The College’s strategic planning process, which began under former College President Jim Yong Kim, never reached its initial goal of creating policy for the College’s future, faculty strategic planning advisory committee chair and sociology professor Denise Anthony said. The recommendations resulting from the process, she said, instead helped inform College President Phil Hanlon when he arrived.
Anthony and dean of admissions and financial aid Maria Laskaris, who served as chair of the College’s senior executive strategic planning advisory committee, said the strategic planning process slowed due to the change in leadership after former College President Jim Yong Kim, who served as president from 2009-12, departed before the plan’s completion.
Interim College President Carol Folt released the plan. Because of Kim’s departure, Laskaris said, the process ended as only a compilation of the ideas and recommendations discussed in working groups and committees, not a plan for the College’s future.
“He happened to leave in the middle of it, which is generally disruptive to those kinds of processes,” Anthony said.
Laskaris also said the results have aided Hanlon, citing his focus on experiential learning and increasing the number of postdoctoral students as connecting to ideas of the strategic planning committee.
The strategic planning process was carried out by a faculty committee, a senior executive advisory committee and a communications committee, which included faculty, staff and students, all responsible to a steering committee. The working groups gathered student feedback on topics from research and scholarship to pedagogy and teaching over the course of six to nine months.
With the arrival of Hanlon and Provost Carolyn Dever, both Laskaris and Anthony said that they are unsure whether there are plans to begin the process of drafting a new strategic plan that reflects a new set of goals.
Since Hanlon took office, he launched the Moving Dartmouth Forward initiative to gather campus feedback and recommendations.
English professor and presidential steering committee chair Barbara Will wrote in an email that the committee is still gathering information and has not yet entered the evaluative stage.
After the results of the strategic planning process were released in March 2013, community members showed general disinterest in the recommendations. One month after the release, no feedback had been garnered via Twitter, an outlet through which the President’s Office aimed to solicit feedback from students, faculty and alumni. Alumni outside of Hanover were generally “unaware and uninterested” in the suggestions the following April, former Alumni Association president John Daukas ’84 told The Dartmouth last April.
The report suggested changing the College’s name to Dartmouth University and creating a “College within the College” living and learning community that would involve 10 percent of the student body breaking away from the traditional D-Plan and 10-week terms. The Global Dartmouth working group suggested creating a central office focused on Dartmouth’s engagement with the international community. The working group also suggested hiring more faculty to decrease student-to-faculty ratio to help increase professors’ ability to conduct research while maintaining academic standards to the College’s global profile.
Institutions undergo strategic planning, a time-intensive process during which an institution’s mission and vision for the coming years is formulated, approximately every five years, said John Stevens, president of Stevens Strategy, a consulting firm that focuses on managing the process of strategic planning. Laskaris said that planning is essential for a forward-looking institution.
“[It helps you] make sure that everything is in alignment with what your broader vision and goals are, whether it’s on the departmental level or the broader institutional level,” she said.
The College’s process more effectively involved the Dartmouth communities, compared to the processes of other universities she examined, Anthony said. She noted, however, that it did not engage everyone in the community.
Stevens said that the process takes a large amount of effort, which makes strategic planning difficult.
“When you do it that way, the campus community, the faculty, the staff, the students, the alumni really do own the plan for the future of the institution,” Stevens said.
Cornell University developmental sociology professor Wendy Wolford, a member of Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences’ strategic planning committee, said Cornell’s process was thorough and democratic.
“We met every two weeks on Wednesdays for two-and-a-half, sometimes three, hours, and everybody had homework,” Wolford said. “We went over every single word of that plan together.”
Wolford added that having a strategic plan is important for maintaining the goals of Cornell as an institution.
“I actually think that it is really valuable to the administration to have some kind of road map,” Wolford said.
Looking forward to future strategic plans, Laskaris said she would like to see committees improve the way feedback and ideas are collected. She pointed to the crowd-sourcing approach of the Improve Dartmouth group as a possible mechanism for data gathering in future strategic planning processes.
