Sept, 4, 2026

Dear UAF staff and faculty members,

In May of this year, former President Pat Pitney asked if I could step in as interim chancellor for UAF. My role was to serve as a bridge between our former interim chancellor, Mike Sfraga, and our new permanent chancellor, Russ Vander Lugt. It has been a special honor for me to serve our university and our community for the past three months and I am deeply grateful for this opportunity.

During this service, I often considered our history and the roles of previous chancellors and the actions they implemented to bring us to the place we are now. I have served under seven chancellors and can affirm: Their foresight and courage enabled hard decisions that were not always popular but fostered the evolution of this university to provide a great education to our students, a fulfilling workplace for our employees, a welcoming environment for our communities, and essential service to our state and nation.

I am grateful that former Chancellor Brian Rogers initiated our Title IX office and associated protections for our community. I understand and appreciate the difficulty Chancellors White and Sfraga faced in helping our athletic programs achieve a stable financial basis. Together, they addressed challenges of a failing power plant, a campuswide ban on smoking, budgetary crises and a myriad of other problems of which we were blissfully unaware. I endorse Chancellor White’s call for professionalism among our faculty, and I would encourage all our employees and students to embrace the expectation of professional and ethical behavior. In addition, please help UAF grow, both in excellence and in happiness. Help us move forward to be the place where people want to live, work and study. If you see colleagues struggling in their studies or duties, offer encouragement or assistance.

For the past two days, I participated in a meeting of the UA Board of Regents and enjoyed the company of UAS, UAA, and UAF chancellors, provosts and vice chancellors, along with our president, vice presidents, and many other members of our university leadership. I was impressed and gratified to witness and appreciate the sincere dedication demonstrated by our university leadership. They are truly gifted individuals who work extremely hard to manage this complex institution. They strive to secure the resources needed for our programs to be delivered effectively. They manage our offices to ensure that our finances are efficiently and appropriately utilized and that our expenditures are proper and defensible.

Universities are among the most regulated organizations in our nation, and competent teams are essential to ensure compliance. Our administration interacts with our faculty, staff, and students to project trends, identify priorities, and help us adapt to the ever-changing demands. Our universities stand as critically important assets in producing the next generation of leaders, training a capable workforce, and promoting economic development for Alaska. Our leadership is a small but important component of those responsibilities.

Today ends my tenure as interim chancellor. I feel blessed to work with so many great people in such a great place. We will always have challenges and we may struggle to meet them, but we are all better and our university is stronger when we support each other.

We are in a tumultuous time across our nation and around the world. Such turmoil affects us all. Elimination of once-reliable federal programs, cancellation of grants and uncertainty of regulations all contribute to new challenges in the university environment.

I have great confidence in our new president, Matt Cooper, and our new chancellor, Russ Vander Lugt. They are the right people at the right time to help us through this transition. Please support them as they rise to meet these challenges.

I am going back to my own work now with a much better view of what it takes to keep this place running and with a great deal of gratitude for the people who do it. Thank you for letting me sit in this chair for a while. I am not going far. If I can be useful to any of you, come find me. It has been a privilege, and I am grateful.

— Interim Chancellor Larry Hinzman