Updated Nov. 10, 2014

Dear Colleagues,

As Dr. Ramsey stated so movingly in his State of the University address, the strongest recommendation coming from the conversations around the 21^st Century University Initiative is that we aren’t ready to “ring the bell,” and, as a community, want to keep moving forward.

That’s the good news.  The other news is also good, but hard.  Moving forward will take all of our creativity, strategic thinking and good will as we work together to make the changes that will allow the amazing trajectory we’ve been on to continue.  As you will see from the attached documents, and my summary of other initiatives that we’ve begun, there is a lot of work to do.

I want to thank all those who worked on the committees and the advisory groups for their time, their willingness to engage in hard conversations and the very good ideas that resulted.  The deans who chaired the groups did an amazing job of leading discussion.  As the committees have been working, we’ve also been moving on a parallel course to institute other changes that came out of other discussions, initiatives, and from directives from our Board of Trustees. Attached is my executive summary of both the committee recommendations and of other initiatives moving forward, my assessment of where we are, and my recommendations for next steps.

The committee reports read quite straightforwardly; my summary consists of a lot of lists.  But the central thrust is the following:

To be a premier nationally recognized metropolitan research university in the 21^st century, we need to move students and the student/faculty relationship back to the center of the enterprise.  This means a renewed emphasis on student success, and both providing the support and services that students need to move seamlessly through the curriculum, and embedding engagement, international experience, research opportunities and sophisticated use of technology into our work with students as appropriate to our fields and our students’ needs.

We also need to rethink the roles of faculty and staff so that we can effectively do the work required in a changing world. This will require increased levels of communication, transparency, reward and recognition, fairly administered policies, more opportunities for training and/or professional development and a rethinking of how we hold ourselves accountable for creating a culture of excellence and evaluating our work.

Many of the systems and processes across the spectrum of all our activities are antiquated, duplicative and inefficient.  We need to rethink how we do our work and redesign our practices to leave more time, energy and people for the crucial academic work that is actually what universities do.  We have enormous strength in our departments and disciplines, but must find a way to better support the areas where excellence exists.  We also must find those areas where we can collaborate with each other to create new knowledge and generate discovery that fulfills our mandate to improve quality of life and economic well-being for our people.

Dr. Ramsey already has held two forums to talk about some of the ideas coming from the committees.  I’ll be glad to meet with any groups to provide clarification and listen to responses regarding any of this.  I’ll then ask for feedback, through the normal processes of constituency group response, as well as responses through the units conveyed from the deans and vice presidents.  We’re also setting up a web page so that any individual who wants to comment can do so.

The list is daunting, and exciting.

Shirley