From the Provost

The foundational values and commitments guiding my team’s work

Cay Leytham-Powell — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 21:48:50 +0000

The foundational values and commitments guiding my team’s work Cay Leytham-Powell Thu, 06/18/2026 - 15:48

Ann Stevens

I chose to do this Perspectives series on the values I bring to leadership because, throughout my career, I have seen how easily values can be obscured by the projects, issues and external influences that accompany academic work in large public research universities. How and why we do our work matter as much as the work itself, and values are at the core of our how and why.

In my first Perspectives piece I discussed how academic freedom is foundational to my decision making. In my second piece, I explored how a commitment to partnership, clarity and facts over fear leads to a clearer leadership consensus that supports the progress of our academic mission. Here, I want to explore how five foundational, shared commitments (that also speak to some underlying values) guide my work with the academic affairs team.

These five commitments are:

Aligning our work with campus priorities
Being good financial stewards, but advocating for what we need
Assuming the best motivations of colleagues
Using our individual portfolio-specific knowledge with confidence and humility
Being a part of problem solving whenever possible

Underlying all five commitments is an important reminder: none of the five are at odds with holding one another, and others, accountable. That accountability is crucial to earning your confidence and that of our students, families, partners, donors, alumni and the public.

Collectively these commitments form the basis not only of work with my team, but of an important relationship with all of you—one built on a trust that my team and I are working hard to earn. We have work to do and a complicated latticework of problems to solve; but this work becomes more difficult when fundamental commitments are unspoken.

As I approach the end of my first year as provost, I am ready to move CU Boulder’s academic mission forward with my team, with the values I’ve addressed in earlier Perspectives and the commitments I’ve outlined here. I look forward to many more years working in partnership with all of you.

Thank you for welcoming me this past year and for all you are doing to advance our mission in Colorado, across the nation and throughout the world.

Ann Stevens

Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs

Part III of a series on leadership and values by Provost Ann Stevens.

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Partnership, clarity and commitment to facts over fear

Cay Leytham-Powell — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 21:44:34 +0000

Partnership, clarity and commitment to facts over fear Cay Leytham-Powell Thu, 04/23/2026 - 15:44

Ann Stevens

Part II of a three-part series by Provost Stevens on the values she brings to academic decision-making and leadership

Throughout this past year of Provost’s Conversations, I’ve heard a common theme: solutions to our challenges in higher education, whether logistical, resource-centered or philosophical do not work when they are dictated from above. I hear that, I agree, and I take that sentiment seriously.

This idea, like our current moment, calls for us to stay closely engaged with the challenges within academic and academic support units, grounded in how priorities are experienced by faculty, staff, students and others. It also calls for us to build a shared understanding of the details of our true challenges, what needs to change, what doesn’t, and how we move forward together to achieve our goals.

In this spirit, I approach decisions by listening first, working to build a common understanding and partnering with you to identify solutions that we carry out together. Sometimes, time or other exigencies will demand a compressed effort that may not cast as wide an input net as we’d all like. In other cases, requests for input will come earlier or later than some might prefer. Nevertheless, I will do my best to seek broad input at the right time and from the right groups.

A good example of this approach is the decision on the structure of our College of Arts and Sciences. To arrive at a key decision on the college’s structure, we first announced a date of decision, then I met with a variety of stakeholders for listening sessions: A&S central leadership, the deans of division, the Arts and Sciences Faculty Senate, and the chairs of divisional councils. At all points, we considered both existing aspirations and current realities (budgets, resources, enrollment trends, changing student wants and needs). I was honest with all constituents, they were honest with me, and in the end, we met our deadline and successfully unveiled the permanent A&S structure with a clear vision for the future.

This underscores what is for me a basic commitment: to make decisions guided by facts, not by perceptions and never by fear. This is one of the real challenges of collaborative leadership. Even in our community of research and scholarship, and in times where more information than we can process comes at us every day, perceptions can overcome facts. People hold on to long-standing paradigms—to things they’ve heard from trusted colleagues or to definitions of problems that look clear and complete from where they’re standing.

I understand this dynamic, I have bought into those perceptions myself as a faculty member and a leader at multiple levels. But with what we are facing now—national funding issues, public skepticism toward our mission, political division and ever-changing student demands—we do not have the luxury of anchoring ourselves in habits and perceptions. This should not imply that past experience should not guide us, but our shared imperative is to arrive at a common and contemporary understanding of the challenges we face. This means looking not only at what the data tell us, but also at the stories beneath the data and the lived experiences of our students, faculty and staff partners. This isn’t easy and will sometimes leave us short of a clear consensus.

It is important that you know I recognize all that has gone before me at CU Boulder: the struggles and successes, the great trajectories of excellence hard won and the ongoing efforts that have yet to bear fruit but that hold great promise. I respect the knowledge and experience gathered over time at CU Boulder, and I recognize, too, that it is now my role to help carry all of this forward with you. My approach is always going to be to dig for the truth and be open to many voices, to seek what’s needed to solve problems and to invite you to dig with me so that we arrive at solutions together.

