Thursday, September 11, 2025

Message from the President

Dear Colleagues,

We have now moved past the date where our official "census" is captured - our student census reflects the number of students enrolled 14 days after the semester begins. This fall we have 4,334 undergraduate students, 971 graduate students, and 365 dual enrollment (high school) students, yielding a final headcount of 5,670.

This number is lower than we'd hoped, yet understandable given the challenges we've experienced over the course of the past year with our Workday transition, the loss of student-facing staff in key positions, the uncertainty about the future of the university regularly reflected in the press, and shifts in procedures to ensure that students are not able to remain enrolled if their fee bills are not paid. Progress has been made in all of these areas, and as mentioned last week in my letter - the future remains incredibly bright as we prepare to transition back to the LSU system with a realigned budget.

We budgeted for this year based on the actual revenues received last year, rather than on headcount. Even so, we're below our budgeted revenues by about 4% (or just over $1.1M). We will not address this by reducing budgets further at this time. However we will need to be extremely judicious in replacing positions - only those that are in critical student-facing postions or that impact health and safety will be filled. We also ask that faculty and staff refrain from purchasing equipment, software and office supplies unless they are absolutely essential or paid through external funds.

We are eager for the transition team work to begin so that we can begin marketing to prospective students the exciting opportunities that rejoining the LSU family will provide. A "launch" of the transition team process is planned for October, to be followed by several months of strategizing and prioritizing by a number of subcommittees aligned with the transition process. I will do my best to keep people apprised through email as well as through faculty, staff, and student governance groups. It is important that everyone's voice be heard during this process and I always welcome conversations to better understand people's perspectives. Thank you for all that you do to support our university.

With UNO Pride,

Kathy E. Johnson, Ph.D. 
President, University of New Orleans