, will be the featured speaker. I hope you will join us for the ceremony at 5:30 p.m., with dinner to follow on Cannan Green.

Those of you returning after time away this summer will notice some significant changes to campus, including the opening of the new facility for the Williams School of Commerce, Economics, and Politics on Washington Street and the Lindley Center for Student Wellness on East Denny Circle. These mark W&L’s first new academic building since the debut of Wilson Hall in 2005 and first-ever dedicated student health center. Both of these projects, which will make meaningful differences for our students and faculty, have been made possible through our capital campaign. We celebrated the public launch of “Leading Lives of Consequence” last October, and to date, we have raised more than $550 million from nearly 23,000 alumni, parents, and friends toward our $650 million goal.

Over the next two years, we will continue to make progress on the remaining initiatives outlined in our Strategic Plan, including support for interdisciplinary teaching and learning; funding for student internships, research, and study abroad; expansion of the Science Center and performing arts rehearsal spaces; a new Admissions, Financial Aid, and Conference center; a new Institutional History Museum; and a softball team. We will also complete renovations to the golf course at the Lexington Golf and Country Club, which serves our varsity men’s and women’s golf teams as well as our physical education programs.

We are moving ahead with our campus infrastructure upgrades, which will make our heating systems more efficient and sustainable and will ultimately allow us to eliminate fossil fuels from our operations. Pipe replacement began this month in three zones:  along Washington Street from Gaines Hall to the Elrod Commons tunnel entrance, in the tunnel itself, and between Graham Lees and Cannan Green. Washington Street is expected to be closed to traffic through November, and this phase of the project should be complete by May.

We welcomed several individuals into campus leadership roles this summer. Paul Youngman is serving as interim dean of the College this year while the search for a new dean takes place. Drew Hess, professor of business administration, has stepped into the role of interim associate provost. Also new in their roles are James Lambert, director of lifelong learning; Alex Rabar, chief public safety officer; and Annie Robinson, director of student counseling.

Lucas Morel, the John K. Boardman Jr. Professor of Politics, kicked off the university’s “Liberating Ideas” initiative — which is dedicated to promoting intellectual pluralism by fostering independent thinking and civil discourse — during Fall Academy by hosting a discussion with two distinguished legal experts on the recent Supreme Court ruling on freedom of religion and public education.  He also welcomed our incoming first-year students at an orientation program facilitated by the College Debates and Discourse Alliance. Liberating Ideas programs will continue throughout the year, including a Constitution Day speaker on September 18 and a series of faculty cohort dinners.

The Harte Center for Teaching and Learning is leading our efforts to explore the possibilities and pitfalls of artificial intelligence in the academy. I encourage you to visit the PLAI Lab (Prompting, Learning and Artificial Intelligence), a dedicated Harte Center space where students, faculty, and staff can develop AI literacy skills, and to take advantage of AcademicAI, the Harte Center’s collection of resources for understanding and evaluating the implications of AI in academic settings. The inaugural PLAI Summit on the future of AI will take place on September 19, with a full day of programming and discussion, featuring scholars, technologists, and industry leaders exploring how artificial intelligence can extend and enhance, rather than replace, human capability.

Looking to the year ahead, I am grateful, as always, for everything you do to make this an exceptional community in which to live, teach, study, and work. My overarching goals, every year, are to provide the best possible education we can for our students, while constantly striving to make the university even better. Our mission matters, and each of you contributes to it.

I wish you an outstanding fall term and look forward to seeing you at Convocation this evening.