On November 1, 2016, the College of ACES at UIUC made history by welcoming the first woman to serve as Dean of the College, Kimberlee Kidwell.

Land grant colleges and the land grant mission were created by the Morrill Acts that established these universities in 1876 and 1890 and the Smith-Lever Act of 1914 that started funding cooperative extension. Society still benefits from the applied research and the public outreach that are the hallmarks of land grant universities, and we still worry about food production and rural livelihoods in the U.S. However, production systems have radically changed, our population has shifted from rural to urban areas, and now we also worry about environmental quality, resource stewardship, and extending quality of life and food security improvements from our now-wealthy nation to those which are still developing. State funding for universities has shrunk, as has funding for formal cooperative extension programs; programs like ours cannot rest on their laurels, but must find new reasons for people to invest in what we do.

Thus, Dean Kidwell is well positioned to lead the College of ACES at this time of change. She grew up in Danville, Illinois, earned her B.S. from UIUC itself, and had a successful career as a professor of Crop Science. Dean Kidwell understands production agriculture in Illinois and the land grant mission. However, she has also contributed to the scholarship of leadership, and thus understands how to make strategic plans that look forward rather than into the past. Additionally, she spent years working at Washington State University, gaining valuable perspective from a different part of the country on concerns about agriculture, natural resources, and human well being. These habits of thought and diverse perspectives can help us to think critically about how our College can serve the spirit of the land grant mission in this era.

Welcome, Dean Kidwell. The faculty of ACES look forward to working with you.

Robert Jones became Chancellor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign at the end of September. We owe gratitude to the Interim Chancellor before him, Barbara Wilson, who led our campus well through some challenging times. It is good, though, now to have stable leadership at the top. I am personally very excited about the directions in which we might go with his voice in our conversations. He is an outstanding scientist. He cares deeply about students (his comments at the first Faculty Senate meeting he attended were effusive tales of the students and alumni with whom he had met in his first weeks.) And he is the son of a sharecropper, bringing a new perspective and urgency to our discussion and efforts surrounding issues of diversity.

I’ll let Dr. Jones own words speak for him (these are excerpts from an October 3 email he sent to campus after two weeks on the job):

“It has everything to do with one day in a field in southwest Georgia when I was 9 years old. I was supposed to be picking cotton. Instead, I was distracted thinking how in the world this green plant could create this fluffy white ball. That was the day I started on the path to becoming an agronomist. … We need to find ways to make that story possible for everyone – no matter where they start, what their parents do … when questions around social equity and social justice are forcing fundamental reevaluations of everything from our admission policies to our investment strategies, we have an opportunity to demonstrate different paths forward.”

Yes, Dr. Jones. Yes, we do.