Dear Members of the TC Community,

As we head toward the year’s end and our annual winter break, I want to take a moment to wish all the members of the Teachers College community—our staff, faculty, students, alumni, Trustees and friends—my best wishes for the holiday season and the coming new year.

As I reflect on the year, I am heartened by so much of what we’ve accomplished—and what’s next:

We launched our refreshed mission statement with a new visual identity campaign through which we promoted the work of College community members demonstrating our impact and emphasizing TC as a place where true change begins. 

In 2024, we will continue to highlight the work of our students, faculty, and alumni, who are leveraging their TC experiences to achieve true change.

We welcomed our new Vice President for Academic Affairs, Provost and Dean KerryAnn O’Meara in July 2023, who, among other things, has been leading us through a series of community-wide dialogues to define and codify our commitments to our students, to our fields, to our schools and communities, and to each other in the context of our new mission.

In 2024, we will share these commitments with our broader community—and hold ourselves accountable to living our mission.

We drilled down into four thematic areas that address some of the greatest challenges to our society: teacher education and literacy; mental health; sustainability and climate change; and digital innovation, with a focus on how best to harness the advantages of artificial intelligence.

In 2024, we will promote the Initiative for Public Good—engaging partners and practitioners toward the goal of influencing policy and practice in the field.

We also made significant progress in moving forward our Strategic Priorities, through which we made headway optimizing our academic organization, including the development of five new online programs, strengthened our student pathways with a stronger financial aid and more services, continued our commitment to institutionalizing our DEI work with the release of our latest report, built up our research capacity, and furthered our reputation as a vanguard on digital innovation through the Digital Futures Institute.

I am proud of all this but most especially, of our community. 

• Our fall 2023 new student class is both remarkably diverse and talented, with about 1,500 students coming from 43 states and 52 countries. Students of color represent 53% of our domestic enrollment and about 20% of the class comes from minority-serving institutions. 
  
  
• Over the past year, I had the great fortune of meeting alumni and other friends through travel to Taipei, Singapore, Jakarta, Seoul, Tokyo, and Hong Kong—as well as those who came to the College, including 250 participants in our first in-person alumni gathering in three years, TC (Re)Unites.
  
  
• And we added close to 100 new staff members over the year and 22 new faculty members, lecturers, and professors of practice who are adding to the rich tapestry of skills and expertise at the College.

All to say, amidst a world that is ever-changing, the sense of strength, vision, and wisdom that I feel among our staff, faculty, students, alumni, and Trustees brings me both a sense of warmth and hope. Indeed, in a year that has brought many challenges, I have been so proud and comforted by the way our community has come together and shown up for one another. In the year ahead, I’m looking forward to continuing our good work together, and finding joy where we can. 

May your upcoming winter break and holidays be peaceful and rejuvenating, and I look forward to greeting the new year with you all when we return.

Warm regards,

Thomas Bailey
President
Teachers College, Columbia University