2008 Woodie Awards
Strategic plan's critics make strong showing
Ken Pitts
Issue date: 3/27/08 Section: News
While the university's new ten-year strategic plan debuted to limited comment and a minor turnout of mostly faculty and administrators two weeks ago, last night, in its first public presentation, the scene was quite different.
Faculty, staff and several undergraduate students filled more than 200 seats in a Skinner Hall lecture room, with some forced to gather in doorways and along walls. Throughout the two-hour session, lines of people crowded by microphones waiting to give their praise and damnation.
"The strategic plan, luckily, is generating a lot of excitement at the university," commented Provost Nariman Farvardin while giving a brief overview of the strategic planning committee's work so far.
"When you develop a plan for a university with 50,000 citizens," he went on, "and you try to engage everything, I want you to recognize that you're going to get input that covers the entire spectrum of possibilities."
The provost stood before a murmuring, fidgety crowd, as the majority of the comments made during the session tended to lean toward the more critical end of the spectrum.
Even though several people made an effort to say something positive about the working document, most accused the planning committee of failing to consider a gamut of issues, including environmental sustainability, resource allocation between departments, tactics to decrease area crime and the ability of the university's non-native and low-income employees to give feedback on the plan on a website written in English.
But the most common complaint, by far, was that the plan contained major flaws in its proposed revisions to undergraduate academics, as faculty members targeted their criticisms particularly at the strategic plan's proposed changes to the CORE curriculum.
While agreeing that CORE must be revisited every decade to remain current, Richard Price, chair of the history department, derided its newest incarnation as one that largely abandons the importance of liberal arts and humanities and cannot be successful if it is rushed through for completion for fall 2009.
Faculty, staff and several undergraduate students filled more than 200 seats in a Skinner Hall lecture room, with some forced to gather in doorways and along walls. Throughout the two-hour session, lines of people crowded by microphones waiting to give their praise and damnation.
"The strategic plan, luckily, is generating a lot of excitement at the university," commented Provost Nariman Farvardin while giving a brief overview of the strategic planning committee's work so far.
"When you develop a plan for a university with 50,000 citizens," he went on, "and you try to engage everything, I want you to recognize that you're going to get input that covers the entire spectrum of possibilities."
The provost stood before a murmuring, fidgety crowd, as the majority of the comments made during the session tended to lean toward the more critical end of the spectrum.
Even though several people made an effort to say something positive about the working document, most accused the planning committee of failing to consider a gamut of issues, including environmental sustainability, resource allocation between departments, tactics to decrease area crime and the ability of the university's non-native and low-income employees to give feedback on the plan on a website written in English.
But the most common complaint, by far, was that the plan contained major flaws in its proposed revisions to undergraduate academics, as faculty members targeted their criticisms particularly at the strategic plan's proposed changes to the CORE curriculum.
While agreeing that CORE must be revisited every decade to remain current, Richard Price, chair of the history department, derided its newest incarnation as one that largely abandons the importance of liberal arts and humanities and cannot be successful if it is rushed through for completion for fall 2009.
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