This year marks Monmouth’s 90th as an institution of higher learning, and this expanded issue of Monmouth magazine celebrates the many things there are to love about our University, past and present. As we continue to celebrate our institution’s rich history, I can’t help but think that future generations will look back on this past semester as pivotal in the trajectory of Monmouth University.

This spring, we celebrated the largest gift in Monmouth University’s history: $21 million from a donor who has chosen to remain anonymous. This transformational gift, which you can read more about in this issue, will help us recruit and retain high-achieving students facing financial hardship, changing the life course of scholarship recipients for generations to come. It directly aligns with our commitment to integrating educational excellence and access, and I am incredibly grateful to the donor for their remarkable endorsement of our mission.

As we pursue our mission of making Monmouth both more excellent and more accessible, it is imperative that we continue to do so in a fiscally responsible way. It therefore brought me great pride to see Inside Higher Education, one of the industry’s leading news publications, laud Monmouth’s ability to enhance infrastructure and increase student aid while remaining relatively debt free. It is a testament to the foresight of past and present trustees and administrative leaders that Monmouth is in such an enviable financial position.

We also celebrated other exciting historic firsts this semester. Our women’s basketball team won the University’s first Colonial Athletic Association (CAA) Championship—and in the process earned the program’s first automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament in 40 years. The Bruce Springsteen Archives and Center for American Music hosted its inaugural American Music Honors, an evening that brought several entertainment icons to campus and showcased Monmouth’s commitment to the arts in an unprecedented way. You can read about both of these accomplishments in this issue, as well as learn about the important work our students, faculty, and alumni are doing to protect our region’s waterways, provide food security to the state’s less fortunate, and discover pharmacological compounds that can treat and cure cardiovascular diseases, the leading cause of death globally.

Indeed, there is much to love about Monmouth University, and many reasons to be excited for the future. The recent institutional successes and historic firsts shared on the pages that follow give me—and you, I hope—great pride in the work that we do here. Thank you for your continued support of Monmouth’s mission. We wouldn’t be who we are today without it.