Dear CMC Campus Community:
Welcome to the 2025-2026 academic year! I hope you all had a wonderful, restorative summer.
I would like to extend a special thank you to everyone who helped with our New Student Move-In, Orientation, and WOA events to get us launched. Please join me in welcoming our outstanding new faculty, staff, and entering students, including 14 transfer students and 335 members of our Class of 2029 from 37 states and 22 countries. It is so great to have you all on campus with us.
We officially begin an exciting, new semester this morning. Our phenomenal faculty lead the first day of classes and celebrate leadership in the liberal arts at our annual Convocation gathering. Angela Vossmeyer, Rothacker Family Associate Professor of Economics and George R. Roberts Fellow, will deliver the keynote, “Selection Mechanisms.” Join us at 11 a.m. inside Roberts Pavilion Arena and pick up a t-shirt featuring this year’s theme, CMC’s Quantum Moment. I hope you will stick around after the ceremony for dessert food trucks (open until 1:30 p.m.).
As I will mention today in my closing Convocation remarks, we look forward to a momentous year together—both in the small moments of connection and the huge leaps forward.
Through our crown jewel Athenaeum, we have another outstanding line-up of programs that will stimulate our imagination and insights: from civil liberties to deepfake technology, from world music to milk production. The semester kicks off with Karen Hao, journalist and author of Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, on September 8. Look for the first Athenaeum sign-up email in the next few days.
Through our nationally leading Open Academy, we reinforce its powerful commitments under the leadership of Ioannis Evrigenis, Alice Tweed Tuohy Professor of Government and Ethics, with a series of exceptional programs in anticipation of, and reflection on, our country’s 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
Through our highly-ranked CMS Athletics teams, our scholar-leader-athletes compete for national championships, thrive academically, and lead both on campus and in our communities. We look forward to another action-packed, competitive year, as we also move forward with the exciting development of our Sports Bowl across Claremont Boulevard.
We enter the second year of our revolutionary Kravis Department of Integrated Sciences with the opening of our iconic, acclaimed Robert Day Sciences Center. In celebration of what may be our largest quantum leap this year, please join us for a series of special dedication programs on September 26, followed by a continuation of ImpactCMC Weekend. Together, we will extend our gratitude to the many architecture and building partners, outstanding artists, generous donors, visionary faculty, dedicated staff, and resolute Board leadership who helped us achieve this important milestone, especially Chair Ken Valach ‘82 and former Chair David Mgrublian ’82 P’11, without whose expert stewardship none of this would have been possible.
In all this and so much more, we create CMC’s Quantum Moment, to share in the promise of why we are here and where we are headed in the coming year and beyond.
Wishing you a wonderful start of the school year. Hope to see you at Convocation!
All very best,
Hiram