OUR TAKE
October 21, 2009 by The Red and Black Archives
Filed under Opinions
A plan for the future
University’s ’strategic plan’ vitally important to educational experience
The words “strategic plan” sound like a title for a paper you’d read to put yourself to sleep.
But the strategic plan – the University’s goals for the next 10 years – is a big deal.
Goals that seem to be common sense – increasing the number of students studying abroad, expanding access to technology on campus and bettering national research rankings – largely determine the University’s focus for the future.
The ideas are complicated and carry many facets, and the editorial board will try to explain the aspects through editorials in the coming weeks.
Today’s topic: Research.
The 2000-2010 strategic plan aimed to raise the University’s research ranking from 86th to 50th, but instead we fell to 98th in 2008. The rankings – based on our federal funding – show that although the University’s research money has reached a peak, it’s woefully lower than comparable institutions.
With a renewed focus on research (as seen in the development of the medical school and engineering faculty), some huge positives come to mind: better programs, better faculty, better graduate students and more funding.
There’s no doubt that focusing on research will bring greater prestige to the University and draw more tenure-track faculty.
But some departments could be marginalized in the race for more money. The sciences, for example, are a magnet for federal funding. The University could unintentionally marginalize tenure-track faculty in humanities and social sciences if administrators focus the rally for federal money around science research. This complicated balance is not new.
On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) proposed prohibiting the National Science Foundation from spending federal research dollars on political science projects, questioning how effective they truly are. We know humanities and social science research contributes a great deal to the academic community, but results often seem less tangible than those in the hard sciences.
With a focus on research, will we lose some emphasis on the University’s liberal arts excellence? Will liberal arts students question their choice of major or see a discrepancy in opportunities?
We sure hope not.
- Carolyn Crist for the editorial board
