Strategic planning process concludes first phase

The administration this month released the Prelude to the Strategic Plan in an effort to further engage the Tufts community in the university?wide strategic planning initiative that launched last October, Tufts: The Next 10 Years (T10).

The 40?page prelude document outlines the findings of seven working groups, four core committees and a steering committee during the first phase of the T10 process and will be used to draft the final 10?year strategic plan by November.

The prelude primarily serves as a guide for soliciting community feedback and invites students, faculty and staff to complete surveys after reading each section, according to Associate Provost for Academic Planning LouAnn Westall.

“What will be important as we move forward in the process with getting community input and working with our steering committee is how we are going to prioritize those initiatives, or things that bubbled up to be very, very important,” she said.

Discussions throughout the T10 process have centered on key areas affecting the university like teaching and learning, research and scholarship, impact on society and enabling services, technologies and resources, Provost and Senior Vice President David Harris said.

He emphasized that Tufts is relatively young as a research institution and that it is crucial to develop a strategic plan to determine where to invest the university’s resources during a challenging time in higher education.

“It’s really important at this point to sort of take stock and say, ‘As these different parts are maturing, and as they’ve been changing, what can we collectively do?’” Harris said.

Alongside the prelude’s observations about the student experience and the need to foster active learning in classrooms, Harris highlighted the section on diversity and inclusion.

“As our pride increases, as the quality of [a Tufts education] goes up, so does our obligation to make sure that this is not just something for the wealthy ... That’s where financial aid comes in,” he said.

The prelude also proposes a new mission statement that stresses that Tufts is a student?centered institution with a commitment to knowledge, inclusion, innovation and impact.

This revised mission statement, about 10 percent of the length of Tufts’ current page?long mission, will be presented to the Board of Trustees for approval along with the final strategic plan, according to Harris.

“[The new mission statement] is really a synthesis of the key messages of what Tufts is,” Westall said. “It’s much more succinct.”

The process leading up to the creation of the prelude involved preparing 10?page reports in specialized working groups, according to Anjuli Branz, a senior on the Active Citizenship and Public Service Working Group. Her group focused on defining active citizenship and how to connect the various public service projects across campus, she said.

“What was so great about being on the working group also was being able to hear from professors at all the different schools about what they’re doing, and I really had no idea before I interacted with them that they were doing such awesome work,” Branz said.

Senior Yulia Korovikov, a student representative on the Teaching and Learning Core Committee, said that her committee met between six and eight times to discuss topics such as online learning, community learning and faculty development.

The core committees reviewed information from the working group reports and submitted separate reports to the steering committee, she said. Harris added that they designed a system of core committees and working groups to make the process inclusive.

“We knew that people are going to be more excited about implementing [the strategic plan] if they’ve been involved in the creation than if something just gets launched one day from Ballou Hall and they had no idea where it is or where it came from,” Harris said.

Students, staff and faculty have already provided input through filling out the prelude’s surveys in the past week, Westall said. She hopes that there will be a spike in data following open community forums and town meetings about the document.

Westall and Harris encouraged students to read the prelude and participate in the public forums to help shape the strategic plan.

“I, or someone else, may show up where you least expect us and start asking you about it, so be ready,” Harris said. “Be it the dining halls or who knows where, [we want] to talk to students about what they think about Tufts now.”

Korovikov said that her experience on a core committee opened her eyes the administration’s efforts.

“This university stands here for us, and they don’t want to make any changes that wouldn’t go with the values of the institution,” she said. “It’s a living institution — it can change, it can adapt and it can grow, but we want it to grow in accordance with the original values of Tufts of education and inclusivity and learning.”