Update on Strategic Direction

Dear UC Community,

I am pleased to report that we are making significant progress in charting the University’s strategic direction.

Since the start of the semester, my team and I have engaged nearly a dozen stakeholder groups in building out the vision, platforms, pathways and resource base of the strategic direction.  Broadening the conversation, we completed four additional open sessions on each of our respective campuses.  We also created a website to gather your insights and input.  

Listening to your hopes for tomorrow as well as to your advice for today, several common themes emerged from the discussions.  Here is a sampling:

• Invest in our people and their development

• Make interdisciplinary work easier to do

• Refine the budget model

• Deepen our ties to the community

• Elevate our commitment to inclusion and innovation

• Lead by design rather than follow by default

Your input has proven invaluable to the evolution of our thinking and planning.  A special thanks to all of you—faculty, students, staff, alumni and community members—who have contributed to the progress thus far.

In the weeks ahead, we will continue to review your feedback and refine our framework accordingly.  We also will develop action plans for the platforms and pathways, including timelines, success indicators and resource requirements.  Notably, some initiatives will demand longer development cycles than others.  The Faculty Success Center, for instance, will have its greatest impact if it is created by faculty for faculty.  That is why we are charging a faculty task force with building out its purpose, scope and services over the course of the Spring semester.  The Staff Success Center, on the other hand, is scheduled to open in early 2018, given the critical assets already in place that simply need to be aligned and activated.  

For the official launch of the strategic direction, we are aiming for February 2018. 

At that time, you can expect to see a framework that is both firm and flexible.  For instance, our vision statement will anchor our forward-leaning story of who we are, where we are going and why it matters.  The platforms—currently defined as Academic Excellence, Urban Impact and the Innovation Agenda—will keep us consistently focused on our main priorities.   And the pathways will be nimble enough to allow us to adapt to the evolving needs and interests of our campus community.  Ultimately, we want a strategic direction that is too relevant and impact driven to sit on the shelf gathering dust.

We encourage you to continue to share your ideas and impressions with us via the website.  Even after we transition to the implementation phase of the strategic direction, we hope that you will use the feedback form to let us know how things are progressing from your perspective.

Since embarking on this journey, I have employed the image of a suspension bridge to illustrate our mission of being a student-centered, faculty-driven, staff-supported, urban-based public research university.  This symbol harkens back to my admiration for Joseph Strauss, the chief engineer of the Golden Gate Bridge and an 1892 graduate of UC.  A century ago, Strauss insisted that “Our world of today revolves completely around things which at one time couldn’t be done because they were supposedly beyond the limits of human endeavor.  Don’t be afraid to dream.”

My hope is that our strategic direction will be dynamic enough not only to capture our current dreams but also to make room for our future ones as well.  

Thank you for your interest and engagement in building out the University’s strategic direction for years to come.

Sincerely,

Neville Pinto
President