1. The plans will cover a ten-year period -- the current biennium,
two biennia in the future and two biennia in the past.
2. The plans will be combined with descriptive statements concerning
present programs and current and retrospective data and will incorporate
the following principles:
a. Each study should address itself to the concepts stressed in
the paper, "Long-Range Planning Under Conditions of Uncertainty,"
presented to the Board of Regents by the Regents Inter-institutional
Committee on Educational Coordination in May, 1976. Specifically,
the study should consider current academic programs in terms of their
quality, centrality, resource requirements, and anticipated demand.
As noted in the paper, quantitative data should be used to aid in
making projections, but they should not overshadow qualitative judgments.
b. The program projections should be related to the mission of the
institution. This means that the institution's statement of mission
should be reviewed to determine whether it is still accurate; if changes
are needed, these should be carefully considered and presented to
the board for approval as appropriate. The institutions should coordinate
any such proposals for revision in statements of mission so that all
proposals can be considered at the same time.
c. Academic planning must, by necessity, be primarily the responsibility
of those closest to the primary discipline--the faculty and the academic
administration. In that context, planning activities will include
efforts to incorporate information from appropriate groups and constituencies.
d. Concern should be directed to the enhancement of ways to insure
flexibility in the university structure in the coming years. Long-range
planning can be most effective if the system is sufficiently flexible
to be able to respond to changing patterns in enrollment and in programmatic
needs. This is difficult if a substantial part of the resource allocations
are relatively unyielding. This presents a challenge to those responsible
for long-range academic planning to find ways to promote flexibility
without sacrificing the traditional values and responsibilities of
the academic community.
e. The planning process should be continuous, in the sense that
reviews should be conducted and reports made on a periodic basis.
Although it is not desirable to invest a great amount of administrative
time in continual planning activities, at the expense of activities
more central to the mission of the university itself, an efficient
planning procedure should be developed which allows for ongoing study
and reporting of relevant information and for decision-making at appropriate
times. The procedure should involve some kind of monitoring system
which would identify those programs which are undergoing significant
changes and for which critical decisions will have to be made in the
near future.
f. Although each institution will conduct its own long-range planning
studies and make its own reports to the board, continued inter-institutional
coordination and cooperation is imperative. Not only will the institutional
reports be more meaningful if the institutions present data in a comparable
form, but increasingly in the future programmatic decisions will have
to be made affecting all three institutions. Cooperation in the planning
activities leading to those decisions should insure that they are
made for the best possible reasons and that all institutions feel
a commitment to them.
In order to meet these objectives, we propose that the academic
planning mechanism at each institution incorporate the following elements:
1) Each institution will collect programmatic data from individual
units of that institution which can help in the assessment of individual
programs according to the criteria of quality, centrality, resource
requirements, and anticipated demand. The type of data collected
should be reasonably comparable among the three institutions in
order that appropriate comparisons can be made. This will require
further study by the inter-institutional committee on long-range
academic planning to arrive at uniform definitions of the data elements.
A format for collecting the data will be devised which will be similar
among the three institutions, although specific details may vary
according to the needs of each.
2) The central administration at each institution will be responsible
for coordinating the planning activities, including the data gathering
as well as the planning program itself. The information obtained
from the individual units, as described above, will be supplemented
by data obtained centrally, including indications of program quality,
judgments as to the centrality of programs, and data with respect
to resource and demand projections.
3) A critical step in the planning mechanism will be reaching
decisions with respect to the setting of priorities in relation
to future programming. This will involve the relating of information
concerning each program to information, concerning projected resources
and anticipated demands, as well as evaluating the quality and centrality
of each program. Criteria will be developed at each institution
for the establishment of program priorities.
4) Each institution will review its mission statement to determine
whether it is still viable and appropriate as a base for long-range
planning. If not, a revision will be prepared and submitted to the
Board of Regents for approval. In any case, the mission statement
will be used as a reference point for the planning activity and
the setting of priorities.
5) Each institution will devise a procedure for continual monitoring
of academic programs so as to call attention to those which require
in-depth study, perhaps because of changes in enrollment patterns
or in quality.
6) The Inter-institutional Committee on Long-Range Academic Planning
should continue to meet periodically to coordinate the planning
activities of the three institutions and to insure that comparable
data-collecting procedures are being followed. It would continue
to be responsible to the Inter-institutional Committee on Educational
Coordination. (November 11, 1976, pp. 255-257)
3. The plans will be presented to the board every second year coincident
with the preparation of biennial budget requests.
