As we prepare to launch the academic year, I am so excited to work with all of you to identify our highest strategic priorities and goals for the years ahead. In 2021, we launched CSU 2.0, the University’s five-year plan for growth and recovery following the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic. That plan served us well in many ways, giving rise to a streamlined collegiate structure and enabling centers of excellence across campus that have strengthened partnerships across the region. Now, as we near 2025, it is time for us to develop the next forward-looking vision for CSU.
This new strategic plan will guide our efforts through 2030, informing how best we can serve our students in a substantially changing higher education landscape. It will inform how and where we invest our time and energy. To the greatest extent possible, I want the plan to be aspirational yet realistic, to reflect the values of our campus, and to be succinct and to the point. Let’s imagine this more as a road map with a manageable number of high priority goals and strategies rather than a dense, detailed report.
Preliminary development of this strategic plan is already underway. Over the summer, members of the CSU Board of Trustees, the Senior Leadership Team and our college deans participated in initial brainstorming sessions to identify the ideas that resonate most strongly and the shared goals we want to accomplish by 2030. While these sessions were held separately, I was pleased to see the consistency in the articulation of mission, vision and values that each group developed.
While many details of the plan will require input and feedback from the campus community over the coming months, we focused initially on the elements that are most central to our identity: We are Cleveland’s university, and we provide our students with infinite opportunity. When we set our focus on serving this region, we recommit to serving our community with a level of inclusive excellence that offers all our students a clear path to graduation and post-college success in their communities and their careers. This is both a point of pride and our responsibility within Northeast Ohio. Our next strategic plan will identify the ways in which we innovate, prioritize and then invest in how we best serve our students and the region.
To continue our momentum, I have formed a Strategic Planning Task Force. This group will meet regularly this fall to provide broad oversight to the process and review the feedback we receive from the CSU community. In addition to myself, the task force members are as follows:
|
- Tachelle Banks, Vice President, Student Belonging and Success
-
Douglas Dykes, Associate Vice President, Human Resources
- Phil Eaves, Director of Communications, Office of the President (staff to the task force)
- Patty Franklin, Chief of Staff
- Roy Gifford, Vice President, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer
- Carol Olszewski, Faculty Senate President and Assoc. Professor, Music Therapy
-
Julie Rehm, Vice President, Advancement and Executive Director, The CSU Foundation
- Richard Schoephoerster, Dean, Washkewicz College of Engineering
- Nigamanth Sridhar, Provost and Senior Vice President, Academic Affairs
- P. Kelly Tompkins, Interim Vice President, Business Affairs and Chief Financial Officer
|
Our timeline for completing this work is ambitious. It is our goal to complete the plan by Thanksgiving break (if at all possible) and submit it to the Board of Trustees by the end of this calendar year for approval so we are ready to officially launch the plan early in 2025. To support us in this task, we are partnering with Dr. Paul Friga, a Clinical Associate Professor of Strategy & Entrepreneurship at Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Friga is an expert in higher education strategic planning and transformation and a Senior Consultant with the Association of Governing Board of Universities and Colleges (AGB). He was responsible for leading the initial brainstorming sessions we held this summer, and he and his team of associate consultants are excited to support our strategic planning efforts this fall. The funding to support this consultation is entirely from philanthropic and external sources.
In the coming weeks, the task force will be sharing information about the planning process for the fall. A critical success factor for developing an exciting and compelling vision and action plan will be the collaboration with the entire campus and Cleveland community. We will hold multiple input forums with faculty, staff and students as well an advisory committee, and we will incorporate this feedback directly into the process.
I look forward to sharing more information in the fall and to working with all of you on designing our shared future at CSU.
|
|
|
© 2024 Cleveland State University, 2121 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio 44115-2215 PH: 216.687.2000
|
|
|
Manage your preferences | Opt Out using TrueRemove™
Got this as a forward? Sign up to receive our future emails.
View this email online.
|
2121 Euclid Avenue | Cleveland, OH 44115 US
|
|
| This email was sent to .
To continue receiving our emails, add us to your address book.
|
| |
|
|
