Momentous year

Five days into her new role as provost and executive vice chancellor, on Feb. 28, 2020, Barbara Bichelmeyer led a Universitywide discussion of KU’s new strategic plan, Jayhawks Rising. As she and Chancellor Doug Girod outlined the guiding vision and priorities, developed over months of study, they thanked the hundreds of faculty and staff who had bypassed a rare, spring-like Friday afternoon in February to brainstorm about the best ways to turn the plan into action.

By mid-March, KU leaders were preparing to close campus and finish the semester online to protect the community from COVID-19. Bichelmeyer’s return to her alma mater after 25 years took a bizarre turn, limiting her first year of settling in and getting to know folks to onscreen encounters. 

“I miss people being in three dimensions and the place that is KU,” says Bichelmeyer, j’82, c’86, g’88, PhD’92. “I’m aware that we are all grieving. We need involvement with each other, interaction, connection, and as human beings we get that best by being present with each other, both physically and psychologically. As soon as you lose physical place, you need connection even more. But it’s so much harder because it’s technology mediated and it’s not as complete.”

Instructional technology happens to be one of Bichelmeyer’s specialties. Now a driving force in transforming higher education’s present and future, it also links her to her KU past. As a doctoral student and the School of Education’s director of technology in the mid-1990s, “when portable computers weighed like 30 pounds,” she recalls, “I had to lug computers all over campus, down to Robinson and back up to Bailey.” She often stopped at the traffic booth at the juncture of Memorial Drive and Mississippi Street to ask the attendant, Debbie Brown, for a coveted temporary campus access pass. Twenty-five years later, Bichelmeyer stopped at the booth on her way to Strong Hall, and Brown said, “Welcome to campus.” The new provost exclaimed, “I know you!” Amid an endless parade of Zoom meetings, she has found moments to stop and reminisce with colleagues about treasured English professors Carroll Edwards and Bud Hirsch. “All of that has given me an important sense of history and stewardship,” Bichelmeyer says, “and that’s also something that sustains me a lot right now: history and stewardship.

“I think a lot about what Mount Oread is going to look like in the future. What is that footprint when I’m finished with my tenure, and how did I help? The Hill will look different.”

 The Jayhawks Rising strategic plan will help answer those questions, and Bichelmeyer is no stranger to such ventures. She spent two decades as a professor and administrator at Indiana University-Bloomington and, most recently, five years as provost, executive vice chancellor and professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She has participated in three strategic planning processes in the past six years.