Strategic Planning

Over the past two years, the FAS Faculty have come together in various forms to embark on a three-year strategic planning project with the goal of developing a forward-looking vision for excellence in our academic communities, the support and development of our faculty, and graduate admissions and education.

The third and final year of this project kicked off with a faculty retreat in August 2023, which begins a year of exploring what we have learned during the first two years of planning and discussing opportunities for change that have emerged from our efforts.

Background

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences has launched a broad, three-year strategic planning process to define the structures and resources needed to support long-term excellence in teaching and research within and across its many fields and disciplines. Our second year, the 2023 academic year, was a year of designing and piloting solutions to the challenges—and opportunities—that surfaced over the course of our first year, which was focused on listening and discovery. The process puts a particular focus on a forward-looking vision for excellence in:

Academic Communities

Faculty Support and Development

Graduate Education

The FAS strategic planning process benefits from insights achieved through a number of distinct review and planning efforts across the Academic Divisions. It draws particular inspiration from a report (and its appendices) by the FAS Study Group, a faculty group convened in November 2020 that spent a year defining a vision for how to position the FAS for broad-based academic excellence, innovation, and sustainability. That report resulted in the use of a new economic budgeting model, a new position that works directly with units to help them increase their access to and use of restricted funds that are now underutilized, and the piloting of a new space planning model to bring transparency and consistency to how we manage our space and make tradeoffs against it.

Vision Statement

From November 2021 through February 2022, the FAS convened nearly 200 faculty members for small group conversations to create a shared vision for the future of the FAS.

A strong, intellectually vibrant, creative FAS ready to steward the future of the liberal arts and sciences through cutting edge research and teaching. An FAS that can:

• Attract and retain the world’s most original and compelling scholars
• Support faculty to achieve excellence in their teaching and research and to contribute at a high level to the University through their citizenship
• Attract and prepare the next generation of leaders and support them in a transformative educational experience
• Foster an environment of ambition, curiosity, and shared commitment to our academic mission that elicits excellence from all members of our community
• Simultaneously cultivate deep disciplinary expertise while promoting meaningful and novel collaboration across disciplines, departments and Schools
• Act quickly and efficiently to advance emerging academic directions and opportunities
• Ensure that individual faculty and academic units have the information they need to make well-considered choices about how to advance our academic mission
• Intentionally structure graduate programs around a shared understanding of student success

GSAS Admissions and Graduate Education Committee

GAGE was tasked with considering advising, teaching, employment outcomes, institutional finances, and equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging to develop actionable steps in how admissions slots are allocated and to outline what PhD education should look like in the 21st century.

View the report

Faculty Workload Committee

The Faculty Workload Committee was charged with examining the non-research workload of faculty at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the John A. Paulson School of
Engineering and Applied Sciences.

View the report