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BU Draft Strategic Plan, Revised, December 16, 2004EXCELLENCE IN A CLIMATE OF CHANGEOur missionBinghamton University is a premier public university dedicated to enriching the lives of people in the region, nation and world through discovery and educationand to being enriched by its engagement in those communities. An evolving institutionSince its inception in 1946 as Triple-Cities College, significant change has characterized the history of Binghamton University. It has evolved from a four-year liberal arts college with a reputation for superb undergraduate education into an excellent doctoral research university with a range of liberal arts and professional programs, one that carefully seeks to preserve that undergraduate excellence. In fewer than 60 years Binghamton University has become recognized for the quality of its academic programs and for the significant contributions its faculty make to understanding hearts and minds, society and culture, the physical world in its myriad forms, and the deepest reaches of abstract thought: analytical, philosophical, and mathematical. Excellence is a delicate state of being; it must be continually recreated. Achieving Binghamton’s greatest potential will require committing ourselves both to enhancing our core strengths and to further change. Binghamton University faces important challenges stemming from shifting national trends and state and institutional realities. This plan charts a course to address those challenges; it arises from the vision of a truly distinguished and unique institution of higher education, one that combines an international reputation for research, scholarship and creative endeavor with the best undergraduate programs available at any public university in the Northeast. Realizing our visionOur mission as a premier public university is to enrich the lives of people in the region, nation and world through discovery, education and engagement. The four overarching strategies below are designed to advance this mission. Pursuing the following actions will broaden the University’s range of influence, enhance its visibility and acclaim, and ensure its vibrancy and vitality. • Invest in academic excellence, innovation, growth, and diversification • Enhance engagement and outreach • Create an adaptive infrastructure to support our mission • Foster a campus culture of respect and success These recommendations encourage the University to pursue both the traditional and the innovative, to reconsider and expand relationships within and beyond the institution’s traditional bounds, and, through decisive action, to position the University to determine its own course in the rapidly changing environment of higher education. Ways to achieve these strategies are set forth in an appended document, Our Roadmap To the Future. Critical guideposts, visible measuresExcellence in achieving our mission is led by faculty. In the next five years we intend to increase the number of faculty by 20% in order to achieve a student to faculty ratio of 20:1. Hiring will occur both within and at the interfaces of disciplines and professions. We will seek individuals who share our enthusiasm for expanding the boundaries of knowledge and understanding while closely mentoring students – both undergraduate and graduate. As new lines of inquiry open and new programs evolve from such interests, more flexible arrangements that promote both discovery and learning will be developed. As a young and energetic research institution, we also intend in the next five years to achieve a doubling in sponsored research activity. Sponsorship comes in many forms -- public and private grants, partnerships, and gifts – we will seek resources for individuals for their research and creative endeavors and for interdisciplinary groups. Sharing specialized facilities, equipment, and technical expertise will increase the University’s competitiveness for external funding and make the best use of resources available to the campus. Advances in knowledge flow from active interchange among seasoned scholars and bright aspirants. Attracting and retaining excellent graduate students is key to enhancing our reputation in research, scholarship, and creative endeavors. As we grow judiciously we intend to achieve a 3:1 ratio of undergraduate to graduate studentsand toprovide competitive stipends for our doctoral students. As a public institution of higher learning, the University has always shown itself willing to collaborate with business, educational, governmental, and not-for-profit organizations in addressing the seemingly intractable problems they face. Over the next five years our aspiration is to increase the number of those partnerships by 25% and to find a way to communicate what we learn from them to the academic community at large. To achieve such ambitious goals the University must devise a more adaptive infrastructure where people, facilities, and technologies can be brought together in ways that enable the University to respond rapidly and effectively to new opportunities and changing circumstances. The campus needs a more diversified resource base, more creative and efficient use of existing resources, and revised policies and practices. The University is determined to expand its human, financial, and material resources by encouraging as many sectors of the institution as possible to look beyond the campus for added support. As a result, a significant increase is expected in the number and percentage of faculty and staff seeking extramural support of all kinds over the next five years. The University will, in turn, support individuals and provide enhancement for all programs or units that 1) seek and acquire resources beyond those normally available on campus, 2) obtain national or international recognition in scholarly, competitive or creative environments, or 3) develop and maintain exceptionally rich learning experiences. In essence, our institutional future depends not on the few but on the many, with each member of the University community contributing to the greater good of the institution. Therefore, our success depends upon creating an environment that brings out the best in everyone. We intend to be a place where each individual understands how he or she helps advance the institution’s mission and feels appreciated for those contributions. ConclusionBinghamton University enjoys a national reputation for excellence, but our past achievements will not assure our success as the world changes around us. Known for the talents and scholarly contributions of our faculty, the selectivity and achievements of our students, and the dedication and ingenuity of our staff, Binghamton intends to enhance the impact of its contributions to discovery, education, and engagement in the years to come. Aligning the choices we make throughout the University with these strategies will enable Binghamton to achieve its vision. Guided by these strategies we can leverage our current strengths, enhance educational opportunities, extend the boundaries of knowledge and understanding, engage the world more broadly, and develop new, diversified sources of revenue, as we seek the best and strongest future possible for Binghamton University.
