November 11, 2004

President Wilson convened the second meeting of the 2004-05 Strategic
Planning Steering Committee (SPSC) at 11:45. The committee approved, with
minor corrections, a draft of a report to the community on its October 26
meeting and asked Professor Gardner to distribute the report electronically
to all faculty and staff members. The report will also be posted on the
Strategic Planning Web site for students, alumni, and other visitors to read
at:

http://www2.iwu.edu/president/Strategic/

The President then asked for further reflections on the draft Vision
Statement. He indicated that he thought it might limit the ability of the
community to be flexible and to respond to new challenges and opportunities
if the language of the vision were "set in stone" by a formal vote of the
Trustees or other constituent groups, and he asked for the SPSC's response
to that notion. All members quickly agreed that the text of an
SPSC-approved Vision Statement should be circulated and publicized within
the community as soon as the SPSC deems such a statement is ready, but that
it would not be wise to treat what is intended to be a working guide to
planning as if it were constitutional language.

Having agreed on that principle, several members of the SPSC argued that the
current draft, with small revisions, was ready for approval. The group
then began to consider whether any changes to that draft were yet needed and
decided on only these: the change of a verb the second paragraph from
"overcome" to "counter" and the addition in two places of a short phrase
affirming the University's commitment to engagement with local community
organizations and citizens. After making these changes, members
enthusiastically endorsed the Vision Statement and asked that it be posted
on the Strategic Planning Web site (see url above).

The committee then spent over an hour reviewing, expanding, and refining the
list of potential planning issues it had begun to develop at its first
meeting. As in the first meeting, each topic/issue was tested against the
ideas in the Vision Statement to be sure it had a secure tether to the
overall vision. The intent of this conversation was to develop a clearer
collective agreement on why each issue/topic should continue to be a
candidate for one the 6-8 planning themes the SPSC intends to determine by
the end of this term. The group asked Professor Gardner to prepare a
revised list of topics for consideration at its November 19 meeting, and
President Wilson asked each member to contact Professor Gardner before that
meeting with further thoughts and refinements. After the Thanksgiving
break, the resulting list of issues/topics will be circulated to the
community for feedback and suggestions. At its December meetings, the
committee will review these comments.

During the last few minutes of the meeting, President Wilson introduced his
idea of combining strategic and budget planning into a single broad-based
committee, starting in the 2005-06 academic year. Because the President had
shared his thoughts about this concept at the November meeting of the
General Faculty, he asked Professor Chapman to report on the faculty's
reaction. Professor Chapman stated that the faculty had responded favorably
to such a possibility and that CUPP would be working on ideas about how such
a committee might be constituted. The President stressed that any group
such as he was considering could not be the sole authority for budget
planning, since Trustees and some administrative offices have clear
budgeting responsibilities. He added, however, that he hoped that a
broad-based planning group with important input in to annual and
longer-range budget models would add to the transparency of the budget
process and could help to ensure that resources are directed to agreed-upon
priorities.

Distributed to all faculty and staff 11/19/2004