Jan. 18, 2012
Catholic University's Board of Trustees has approved the University's Strategic Plan, a document outlining CUA's priorities for the next 10 years.
The plan, which went into effect January 1, 2012, is the culmination of 15 town hall meetings and 26 drafts that have resulted in a 50-page document that comprises four strategic goals, more than 15 objectives, over 35 specific initiatives, and 200-plus action items, each with specific metrics, timelines, and a responsible administrator. The process, which began in November 2010 and concluded in December 2011, was coordinated by a 25-member steering committee, led by Provost James Brennan and Vice President for Finance and Treasurer Cathy Wood.
"Catholic University's new Strategic Plan is the most ambitious undertaking of its kind in the University's history," says President John Garvey. "Never before has the University sought so much input from so many to arrive at such a thoughtful and comprehensive roadmap for our future."
Catholic University's Strategic Plan was developed in parallel with its proposed new 15-year Master Plan, which the University has submitted to the Washington, D.C., government for approval by spring 2012. The Strategic Plan substantially influenced the proposed Master Plan, which contains projections of the future size of the campus, the enrollment, the number of employees, and major changes to campus buildings and landscape.
The new Strategic Plan's four broad goals are to promote the distinctive Catholic culture of the University, strengthen the University's academic excellence, enhance the student collegiate experience, and improve the experience of work at CUA.
The University's Catholic identity was identified as a major institutional strength by faculty, staff, and students at each town hall meeting. The plan contains a number of proposals to strengthen that identity. Chief among them is the recruitment and appointment of serious Catholic intellectuals, with the goal of ensuring that they predominate on the faculty. The plan also focuses attention on the ways in which the curriculum incorporates the Catholic intellectual tradition. And it proposes a study of the strengths and challenges of the University's three ecclesiastical faculties of philosophy, theology, and canon law, with a view to positioning the University as the leading institution in the country for ecclesiastical graduate programs.
The Strategic Plan also aims to strengthen the University's academic excellence, laying out initiatives and action items tailored separately to undergraduate students and to graduate students.
For undergraduate students, the plan proposes ways to improve the academic experience and life beyond the classroom. These efforts are all coordinated within a model of undergraduate student success that is both developmental and holistic. It anticipates the creation of a new undergraduate unit to provide an academic home for exploratory students. The unit will also house new centers for first- and second-year advising, a center for service learning, and an intercollegiate faculty curriculum oversight committee for general education.
The plan mandates specific actions to promote interdisciplinary majors and minors, to streamline the process of changing majors within and across schools with minimal loss of credits toward degree completion, and to integrate national standards for information literacy into the undergraduate curriculum.
To enhance life beyond the classroom the Strategic Plan calls for the creation of lively and welcoming 24-hour common spaces for all students, where they can study, eat, and socialize.
For graduate students, the plan envisions raising the University's research profile, fostering nationally distinguished doctoral programs, supporting graduate student needs, and continuing development of professional master's programs. To increase the level of research, the plan calls for more investment in research administration structure. It also details the creation of a University-wide culture of assessment that will set expectations of research productivity and academic excellence and then measure how those expectations are met. In addition, the plan places particular emphasis on expanding the resource base to develop multi-year, competitive financial support packages to attract the highest quality students for the more than 45 doctoral programs at the University. It calls for increased focus on and support of career services for doctoral students.
The Strategic Plan calls for promoting greater diversity among its undergraduate and graduate student populations through tuition scholarships and marketing of prospective students. "At a time when Hispanics comprise more than half of the Catholic population under the age of 25, it is particularly important for the national university of the Catholic Church to pay special attention to the recruitment and retention of underrepresented minorities," says Garvey.
Finally, the Strategic Plan addresses ways in which the University can become a better workplace. This includes more competitive wages and benefits, enhanced social supports, and additional staff development training. The plan anticipates achieving greater diversity through hiring so that the composition of the CUA workforce more closely represents the D.C. community and the minority students who represent the growing segment of the Catholic population in the United States.
The final version of the Strategic Plan can be found at http://spp.cua.edu/ .