The Strategic Planning Committee held their second strategic plan open forum for faculty Friday in the L.A. Pittenger Student Center Ballroom.
These faculty and staff were asked to give feedback on the current strategic plan.
Ball State President Geoffrey Mearns broke down the process of the plan into two major phases. Phase one is to continue getting feedback from the University, revise a final draft and present it to the Board of Trustees. The Strategic Planning Committee plans to present the final draft December.
Phase two will entrust each division of the school to form university and college-wide action and implementation plans.
“Some of the feedback we’ve heard is ‘Well, we haven’t seen your metric and targets,’” Mearns said. “That’s a fair observation, but our argument is those are part of the implementation and assessment of the strategic plan.”
Mearns said the committee will be forming university-wide strategic plans November through February.
“We want to expedite that process even before the strategic plan is concluded because the university-wide strategic plans are important for the college and division plans to be aware of so they can develop their college and unit plans.” Mearns said.
Bruce Frankel, an urban planning professor, shared his concerns regarding employee commitment.
“They (staff and faculty) allocate their time, and the time I’ve been given is in the classroom.” Frankel said. “Your responsibilities are to teaching, research and service. Service can involve institutional service to the university or public service to the outside community.”
Frankel said the Strategic Plan only focuses on the service side of a professor's job and doesn’t account for the time required for divisions and colleges to make their action and implementation plans.
Frankel says the hindrance is that if he spends his time on department responsibilities, he can’t spend his time on what the university thinks is important.
“We are talking about the fundamental issue here.” Frankel said. "There is no “how” in the plan, we have to come up with the how, and one of the things is we have to release professors and professional staff to implement the plan. To me that’s a foundational issue.”
The Strategic Plan Committee has received feedback not only from the forums, but through online and paper surveys. Mearns said the committee has received around 400 responses.
James Lowe, a member of the Strategic Planning Board and associate vice president for Facilities Planning and Management, said there are some common responses they are seeing in the surveys.
“There is a confusion because they are not seeing all the metrics,” Lowe said.
Lowe said Mearns did a great job at communicating with the faculty and staff in building the metrics of the plan.
“They are not going to be as extensive as the last strategic plan, where we had 110 metrics,” Lowe said. “This is driven by the vision, the destination. We want to be at some point in 2040, help us figure out how to get there.”
The third and last open forum will be for alumni, faculty, professional, staff and service personnel 3-4:30 p.m. Oct. 18 in Emens Auditorium. The online survey will be available for staff and faculty until Oct. 21.
Contact Charles Melton with comments at cwmelton@bsu.edu or on Twitter @Charles61367249.
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