The university’s Strategic Planning and Resources Council has approved a draft strategic plan to guide the university over the next three to five years.
The proposed plan will be presented to the UCA Board of Trustees during its May 6 meeting. The draft strategic plan is available at http://www.uca.edu/strategicplan/.
Various groups have been meeting since February 2010 to develop a strategic plan that will examine the university’s strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities. A series of forums were held to receive input from each of the six colleges, staff and students.
In November, more than 150 people voted on nearly 300 initiatives generated from the forums. SPARC, its task forces, the Council of Deans, the Executive Committees of the Faculty Senate, and the Student Government Association created a draft list of ten initiatives they felt were high priority and financially feasible from the feedback received from the November meeting.
SPARC and its tasks forces met on Feb. 24 to integrate the draft lists and approve a single list of strategic initiatives.
If the Board of Trustees approves the proposed plan, the university’s senior staff and SPARC will work together over the summer to turn the strategic plan into an operational plan by determining which initiatives to tackle first, how to accomplish them, and how to fund the initiatives, said Mike Schaefer, SPARC chairman.
“We should see a lot of results over the next academic year,” Schaefer said.
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.
“I personally learned a tremendous amount about the needs and views of everyone on campus, and I’ve truly enjoyed every minute of that,” Schaefer said. “I’ve discovered that there’s a lot more we all agree on than we disagree on, and I’ve seen clearly that we all are genuinely committed to doing our jobs the best way we can and giving the students the best education possible. That may sound like a platitude, but at UCA it isn’t; it’s a fact.”
Judging by the number of people who have participated in the process and the feedback SPARC has received, the proposed plan appears to have campus-wide support, said Schaefer.
“However, the more important thing to me than the current level of support is that over the next few years those of us involved in accomplishing the plan’s initiatives continue to earn that support on a daily basis by making certain that things actually get done,” he said. “The last plan UCA composed was an excellent piece of work, but it simply got filed away and was never implemented; that must not happen this time.”
Schaefer feels the strategic plan is a good road map for the future of the university.
“It comprises the wisdom of several hundred highly dedicated people who know what our challenges are and, collectively, have excellent ideas for how to meet them,” he said.