On March 21, the Strategic Plan Steering Committee held a virtual town hall open to faculty, staff, and students. The Committee is in charge of the development of Stevens’ 2022-2023 strategic plan, with the meeting focusing on the presentation of draft goals for each of the University’s seven areas of focus. Planning events for the plan have been held periodically since Spring of 2021.
Dr. Jianmin Qu, Chair of the Committee and Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs, gave the presentation and led the subsequent question and answer segment. Before beginning, he stressed that all parts of the current draft plan are subject to change and that the Committee will be highly responsive to feedback from all corners of the campus community.
The University also touted its progress from 2011 to 2021, when the administration was guided by its last strategic plan. Although falling short in some areas, like international enrollment, Stevens saw dramatic growth in overall undergraduate enrollment, research funding, and infrastructure development.
Dr. Qu said that the University will be driven by a guiding vision to be a “premier student-centric technological research university.” Its values, he said, will be excellence, creativity and innovation, student-centricity, community, respect, responsibility and accountability, and sustainability.
Stevens’ overarching goal will be to improve its reputation and prestige, as well as to expand the horizons of human knowledge. It will accomplish this, Dr. Qu said, by pursuing the dual objectives of enhancing the experience and success of students and amplifying the impact of University research and education, in a strategy called “Excellence in All We Do.” “Our motto should be ‘Once a duck, always a duck,’” he emphasized.
Other overarching strategies were outlined. One of these was the pursuit of “modest” growth and selective increases in academic and research offerings, perhaps indicating that the University desires total enrollment to climb at a more modest pace than it did over the previous ten years. This year, many courses had difficulty finding regular open classrooms, while the previous location of Colonel Johns is currently being converted into two new classrooms. The other strategies centered around the University’s efforts to increase reputation and prestige and to leverage technological resources and student and faculty talent.
With regard to University strategy, what Dr. Qu called the seven “areas critical to Stevens’ future” have changed slightly since the last campus community town hall when there were only six. The new list includes “Transforming Undergraduate Education and Experience,” “Inspiring and Supporting Lifelong Learning Through Graduate Education Innovations,” “Empowering Scholarship, Discovery, Invention, and Innovation,” “Strengthening Alumni Engagement and Development,” “Building Institutional Culture,” “Elevating Academic Reputation and Forging Strategic Partnerships,” and “Enabling Infrastructure to Drive the University’s Mission and Goals.” Most of the changes that have been made are additions, while the previous combined goal of alumni engagement and forging strategic partnerships has been separated into two objectives.
The bulk of the remainder of the presentation focused on more specific goals within each of these critical areas. The segment on Transforming Undergraduate Education and Experience described the University’s desire to have a student body that conforms to the “optimized” size of individual schools and majors, as well as a commitment to “continuous improvement” in student satisfaction and success. Other highlights include increasing the degree to which graduate students are prepared to address global issues, increasing the quantity and quality of Stevens research, and fostering a culture of “lifelong connection” to the University among students and alumni.
After the conclusion of the presentation, President Nariman Farvardin, who was in attendance, asked for clarification regarding proposed changes to the undergraduate curriculum. The Committee reiterated that the current plan includes the goal to introduce a new University-wide initiative that would center on providing students with important non-engineering skills, with the goal of enabling Stevens students to become more effective leaders and communicators. As phrased by President Farvardin, such a curriculum overhaul is hoped to become “a hallmark of a Stevens education.”
In the near future, the Committee will compose a preliminary draft of the strategic plan, obtain more community review and feedback, and finally request approval from the Board of Trustees for implementation. The final draft will consist of a public-facing Strategic Plan, which will be more broad and aspirational in scope, and an internal Implementation Plan with more concrete administrative steps.
In the meantime, Dr. Qu encouraged all members of the Stevens community to provide feedback and comments. “This is your future. We are mapping out the path for Stevens over the next ten years. It is important that we hear from each and every one of you.”
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