Provost Updates | October 2026

October 28, 2026 

Dear Faculty Colleagues,

I hope the fall semester has been good for each of you. In the Provost's Office, we were glad to see so many of you at our recent Community Conversation, where Associate Provost Mairead Sullivan shared updates on the recommendations from the task force on scholarly and academic uses of generative artificial intelligence. I am grateful for how our faculty community continues to show up for this work, asking hard questions, foregrounding mission, and putting our students first. There will be many more conversations on the challenges and opportunities of the AI era in the months ahead, including CFD workshops and opportunities offered by AP Sullivan, which will be announced in an email to faculty later today. I invite you to stay connected as we work together to shape our interrogations of and engagements with AI.

Below are updates and opportunities from Academic Affairs, including retention highlights, upcoming initiatives, and events.

Retention and Access

I am pleased to share updates on our institutional commitments to student retention and educational access. Of our fall 2025 first-time undergraduates, 90.1% returned for the fall semester this academic year — our highest rate of retention since the fall 2016 cohort. In addition, our latest 4-year graduation rate is 72.2% (Fall 2022 cohort), also the highest it has been since the 2016 cohort. However, we saw a modest decrease in persistence to the junior year, and our office will be working with colleges and schools to try and bring this back up. We launched the CURCIE department awards (see below) to support the university’s retention initiative and hope all departments will consider applying. 

Our newest entering class further reflects the diversity of our student community and our commitment to expanding access to an LMU education: 9% are international students, 18% are first-generation college students, and 19% receive Pell Grants. LMU also continues to maintain its minority-serving classifications, with 26% of fall 2026 entering undergraduates as Latinx, 12% as Black, and 12% as Asian, Native Hawaiian, or Other Pacific Islander.

CURCIE Department Awards

The Provost-funded Course-Based Undergraduate Research and Creative Inquiry Experience (CURCIE) initiative supports departments in developing and sustaining course-based undergraduate research and creative inquiry experiences in lower-division courses, with a focus on first-year students. The application deadline is Nov. 16, 2026, at 5 p.m. To apply, visit the CURCIE initiative program details and application.

Global Conversations: Guest Jori Lee Lewis

The Global Conversations Series is pleased to welcome Jori Lewis, an award-winning journalist and author of “Slaves for Peanuts: A Story of Conquest, Liberation, and a Crop That Changed History” and “A Natural History of the Spirits.” Lewis will speak on Nov. 16, 2026, from 4–5:30 p.m. in University Hall's Ahmanson Auditorium (UHall 1000) at Loyola Marymount University. RSVP here.

Warmly, 

Kat

Kat Weaver, Ph.D.
Executive Vice President and Provost
Professor of Biology