President’s Introduction

A Message from
FSU President Nancy S. Niemi

President’s Introduction

FSU’s Strategic Priorities

Public regional institutions of higher education are the centers of their communities—we are anchor institutions. Unlike major corporations or businesses, public regionals cannot decide to relocate. Framingham State University would be mighty strange-sounding if it relocated to Ottumwa, Iowa or Massapequa, New York. We are, in fact, ‘stewards of place,’ organizations whose job it is to serve the community in which we are located. Serving our public and our people is, in fact, part of our organizational DNA.

This locational anchor demands great responsibility; in exchange for security of place, we are bound to offer our public a great measure of good. That is, we

must remember whom we serve, and why, and we must continuously evaluate how effective we are at doing so. The “who” and the “why” changes with time, and the greater community we now serve needs Framingham State University to offer educational opportunities and relationships that meet the developments of our current state: value, relevant experiences, and expertise on which our community can draw.

The stories that you’ll encounter in the 2025 President’s Report offer a window to the ways FSU is developing its current regional stewardship. We are building on our goal of offering every Framingham State student a paid internship, work experience, or co-op,

without increasing their time to graduation, so that each can explore the ways in which their studies intersect with careers, in many cases finding those they did not even know were possible. Enacting this vision takes shared internal and external infrastructures–how do you find 3,000 students the places they might flourish and ways to get them there? How do we help employers offer meaningful experiences that benefit them as well as our students?

Building infrastructure also matters as we develop a robust data information framework for FSU. Like other regional organizations—hospitals, K-12 schools—Framingham State operates on reams of data; how we use that data with

intelligence and with all due speed is a feat that takes a framework built to gather, hold, sort, and offer such information to the organization so that we can make timely decisions about what we do. Being able to use these data frameworks and structures will, in turn, allow FSU to make more informed decisions with our community partners as well.

Finally, our commitment to community demands that we continue to build ways in which we meaningfully stay part of the other community networks that make up our region. This is a beautiful and shape-shifting task. What do our K–12 schools, our non-profits, our parks and roads and trails need? How do the services we offer interweave

with other community services? You’ll read in this issue some of the ways in which we are literally building bridges.

We at FSU consider the communities in which we live as a living part of our organization—we thrive and grow together, and we are so happy to envision how next we will grow.

Warmly,

Nancy S. Niemi, PhD

President
Framingham State University