May 4, 1999
TO: Provost Gregory L. Geoffroy
FROM: J. H. Lesher, Assistant to the Provost
SUBJECT: Implementation of the 1996 Strategic Plan
In response to your request I have reviewed the various steps taken by campus faculty and staff to implement the recommendations made in the 1996 Strategic Plan. The following report focuses on activities during 1996-97 and 1997-98, the two-year period during which the bulk of the implementation effort took place. In the course of preparing this report I interviewed twenty-one colleagues--Vice Presidents, Deans, faculty, and staff (a full listing appears in Appendix I). I also received a good deal of information from the Office of Institutional Studies (following the format of the ‘implementation report card’ developed by you in the Spring of 1998), and reviewed the reports of the Strategic Plan Implementation Advisory Committee for 1996-97 and 1997-98.
In the interests of full disclosure, I should mention that I was a member of the group which crafted the final version of the Strategic Plan in the Spring of 1996, and I served as chair of the Implementation Evaluation Committee established by President Kirwan later that year. In any case, I offer the following as an account of the efforts made by a great many members of the campus community to move the University forward during a difficult period in its history. I conclude with a brief discussion of the need for some form of continuing planning activity at the campus level and suggest some possible approaches. I would be happy to discuss my report with you at your convenience, and to assist in making some portions of it available through Outlook. It might also be useful to place a copy of the full report on the University’s Inform web site.
Executive Summary
The Strategic Plan adopted in March, 1996, called for a concerted effort on the part of campus faculty and staff to continue to improve the University even in the absence of additional State appropriations. As an aid to this effort the Plan set out five main initiatives and invited responses from individual units indicating how they would either: enhance undergraduate education through the creation of living-learning programs and other innovative approaches to instruction; enhance graduate education through a review of existing program quality, selective enhancement, and the elimination or consolidation of weaker programs; increase ‘cash flow’ through entrepreneurial efforts; reorganize and expand current service programs; or rationalize the process of resource allocation and upgrade administrative-support services.
From the Fall semester of the 1996-97 year through the Spring semester of 1997-98 faculty and staff in virtually every unit on the campus responded to this request in some fashion. At the highest administrative level, President Kirwan and Provost Markley (subsequently Provost Geoffroy) embraced the Plan’s main provisions as mandates for action and guidelines for resource reallocation. As a consequence, the resource-allocation process during this period enjoyed an unusual degree of coherence, effectiveness, and support from within the campus community. Within the divisions and colleges, the Vice Presidents and Deans oversaw the development of strategic plans for their units, and structured their budget requests within the framework of the Plan’s main initiatives. By all accounts, these efforts energized many faculty and staff to become more active and knowledgeable participants in program development, and many of the initiatives undertaken at the individual unit level continue to benefit the institution. By the end of the two-year period, the campus had succeeded in launching four new College Park Scholars Programs, placing University Honors on a secure financial footing, and creating an array of new advising and student information-technology support services; conducting a comprehensive review of all graduate programs and increasing funding in those units identified as the best or most promising; generating a number of new profit-making enterprises and dramatically increasing the levels of private, corporate, State, and federal support for research; and privatizing selected administrative operations while launching a comprehensive, multi-year Business Process Re-engineering Project.
The Strategic Plan did not lead to success on all fronts. The annual 1% tax on unit budgets proved to be onerous and had to be discontinued after two years. The findings of the Graduate Program Review Committee were contested by faculty in many units (although the review did help to create a consensus concerning the campus’s strongest programs and sparked a series of measures that have strengthened the campus’s graduate programs). While efforts to recruit additional women and minority faculty showed good results, the size of the faculty and minority graduate-student cohorts declined during this period. A broad enhancement of the quality of the undergraduate educational experience, along with the funding required for so massive an undertaking, have yet to occur. Creating a robust information-technology infrastructure and rebuilding library monograph and serials collections will also require significant additional funding. Average faculty salaries continue to rank well below the targeted level of the 85th percentile among all Carnegie Class I research universities.
On the whole, however, the creation and implementation of the Strategic Plan enabled the University to continue to move forward toward the goals set out for it in the 1988 Charter for Higher Education, even during a period of restricted State appropriations. During the coming year the campus should revisit the 1996 document with an eye toward updating its vision of the ‘path to excellence’, and develop a mechanism for articulating and periodically revising a broad statement of the University’s long-term goals and areas of greatest need.
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