For the past five years Duke has been building on excellence. Now, as the University’s officials prepare to write Duke’s next strategic plan, administrators are looking to determine where the institution’s priorities should lie for the next five years.
The strategic plan, the document that guides the University’s overall priorities, could cover anything and everything from academic programs to student life and facilities to diversity and technology. Building on Excellence, the current strategic plan, took effect in 2001 and expires this year.
The process of developing the next plan will enter an open phase in the fall, but administrators already have a list of “lessons learned” from Building on Excellence, and they are beginning to highlight priorities for the new one.
The Office of the Provost is leading the planning, which will encompass all of the University’s departments, schools and centers. John Simon, vice provost for academic affairs, is coordinating the planning, which has already begun with self-evaluations from various departments and deans. Administrators said they aim to present a draft of the plan at the May 2006 meeting of the Board of Trustees.
Some of the plan’s likely priorities include President Richard Brodhead’s well known foci of the undergraduate experience and financial aid, as well as the Central Campus project, which is already well into its planning process. Other objectives include “pushing up the quality of faculty hiring, creating a number of peaks of excellence among various schools and departments” and “making a theme putting our knowledge at the surface of society,” Provost Peter Lange said in February.
Jim Roberts, executive vice provost for finance and administration, said there was not yet a ballpark estimate for how much money will be earmarked for the next plan. Funds committed to Building on Excellence totaled $727.1 million over five years. Whereas a significant portion of the last plan’s capital went to building new facilities, Roberts said the next plan would focus on funding academic programs.
“By the time there is a next plan to put before the community, most of the money would be committed to specific projects,” including academic and student programming initiatives, Roberts said.
He noted that one of the strengths of Building on Excellence was that it did not spell out too many financial specifics; for example, it left the details of information technology investments flexible, a philosophy he said could be useful for the next plan as well.
Although the open part of the planning will not begin until early fall, several initiatives are already underway to begin outlining the process. The faculty-driven Academic Programs Committee is examining a set of self-assessment questions Lange sent to members of various schools and departments.
“The goal of that is two-fold: to identify our areas of excellence, unrealized potential and challenges, and probably more importantly to provoke discussion of how to enhance the intellectual environment,” Simon said. Eventually, the strategic plan will outline the University’s goals in the broadest scheme. The individual schools will also develop their own strategic plans that expand on the themes in the main plan.
In addition, the provost has organized a “blue sky” discovery group that will examine issues in higher education over the next two decades or so. The goal, Simon said, is to avoid missing trends because of a preoccupation with the details of executing the plan.
At a retreat following the Board of Trustees’ February meeting, the Trustees discussed some of the lessons they learned from Building on Excellence. Those lessons included the importance of leadership, the balance between sticking with the plan and being opportunistic, the importance of hiring and the way school size affects the impact of hiring.
Some of the key elements of Building on Excellence, however, will be absent from the new plan as the University decides to focus its energies elsewhere. Simon noted that science and engineering would not be developed with the same intensity.
Other goals from Building on Excellence will be continued in a different way, as recently completed facilities are filled with faculty and academic programs.
“It’s really important at this particular juncture not to mix the means with the ends,” Simon said. “Once [buildings are] erected, that’s not the end.”
Although Simon currently serves as the administrative point person for strategic planning, the main planning committee will likely be chaired by a faculty member and faculty will play a large role in the overall planning process.
“The faculty have to substantially buy in to the goals of the plan and the programmatic elements you want to establish,” Simon said. “There has to be significant bottom-up generation of ideas.”
Once the committees are formed, undergraduates and graduate and professional students will also participate. Simon said he expected many of those students would get involved with the committees through student government channels. In addition, he plans to take on a handful of undergraduate and graduate student interns or independent study students who would work directly with him.
As officials are turning inward to begin the planning process, Simon said they also have an eye to what Duke’s peer institutions are doing. “We want to make sure,” Simon explained, “we’re not missing trends or opportunities that we should be doing here at Duke, and also making sure we’re not going to embark down a path where we’re going to end up being mediocre compared to the competition in that direction.”
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