As I wrap up my first academic year at CU Boulder, I’m grateful to do this work in partnership with you, grounded in our shared commitment to students, excellence in research, scholarship and creative work, integrity in policy and programmatic analysis and transparency in decision-making. Above all, my goal is that we serve as careful stewards of this institution, strengthening trust, deepening our connection to our mission, and ensuring CU Boulder is stronger and better prepared for the future through the choices we make together today.

Thank you for all you do to make this work possible. I wish you a strong close to the academic year and a joyful celebration of our graduates, along with time for some rest and recreation over the summer.

Part one of this series is available on the Academic Affairs website.

Part II of a three-part series by Provost Stevens on the values she brings to academic decision-making and leadership.

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Academic freedom as a foundational value in my work as provost

Cay Leytham-Powell — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 13:56:58 +0000

Academic freedom as a foundational value in my work as provost Cay Leytham-Powell Tue, 03/24/2026 - 07:56

Ann Stevens

Throughout this academic year, I have been in conversation with faculty, staff and students across CU Boulder and with shared governance partners. Again and again, I’ve heard a shared concern about how we will advance our academic mission and stay true to our values at a time of declining public confidence in higher education and federal challenges to research and scholarship. For those who have not been able to attend my Provost’s Conversations, I’d like to address these questions directly in this issue and the next two Provost’s Posts.

To start, my decisions and those of my academic leadership team are focused on advancing our four institutional priorities. Within that framework, these decisions are driven by a set of basic leadership values: protecting academic freedom and recognizing its associated responsibilities; encouraging excellence in our research, scholarship, creative work, teaching and service; ensuring that Academic Affairs is a constructive and accessible partner across all parts of campus; and finally, making difficult decisions based on facts and realities, not on unquestioned practices, conventional wisdom or fear. Here, I’d like to share my perspective on academic freedom.

I have built my career in research institutions—Michigan, where I earned my PhD, then UC Davis, then UT-Austin. I came to CU Boulder because I was intrigued and inspired by an institution dedicated to the core mission of a public research university, but also well-prepared to face the challenging times facing higher education. My move from professor to leader and administrator began around 2010 when I realized the need for institutions to develop leaders who believed in and could advance that core mission of excellence in research, teaching that opens doors to social mobility, and service to communities, states and the world. This core mission cannot be achieved without academic freedom—the uncorrupted pursuit of truth as the scholar sees it and interpreted by the norms of each academic discipline, not by politics, donors or other outside influences.

My predecessor, Provost Russell Moore, began an affirmation of this fact when he partnered with the Office of Faculty Affairs in 2019 and engaged in a multi-year effort to define and explore the dimensions of academic freedom, including extensive support for faculty who experience threats to that academic freedom. In less than a year here at CU Boulder, I’ve seen an ironclad commitment to academic freedom expressed from members of the Board of Regents, President Todd Saliman and Chancellor Justin Schwartz.

At the center of my values is empowering scholars to pursue difficult and contested questions in the search for truth, guided by the ethical standards and scholarly rigor of their disciplines. My confidence in defending that work comes from a career‑long understanding that academic freedom and accountability go hand in hand. What is often less visible is the level of scrutiny academic work routinely faces. Faculty earn publication, funding and tenure through rigorous peer review, a process that can be challenging and, at its best, transformative. There is no path to academic success without sustained critical engagement from disciplinary peers. The peer review process is far from perfect but continued active engagement by our faculty in that process can not only push us toward excellence, it can contribute to improving the process itself. Students also play a vital role, bringing questions and perspectives that sharpen inquiry, strengthen teaching and guard against unsupported claims.

As we see threats to academic freedom, and sometimes even direct censorship, it is critical to remember that academic freedom, and academia, is about ideas. Ideas have an essential quality of lacking clear borders; they blend and blur into new ideas, and one idea connects to countless others. This means that threats to academic freedom are hard to contain. If we aren’t allowed to consider, research and teach certain controversial ideas, it’s impossible to know what potential chain of ideas and discovery we are breaking. The alternative is to uphold academic freedom by allowing ideas to be shared, tested and refined within guardrails rooted in faculty expertise, rigorous peer review, and further tested by student input and exchange in the classroom.

Building on what my predecessor established, I will continue to explore the dimensions of academic freedom in partnership with our faculty, our deans and via the truest method within our mission: seeking, defining, challenging and redefining. Academic freedom will always be the north star of my scholarly values, the ethical center of my leadership, and the grounding for all research, scholarship, creative work, teaching and service at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Provost Ann Stevens addresses the shared concerns from faculty, staff and students and shared governance partners about how we will advance our academic mission and stay true to our values in the current climate.

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