THE LAST YEAR HAS FLOWN BY with the start of the Fall semester giving way to a chilly winter, and now the blooms up and down Drury Lane warm our hearts. The 2024-2025 academic year is over, and what a year it has been. Everywhere you look there is excellence all around: an exciting new enrollment commitment with the Drury Springfield Promise; a new skills transcript documenting all the market skills a Drury grad earns; student research awards, fellowships, and regional, national, and international honors galore, and another outstanding year for Panther student-athletes on the pitch, court, rink, field, mat, and everywhere else including the classroom. Our faculty and students continue to execute the Drury mission of personalized education, our 151-year tradition of making sure everyone is a name and never a number. Our dedicated staff keeps us operating morning, noon, and night, and our alums continue to excel across Missouri, the United States, and around the world.
One of my priorities has been getting Drury back to front and center in Springfield, the Ozarks, and beyond. The theme of my October inauguration was the connection between campus and community, Drury’s difference-making mixture of practical, professional, market, and life skills in the studio, lab, lecture hall, research space, community, and at the internship and work site. Our graduates in GO, Day, and Grad merge together into a single stream known as One Drury. As always, graduates tell our collective story better than anyone else can as they carry the Drury standard of modern skills and timeless interpersonal sensibilities to every community where they connect, bringing a little bit of our campus with them at every stop along the way. It is the Drury stories that connect us across campus and beyond, over time and era, and in a culture that values “a spirit of community, passionate about student success.”
These are unusual times in higher education, but the magic of the Drury mission and the soul of the university continues to flourish. Thanks to all of you who support Drury through your prayers, well wishes, time, talents, and treasure. When we all pull together, we become #OneDrury, an unstoppable force grounded in individual and collective excellence.
Believe in the work we do, and in each other.
Jeff Frederick, Ph.D.
