Larry Lyon
Vice Provost & Dean of the Graduate School
“Penultimate” is word I have found myself thinking about a lot and using more often—for example, as in this was my penultimate Summer Graduation, Graduate Orientation, fall Grad Council meeting, and now, my penultimate Annual Report. Many more uses of the word will quickly follow for me as I have announced my planned retirement for May, 2025.
Two factors determined my 2025 retirement date (besides being very old). One was that I projected we would achieve R1 status in 2024, allowing me a year to enjoy being dean of an R1 Graduate School. Happily, my predictive skills haven’t changed over the years; I’m still not very good at it. Baylor officially became R1 in 2022 and surprisingly, I will have had three years to enjoy this new status. The other consideration was that 2025 will mark 50 years as a faculty member at Baylor, 27 as graduate dean, both inconceivable temporal milestones when I joined the Sociology Department in 1975.
The Baylor of 1975 and the Graduate School of 1998 are in many ways unrecognizable from the vantage point of today. In next year’s Annual Report, I hope to provide a retrospective charting of the changes during those years. For now, however, my penultimate conclusion, as evidenced by the articles in this Annual Report, is that R1, even though it arrived a couple of years early, is all I thought it would be. In fact, it has exceeded my expectations as we improve to meet the quality associated with being a “premier Christian research university.” And I am both pleased and wistful to transition from personal penultimates to personal ultimates.