The Faculty Strategic Planning Advisory Committee and the Senior Executive Strategic Planning Advisory Committee form the project's main structure and oversee various specialized working groups, according to Dean of Graduate Studies and engineering professor Brian Pogue. The two committees advise the Strategic Planning Steering Committee, which is chaired by Kim and Provost Carol Folt, Pogue said.
The College has formed seven working groups, including Global Dartmouth and Workforce of the Future, whose memberships have not been publicly announced, according to the College's strategic planning website. Working groups gather relevant information and prepare recommendations on topics identified by SPSC, F-SPAC and SE-SPAC, according to Pogue, a member of SPSC and chair of the Graduate Education for the Future working group.
SPSC aims to approve all final recommendations from the working groups by December 2012, according to Pogue.
"We're cautiously optimistic," Pogue said. "We will need all details to be worked out."
The 29-member Graduate Education for the Future working group, which includes faculty and graduate student representatives, has met four times and plans to meet regularly every two weeks to analyze the "distinct structure" of the College's graduate programs, Pogue said.
"The emphasis is to focus on big picture ideas and where the College sees itself 10, 20 years from now," Pogue said. "For example, we are beginning to evaluate and review our graduate programs to see how we want to move forward. We're focusing on radical changes rather than the day-to-day, and I would say that's pretty refreshing."
The working group invited a consulting group from the National Council on Graduate Schools to visit the College on Nov. 14 and Nov. 15 to help evaluate the graduate programs "relative to other schools," Pogue said.
The working group aims to have a preliminary report for the committees by January, he said.
"One transformative idea is to move away from department-based graduate programs," Pogue said. "The study of molecular cellular biology, for example, can represent five or six different academic areas."
The Research, Scholarship and Creativity working group also began meeting this summer and is currently in an information gathering stage, according to government professor William Wohlforth, an F-SPAC member who co-chairs the working group with Dartmouth Medical School professor George O'Toole.
"Our job is to look into where we want Dartmouth to be in the future and what role does research play within that vision," Wohlforth said. "It's very much about thinking about what might be needed for Dartmouth to continue to flourish."
The Research working group includes 16 members and has met four times since its initial gathering in August, according to O'Toole.
"Our working group is like a seminar," Wohlforth said. "We come in and have a common agenda and reading assignments."
The working group is also interviewing faculty members and others at the College with broad and varied experiences concerning research, O'Toole said. The group launched an online survey, available on the College's strategic planning website, as another outreach effort to gather popular opinion, Wohlforth said.
"We're aiming to have about 40 interviews completed, and then we will correlate the information we're learning from them," O'Toole said.
The Research group plans to work with the Digital Dartmouth working group to develop a "media jam" publicity project to promote a greater "interaction of ideas," O'Toole said. The group will collaborate on various initiatives with other working groups such as the Pedagogy, Teaching and Mentorship group, O'Toole said.
DMS professor Leslie Fall, co-chair of the Pedagogy working group and F-SPAC member, said her group has looked broadly across campus and the country to examine the relationship between scholarship and teaching, as well as the concept of "high-touch education."
The Pedagogy working group, composed of 16 members, has met five times, Fall said.
After interviewing a wide range of Dartmouth professors and listening to guest speakers discuss strategic planning strategies, the Pedagogy group will release a survey based on data collected to gather even more feedback from the faculty before making formal recommendations, according to Fall.
"I would say we are one of the most active groups so far," Fall said. "We're taking our job really seriously even though none of us have extra designated time to do this job."
Fall's co-chair, psychology professor David Bucci, did not respond to requests for comment by press time.
The Digital Dartmouth working group studies the various roles of technology at the College, Dean of Libraries and College Librarian Jeffrey Horrell said. Horrell is one of Digital Dartmouth's co-chairs and a member of SE-SPAC.
Vice President of Information Technology Ellen Waite-Franzen and film professor Mark Williams also chair the working group, Horrell said.
"Our initial discussions have been trying to get our hands around this big topic of digital Dartmouth,'" Horrell said. "This includes the technology infrastructure that Dartmouth needs in place to do our work every day, as well as the greater relationship between research and teaching."
Digital Dartmouth is currently in the process of setting up meetings with campus groups, including the Student Advisors on Libraries and Computing, the Council on the Libraries and the Council on Computing, according to Horrell. The group will also run a focus group with the Hacker's Club, a student computer programming group, beginning this week, he said.
"We also plan to share our data with other working groups to facilitate greater discussion," Horrell said. "We can only imagine that there's going to be a lot of overlap."
The Students of the Future working group, chaired by Dean of the College Charlotte Johnson, Dean of Admissions Maria Laskaris and Native American studies professor Bruce Duthu, will think broadly about future incoming classes, and will aim to predict changes to the recruitment and admissions processes.
While the strategic planning process just recently launched, the response from those involved has been positive, according to faculty members interviewed by The Dartmouth.
"This is the first time I've done strategic planning," O'Toole said. "It's been a learning experience but broadly it's a really good exercise to have bright people think about where research might be going."
Fall said that this opportunity has allowed her to work with individuals across the College's divisions with whom she otherwise might not interact.
"As [a DMS professor], I came into this process not knowing much about the undergraduate campus," Fall said. "I took my marching orders at face value and it's been really very enlightening."
Wohlforth said that the process is a change from the daily work most faculty members encounter.
"This is a very elaborate, hard-working process that asks us to take time away from the daily press to look at the long-term," Wohlforth said. "I was skeptical at first, but I think the process is working."
