Dear Vanderbilt community,
Welcome to the 2024–25 academic year!
As we gather this fall, we are continuing our ambitious journey toward making Vanderbilt the great university of the 21st century. Together, we are doing remarkable things: transformative education, pathbreaking research, creating knowledge and developing solutions to some of society’s most pressing challenges.
We do all of this according to the time-tested tenets of The Vanderbilt Way. And we do so grounded in our shared values and common purpose.
Making all this possible is our commitment to radical collaboration—to reaching across differences of all kinds to find the common ground where progress can happen.
As we gather this fall, it is paramount that we do so in a spirit of unity and mutual respect: Our nation remains politically polarized. World events continue to inflame passions. And we are just a few months away from a contentious presidential election. Amid these pressures, it is essential that we resist division.
Unity does not mean we have to agree on every issue or idea. At a university, of all places, we welcome and encourage diverging viewpoints and the challenging of conventional wisdom. But unity demands that we voice our opinions and engage in debate with respect—for facts, for one another and for the university as a place held sacred for learning, discovery and growth. It requires that we hold our community and our common purpose as the greater good.
To encourage and support respectful and constructive dialogue and debate, we are expanding our Dialogue Vanderbilt initiative. We will host more speakers with differing viewpoints, offer more opportunities for you to engage in structured conversation and debate, and provide more support for having challenging conversations.
But in the end, we are counting on you. We are asking you to honor our Community Creed and our university values. We are asking you to treat those you disagree with not as adversaries, but as members of one community on the same path to knowledge and understanding, with all the generosity, open-mindedness and courage that requires. We are asking you to follow the rules and guidelines in the Student Handbook. We are asking you to demonstrate what is possible when a community reaches across its differences to accomplish great and meaningful things.
Let’s move into this promising new semester in that spirit. Let’s show the world how it’s done. Let’s dare to grow—together.
Sincerely,
Daniel Diermeier
Chancellor
