April 15, 2005

President Wilson convened the tenth SPSC meeting of the Spring 2005 semester at 3:00 p.m. The Committee approved a draft of a report of its April 1 meeting and asked Professor Gardner to distribute it via e-mail to all faculty and staff members and to have it posted on the public strategic planning Website.

The President asked the Committee if all members were satisfied with the five proposed strategic goal statements that had been circulated and discussed on campus over the last couple of weeks. The group unanimously agreed to adopt the goals statements as originally written, with the sole addition of “social justice” to the language of the Teaching and Learning goal. Professor Gardner was then asked to arrange for posting the final statements on the public planning Website.

The President then turned the Committee's attention to organizing principles for the work groups that will propose strategies for each of the five goals. Members agreed that these work groups must be given a clear sense of the purpose and scope of their activities and that groups should consult widely within the campus community before submitting their list of shorter- and longer-term strategies to the Steering Committee. Although CUPP is prepared to take the lead in selecting faculty representatives on the work groups, the Committee recognized that it is important to devise appropriate ways to select staff members as well; the President indicated that he would like to explore effective mechanisms for selecting staff representatives during the summer months. The Committee closed out its discussion of work group membership by agreeing that each work group will be co-chaired by two members of the Steering Committee.

The Committee also recognized a need to develop a schedule for work group activities. The President indicated that he would like to prepare planning documents, including goal statements with 4 to 6 strategies appropriate to each goal, for discussion and ratification at the February 2006 meeting of the Board of Trustees. Thus, the work groups will need to submit their final reports to the Steering Committee during the Fall 2005 term to give the Steering Committee time to put these planning documents together.

Finally, the Committee was reminded that an experimental proposal to replace the SPSC with a Strategic Planning and Budgeting Committee was scheduled to be considered at a meeting of the General Faculty on April 18, 2005. If the faculty approves the experiment, the name of the Strategic Planning Steering Committee will change, effective with its first meeting after April 18.

Distributed to all faculty and staff: May 12, 2005