Good morning. Osiyo nigad. Marcia, thank you for that incredibly generous and kind introduction, and thanks to each of you for giving us the gift of your time and your presence today.
This is such an incredible full circle moment for me, and I’d like to begin with gratitude. Ulahelajadi.
I have with me today two of my best men. My husband, Lonnie Beard, a retired law professor and a wonderful partner in both the calm and the whirlwind moments in life. And my brother Scott Leeds, a fellow TU alum who lives in midtown Tulsa.
To the entire Board of Trustees and especially to the Chair Marcia MacLeod, thank you for placing your trust and confidence in me. Thank you for ensuring such a professional, thorough and important search process. I appreciate your long-term devotion and passion for this institution. With countless hours away from your families, and on top of your important day jobs, you have endured the grind, the stress and the criticism that naturally comes with the awesome responsibility you carry for us. I am so grateful for your investment in the future of this institution for our students.
To Co-Chairs David Harris and Jana Shoulders and the full search committee including faculty, staff, students and alumni, I appreciate all that I learned from you during this process. You have been exceedingly kind and patient but also steadfast and rigorous. Your love for this institution is apparent, and I look forward to working with each of you.
And to Interim President Rick Dickson: When we first met, I knew I had found a kindred spirit that I could easily work with in this transition. Thank you for stepping up for our alma mater on so many occasions.
Finally, my sincere thanks to my colleagues at Arizona State University where I am currently in my sixth year. I intended to stay much longer, before eventually coming back home to Oklahoma.
The University of Tulsa is the one and only place that could have changed that trajectory.
Since an early age, sports have had a profound impact on my life, opening unimaginable doors, conditioning my mental and physical stamina and giving me the confidence to navigate well beyond my comfort zone. I was a two-sport NCAA college athlete, so I am naturally drawn to a campus with such a high percentage of student-athletes in the student body and in the alumni base.
So, please indulge me in just one sports metaphor when I say that I have spent a lifetime maturing and training for this moment, and I’m prepared to be your clutch player.
This university has given my family so much: Our first college degree when my brother Scott range the bell. My law degree, where TU’s national reputation in Indian Law and energy and natural resources launched my career in a distinctively Tulsa way.
Professors like Judy Royster, Bill Rice and Vicki Limas had a profound impact on my life, just as our current students are being guided by their mentors on this campus, toward experiences and accomplishments beyond their wildest dreams.
It’s a supreme honor to be in a position to pay it forward by helping to steward this great university – not just back to it’s finest moment but forward to a destiny yet to be fully realized.
Understanding, reconciling and learning from our history will empower our future and enable us all to grow and prosper together – not in spite of all the complexity that is Tulsa but precisely because of it.
TU’s first origin story is a boarding school for Indian girls here on the Muscogee (Creek) Nation reservation. And while similar in some aspects to the contemporary boarding school experiences across the United States at that time, the school was unique and offered comparatively more positive experiences because many of the students were able to maintain their community identities and family ties thanks to the proximity to and participation of, the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and its people. Some of those Mvskoke family values are manifesting around us here today. The modern University of Tulsa is a place where students are treated like they are a part of a small family, whether they are coming to us from down the street or from around the globe.
Although I’ve never heard anyone else describe it in this way, TU’s second origin story was Oklahoma’s first successful public-private partnership. After statehood, Tulsa businessmen and civic leaders courted the boarding-school-turned-Kendall College to move from my hometown of Muskogee to Tulsa in order to establish a prestigious educational institution to match the rapid economic growth on the horizon.
As Tulsa transformed from small town into the then Oil Capital of the World, Tulsa invested in this university as a way to boost the city’s reputation. It was also expected that The University of Tulsa would advance both the economic and cultural development of the region in ways only universities can.
The leaders of Tulsa, the city, and Tulsa, the university community, were ahead of their time in understanding that a thriving city requires a thriving university, and a robust university requires a robust city.
There is yet a third founding of The University of Tulsa that I can clearly see on the horizon. And it’s the perfect combination of origin story number one and origin story number two, but it’s rebranded and re-energized for this modern moment.
We have fantastic faculty, staff and students at this university. We have fantastic business, local and community leaders in Tulsa and the surrounding areas, including tribal leadership. We have great ideas, libraries, museums, parks and a thriving art, film and literary synergy. And we are a private research university appropriately missioned for the public good.
The low hanging fruit in this is for each of us to envision and commit to working with each other, in innovative and out of the box ways, with the same clarity of mission that drove our past leaders to instinctually understand that Tulsa was incomplete without a strong University of Tulsa.
And that we do so with the same enthusiasm that has made this campus well-known as a place that is welcoming to everyone.
I am not naive to presume that the path that lies ahead will be an easy one. The future presents challenging times for higher education and an economy that will see great workforce upheaval due to new technologies.
We will need to be agile to withstand pressures that are beyond our control. What we DO control is how we choose to respond. And how we choose to lead. And how we accelerate our momentum.
The universities that will survive and thrive this next wave will do so because they are nimble and innovative and bold in their imagination and in the partnerships they create. TU’s small size and that fact that we are a private university will give The University of Tulsa and the City of Tulsa a competitive advantage to think differently together.
Knowing that most of your backgrounds match mine to some extent, we are collectively a gritty, hard working, resilient bunch of people who are natural optimists and pragmatists in life and in leadership.
We know what we need to do. We know where we need to go. And we are ready to do this together.
I look forward to being a fierce champion of our faculty and all of the bold minds on this campus, so that we can ensure an environment of discovery and creativity, while teaching our students not what to think, but how to think critically.
It’s really great to be back home and I look forward to getting to know each of you. Wado. Thank you.