Draft of Strategic Plan 2009

Celebrating our Traditions, Imagining our Futures 

OUR VISION

The College of Liberal Arts will marshal its rich human, intellectual, and cultural resources to address the grand challenges of our times.  Faculty and students in our programs will work within and across disciplinary boundaries in the land-grant tradition to advance Purdue University’s role in contributing to fundamental discoveries in the arts, humanities, behavioral sciences and social sciences and to contribute to the quality of life worldwide.

We will lead as artists, educators, and researchers in the humanities, the performing and creative arts, and the social, behavioral and health sciences.

•  We will advance knowledge and creative expression at the highest levels befitting a Research 1 university.
•  We will advance understandings of cultures and political processes.
•  We will produce and present excellence in the visual and performing arts.
•  We will through our research and clinical programs increase personal wellness and quality of life and address pressing social issues. .
•  We will work with all colleges in the Purdue system to better steward the earth.
•  We will develop communication in all its emergent forms.
•  We will foster the development of a “creative community”--a place where creative people will locate and contribute to the vitality of Purdue University and our communities. 

OUR CHARACTERISTICS and STRENGTHS 

Our programs in the humanities, the performing and creative arts, and the social, behavioral and health sciences translate discovery and learning to our local, national, and international communities, enabling the University to align itself with its benchmark and peer universities.  Our strengths include the following:

•  In the spirit of the great land-grant tradition, education and learning programs integrate the University’s rich resources in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines with learning in the arts and the humanities, and in the behavioral and social sciences.
•  Basic research and scholarship emerge from our laboratories, libraries, and the field, defining innovations within and across our disciplines.
•  Creativity drives the exploration and presentation of the arts to define Purdue University as a leading national voice in the creative arts.
•  Excellence in the health sciences combines basic research, health care delivery, and clinical innovations as a major contributor to comprehensive health and wellness.
•  Challenging undergraduate curricula in the College prepare students for a dynamic and ever-changing world of work and enhance their knowledge of world cultures and perspectives, aesthetic awareness, racial and ethnic diversity, gender issues, social ethics, the individual and society, world languages, mathematics and statistics, natural sciences, and written and oral communication.
•  Faculty and staff are committed to inclusiveness, using their insights to prepare our students to live and compete successfully in a multicultural world.
•  College of Liberal Arts faculty and students participate globally in discovery, learning, and engagement.
•  Transformational learning throughout our curricula prepares both graduate and undergraduate students to use their talents in any career context.
•  Faculty, staff, and students are resolved to harness our resources to enhance campus design, including safety, aesthetics, and environmental stewardship.

GOAL 1.  Launching Tomorrow’s Leaders  

The College of Liberal Arts steadfastly presents excellent, diverse, and rigorous programs of learning to prepare tomorrow’s leaders in our ever-changing world.

Launching Tomorrow’s Leaders: Our Strengths 

Faculty and staff in the College of Liberal Arts develop and participate in innovative programs that enhance analytical competence appropriate to our disciplines and programs.  These programs increase interaction with the wider world in the 21st Century, and make us a statewide, nationwide, and global resource that launches tomorrow’s leaders. Our programs: 

•  Prepare students to be competitive for the best occupations, professions, and graduate schools in a changing, global society.
•  Develop mentoring programs, processes, and support mechanisms that strengthen graduate education and position the College as a national leader in graduate student PhD completion rates and lower time to degree averages.
•  Help students appreciate the synergies among the humanities, the performing and creative arts, and the social, behavioral and health sciences and ensure that these synergies are developed, fostered, and sustained.
•  Provide a global education, thereby promoting respect and celebration for diverse populations across global societies.
•  Prepare students for global experiences with an interdisciplinary Global Studies minor field of study.
•  Give broad exposure to the liberal arts curriculum, cultivating a celebration of the value of learning and teaching as ongoing, lifelong endeavors.

 Excellent teaching is rewarded and developed with grants and awards for improved learning and success for undergraduate and graduate students.  Programs that increase the diversity of student learning styles and skills are continuously enhanced.

