Yesterday we had our opening of the year day of prayer. As always, a diverse group of students, faculty and staff participated.

There were prayers by students, faculty and staff, along with songs.

We closed with a final prayer by our chaplain, Rev. Ronnie Miller-Yow.

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Last night a reception was held for the international students. Over the past few years we have really worked to expand the geographic diversity of the campus, and our international students have really been very active.

For example, in this year's freshman class, outside of Arkansas, our top two feeder areas are Illinois and then the Bahamas. We are part of a consortium with the government of Rwanda which brings 2 Rwandan students to campus each year. We now have six. We also have students from Jamaica, Zimbabwe, and China. Hopefully we will open new territories in the future.

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Today we hosted a reception for our freshmen who are in the honors program. A total of 31 students will participate this year.

They all had to do a video introduction. This is a technique I learned about last year to learn their names quickly. My wife and I teach the 2 honors freshman colloquia classes, and we will know their names and where they're from before the first class on Tuesday.

After that they had a chance to visit with each other, and with the senior leadership of the college.

Many of them used the time to interact with faculty in their major areas, and others met many of the staff members.

This was a lot of fun for everyone, and a good activity for the second day of the academic year.

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Prior to our gift announcement, we started our faculty-staff institute with a presentation by Dr. John S. Wilson, executive director of the White House Initiative on HBCUs. He helped us discuss institutional infrastructure for maintaining best practices.

As always, Dr. Wilson was profound and gave me new ideas to consider. One of the key ideas was prestige versus reputation, and we should be working toward prestige where we drive the market.

Another idea is to prioritize permanence, where developing a strong enough endowment allows the president to be creative without worrying about resources. The goal should be for us to have an endowment to expense ratio that is at least 5. Only one HBCU is close to this (Spelman), so we all have lots of work to do.

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New students moved in today. Here are some scenes from move in and the new beginnings ceremony.

Today we opened up our school year officially with our faculty-staff institute. I will discuss more of that later, but a part of our program today focused on the gift announcement for our Social Justice Initiative.

Bob Birch, our chair of the Board of Trustees, welcomed the guests. Several board members were on hand, along with a strong contingent of news agencies. Bob is regional president of Centennial Bank.

Our next speaker was Dr. John S. Wilson, executive director of the White House Initiative on HBCUs. Dr. Wilson keynoted our conference earlier in the morning, and offered comments about the important role HBCUs will play in helping to achieve President Obama's 20-20 goal.

I offered remarks about the evolution of the justice initiative, and the work done to lead up to this gift. It was important to remind everyone that social justice is very important in the United Methodist Church as well, since we are a Methodist HBCU.

Finally, Bill Moses from the Kresge Foundation, discussed this history of the foundation. He shared that we received a $1.2M grant for our initiative, to provide funds for staff, faculty development, conferences, student experiences, and visiting professorships. In addition, $300K will be used as part of a challenge grant to assist with endowment building.

So today was a great day for the college, as well as the city and the state. Stay tuned for more news about the development of the social justice initiative.

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Last week was the end of our 6 week summer bridge program for students interested in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields. As you know, every report about higher education emphasizes the need for more STEM majors, and especially for students of color. So for a few years now we have worked to prepare students for the rigorous STEM fields through this summer program. Below are some pictures from their final projects.

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I just attended a meeting this morning with Central Arkansas higher education institutions, as well as a few elected officials (the mayors of Little Rock and North Little Rock included), to determine ways to integrate housing, land use, economic and workforce development, transportation, and infrastructure investments. This coalition will apply for a grant to help do more of that.

The challenge the colleges and universities have is in acquiring property to use for this purpose. Unfortunately, people who have some land in key areas would rather hold on to it and ask outrageous prices that to assist in the development of the community. But hopefully we can have some strategies to improve this.

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