Implementing Our Strategies: A Roadmap To the FutureNew Environments, New ChallengesIn previous generations, public higher education was viewed as a public good, and public taxation was the generally accepted means of paying for it. Today, a college degree is more commonly viewed as a benefit to the individual who holds it. Consequently the public increasingly expects the costs of higher education, even public higher education, to be recouped through individual tuition rather than taxes. Simultaneously, the demands on colleges and universities have increased dramatically. The public expects universities to help drive economic development, improve K-12 education, cure disease, design better approaches to caring for the elderly and infirm, and resolve international disputes. Calls by state and federal governments for greater accountability are also a part of the changing environment in which we must learn to flourish. Technological advances have given rise to a new constellation of learning and research environments that can benefit Binghamton University. Time and place no longer constrain the creation and dissemination of knowledge. New methods that affect how we promote discovery and learning are enabled by the Internet and enhanced telecommunications. Such advances broaden the scope of what is possible for Binghamton; but also increase competition for students and resources. All these trends challenge us to continue to evolve, blending traditional and innovative approaches into effective actions. Our vision is to become a truly distinguished and unique institution of higher education, one that combines an international reputation for research, scholarship and creative endeavor with the best undergraduate programs available at any public university in the Northeast. Toward that end, the following four overarching strategies are intended to position the University to determine its own course in the rapidly changing environment of higher education. As it prepares for the future the University should: • Invest in academic excellence, innovation, growth, and diversification • Enhance engagement and outreach • Create an adaptive infrastructure to support our mission • Foster a campus culture of respect and success. Each strategy, along with some suggested approaches towards its implementation, is detailed below. Invest in academic excellence, innovation, growth, and diversificationEmbracing both liberal and professional learning is fully consistent with the University’s stated mission, which is to enrich lives through discovery, education and engagement. The University must do all it can to enable those activities—within and across traditional organizational lines, at both the undergraduate and graduate levels of education, and through scholarship, creative activities, and basic and applied research. Excellence in these academic pursuits begins with the faculty. Increase the number of faculty who will advance the mission of discovery and education both within and at the interfaces of the disciplines and professions. Faculty discovery, creativity and scholarship are stimulated and enlivened by wide-ranging and insightful interchange with peers. The University envisions a campus in which the intellectual work of faculty is undertaken within a variety of organizations. To promote a daily exchange of ideas among like-minded colleagues academic units will need to choose a limited number of areas in which to focus their intellectual work and graduate programs. Pursuing emerging lines of inquiry and creative endeavors will require expanding our approach to faculty hiring and organization. Faculty will continue to be hired in existing departments, schools, and colleges. Also, the University proposes a highly flexible approach: Hire the best faculty we can and allow them to self-organize. Policies that empower faculty to cluster around intellectual interests and to initiate and complete faculty hires in emerging interdisciplinary initiatives will be needed. New graduate programs should emerge from the interdisciplinary work of faculty and students. Binghamton’s intellectual leadership will be underscored by offering graduate programs in developing fields of study, with carefully designed curricula that meet the needs of students and society. Improve graduate stipends. Graduate students are key to Binghamton University’s discovery and learning missions. The biggest challenge to expanding graduate education at Binghamton University is improving graduate stipends.We attract excellent graduate students because of the quality of our faculty and the individual mentoring they provide to students. We must ensure that economic factors do not influence their decisions about whether or not to enroll at this University. Enhance the internationalization of the campus. We are proud to have been recognized as one of two research campuses with exemplary international experiences for students, but more can be done. We can increase the number of students who study abroad, enhance students’ language competencies, integrate study abroad into degree requirements, and assure that financial aid and program policies do not hinder study abroad. Joint diploma programs with international universities also bring important international perspectives to the campus. Expanding Languages Across the Curriculum, supporting international festivals, and developing new ways to promote meaningful interchange among Binghamton’s national and international students contribute to the same goal. Faculty and staff should also be afforded opportunities to participate in international programs and advance international ties. Enrich instructional methodologies employed by faculty. A new mix of traditional methods and emerging technologies can sustain and enhance our ability to foster deep learning, critical thinking, and creative problem-solving among our students. Indeed, current practices suggest that a hybrid model is already being successfully