March 6, 2023

Dear William Paterson Faculty and Staff,

In a recent message, I committed to sharing with you any news I received about the status of our supplemental funding request for the Governor’s budget. Unfortunately, our request for additional funding was not included in the proposed budget that Governor Murphy unveiled last week. However, we remain cautiously optimistic that there remains another path to successfully securing additional funding, namely through the legislature. We will continue working with our representatives in Trenton as the budget process continues over the next few months. I want to thank Sue Tardi and the AFT for their continued partnership in advocating for additional funding, and I hope to have some good news to share on this front later in the spring.

Last week, I had the honor of helping kick off William Paterson’s celebration of Women’s History Month. There is a great lineup of educational and entertaining events planned throughout March organized around the theme “Celebrating women who tell our stories”, and I encourage you to take part. Click here for a complete list.  

I am happy to report that our project to implement Workday as WP’s new system for Human Resources, Payroll, Budget, and Finance is moving along quickly and smoothly, with everything on track for the system to launch campus-wide on July 3. Staff members in the aforementioned areas, with support from Information Technology, are currently engaged in end-to-end testing of our Workday configuration, simulating and refining various user scenarios from start to finish. Such testing is crucial to ensuring the system serves our needs appropriately going forward, and doing this properly takes time. I ask that everyone on campus be extra patient with Human Resources, Payroll, Finance, the Office of the General Counsel, and Information Technology over the coming weeks, as you may experience longer-than-usual turnaround times on service from these areas. Please plan accordingly by providing as much lead time as possible for requests of these offices. Thank you for your understanding and cooperation.

This week’s WP: We are Proud – William Paterson recently won three Educational Advertising Awards, including a Gold for our Website Refresh for Career Outcomes Campaign – Academic Department Pages; Silver for our University Spirit Branding Campaign; and Merit for Web Refresh for Academic Search Page. The web refresh includes the wholesale remaking of our department homepages to shift the emphasis from inputs to career, salary, and learning outcomes. As a result of these changes, three-quarters of the pages have seen an average increase of 15% in the amount of time visitors spend on them. The Spirit Branding Campaign ranged from the introduction of our new mascot, Pio, and WP’s first-ever spirit song to extensive branding and promotional efforts. Congratulations to Vice President Stuart Goldstein and his Marketing and Communications team, as well as everyone in Academic Affairs, the Division of Student Development, the Career Development Center, Intercollegiate Athletics and Recreation, IRT, Institutional Advancement, Alumni Relations, and everyone across campus who had a part in all this good work.

My next scheduled update will come March 20, as our students return from Spring Break, and we will all speed toward the end of the semester. Until then, have a great couple of weeks.