Dear Alumni and Friends –
The new year could not have started any better as thousands of Jackrabbits descended on Frisco, Texas, to watch our SDSU football team earn its second consecutive national championship with a 23-3 victory over the University of Montana. This year’s game was an amazing showcase by Jackrabbit Nation as there was even more yellow and blue in the stands than the year before. I have been told there may have been as many as 12,000 SDSU fans among the 19,500 in the stadium.
Congratulations to Coach Jimmy Rogers and his staff, our student-athletes and everyone who was a part of another championship season. I hope you enjoy reliving the moment in this edition of STATE Magazine.
The new year has also brought on new opportunities for our university. In the last issue of STATE Magazine, I wrote about the launch of our new strategic plan, Pathway to Premier 2030, and how we continue to shape our university around our core values of being people-centered, acting with integrity, being committed to a diverse community of ideas and perspectives, allowing creativity to fuel innovation, and maintaining excellence in everything we do.
The success of Imagine 2023 set the framework to be bolder and create a vision for South Dakota State University that was not possible five years ago when we launched the plan. It set the foundation for Pathway to Premier and the ambitious goal of becoming a Carnegie Classification R1: Doctoral University.
As you will read in this edition of STATE Magazine, “R1 Our Way” will elevate SDSU as a research university and create a pathway to the possibility of achieving the designation of an R1 research university by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. It is the next step in the evolution of South Dakota State University as we continue to grow in providing the greatest economic impact to our state, region and world. Currently, South Dakota is one of five states that does not have an R1 institution.
Striving for R1 status will elevate our research and support our land-grant mission to help solve the multifaceted challenges we all face today related to food, agriculture, engineering, health, education, social sciences and much more. R1 Our Way will also strengthen SDSU’s teaching and learning focus, which has long served the citizens of South Dakota and the communities they call home through increased opportunities to participate in research and creative activity at SDSU. These opportunities are unique in comparison to other universities in our region.
University administrators have already begun to explore what being R1 means to SDSU. Over the next several months we will continue engage industry leaders, community and state officials and their peers throughout higher education to chart a pathway that not only explores the possibility of meeting this bold initiative, but also to establish SDSU’s own identity as a premier land-grant university.
I look forward to this process and the opportunity to engage with many of you. I am excited for what the future holds, not only for our university, but our state, region and world. It is truly an amazing time to be a Jackrabbit.
Sincerely,
Barry H. Dunn
President
