A Letter from Dr. Karen Riley

Good morning Regis:

Welcome back! I hope that you all had a restful and rejuvenating holiday and were able to truly enjoy the gift of time with family and friends. 

We have not had a Provost Digest for the past couple of weeks and a lot has happened during that time. We all received the much-awaited announcement of our new president, Dr. Salvador Aceves. He has an impressive background in higher education and a long history in Jesuit education. He also has a deep understanding of Regis and will be able to move forward quickly. He brings both experience and thoughtfulness to the role while centering our Jesuit values. Salvador is completely dedicated to the success of Regis University and his stated goals are what we need!  I want to publicly congratulate Salvador and look forward to working with him.

I also want to take a moment to publicly thank our Interim President Cody Teets. An interim role is, at its core, service. Service to the community, service to the students, faculty and staff, service to our university, and most importantly service to our mission. It is a role that is designed to be temporary. Cody brought an openness and a curiosity to the office of the president that allowed us to rethink and reexamine our processes. These things will live on well past her tenure. She cares deeply for Regis and that showed through her actions. I want to personally thank her for all of her work and for her unwavering support for Regis University.

Congratulations to the Clinical Mental Health Counseling faculty and staff who recently had a Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP) site visit. The site visit team members were extremely complimentary of the program, faculty, staff and students. We will receive the official report following the July CACREP board meeting. A special thanks to the RHCHP team and Dr. Megan Murphy for her leadership. Well done!!

We convened the search committee for the new Dean of Dayton Memorial Library. Thank you to the members of the committee, the faculty and staff of the library, and the members of the Regis community who provided their thoughts about the future of the library. I also want to thank Dr. Mark Reinking for serving as the chair of the search committee.

We also had a great retreat regarding research at Regis. The group discussed our current culture, barriers to success, ideas for moving forward and goals for the future. I want to publicly thank this group: Hugo Bergier, Mike Busch, Meghan Cohen, Brian Drwecki, Ashley Fricks-Gleason, Fred Gray, Micah Harrold, Doug Hart, Jeff Hemmes, Amy Hezel, Stephanie James, Kim Kemp, Andy Littmann, Chris Malarkey, Ellyn Matthews, Rona McCall, Lynetta Mier, Linda Osterlund, Shari Plantz-Masters, Abby Schneider, Leticia Shea, and Alan Stark for their time, their ideas, their candor and their commitment. Again, I am so thankful to work with such dedicated and creative individuals. We will update all of you as we move forward. 

I want to thank everyone for their well wishes. It has truly been an honor to serve as your Provost and want to thank all of you who have been so supportive during my tenure at Regis. I have truly enjoyed the work and have been inspired by your passion and dedication. Our work together has been exciting, and I am confident it will continue to be fruitful long into the future. Regis is poised to move in a forward direction, and I wish nothing but great things for this special organization.

My position at Slippery Rock starts July 1, 2023, and I will be working with our new president, Dr. Salvador Aceves, and the rest of the leadership teams to ensure that we do not lose momentum during these next few months and that we have a smooth transition. I will continue to work, as I have throughout my time at Regis, as hard as I can on behalf of this university. A special note of thanks to the deans, faculty and staff within and across academic affairs. You are an impressive group, and it has truly been an honor to work alongside of you.

Karen Riley