Dear Friends and Colleagues,
We recently welcomed our Fine Arts Advisory Council for our annual fall meeting, which included an invigorating set of conversations. President Hartzell spoke to our council members about the importance of the arts in our UT community, and we also had a panel of faculty experts talking about arts and technology, as well as a terrific student performance. We also had a panel of faculty experts talking about arts and technology, as well as a terrific student performance. We all left the meeting energized, excited to advance our work together.
To that end, we’re excited to begin advancing our five-year strategic plan for the College of Fine Arts. We shared an outline of the plan in the fall issue of Arts Next, and in the new year, we’ll begin to move into an implementation phase. In January, we’ll gather again as a community for an interactive town hall event.
This strategic plan has been the result of a long process of listening and deliberating collectively with our faculty, staff, students and other friends of the college. We’ve worked hard over the past couple of years to invite as many voices as possible to the choir so that our final document sings with our collective aspirations. We’ve organized our college’s strategic directions around four pillars:
- Research
- Education
- Organizational Culture
- Community Engagement and Public Practice
None of these themes will surprise you — we’ve always been focused on these pillars in the college’s history. But now that we’ve outlined a set of operating principles around our key areas, we’ll now begin to implement our vision for the future of the College of Fine Arts.
Our strategic plan will help us advance the future of the arts in Austin, across Texas and into the wider world. The strategic plan re-asserts our commitment to community, which includes our internal community of learners and workers, as well as the community we assemble as we advance arts and scholarship out into the world.
In our next steps, we’ll explore these questions:
- How do we best secure the research activity impact for our faculty and students that help tell the stories and address the urgencies of our times, while also giving us opportunities for joy, laughter, connection and community?
- How do we continue to be a destination for future generations who want to join this effort and who want to come learn with the high-achievers who comprise our faculty?
Our work continues this spring as we assemble our community to move into thinking about how we implement these principles into our practices going forward. I look forward to working together to implement our vision for the college’s future.
Sincerely,
