With deep appreciation and immense gratitude, farewell

Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin offers a parting note as the academic year and her time at UW-Madison comes to a close.

A look back at the year and a glimpse ahead with Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin and incoming interim Chancellor Eric Wilcots.

Dear UW-Madison community,

As my time as chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison comes to a close this week, I am filled with gratitude, affection, and more than a little wistfulness.

I arrived in Wisconsin already knowing that UW-Madison was one of the world's great public universities. What I could not have fully anticipated was just how quickly this place - and its people - would become part of my heart and part of who I am.

Serving as your chancellor has been one of the greatest privileges of my life. It has also been one of the most demanding, energizing, humbling and joyful experiences I have ever had. Great public universities ask us to hold onto many things at once: excellence and access, tradition and change, freedom and responsibility, ambition and humility, fierce disagreement and shared purpose.

At its best, UW-Madison meets these demands with a spirit that is unmistakably its own. It brings together people who care deeply, debate vigorously, imagine boldly and work hard. It is serious without being pompous, ambitious without losing its sense of humor, and rooted in Wisconsin while reaching everywhere.

Over the years, I have seen our distinctive spirit across campus, throughout Wisconsin, and far beyond.

I have seen it in students deeply engaged with their learning and with one another. I have seen it in faculty asking big questions, sifting and winnowing, driven by both curiosity and the Wisconsin Idea to expand the boundaries of what we know and who we serve. I have seen it when our instructors bring both rigor and humanity to their teaching, in FIGs and capstones and everywhere in between. I have seen it in staff whose commitment, professionalism and care make this university work every day, in ways sometimes unseen and underrecognized.

I have seen it in the remarkable range of discovery that happens here, from neutrino detection and fusion research to theranostics; from dairy science and agricultural innovation to data science; and from the arts and humanities to groundbreaking work in education, social science, law, engineering, medicine and so much more.

And I have seen it in smaller, more personal moments that I will carry with me: the glory of the Terrace on a summer evening; the energy of Camp Randall on a Saturday afternoon; the sound of the marching band playing "Varsity"; wading in a bog at our cranberry research station; the particular joy of Babcock ice cream; and the delighted squeals of neighborhood children seeing Bucky live and in person at Olin House on Halloween.

Those moments matter. They are not incidental to the life of our university. They are part of what makes UW-Madison excellent and beloved.

Together, we expanded access and affordability for Wisconsin students. We launched RISE to strengthen communities of scholarship around some of the most consequential challenges of our time. We advanced work in AI, sustainability, healthspan, entrepreneurship and civic dialogue. And we opened new doors to collaboration across disciplines, deepening UW-Madison's capacity to serve Wisconsin and the world.

We have also practiced, in imperfect but important ways, the habits that universities and democracies both require: listening carefully, disagreeing honestly, engaging across difference, and continuing to seek common purpose even when we do not see every issue the same way.

While serving our mission and living our values, we have faced real tests: significant fiscal pressures, political crosscurrents, threats to research funding, moments of conflict and strain, and the daily complexities of a large public university in a time of national uncertainty. In such moments, easy answers are rare. But what I will remember most is how many people continued to engage the work with seriousness, creativity, conviction and care, returning again and again to the question that matters most: how best to serve this university, our students, our state and the public good.

UW-Madison has made me more hopeful about what public higher education can still mean in America. It has reminded me that institutions endure not because they are perfect, but because generation after generation of people choose to believe in them, improve them, argue with them, and do the day-to-day hard work of making them better.

The university welcomed my husband, Joshua, and me - and even our dog, Plato, who saw snow here for the first time - with warmth, generosity and occasional healthy skepticism. You challenged me, taught me, surprised me and inspired me. You reminded me, again and again, why higher education matters so profoundly and why UW-Madison is extraordinary.

I will miss this place, and so many of you, enormously.

Thank you for the privilege of serving as your chancellor. I leave with deep appreciation, immense gratitude and abiding confidence in what lies ahead for this great university.

I will always be cheering for UW-Madison.

On, Wisconsin.

Jennifer L. Mnookin

Chancellor, University of Wisconsin-Madison