Dear Unity College Enterprise Colleagues,

As we complete the Fall One term in Distance Education and Hybrid Learning, I want to say thank you for your hard work and dedication to Unity College.  We have been through a lot as a team in the last six months and I know it has not been easy.  Your willingness to try something new and advance the mission of America’s Environmental College has been a bright spot in the chaos that surrounds us at Unity and for our industry as a whole. 

Over the last couple of years we have been slowly changing the way we work and the tempo at which we work, as we build out the Enterprise Model.  This spring and summer those changes have been accelerated at a pace that even I had not anticipated.  We are now fully working within a term model – five weeks for undergraduate and eight weeks for graduate. 

For those of us who are accustomed to the traditional higher education cadence this has been a challenge, but one this team has stepped up to and embraced.  It has been a pleasure to watch you stretch your professional skills, learn new ones and lean into the new model.  I know change is hard, especially when the world around us is so uncertain but sometimes change is the only option and you have to let your faith be bigger than your fear. 

As we move through the 2020-21 fiscal year, we are going to continue building out the Enterprise Model which includes even more changes to the way we work.  We are going to become a more integrated team that can lean on each other, work with each other and ultimately take collective responsibility for our successes and failures.  We will be measured on the quality and results of our efforts not just by our time spent on a task.  We will take pride in the results of our innovation accepting that there may be risks as well as rewards.  The future depends on what each and everyoneof us does every day. Gloria Steinem.

Some may ask, why are we continuing to buildout the Enterprise Model?  The answer is because higher education is changing, and we need to be on the forefront of that change.  It is moving from us telling students “this is what we offer, would you like that?” to students saying, “this is what I need, do you offer that?”. Article after article and study after study show that we as an industry need to change and embrace technology to make education more affordable, accessible, flexible and valuable and those who don’t change are going to cease to exist.

As we close the books on our Fall One term, it is important that we acknowledge how far we have come as an institution and how many tasks we have yet to complete.  This team is second to none and your hard work and dedication will be what makes America’s Environmental College survive today and thrive in the future.  Thank you and congratulations on completing the first term of the new model.

I hope to have a meeting soon to discuss the implementation of the Path forward, with the continued buildout and diversification of our audience first approach!

In Unity,

Dr. Melik Peter Khoury
President, Unity College