Strategic planning update

During the course of nearly every day I am reminded of the commitment and passion that our faculty and staff here at the University of Massachusetts Boston have in making our campus an even greater student-centered urban public research university. It is this dedication that continually pushes me to work toward finding new ways to achieve this goal.

To that end, as you may know, last spring I charged Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Winston Langley with forming a task force to begin the process of developing a new, forward-thinking strategic plan for our university. The new plan will guide our efforts moving forward and will succeed the university’s highly effective strategic plan of 2007-2010.

The valuable work of the task force and its subcommittees has already produced a Statement of Mission and Values, a long-term Vision Statement reaching to 2025, and a number of reports containing recommendations in key areas, all of which are available on our website.

From this work, the university’s Executive Leadership Team, composed primarily of deans and vice chancellors, endorsed a broad strategic planning theme of "Inclusive Excellence: Enhancing the University's Effectiveness, Reach, and Stature," and five major goals:

• Advance student success and development,
• Enrich and expand academic programs and research,
• Improve the learning, teaching, and working environment,
• Establish a financial resources model consistent with the university's vision statement, and
• Develop an infrastructure supportive of the preceding goals.

Over the past months, a cross section of faculty, staff, and students from our university community have been participating in the Strategic Planning Design Implementation Team and in workgroups to develop plans and craft action items to achieve these goals, which will be incorporated into a new strategic plan for the University of Massachusetts Boston.

While I am pleased to report that significant progress is being made in developing our new strategic plan, I know that the success of any planning effort depends on an inclusive process that gathers broad input. You may already have seen one survey requesting feedback, and you will likely receive a couple more. In addition, one of the workgroups is scheduling public feedback sessions for the coming weeks; watch for the announcement on the Community Front Page, monitors across campus, flyers, and other sources of campus news. I also encourage you to use our web-based feedback form to give us your ideas, comments, suggestions, and critical observations.

I thank each of you for your commitment to making the University of Massachusetts Boston an even better place to learn, teach, and work, and I hope you will join me in that effort by participating in our planning process.