Meeting Our Moment

Friday, October 9, 2026

How do we meet this moment here at UNT? How do we bring the full measure of our excellence to the work before us, faithful to our calling to serve this generation and thoughtful enough to prepare for the next?

I have returned to those questions often during these first months as provost. Sometimes in a conversation with a colleague. Sometimes between meetings, when something someone said stays with me. And recently, while traveling, when there is a little room to think. I know many of you have been carrying similar questions of your own.

As a first-generation college graduate, I feel that responsibility personally. Higher education helped me imagine possibilities I had not fully understood were available to me. Our students arrive with hopes of their own, along with questions they may not yet know how to ask. But I believe deeply that what we make possible for them matters!

Our work at UNT asks us to hold many things in view. Our students and their families want to understand what a university education will make possible. Our communities ask whether we are prepared to address their challenges. Questions about public trust intersect with fiscal realities that require difficult choices among priorities we care deeply about.

And through it all, emerging technologies keep changing the pace of our lives. We are discovering new ways to teach and pursue research and creative work while confronting what happens when the ease of obtaining an answer displaces the effort of understanding it. How do we help students use extraordinary tools — from AI agents to robots to systems that generate code and music — while strengthening their capacity to question how they work, whose assumptions they carry, and when to trust them? To exercise judgment. To remain curious. To recognize that discernment, imagination, and wisdom take time to cultivate. And that becoming an educated person — developing the whole person — asks something of us that convenience alone cannot provide.

These questions call upon your expertise and invite us to consider how the ways we organize our work might help those perspectives find one another. As it turns out, a word I needed had been sitting in the margin of my notes.

A Word in the Margin

Several weeks ago, I was in a meeting, scribbling thoughts in my spiral notebook, when someone used the word confluence. I wrote it in the margin, intrigued, though not entirely confident I could have explained why at that particular time. I might have encountered it before, nodded as though I fully appreciated its meaning, and moved on.

While working through emails, traveling between conferences and workshops, and taking a couple of hikes to clear my mind, I caught myself saying…“There it is again!” When it surfaced in a conversation with fellow provosts in New York recently, something settled into place. The word named an idea I had been circling in our conversations at UNT.

Those conversations often begin with a fair and necessary question: Why?

Why consider realignment now? Why ask a strong academic unit to imagine a different relationship with another whose work it may not yet know well? Why reconsider structures that carry years of accomplishment and the history of colleagues who helped build them?

I appreciate those questions…I really do! I hear in them the years you have invested in our students, your work, and your academic communities. As I have listened, I have returned to the places where our distinct strengths might meet. Where one colleague's question opens a possibility in another's work. Where a student sees a connection between subjects that had seemed unrelated. Where the depth of our discipline and the perspective of another help us see more clearly. Come to find out…I had been thinking about confluence long before I knew I was thinking about confluence.

The word comes from the Latin confluere, meaning to flow together. A confluence is where rivers or streams meet. Each has traveled its own course, shaping and shaped by the land, carrying a story familiar to those who have known it well. What meets there has a history. And its journey continues within a larger current.

Having been born and raised in Dallas-Fort Worth, I began to realize that this idea, albeit new to my thinking, had long been part of the landscape I called home. The Elm Fork of the Trinity River flows through Denton County and meets the West Fork near Dallas. Their meeting forms the main stem of the Trinity. A river familiar to so many of us has, within its beginnings, a story of separate journeys coming together.

A Familiar Place

By now, you may be rightly wondering, “Where is this river taking us? Back to UNT, I hope?” Fair question indeed. And yes, to a familiar name on our own campus: Elm Fork.

The late Professor Emeritus Kenneth Dickson founded the Elm Fork Education Center in 1998 to reach children early and sustain their curiosity about science. My youngest son, Austin, was recently among them, excitedly joining his classmates in identifying the animal statues around the Environmental Education, Science and Technology Building. There is something deeply generous in that idea — to devote our university’s knowledge and resources to young people years before they might become our students. To take their questions seriously now and make room for the young adults they will soon become. I suspect many of us entered higher education hoping to help create that possibility.

That is the purpose I want us to carry into realignment.

Connections That Serve Our Students

Our students already live among the connections we are asking our structures to support.  Health intersects with data and human behavior. Creative work requires us to consider how new tools shape what we make, whose stories we tell, and how we understand one another. Preparing an educator involves understanding new technologies, a subject, and the experiences learners bring with them, across ages, backgrounds, and pathways into education. Realignment must strengthen our education, create closer connections among our fields, and help students prepare for the lives and work ahead. Thus, I firmly believe that our graduates will need to find connections across perspectives while drawing on the depth of what they know.

We can see possibilities taking shape in the proposals from our colleges. The College of Engineering is exploring ways to connect our strengths in construction with new opportunities in civil and environmental engineering, preparing students and advancing research to help our region and state build the resilient infrastructure their future requires. In the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, bringing creative writing and the performing arts together could invite our students to explore how a story moves from the page to the stage. Our College of Education is looking to broaden efforts to connect teacher preparation with the work of leading schools. In the College of Public Affairs and Health Sciences, new structures could bring public health, nutrition, kinesiology, and health services together, inviting our students to consider how movement, nourishment, access to care, and the conditions of everyday life shape a community’s well-being. These configurations invite us to ask what students could learn, practice, and carry into their lives through closer relationships among these fields. The details still require careful work, and the educational promise must guide that work.

A recent Forbes article by Bryan Penprase featuring President Keller considers a related question: How can universities create the conditions for faculty creativity to reach more students? Here at UNT, that question is part of my responsibility to you. Your talents and expertise give us much to build upon — as does your care for students — and your ideas need practical support if their possibilities are to become part of our students’ education.

Stewardship of Our Shared Work

We undertake this work mindful of UNT’s financial realities and our responsibility to steward the resources entrusted to us while also caring for our people and creating opportunities for our students.

Some of you on our staff have shared where our processes help people move forward and where they ask them to retrace their steps. Your experience should shape this work as well. Where might we simplify a process or clarify a responsibility to make more room for your expertise? To support a student or to solve a persistent problem. Any proposed arrangement must be honest about its costs, its demands on you, and the support needed to make it work.

In my welcome message at the start of this academic year, I shared my belief that excellence and care must go hand in hand. That belongs here, too! Our aspirations should be ambitious, and our attention to people should be just as intentional.

I invite you to bring your questions and imagination to this work across our colleges. Help us see the connections that deserve to grow and understand what they will need. Help us recognize where a student’s path could become clearer or where a colleague could find new support, and where a partnership might make something possible that we have long hoped to accomplish. Our College Realignment Initiative webpage provides the purpose and guiding principles for this work, along with the working groups supporting its implementation.

Meeting This Moment Together

How, then, do we meet this moment?

My confidence begins with you and has deepened as conversations have evolved. It grows from the care you bring to those whose lives you touch and from what we continue to learn alongside our students. Serving as interim provost has made my responsibility more immediate as I aim to listen carefully, make thoughtful decisions, and help your work and our students thrive. If we are curious enough to ask and humble enough to listen, I believe we will discover more in one another than we have yet had the opportunity to see.

We bring the excellence built by those before us and the aspirations of our students today. And we make room for those still to come, including the children arriving on campus who may not yet know what a university could mean in their lives. To serve them well, and to prepare for those who follow, is a calling worthy of our shared effort.

How we answer it, together, will be the measure of how we meet this moment.

Go Mean Green!

-albert

Albert Bimper Jr., Ph.D. 

Interim Provost & Vice President for Academic Affairs
Office of the Provost
University of North Texas