President’s Page
Planning for a Changing World
By Joel Seligman
Few projects are more important to a university than strategic planning. Strategic
plans give a university and its academic components the opportunity to articulate
priorities and address the means of achieving them. Effective strategic planning
takes time because it is essential to involve all relevant constituencies in
the process.
During the next two years, the University, each school, and the Medical Center
will undertake a strategic planning effort—drafting, reviewing, and ultimately
adopting plans for each unit and for the University as a whole.
Our nation is in the midst of a profound economic transformation. Domestic
manufacturing has declined sharply, from 20.7 percent of the workforce in 1980
to 11.7 percent in 2002. This has created painful challenges for many regions,
including Monroe County, where manufacturing employment has dropped from 133,800
to 76,400 in just 10 years, from 1995 to 2005.
Simultaneously, however, a knowledge-based economy is rapidly expanding. Federal
agencies predict that 90 percent of the jobs in the knowledge economy will require
some postsecondary education; that there will be 2 million new jobs in engineering,
computer science, mathematics, and the physical sciences in the next eight years;
and that 16 of the 30 fastest growing jobs in the next decade will be in the
health professions, including physicians, nurses, and other medical professionals
who will be needed to address the health concerns of an aging population.
“The question before us is how to build on our traditional
strengths to meet the challenges of a rapidly changing world.”
The University is unusually well positioned to respond to this transformation.
We are committed to the very fields at the heart of future need and growth,
including medicine (as well as dentistry and nursing), engineering, mathematics,
computer sciences, and the natural sciences.
Demographic changes also favor the University. The first 15 years of this century
are predicted to see the largest university enrollment growth in our nation’s
history, adding 2 million additional undergraduates. This growth presents a
special opportunity to increase enrollment while simultaneously increasing student
quality.
A review of these challenges underlines the need for strategic planning. In
preparation for our own process, I have been reviewing the plans of similar
institutions. One theme is consistent throughout: We live in an age of academic
interdisciplinarity. Our leading peers are rapidly shifting from a model that
simultaneously emphasizes the disciplinary grounding provided in existing departments
and schools toward a hybrid model which continues traditional departments and
schools while creating new institutes, schools, and programs that involve two
or more academic disciplines.
Faculty often praise the culture of collaboration at the University. Interdisciplinary
work has been a strength. One needs to look no further than the study of optics
or medicine. The new Goergen Center for biomedical engineering and optics is
an outstanding example. We are fortunate that the River and Medical Center campuses
are contiguous.
Physical proximity tends to facilitate collaborative work. Our modest resources
and faculty size have also tended to inspire interdisciplinarity. The faculty
have often made a virtue of necessity in joint appointments, core facilities,
research, and curricular design. The question before us now is how to build
on our traditional strengths to meet the challenges of a rapidly changing world.
We are beginning a thoughtful, inclusive, consultative planning process that
will involve the entire University community.
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