Good evening. This is an exciting time of year, and I know my faculty colleagues are looking forward to the start of classes on Monday morning. The reciprocity we experience in the classroom with our students is always the best part of our fall semester.

In many ways, it’s been an eventful summer at COD, and today and yesterday my faculty colleagues have expressed their worries and concerns in various ways and at various volumes. We read enrollment reports, and we speculate about cause and effect. We watch our sections climb in headcount and hope our classes run as scheduled. We ask questions about the summer search for the new provost and the intricacies of Pathways developments over the summer. We worry about the insurance update and we fret about the inconvenient Blackboard shut down. We look at the ongoing squabbling in Springfield and the looming fall elections, and we wonder what it means for our students and for higher education. And beyond our district and our state, we look at what my outstanding colleague Tom Carter referred to as “dark times” in his moving speech on stage yesterday at Inservice, and we wonder how we can help our campus can become a safe and equitable place that changes people’s lives.

And yet, we must try to make progress on these issues; as Professor Carter put it, “we are morally required to try to make the world a better place.” As educators, we care about the common good and we have faith in our ability to contribute to it through the classes that we teach. I am always proud of my faculty colleagues who speak up about their concerns, whose ideas and experiences can lead to better decisions at COD when it comes to these worrisome issues. Sometimes, it is hard to have faith that progress might be made, but we keep at it, and we will come in Monday morning ready to do good work.