Work on the strategic plan that will guide the university’s direction into the year 2020 is under way. Once completed, Stephen Gottfredson, interim provost and vice president for academic affairs, said the strategic plan will become the primary focus for the university community as well as for its students.
The strategic plan, Gottfredson said, will “determine where we grow as an institution, where we diminish as an institution and where we maintain as an institution.” He suggested that it will concentrate heavily on research and on the overall student experience.
With those thoughts in mind, VCU administrators and student government leaders have spent the past few weeks working together through the various phases to develop the plan and prepare it for its implementation.
“It helps when you have students involved in the decision-making process…students are more receptive,” said Zmarak Khan, the Student Government Association president who serves as the student liaison to the strategic planning executive committee.
In an e-mail, Khan listed some of the major issues he, Gottfredson and the provost’s VCU Medical Center counterpart, Dr. Sheldon Retchin, vice president for VCU Health Sciences and CEO of VCU’s Health System put on the table for further discussion. Three of those issues specifically include students
* Increase the interaction between students and faculty
* Increase the funding for library hours
* Increase the funding for homecoming and other student activities.
Daniel Tanner, chief of staff and senior adviser to the SGA president, said he thinks one of the more pressing issues concerns the lack of communication between students and their academic advisers.
“Advising,” he said “plays a vital role in the academic success of the student,” which starts with their experiences at the university and ends with whether they graduate on time.
In addition, he envisions that a stronger advising system that will offer students one-on-one continuous contact with their advisers so students will not become lost in the bureaucracy.
“It is very important,” Tanner said, “if you are student at VCU – if you are a VCU Ram – to be well-informed and have that communication there and to not have the hassles and problems of a larger institution. You should never feel like…VCU is so large that you’re not getting help or you’re not getting the action you need.”
The Small Community Initiative in the strategic plan, he said, would help create a much more intimate campus feel for VCU.
“(It would be) geared toward connecting (students) with (their) individual school or college instead of trying to connect (them) to the university as a whole.”
Gottfredson, Khan and Tanner agree that VCU is changing into a more residential campus, which helps to create a deeper sense of community and of camaraderie among the students.
“We (VCU) take our civic responsibility very seriously. We consider the community to be part of us as we are part of the community,” Gottfredson said, noting that many urban universities are walled off from the city.
The change to a more traditional full-time residential campus, he said, will mean “students have different expectations, and students have different requirements of us. And we need to figure out what those expectations and what those requirements are.”
In the next few weeks, the executive committee leading the strategic plan initiatives will wade through the 272 recommendations given to it by the seven branch committees.
“Each (committee was) charged with developing a set of initiatives that would move us from 2005 to 2020,” Gottfredson said.
Tanner rated student input as vital to making VCU the student-centered university, which he said is the university’s mission for designing the 2020 strategic plan.
“If we don’t hear from students we can’t do anything to help them…that’s our goal and our purpose,” he said, urging students to respond to the SGA’s request for feedback about the plan.