October 01, 2020
Fall Letter from President Schutt
Read how faculty and staff have prepped for an active, connected, and engaged remote semester, along with what to look forward to in the spring.
Dear Forester Alumni, Parents, and Friends,
This year has been filled with challenges, and our world feels very different than it did just six months ago. Our strong Forester community remains a beacon of hope, however, as you will read throughout this newsletter.
Nearly 500 new students joined the College this fall, including almost 400 firstyear students and 98 transfer students. As always, they are academically talented and full of interesting experiences, and they hail from across the country and around the world.
The college experience for all of our students is quite different this fall. To protect the health and safety of students, faculty, and staff in this time of the coronavirus, we directed students to stay home and our faculty to teach all courses remotely. Faculty spent countless hours reorganizing and enriching their courses for online delivery, and we are very confident, as a result, that our students will have an exceptional educational experience.
We expect students to return to campus for the spring semester, which will begin February 1. Looking ahead to that time, nearly 200 students will actively participate in our new Health Professions Program (HPP) in collaboration with Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science. HPP students will prepare for careers across the healthcare spectrum, including medicine, pharmacy, physical therapy, and health care administration—just to name a few.
Students next spring will also see a lot of progress on the historic Brown Hall project. This renovation and expansion of College Hall, which some of you knew as Young Hall, will be well on its way to completion by the end of the summer 2021. The new Oppenheimer Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation will be another shining star next spring, and the Jean and Frank Mohr Field will be ready for varsity men’s and women’s lacrosse to begin in the fall of 2021.
You and your loved ones are in our thoughts this fall. We wish you continued health and safety as we all move ahead though this challenging time.
President Stephen D. Schutt