More than a year and a half after Boston University President Robert Brown announced his plans to better address faculty and student concerns about how to improve BU, he made available an online presentation yesterday detailing some of those points.
The website is part of an effort to better advertise the Strategic Planning Task Force, which Brown created in winter 2005 to asses university members’ opinions about BU. Brown will present some of his goals for the Task Force through the online PowerPoint presentation available on the website.
Brown will discuss his presentation — “Forging Our Future by Choosing to Be Great” — at a Faculty Assembly meeting today at 3 p.m. in the School of Law Auditorium. A videocast will be held in Evans 720 for faculty on the Medical Campus.
The presentation outlines specific commitments for BU, which are supplemented with information from the December 2006 report of Strategic Planning. The Board of Trustees approved Brown’s Strategic Plan draft April 14, according to an April 30 letter from Brown to faculty members.
While the Strategic Plan has 12 commitments, only the ones with top priority are detailed in the presentation, which include hiring faculty members with significant achievements, strengthening undergraduate programs based on liberal arts, merging the academic initiatives of BU’s colleges and enhancing graduate colleges’ programs.
The presentation also lists more specific steps, such as adding an associate provost for undergraduate education position and increasing the College of Arts and Sciences faculty by 100 in the next 10 years. To attract faculty with impressive research and scholarship, BU will have to consider their compensation, Brown’s letter states.
“Boston University will have to increase faculty compensation to be competitive with our peer institutions,” he stated. “Implementing a long-term plan for increasing faculty compensation is one of the most important components of the plan.”
The presentation also points out ways BU should be more involved in Boston, including “leadership in community engagement,” such as working in public service or healthcare sectors and opening arts and cultural events to Boston’s general public.
Brown’s April 30 letter went into greater detail about each of the goals and outlined the timeline of progress on the plan so far. He said feedback from the community is crucial to adopting the Strategic Plan quickly.
“Many university planning exercises take considerably longer than a year and a half that we have used [for the Strategic Plan],” Brown says in the letter. “But it was my view . . . that it was critical to move forward expeditiously so that we would have a sound basis for decision-making and for financial planning and fundraising.”
Brown’s letter stresses reinvesting in the Strategic Plan goals and eventually creating a “virtuous cycle in which this reinvestment increases the quality of the university,” because if the university improves itself, students and faculty will be more likely to support the institution, he said.
Although he is optimistic about the Strategic Plan, Brown said it will be important to reassess it on an annual basis as circumstances change and amendments to the plan are considered.
“In this sense, a plan is as much about what you decide not to do as the initiatives you decide to support,” he said.