The University’s Planning Process

 John Simon

Since February 2001, Duke’s academic development has been guided by the strategic plan Building on Excellence. By connecting academic goals to fiscal resources, this strategic plan has enabled Duke to build new facilities, establish new programmatic initiatives, and strengthen academic units. It is now time to work towards developing Duke University’s next strategic plan. During summer 2005 the Provost's office charged the schools and major institutes to begin to develop strategic plans to address both their internal development and their relationship to University-wide priorities and initiatives.

Strategic plans serve to identify aspirations as well as the resources needed to support these efforts. While the immediate focus is on the next five years, these plans must continue efforts begun under Building on Excellence and also look ahead to planning for the next ten-year period and even beyond. Ideas for ways to further our institutional efforts in interdisciplinarity, internationalization, and diversity are paramount. These themes, central to Building on Excellence, remain important priorities for the University. We cannot lose our lead and our momentum in making these goals integral parts of our institutional programs and culture. Planning documents need to articulate school and cross-school efforts relating to these emerging broad university themes: creating coherence and distinctiveness in the undergraduate experience, translating research for the service of society, and strengthening the role of the arts within the University. If we are willing to act on our most ambitious thoughts, other themes and novel ways to contribute to these emerging themes will certainly result from the planning process.

Oversight of the planning process will be the charge of a Planning Steering Committee (PSC), which will be appointed in the next month. The development of the University strategic plan will be an iterative process among faculty (within the schools and though working groups that will be created), schools, institutes, supporting infrastructures such as libraries and technology, faculty governance bodies, and University administrators. The PSC will examine plans and obtain input from several existing faculty committees (e.g., Executive Committee of the Academic Council, Academic Programs Committee, the University Priorities Committee, Standing Committee on Faculty Diversity, Information Technology Advisory Council, and Council for the Arts). It is our goal to provide the Board of Trustees with a draft of the strategic plan in May 2006.