Dear Faculty Colleagues,

Welcome back! I hope that you enjoyed a restful and restorative winter break and Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday weekend and are excited to embark on the Spring 2021 semester.

As we approach the one-year mark of the COVID-19 pandemic — and the resultant shift that has changed so much of how we do our work as an institution of higher education — it would be easy to focus on how things didn’t go as we initially planned for 2020. However, looking back at the past year and especially the tumultuous past few weeks in our nation, I am reminded of the unique role we as educators and scholars have in moving our society forward. Indeed, what stands out to me are not the hurdles we have faced as institutions of higher education but the many collective successes we celebrated despite challenging circumstances. UTSA did experience numerous successes in 2020, not the least of which are these record highs we reached in support of our destinations to be a Model for Student Success and Great Public Research University:

• Student enrollment reached 34,742, up 6.6% from Fall 2019.
• First-year retention rate hit 80% — a nationally recognized benchmark.
• 7,415 undergraduate and graduate degrees were awarded in 2019-2020, a 22% increase from just three years prior.
• Four-year graduation rate improved to 34% (up from 31% in 2019); six-year graduation rate continued to exceed 50%.
• Total research expenditures increased to $134 million, a 66% increase from FY 2019.

Of course, your efforts were fundamental to these collective successes. On behalf of university leadership, I thank you … for pivoting, for innovating, for serving our students and ultimately for rising to the challenge to ensure UTSA advances its mission.

A particularly gratifying recognition of our efforts came this fall as UTSA was awarded the prestigious Seal of Excelencia by Excelencia in Education — the comprehensive certification recognizing our commitment to and achievements in accelerating Latino student success. Higher education plays a key role in simultaneously advancing the social mobility of individuals and promoting stability and prosperity of our communities, and as a premier Hispanic-Serving Institution, UTSA can play an even larger role in addressing inequality and injustice through our longstanding efforts to advance educational attainment for students from underrepresented groups. Further underscoring this commitment, this fall we launched the Equity Advocacy Initiative with an intentional focus to create truly inclusive learning environments where all UTSA students will thrive now and be well prepared for their bold futures after college. Stay tuned for an update on our progress.

We also celebrate the “birthday” of the College for Health, Community and Policy under the direction of inaugural dean Lynne Cossman. 2021 will bring another “new” college to UTSA, as the Integrated Design Initiative task force nears completion of its work to unite the Colleges of Engineering and of Architecture, Construction and Planning under one new college home. More information will be forthcoming on the name for the combined college and timeline for implementation!

At the tail end of 2020, construction began on the downtown building for our School of Data Science, which serves as the keystone of our efforts in democratizing digital fluency for our students as part of our focus on career readiness. Faculty in diverse disciplines are participating in the Gen AI program through our partnership with MITRE to incorporate AI, big data analytics and data visualization in classrooms across campus so that all UTSA students are familiar with these capabilities. More than 1,200 students have participated in Gen AI lessons to date, with another 1,000 expected to take part this semester. If you are interested in getting involved, be sure to reach out the SDS Interim Academic Director Jianwei Niu for support.

2020 also marked the one-year anniversary of UTSA’s joining the Adobe Creative Campus program, which also supported our shift to remote learning last spring: Academic Innovation reported a 15% uptick in Adobe Creative Cloud usage after classes moved online in March, and 53% of faculty survey respondents use Adobe products in their classes. Remember that Creative Cloud is available to all UTSA faculty, staff and students at no cost on all their devices by logging into ASAP and clicking on Software Downloads. Nothing spreads digital fluency more widely than free software tools to explore!

Looking ahead to summer and fall, the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines brings great promise for an eventual return to more extensive campus activities. Of course, when exactly faculty, staff and students can conduct more academic activities on campus depends largely on vaccine availability.

With consultation by academic leadership and to move forward confidently in our planning, UTSA will hold Summer 2021 classes primarily online, like Fall ’19 and Spring ’20. With 100% of courses being offered only online in Summer 2020, more UTSA students took advantage of the summer course offerings, resulting in our highest summer enrollment ever, up almost 20% from Summer 2019. Accessible and flexible online course delivery in summer is critical to support students who want to stay on track with their degree plans while pursuing other opportunities: study abroad, summer internships and other work opportunities, or simply returning to their hometowns.

One bright spot of the pandemic is the innovative pedagogy and creative instructional practices that have been spawned — out of necessity — which now can be built upon and expanded as we plan for substantially more face-to-face learning in our Fall 2021 courses. As an example, our students appreciate and benefit from being able to search and re-watch faculty lectures in Panopto — with 24/7 access to these materials that deepen their learning and engagement. Balancing that innovation with strong faculty-student engagement — in addition to robust support from the colleges and teaching and learning specialists in Academic Innovation — will be key to further advancing course learning outcomes and instructional goals. A planning group now is working on the framework for course modalities for Fall 2021, which will include greater flexibility to support continued innovation. Again, we will be following the pandemic situation carefully as it continues to unfold and will have ongoing campus community discussions with academic leadership throughout the spring.

As President Eighmy shared in his message to campus yesterday, I encourage you to commence this new semester mindful or our mission and core values, and of the great things that we can continue to accomplish as a dedicated community of learners and scholars.  As always, I thank you for the work you do every day to prepare our students for success here at UTSA and in charting their bold futures! I welcome your ideas on these and other topics — please feel free to reach out to provost@utsa.edu to share your thoughts with me.

Kimberly Andrews Espy, Ph.D.
Peter T. Flawn Distinguished Professor
Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs