President Daisy's Message to the College Community

February 13, 2012

Dear Colleagues and Fellow Members of the COM-FSM Community, I want to express to you my deepest thanks for the extraordinary welcome received, not just upon my arrival at the airport but throughout the entire first week. The investiture ceremony and the reception last Monday provided us with a valuable opportunity to come together as a community not only to begin a new relationship with one another, but to also renew our commitment to the college’s mission and its core values.

This past week, I began to meet with so many of you. Please know that there are many more people with whom I wish to meet, both at the National Campus and at each of the States’ Campuses, and these meetings will continue. For those with whom I have already met please know that I appreciate the time you have given from your busy schedules to attend these meetings. These meetings and your willingness to candidly share your thoughts, ideas, and concerns are serving me well as I listen and learn more about the college and its strengths and areas of need. I have much to learn from all of you. It is with gratitude that I accept the many expressions of support, commitment and collaboration you have offered.

I am cognizant that all of your candor, support, commitment and collaboration will be needed if I am to effectively, efficiently and successfully serve you as president. Please be assured that I have the heart, the drive, and the commitment to this learning community and promise my best efforts to lead this community with you. As I said in my remarks on Monday, only together can we successfully confront our challenges and create our future.

So, together let us move forward. Let us recognize that each of us has special gifts and talents, and while each of us may not possess all of them, collectively we do. Collectively, we will be a positive force for the assessments we will need to make, the subsequent data informed decisions, and the implementation of change to effectuate strengthening and ensuring the legacy of COM-FSM. Each of you is asked to contribute all of your gifts and talents to this special place.

At this time I also ask for your patience, as I am new to this learning community and have so much more to learn about the college I will likely stumble from time to time. I also ask for your patience with one another, while we all work together to address our issues we may have differing ideas about how we get there. As we all have the college’s best interest at heart, we should continue to be respectful of each other realizing that we may have disagreements from time to time.

In the conversations I have had with you, I have shared that while I cannot change the past I will work to improve the ways in which we will move forward, and I ask your help in doing that. Through the thoughtful discussions we have had so far, we recognize that as an institution of higher learning we have, many strengths, and many areas in which we need improvement. None of us is perfect and so in that regard we are not unlike other colleges and universities. Yet, like other colleges and universities, we must hold ourselves accountable to do more than try to improve rather we must hold ourselves accountable and provide a wide range of evidence which documents improvement and the robust culture of assessment that underlies it and exists within the rich tapestry that is the COM-FSM. I look forward to continuing to meet all of the members of this learning community across the entire college. I look forward to listening and learning from you.

I look forward with pride and optimism to successfully serving you as president.

Warm regards,

Joseph M. Daisy, Ed.D., President