More than 150 people participated in a two-hour forum on Nov. 22 to vote on initiatives for the university’s strategic plan.
The Strategic Planning and Resources Council will use the results to craft a draft version of the strategic plan. The plan will be developed over the next couple of months, said Mike Schaefer, chairman of the SPARC. The initiatives will set the university’s priorities for the next three to five years.
To view the results, click here.
A series of meetings were held in October seeking input from the colleges, departments, and divisions on the university’s initiatives. Suggestions were compiled to create a master list of nearly 300 initiatives in the areas of excellence, learner-focused environment, facilities and technology, engagement with external partners, diversity and integrity. The list was shared with the community prior to the vote.
Various groups have been meeting since early February to develop a strategic plan that will examine the university’s strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities.
The goal of strategic planning is to:
•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.
Documents created by several task forces over the past nine months are available for review at the Strategic Planning icon on the UCA main page. Send comments to Mike Schaefer at Schaefer@uca.edu.
“The final strategic plan will incorporate our statements of values, distinctiveness, planning assumptions, and driving forces; and many of the initiatives that appear in the documents from meetings with individual units will likely be folded into the larger initiatives that will appear in the draft plan,” Schaefer said. “Additionally, these documents are a rich source of information for all of us about what we regard as important at UCA, so I urge everyone to give them a reading for informational purposes and as possible suggestions for actions in our own areas. I think you’ll find that, despite the different roles we all play in the functioning of the university, there are more things we all agree on than things that divide us, a fact that bodes well for coming up with a strategic plan that we’ll all find workable.”