employed on this campus, where Binghamton faculty have widely adopted technology as a means of enhancing highly individualized instruction or increasing their professional accessibility. The University should encourage faculty experimentation with new technologies through training workshops and a small grants program, and should devise new ways to share promising practices widely. Enhance the role collegiate communities play in undergraduate education for students both on and off campus. Interactions between faculty and staff and among students themselves contribute to Binghamton’s culture of achievement, which extends well beyond academics. The opportunity to live for four years in a residential community with its own identity, traditions, and faculty leadership is not replicated on any other U.S. campus. Adopting a more developmental plan of learning experiences to advance confidence and mastery would enhance the impact of the collegiate communities. There is also a need to enhance ties between off-campus students and the vibrant on-campus culture fostered by the collegiate communities. Academic Affairs and Student Affairs should work together to outline year-to-year expectations for developing students skills and competencies as well as to identify the programs and projects that could foster those outcomes. Expand educational opportunities. Binghamton University must increase enrollment in its traditional programs, even as it expands, through bold but careful selection, the number of degree programs, schools and colleges within the institution. Three criteria should shape consideration and selection of new educational ventures: (1) viable intellectual intersections with other campus programs, (2) reasonable career paths for students, and (3) likelihood of requisite resources from a variety of sources. Suggested candidates for immediate evaluation are schools of education, law, public affairs, and social work, and new programs in educational leadership, gerontology, speech/language development/pathology, student affairs administration, and teaching English as a second language. More study is recommended, but the prevailing assumption should be that the University must consider when to open a new school or program, not whether to do so. Enhance engagement and outreachProactive engagement with the world around us is in the best interest of all. Fulfilling its covenant as a public university, Binghamton University elects to go beyond the notion that knowledge is generated within the university and then applied in external contexts. External “communities of interest” often possess remarkable clarity on the practical limits of current knowledge and can provide novel perspectives on possible solutions for pressing problems. Therefore, the University seeks to realize the significant dividends that can result from synergistic partnerships with these constituencies. Make engagement with our communities of interest a University-wide priority. The creation of policies to promote and recognize the involvement of faculty, staff and students in outreach will help to stimulate and support campus-wide interest in this important realm of activity.Augmenting traditional definitions of research, scholarship, and creative activity could help to advance faculty as “public intellectuals,” making the University’s scholarly expertise more accessible to practitioners and policy makers in the external community. A downtown center should be the hub of University efforts to partner with the local community and to make educational programs more accessible to local citizens. It should become a vibrant, energizing presence in the City of Binghamton. Realization of the University’s commitment to engagement will take more than physical space. An advisory committee comprising representatives from both the University and the community should be formed to identify areas of greatest promise for joint University-community projects. [An immediate agenda for the advisory committee might be to devise ways to make both the University and the community more accessible to their respective members. Establishing an Office for Outreach in the downtown center would provide a highly visible coordinating agency for university/community partnerships, internships, and developing ways to solicit and respond to input from the community. Creating a Center for Applied Community Research with a charge to assist community and governmental organizations with grant applications and program evaluation could assist community organizations and also provide excellent educational experiences for students.] Respond rapidly to educational needs arising from a fast-paced, high-performance work world. Binghamton University needs to develop a means to respond in a timely and effective way to the rapidly changing educational needs of our alumni and others who as life-long learners could benefit from new courses, certificates, and other thoughtfully designed educational experiences. Computer aided and distance education technologies are one way to respond rapidly and effectively to the changing educational needs of the community. A method that better tracks revenues and expenses related to summer and winter sessions as well as continuing professional education should be developed, accompanied by incentives that stimulate units to engage in these forms of education. Enhance the University’s stature as a successful technology transfer agent. The University should find ways to communicate to faculty and staff the importance and possible public utility of the work that they are doing, and to become an even more successful agent in the transfer of new ideas and technologies to the community. Since technology transfer takes time, it is important to reward faculty and staff for taking steps to make their ideas and work more accessible to others. The Office for Outreach and the Office for Technology Transfer should further develop processes and incentives to facilitate the infusion of University knowledge into the public domain. Create an adaptive infrastructure to support our missionEnvironment and resources are key factors in the success or failure of any enterprise. Creating an enabling environment and ensuring that available resources are adequate to the success of the University’s critical missions of discovery, learning, and engagement are undertakings that rely on the active involvement and ingenuity of the entire campus community. Faculty, staff and students must be enjoined to become actively involved in seeking and securing extramural resources to support their efforts. Promote resource