The groundwork for a strategic plan for university is underway. Four task forces have been formed to create preliminary documents on planning assumptions, driving forces, values, and distinctiveness.
Professor Mike Schaefer, who serves as chairman of the Strategic Planning and Resources Council, addressed the task forces’ members March 2 during a meeting. He shared information gathered by a preliminary working group in February.
“You can refine or delete some of those ideas and add new ones,” Schaefer told the task forces. “Each list is meant to be partly a summary of where we are now and partly a projection of where we want to go.”
Schaefer gave examples of driving forces such as state cuts and state mandates regarding scholarships as well as core values such as academic excellence and shared governance.
Each task force must have a draft version of its area statement ready for the Strategic Planning and Resources Council by April 5, Schaefer said. A campus-wide forum to receive input from the UCA community is tentatively scheduled for April 15 in the Ida Waldran Auditorium.
The overall task is to have a set of goals established by the fall semester. A number of initiatives will be generated from those goals. The administration has agreed to commit resources to carry out the strategic plan, Schaefer said.
“Our experience in strategic planning before is that we created the goals and so on, and then the entire report was placed on a shelf somewhere,” he said. “…The administration will commit resources to getting those goals met.”
The Strategic Planning and Resources Council consists of representatives from the staff, faculty, students, alumni, UCA board of trustees and the community. The council is charged with developing a strategic plan that will:
- Identify the various forces acting on the university as a whole–including finances, public perceptions and expectations, demographics, and technology.
- Assess the resources of various types the university has at its disposal for carrying out its planning.
- Examine and articulate the mission and vision of the university–our sense of our purpose and our aspirations for the future–which will be informed by the core shared values of the university community.
- Identify particular attributes of the university that set us apart from our sister institutions and that thus constitute our distinctive strengths.
Provost Lance Grahn told the task forces the strategic plan is critical for the university’s future.
“What is UCA? What will UCA be?” asked Grahn. “We cannot allow our future simply to happen. We need to define our future. We must take control of our future.”
Grahn thanked the council and task force members for taking on the project.
“We have a tight timeline as Mike explained,” he said. “… This will be very meaningful for UCA. We are not going to have you go through all this work just to have it sit on the shelf or posted somewhere on the internet.”