Strategic Planning Committee Introductory Remarks
Remarks by Provost Holub to the SPC on December 12, 2007
The first order of business is for me to thank all of you for your willingness to serve on this committee. It will be an important committee since we are entrusted with developing a strategic plan that will guide the campus for the coming decade.
Although I believe most of us know each other, I’d like to go around the room and have each of you introduce yourself.
I would like to accomplish two tasks today: (1) First I want to explain how I would like to proceed with developing and writing the strategic plan, soliciting at the same time your input on these proceedings; in connection with this introduction to the planning exercise I would like to make a few remarks about the proposed themes of our plan and about the financial implications contained in the plan to grow. (2) For the second part of the meeting I would like to obtain your input on the tasks and goals assigned to the subcommittees.
I envision that there will be two levels of activity, and most of us here will take part in both of these levels. The first is the activity of this committee, the Strategic Planning Committee or SPC. Our function is to agree on how the strategic planning process should proceed, to give feedback to sub-committees as they do their work, and to read drafts of sections of documents as they are submitted, to comment on them, and to finalize the document once all the parts are submitted.
The work of developing and writing drafts for the strategic plan will be accomplished in smaller groups. A committee of this size cannot possibly deliberate on all the aspects of a strategic plan. I therefore propose to appoint from this body a subcommittee chair in eighteen different areas. That subcommittee chair will then recruit from this committee, as well as from the campus at large, other members who can assist in the work of that particular sub-committee. I have already been contacted by several members of the university community who want to help with our task. There are many deans not on this committee waiting to be recruited for subcommittees, as well as dozens of faculty members and staff personnel. So I am happy to report that there is an enthusiasm for what we are doing among various shareholders on the campus. You will need to select among these individuals for your subcommittees and try to enlist a manageable group. Five or six seems to me to be an ideal size. In any case I will return to the sub-committees later in second part of the meeting.
The Chancellor’s Executive Staff has discussed the general guidelines for the strategic plan. We will follow loosely the categories articulated in the systemwide benchmarking process, and we will be establishing a time line of a decade. This means we will be paying careful attention to access and success, research and economic development, and outreach and globalization. We recognize that as the flagship campus of the University of Tennessee, some of these categories are more important for our success than others, but all of the categories should have a place in our plan.
Overlaying these categories are three themes or principles that are driving the plan and that permeate almost everything we are going to do:
(1) Accessibility: In the first instance we recognize that as the public university in the state with the Carnegie designation Very High Research, we are not large enough. When compared with other states, we find that we are deficient in the opportunities we are providing for undergraduate students to study at this very special type of institution. We do poorly compared with most states with similar populations. But accessibility will also entail other features, such as maximizing the campus capacity, encouraging the enrollment of successful transfer students, making a class that is diverse and representative; and determining the right proportion of undergraduate and graduate students for a major research institution.
(2) Quality: We have made strides in some areas over the past few years in terms of the quality of the institution. We must not allow an increase in size to have a negative impact on quality. Moreover, we have not made sufficient progress in several areas, including research contracts and expenditures, number of national science members, PhDs, and postdocs. The Chancellor has often articulated the goal of admission into the AAU, and the membership criteria are well known. That goal is far down the road. But one of the aims of our strategic plan should be to build an institution that has the quality of the best public universities in the country.
(3) Diversity and Inclusiveness: In keeping with the Ready for the World initiative and our diversity plan, we must attract a diverse population among faculty, students and staff, and promote intercultural and international programs. In terms of people, this inclusiveness must operate at all levels: students, faculty, administration, and staff. But it must also become a part of the way we do business. The campus climate must be one in which difference and otherness are welcome; the curriculum must be infused with global and intercultural values; the events on campus must be representative of a culture of openness and understanding.
These three leitmotifs: accessibility, quality, and inclusiveness will be reflected in all or many categories in the final report and will be included as guidelines for the work in the subcommittees.
The final report will eventually consist of three documents, and I will be asking the sub-committees to submit all three documents for our approval. The first will be a narrative report. There are many examples of narrative reports on web sites of major universities. These documents range in length from 20 pages to 70 or 80 pages. In the narrative document we can describe the area of concern, what the current status is, what the impediments are to success, and how we are going to proceed.
The second document will consist of bulleted items drawn from the narrative version. Several strategic plans I have seen contain nothing more than bulleted items, but I think we need a narrative to provide rationales and explanation, while at the same time composing bullets points so that we can see at a glance the essence of our undertaking.
A third iteration of the report will consist of a check list or spreadsheet of tasks. This report will be drawn of course from the first two reports. We need it to be able to keep track of what we are doing and the progress we are making.
Let me give you an example of how these three iterations will function. In the area of increased access of transfer students from community colleges to the Knoxville campus, we might describe in the narrative what our current procedures are, what other states do, what we would like to do, why we would like to do it, what it will cost us to do it, and what advantages we hope to have from increasing access of community college students. To deal with these matters may require several paragraphs or even a few pages. The bulleted list, however, would contain perhaps two items: (1) increase the number of community college students on the Knoxville campus, especially from traditional non-feeder schools; (2) increase the indicators for success of community college transfers. The check list might contain several items, such as alter the general education requirement to align with the requirements of Associate’s Degrees in community colleges; articulate a new policy for community college transfers; establish a course for transfer students; increase the staffing in student services for community college transfers, etc.
A final and essential organizational detail concerns how we plan to obtain input from the campus community. I have already established and plan on maintaining a web site for strategic planning. The site is http://provost.utk.edu/strategic/. On that site you will find the SPC membership and their email addresses, the subcommittees and their charges, and write-ups from our meetings. I will include, for example, the introduction I am presenting to you now and then copies of draft reports, when they are suitable for public input. There will be a mechanism for commenting on all aspects of the planning effort, and Linda Broyles, who is staffing this enormous effort, will be reading everything that comes in and distributing it as appropriate.
I will also be holding various town-hall-type meetings around campus starting in the New Year. The purpose of these meetings is also to encourage input from stakeholders. I hope that some of you will attend these meetings, but I will ask Linda to take notes and again pass on any information or contribution that we should incorporate into our process.
I firmly believe that at the heart of any strategic plan of a campus that wants to vault itself into the ranks of the best institutions in the country is academic planning. For that reason I have written to each of the deans of our colleges, asking them about their current status and about their goals with regard to a campus expansion. We will have a sub-committee looking at these plans with me to decide how we should proceed. The criteria we will use for evaluating the academic planning are (1) excellence in terms of academic quality, (2) comparative advantage with regard to disciplinary areas as compared to other quality institutions in the country, (3) interdisciplinarity, especially in the exploration of new areas of knowledge, (4) sustainability over time or institutional longevity, i.e., is expansion in a given area a good investment not only over the next decade, but into the future, (5) innovation and the inclusion of emerging fields of knowledge, and (6) measurements of accountability.
I would now like to invite you to comment on what I have said thus far. Does it sound like a good plan of attack? Have I passed over anything obvious? Should something be modified?
The Office of the Provost and the strategic planning committee welcome input from the campus community at any point during this important process. You may send comments here.