development and mobilization. The University should foster an innovative, entrepreneurial culture in which people are encouraged to watch for opportunities and resources that will advance our vision and mission. Appropriate procedures and policies should be developed to access, capitalize on, and reward faculty and staff resourcefulness and creativity. A second, even more ambitious, comprehensive gifts campaign is critically important to the University’s future. Identification of more effective and efficient operating procedures can also free resources to advance University goals and enhance our margin of excellence. Encourage faculty and staff to seek sponsored programs funds that advance their particular intellectual interests. Our goal is to double the amount of funds from sponsoring agencies over the next five-years. We fully recognize that external factors such as the state of the economy and possible reductions in government-sponsored research may reduce the availability of funds from any particular source during this period. An adaptive and aggressive approach to seeking sponsored funding is therefore imperative. As part of that approach, we intend to foster innovative "packaging" of the work of different faculty to help us meet the objectives of sponsoring agencies and secure larger grants with wider participation. Where the potential for securing extramural support might seem limited by narrowly defined funding agency priorities, we intend to support faculty in challenging and expanding those limits by crafting proposals that imaginatively interpret and effectively reframe them. Further, we intend to ask that faculty regularly review the major objectives of sponsoring agencies and, then, consider whether modest reformulation of their initiatives might result in greater success in securing extramural support. Ultimately, as academic integrity allows, we intend to advance the expectation that all faculty will diligently seek out and aggressively pursue every opportunity to grow sponsored research, scholarship and creative activity on our campus. Prioritize and accelerate development of additional research space, including the Innovative Technologies Complex, to ensure the infrastructure necessary to support the growth of sponsored research. Within the next year, at the eastern edge of the campus, the first building in the Innovative Technologies Complex will come on line, providing much needed space for new and expanding research programs. Thereafter, the university should vigorously pursue its plans to construct other buildings on that site. Moving forward with the development of the downtown center and maximizing educational and research use of facilities being provided to the University by Endicott Interconnect Technologies should also be high priorities. In addition, the University should develop a feasible plan for regular renovation and maintenance of its research facilities, including taking steps to ensure the viability of its libraries, which are critical to its growth as a research institution. This plan should also address renovation of space for new faculty as well as installation of new equipment. Proposed processes need to be cost-effective, timely, and responsive to the campus’ rapidly changing research needs. Greater openness and flexibility in approaches to planning, design and construction will also be needed to achieve this goal. Encourage faculty with common interests, within and/or across academic units, to physically organize themselves in the manner they believe will best assure success in their teaching, research and creative activities.Empower such groups, based on their level of extramural funding, to purchase and maintain equipment and facilities. No single organizational structure is ideal for every case; solutions or structures that work well in one context may not be effective in another. Faced with this reality, the University’s organizing principle should be topromoteintellectual synergy amongst its scholars and researchers. This bold initiative will require the University to devise more flexible means of marshalling and deploying its resources, including facilities and infrastructure, to facilitate and support non-traditional, approaches to discovery and education. [An example of an interdisciplinary research approach involving social sciences, humanities, the professional schools and performing arts would be a “public service” research cluster. One case suggested to the Strategic Planning Council involved “School-linked-services,” described as “an innovative system of delivering services in which community agencies and schools collaborate to provide a variety of health and social services to children and their families at or near school sites” (Hare, 1995). School-linked-services are a growing phenomenon across the US, spanning pre-school through high school programs. Many of these programs are connected through partnerships with universities. They involve education, as well as legal aid services, mental health services (social work, psychology), nursing services and expressive arts including creative writing and poetry, music, dance and theatre. A school-linked-services research cluster could seek funds to establish, expand, run, provide student internships and evaluate school-linked-services in the Southern Tier and beyond.] Faculty in equipment-intensive and facilities-intensive research clusters should receive appropriate support from the University for the purchase and maintenance of equipment and facilities in the cluster, based on the research cluster’s level of extramural funding. The University should adopt as a guiding principle the idea that the cost of operating and maintaining core research facilities and equipment ought to be borne by the faculty groups who are the primary users of these resources in their daily research activity. Within University guidelines, responsible charge-back arrangements should be employed to support programmatic use of equipment for educational purposes and the intellectual work of faculty not affiliated with the cluster. Become more adaptive in allocating space in order to foster establishment of physical research clusters that can house core equipment and other specialized facilities needed to support faculty investigations. Encouraging faculty to organize themselves according to shared topics of inquiry will not have its full impact without attendant changes in how the University enables faculty to come together, disband, and reorganize as their interests coalesce and change over time. Periodic reconfigurations will assuredly put pressure on many