Beginning a Year of Transition and Transformation

Dear fellow members of the Drexel community,

With great excitement and a deep sense of responsibility for Drexel University’s future, I look forward to beginning my tenure as your interim president next week.

As we begin a new academic year, I want to extend a warm welcome back to all our returning students, faculty, and professional staff. To our new colleagues and students, including those of you transferring from The University of the Arts and the entire Salus at Drexel University community, I am delighted to welcome you to our Drexel family.

Drexel is a second family to me. As a proud alumnus and a long-time University Trustee, I embrace my Dragon roots.

My daily contact with faculty, students, and professional staff over the past two months has further deepened my appreciation of our community’s creativity, resilience, problem-solving resourcefulness, and collaborative spirit.

We’re coming off a banner year for faculty scholarship and for student achievement in awards, research presentations, creative projects and performances, and athletics, which included the exciting run by our women’s basketball team to win a berth in the NCAA tournament.

And just this morning, we learned that Drexel made a huge jump in the 2025 U.S. News & World Report rankings of national universities, which now focus more heavily on student outcomes. We moved up 12 spots – from 98th to 86th in the overall rankings – and seven spots from 50th to 43rd place among private universities. Drexel scored incredibly impressive gains to secure its position in the top tier across multiple categories, including Pell graduation rankings, “Top Performers for Social Mobility,” “Best Colleges for Veterans,” “Best Value Schools,” and financial commitment to student success. Drexel is also ranked 29th among the “Most Innovative Universities.”

My job as your interim president is to keep Drexel moving along the critical path of continuous improvement toward becoming ever safer and ever more successful in our core endeavors.  

A safe, inclusive, and respectful environment for free speech and debate

An immediate pressing challenge for all of us is to find constructive ways to express our views, to listen and learn from one another, and to disagree with civility. I am counting on everyone in our community to engage in civil discourse and show respect toward one another, especially during campus vigils, teach-ins, and demonstrations.

Each of us can play a part in keeping our discourse civil and our community safe. If you experience or observe threatening or even suspicious behavior, please do not hesitate to contact Public Safety at 215.895. 2222. And we all have the responsibility to report incidents of discrimination and harassment to the Office of Institutional Equity and Inclusive Culture.

Exercising ‘institutional restraint’ in University statements

As members of our community participating in our External Review recently noted, requests for the University to make statements on a variety of topics and events have significantly increased in recent years. They also noted that the practice of routinely issuing statements on all matters of public interest can unintentionally undermine our commitment to the free exchange of ideas among members of our community.

These discussions produced a consensus in support of an approach of “institutional restraint” to inform the way the University communicates about external social or political issues or events. As interim president, I will support this approach. Going forward we will issue statements on issues or events only in specific circumstances where we determine there is a direct impact on the University’s values or key interests, such as its operations, campus climate, or ability to pursue its teaching and research missions.  

In the meantime, as my colleagues wrote recently, there are ongoing discussions to ensure that the effect of our Activism guidelines now in place continues to reflect the mission and values of the University. I look forward to working with our community to ensure that our rules, guidelines, and standards for campus events and demonstrations strengthen Drexel’s ability to serve as an exemplar of free speech, civility, and mutual respect.

Let’s make this year of transition for Drexel a productive year of transformation. 

Onward!

Denis P. O’Brien
Incoming Interim President