 Launching Tomorrow’s Leaders:  Our Plans  

The College of Liberal Arts will encourage, through incentives and recognition in the tenure and promotion process, the participation of faculty in collaborative research projects in research centers and other units, and the incorporation of multidisciplinary synergies in courses, programs, and special initiatives.  Additionally, we plan to:

•  Increase the involvement of undergraduate and graduate students in professional societies.
•  Improve mentoring strategies for undergraduates that will prepare them for the best graduate programs as well as for entry into a career.
•  Encourage and reward students at the undergraduate and graduate level for published scholarship and scholarly presentations at regional and national conferences.
•  Strengthen the ways we market the accomplishments of our undergraduate and graduate students.
•  Participate in University programs that enhance the competitiveness of our students for national and international scholarships.
•  Connect our courses within and across the humanities, the performing and creative arts, and the social, behavioral and health sciences
•  Continue to use and develop innovative teaching methodologies, including team teaching, cross-disciplinary and cross-college courses linkages, and experiential and service learning classes.
•  Provide outstanding students with advanced educational opportunities through an expanded college honors program and encourage discovery-based departmental honors programs.
•  Encourage students to interact with diverse populations, including alumni and members of the international student body.
•  Encourage students to enroll in globally oriented courses and interdisciplinary minors to promote preparation for study abroad and understanding of the wider world
•  Support and encourage P-14 educational partnerships to promote and prepare students for careers in both secondary and post-secondary education.
•  Develop international service learning opportunities, activities, short courses, and innovative degree programs with a global perspective for undergraduate and graduate students across the University.

GOAL 2. Discovery with Delivery 

The College of Liberal Arts develops and sustains robust programs of research and creative inquiry to investigate human and social issues and problems with the intent of serving and improving the quality of life in Indiana, the U.S. and throughout the world.

Discovery with Delivery:  Our Strengths

 The College of Liberal Arts rewards creative artists and researchers who achieve national or international recognition for their work.  It proactively promotes and honors those who accomplish great things at Purdue and around the world.  The College merits its national and international reputation for cultivating excellence, leadership, and consequential outcomes through the formation of scholarly research communities that are represented by networks of cooperating centers, academic departments, and interdisciplinary programs.  Our achievements are based upon these attributes:

•  Faculty and students across the College uphold the highest standards of ethics and integrity in their work.  Ethical standards are linked to the methods of critical and analytical thinking, the hallmark of Liberal Arts faculty and students.
•  Faculty, staff and students in the humanities, the performing and creative arts, and the social, behavioral and health sciences, work with science, technology, and engineering programs across campuses to generate unique cultural events, including Cancer, Culture, and Community and EPICS. 
•  Interdisciplinary teams of researchers, scholars, and students investigate persistent social inequalities that affect local, national, and global communities. 
•  The College of Liberal Arts recruits diverse and exceptionally talented faculty and students to pursue distinction in discovery, the dissemination and promotion of research findings, and the communication of its work to the wider world.
•  Our faculty, students, and staff share the talent, dedication, and leadership necessary to grow and sustain a global and preeminent commitment to breakthrough research and imaginative enterprises.
•  Our partnerships with other universities, and with profit and nonprofit organizations in Indiana, the nation, and the wider world create a successful model for discovery with delivery.

Discovery with Delivery: Our Plans 

The College of Liberal Arts will enhance our already robust scholarly programs of research and creative inquiry in the following ways:

• Continue to recruit the best diverse faculty with approaches that include competitive salaries, stipends, and start up packages.
• Continue to recruit the best diverse graduate students with competitive stipends, fees, mentoring programs that are competitive with those of our aspirational peers.
• Facilitate disciplined-based research and interdisciplinary research with existing intramural grants that provide support for pursuing extramural funds from foundations, companies, and governments.
• Develop faculty and graduate student workshops on research ethics and integrity to prepare classroom instructors to teach a required section on ethics and integrity in all research methods classes taught to undergraduate and graduate students.
• Create interactive communication models to disseminate science, social and behavioral science, cultural and creative work, and technology and engineering initiatives across campus to invite multidisciplinary work in areas that benefit local, national, and international communities.
• Increase our participation in interdisciplinary work in centers such as the Center for Families, Center on Aging and the Life Course, Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security, the Ingestive Behavior Research Center, the Oncological Sciences Center, and the Regenstreif Center, to generate theory and applications for health and health care delivery systems as well as theory- and research-driven explanations of gender, race, and ethnic group harmony, conflict, and violence in order to be able to advise policy makers at the local, national, and international levels.
• Improve retention of the best faculty and graduate students worldwide by creating a formalized mentoring system and providing more opportunities for informal mentor networks.
• Connect faculty with advancement and development officers to increase the likelihood of financial support for scholarship, as well as collaborations within and across universities, the state, and governments.  
• Seek more synergies with technology parks, Discovery Park, and the Research Park.
• Provide leadership for Indiana’s P-14 educational communities to prepare more students for higher education.  

GOAL 3:  Meeting Global Challenges 

The College of Liberal Arts enhances Purdue University’s commitment to address the grand challenges of humanity.   