different units within the University. New policies and procedures that result from this initiative will set a standard for timely responsiveness, while recognizing realistic constraints where they exist. Expanding the total inventory of available research space through the construction of new buildings, retrofitting of existing buildings, and purchase or lease of space in the Greater Binghamton area will foster the University’s ability to provide research space expeditiously. Ensure that policies and procedures for tenure, promotion, and merit review appropriately recognize interdisciplinary research efforts across the institution. Recognizing the limitations of current procedures, the University must develop policies and processes that will allow junior faculty, without jeopardizing their tenure status, to maximize their research and scholarship by affiliating with like-minded peers across the disciplines. Staff, too, have specialized expertise that can contribute to the University’s research efforts across organizational lines. They should be encouraged and rewarded for this important interdisciplinary contribution to mission as well. Foster a campus culture of respect and successThe success of the University is inextricably tied to those who work here, and our aspiration is to create an environment that brings out the best in everyone. Establishing such a workplace begins with a culture of respect—respect for every individual, respect for every idea, respect for the contributions inherent in each job title within the organization, and respect for the physical campus in which we work. Ensure the best possible management of all University employees. Because of the influence they wield, leaders, managers and supervisors, at every level, should have formal preparation for their roles in the lives of others. This training should be designed to foster effective communication, mutual problem solving, win-win conflict resolution, sensitivity to diversity, crisis management and coaching/mentoring skills to help foster professional development across the institution. To help individuals deal with reasonable, time-limited personal demands and circumstances the University should be flexible when possible about adjusting work schedules and work requirements. Concerns expressed about health and environmental issues and other dangers in the workplace should be taken seriously and, when verified, unsafe/unhealthy conditions should be expeditiously remedied. Developing a regular schedule for repainting, refurbishing and improving University grounds, and sharing that schedule with the University community, is another way to demonstrate the University’s respect for its talented workforce. Make professional development a University-wide priority. Faculty and employee orientation and professional/staff development programs foster high performance. Both should be enhanced on this campus. The University should also review its criteria for all positions and ensure that requirements for promotion and success are appropriate and attainable. Because a loyal and stable workforce often limits promotional opportunities, Binghamton should also develop a more varied and rich reward structure tailored to the preferences of different groups. Critical next-steps toward implementation of this planOur aims are broadly conceived. Pathways to their achievement are multiple and diverse, and there is much to be done in order to realize our vision. Enlisting the creativity and energy in each unit and each individual in this endeavor will ensure an institutional outcome of which we can all be proud. Establish plans, within each division, that articulate how the unit will advance the University’s goals. Annually evaluate progress. Each division should develop a plan for carrying out the overarching strategies within their respective units. Divisional proposals should outline possible actions to be taken alone and in concert with other divisions, resources to be sought, funds requested from University sources, and indices that will be used to monitor progress. Synthesizing unit proposals is the next step. The Vice Provost for Strategic and Fiscal Planning is charged with collecting and reviewing divisional plans and making recommendations to the President and Vice Presidents for the most promising next steps, the budget allocations to underwrite those actions, and the means (metrics) to assess progress annually. Senior Staff deliberations on proposals will result in a more detailed framework to guide the decisions and actions of all members of the University community. Senior Staff should review annually the University’s progress in achieving its goals, identify emerging opportunities and potential threats in the surrounding environment, and make appropriate modifications in its approach to the future. Develop a comprehensive plan to communicate the University’s aspirations and achievements to internal and external constituencies. Realizing the University’s vision will require support from within and from without the institution. Our story of success needs to be widely and repeatedly told. Telling it internally will prepare a league of well-informed campus ambassadors out of students, faculty and staff. Telling it externally will expand and enhance our successes with faculty and student recruitment, economic and community outreach, and private and public endowments and fundraising. Binghamton should review and where necessary revise its communication strategies to assure that our institutional identity is clear, that our messages are compelling and that our communications consistently capture and effectively relay our strategies and achievements. CONCLUSIONBinghamton University enjoys a national reputation for excellence, but our past achievements will not assure our success as the world changes around us. Known for the talents and scholarly contributions of our faculty, the selectivity and achievements of our students, and the dedication and ingenuity of our staff, Binghamton wants to become an even more vital and vibrant home to discovery, education and engagement. Aligning the choices we make throughout the University with our strategies will keep Binghamton moving toward its institutional aspirations. Guided by these aims we can leverage our current strengths, enhance educational opportunities, extend the boundaries of knowledge and understanding, engage the world more broadly, and energetically develop new, diversified sources of revenue, as we seek the best and strongest future possible for Binghamton University.
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