Provost Ray Alden
David Changnon
Carolinda Douglass
by Mark McGowan
Members of NIU’s strategic planning task forces will spell out their recommendations Friday to President John Peters and Provost Ray Alden.
The 15 “broad and sweeping” proposals to enhance curricular innovation and student success are consistent with goals determined at the beginning of the process last fall, said Carolinda Douglass, chair of the Task Force on Student Success.
Yet the ideas also fit into a larger vision created after the tragic events of Feb. 14.
The new and overarching objective helped both groups regain their concentration and proceed with excitement, Douglass said.
“We wanted to solidify the NIU Huskie identity as a strong, caring and engaged community committed to local, regional and global citizenship,” Douglass said. “That was not a new idea to us, but we really came together after 2-14 and thought, ‘What is really guiding us?’ It somewhat altered how we thought about our strategies, and hopefully for the better.”
Douglass and David Changnon, chair of the Task Force on Curricular Innovation, also will give Peters and Alden a similar number of sub-strategies related to the top recommendations and some additional proposals tied to some of the concept papers submitted by faculty and staff.
Alden expects to “get a sense of not only the goals and the strategies but also the priorities and the sequencing.”
“What we asked the task forces to do was to work in small groups to develop a number of strategies and initiatives that can help advance the goals they have set,” Alden said. “From what I hear, there may be some very interesting things coming forward, and because we see the process taking place over the next five years, some of these will evolve over time.”
The activities of the two task forces are rooted in Peters’ vision of NIU as a university that is sustainable, engaged, global, responsive and accountable.
Earlier work by the NIU Strategic Planning Task Force identified a set of key values and four planning imperatives:
In turn, the task forces set four goals their strategies would accomplish:
“We are very confident that there are some excellent ideas and strategies within our reports. This was an enormous undertaking, and it’s rewarding to finally have concrete recommendations to present that hopefully will have an impact,” Douglass said.
“It also created a great opportunity for people to have conversations,” she added. “In my group on student success, we were able to really dig deep into some of the data and some of the assumptions we have about why students stay at NIU or don’t and why students do well at NIU or don’t.”
The next step is for Peters and Alden to review the proposals and decide which hold the highest priority, Douglass said.
NIU’s vice provosts and members of the Council of Deans are invited to attend Friday’s presentation, she said. Participants in NIU’s system of shared governance also will have an opportunity to review the proposals, she added.
For more information on NIU’s strategic planning, visit http://www.niu.edu/strategicplan/.