Meeting Global Challenges:  Our Strengths  

The Purdue campus is a localized global community with all of the challenges of cultural awareness, collegiality, and respect for diversity that exist in any community. The campus provides a culturally rich and diverse environment that reflects its global population and enriches the lives of its faculty, staff, and students. The College of Liberal Arts is an essential component of the University in its globalization goals:

•  The College of Liberal Arts promotes an environment where its employees, its students, the local and state citizenry, and the global community are able to benefit from the cultural and intellectual activities that a thriving university community provides.
• Liberal Arts professors are active scholars within their fields and as globally engaged citizens and resource persons
• The College of Liberal Arts nurtures an awareness and appreciation of diversity and of the expansion of our cultural horizons that accompanies becoming a global institution.
• Together with the Indiana Economic Development Corp., The College of Liberal Arts actively engages in the preparation of state regional economic development plans, based upon the historical significance of each area (county or city) and its anticipated contribution to the partnerships among science, engineering, and the liberal arts, work that is essential for a land-grant university and for an institution of public higher education.  

Meeting Global Challenges:  Our Plans  

In order to meet the global challenges of the future, the College of Liberal Arts will: 

• Propose a core curricular experience (above the 100-level) for students across the University to study global issues and the ways in which the social and behavioral sciences and the arts and humanities are effective in promoting human well being through engagement with sciences and engineering.
• Play a leadership role in developing an Institute for Public Policy, and will find ways to reward and encourage faculty to participate in making contributions to public policy and to the improvement of collaborative scientific and engineering efforts that have social impact.
• Encourage students to enroll in the Global Studies Minor to promote excellence in their study abroad experiences and their understanding of the wider world.
• Encourage faculty to cultivate an understanding of Indiana and its challenges as they relate to the wider world.
• Encourage faculty to engage in hands-on consultation work (beyond public lectures) with state, local, and international agencies and with media outlets.
• Promote global-oriented education goals at high schools across the state.
• Launch information literacy (numeracy and logic) as curricular components for Purdue and as a focal point for engagement work.
• Participate in the development of a University Synergies Advancement Council to find ways to promote synergistic curricula, discovery, and engagement.
• Take the lead in establishing a full-fledged International Center that will house interdisciplinary regional and global area studies programs, provide a regularly programmed meeting space for relevant presentations, and attract faculty, staff, and students from outside the College to participate.
• Develop a seed grant program that will encourage interdisciplinary involvement with liberal arts and the social sciences related to economic development.
• Recruit faculty with strong economic development interests, capabilities, and track records.
• Develop a blueprint for the role that the humanities, the performing and creative arts, and the social, behavioral and health sciences will play in creating welcoming and tolerant communities for international businesses. 
• Create a database of alumni who work or reside internationally to engage international alumni in the College’s global initiatives. 
  

Benchmark Measures 

The College of Liberal Arts will track progress toward achieving the goals specified in Celebrating our Traditions, Imagining our Futures by collecting and examining the following benchmark measures each year.

Input Measures

• Entering students’ standardized test scores
•  Percent of admitted students who enroll
•  Number of students awarded academic scholarships or fellowships
•  Number of students in the College and University Honors Programs
•  Number of research courses containing sections on the responsible conduct of research
•  Number of faculty associated with interdisciplinary centers
•  Number of courses taught on global issues
•  Number of service learning courses

Output Measures

•  Undergraduate and graduate student retention rates
•  Time to degree completion for undergraduate and graduate students
•  Number of undergraduate and graduate degrees awarded
•  Number of students in study abroad programs
•  Number of students graduating with honors
•  Extramural funds awarded
•  Number of faculty holding editorial positions on leading scholarly journals
•  Number of best article and best book prizes
•  Number of national fellowships and academy memberships awarded
• Number of faculty participating in community engagement projects
•  Number of faculty participating in research or teaching programs abroad
•  Number of faculty with strong economic development involvement

Strategies and Metrics

Implementation 

The College of Liberal Arts will implement its strategic plan by April, 2009.  Each department and the interdisciplinary programs will develop its corresponding plans by December 2009.  The College will recognize the mission and vision of each academic unit while maintaining the framework of Celebrating our Traditions, Imagining our Futures.  

Each August department heads and program directors will submit annual reports to the College that measure progress.  Biannual meetings will be convened by the Dean to examine and assess achievements and challenges.  Discussions will focus on how departments and programs can be assisted in achieving goals that represent the vision and mission of each academic unit and the College of Liberal Arts. 

In this section

• Draft of Strategic Plan 2009
• Committee for Strategic Plan 2009