This week, Northwestern Provost Dan Linzer e-mailed members of the NU community inviting them to participate in two community forums held on Monday and Tuesday, as a way to give their feedback on NU’s Strategic Plan. The plan, to be released in its final version at the beginning of the 2011-2012 school year, will outline the administration’s next capital campaign and “set the tone” for the University for the next 10 years.
After reporting on the community forums, The Daily noted that they were better attended by faculty and staff members than students. In a sense, this is understandable. The strategic plan will be carried out over the next 10 years, so no current students will be around to experience its effects. But The Daily strongly believes that students should take an active interest in this process over the next several months because although we may not be here to see it, this plan is a part of the legacy we leave behind when we leave NU.
The reality is that there is no way for the administration to know what NU students in ten years are going to want or what kinds of initiatives that will most benefit them. The closest they can come is asking the students who are here now. This can be the legacy current students leave behind for the NU students of the future. Every student and every class has some opportunity to leave behind a legacy, but being at NU during the preparatory stages of a new strategic plan is an especially opportune moment for a student to play a role in determining the future course of the University.
The more material reason that we, as students should feel obligated to participate in this process is that ultimately, we will be paying for it. This plan is the outline for the next “capital campaign,” which is the official name of the University’s periodic, intensive effort to raise funds from the alumni to pay for the special projects outlined in the campaign. The success of the campaign will depend on part how worthy the NU alumni deem the projects. We as future members of the alumni base being asked for the funds, should take advantage of this opportunity to tell the university what we are and are not interested in helping to finance going forward. We don’t just have a theoretical stake in this plan, many of us will likely have a financial stake in it as well.
We commend the administration’s attempts so far to engage the NU community in the strategic planning process, but we also see room for improvement in this process over the next few months before the plan is finalized.
Linzer noted in an e-mail to The Daily that more meetings to gain feedback from community members will be held, including a meeting scheduled with NU student leaders in November. Feedback from the community was received through focus groups, surveys, panel discussions and a large volume of e-mails through the [email protected] address, Linzer said. But we believe that people, especially students, are much more likely to respond with their feedback to specific plans or ideas than to come up with something completely on their own. We urge the University to solicit this type of feedback as well as collect ideas, either by releasing more detailed plans before the draft of the plan is released in December or by continuing to collect feedback during the draft phase. Once the draft is released it is important that the administration maintain flexibility. While students have not been an integral part of forming this draft since the beginning meetings in 2009 there should be ample opportunity to have their opinions worked into the final plan for the university.
We understand that the administration has reasons for wanting to keep the plan’s details somewhat of a secret right now but the vague nature of the meetings held this week made it less enticing for students to attend them than if they had seen specific ideas listed, which would make people either really excited or enraged, and in both cases interested in offering feedback.
We also believe the meetings held this week could have been better organized to encourage more student participation. The community forum held on the Evanston campus took place from 9 to 11 a.m., a time period during which any student who isn’t in class is probably still asleep. Additionally, we believe it could be beneficial to, rather than holding large, general forums, to hold smaller, but still community-wide meetings dealing with specific meetings. That way, someone interested in discussing improvements to engineering research could meet with other people interested in like-minded proposals rather than spending half of the meeting hearing about plans for a new student center, when that is not what they came hoping to hear about.
Finally, we encourage the administration to use electronic as well as face-to-face methods of soliciting feedback. If the university truly cares about getting feedback from a large cross-section of the community, they can’t rely too much people taking the initiative to come to an event or having flexible schedules. Face-to-face suggestion sessions have their merits, but in this day and age, we feel that the university should also utilize all possible methods of generating feedback electronically. The Undergraduate Budget Priorities Committee is a group that has been very successful in collecting student input, because they use an electronic survey that asks students to respond to and rank specific ideas. We believe that the best way for the administration to engage students in the strategic planning process would be to use a similar model, among other things.
We are very excited to be a part of the NU community during this critical planning process, and we encourage other students to get excited and be involved as well. Because this is going to be our legacy, and for many of us, a financial investment as well. We also encourage the administration to continue to use every possible method to engage students in this process.
