Long Term Planning

Long Term Planning at the College of Arts and Sciences has as its goal a strategic foundation that is financially sustainable in supporting our liberal arts mission. Building on work done last year, this effort seeks a transparent, collaborative process, placed within current governance structures, and involving broad-based participation from the CAS community.

Careful and thoughtful planning has allowed the College to zero-balance its annual budgets, but this has meant increasingly difficult exercises in cost-containment and spending reductions. This effort in long term planning is designed to better align our expenses to expected revenues, and thus alleviate our structural deficit. The work ahead will involve changes, both to curriculum and to larger structural elements, and will involve strategies for boosting revenue and lowering overall expenses.

These longer term, curricular and structural changes are not single-level, simple fixes, but will require an array of strategies, grounded in and informed by data, and guided by larger principles that articulate our priorities. Borrowing elements from our successful work on Strategic Enrollment Management, Long Term Planning will be a data-informed, broad-based effort that uses existing governance structures. It will require a much more compressed timeline than SEM but these guiding principles will be largely the same.

Our plan involves three primary elements.

  • Data Model - Resources and Enrollment Pressures
    • primary contact: Faculty Council / IR / Dean’s Office
  • Statement of Principles - criteria for our decision making
    • primary contact: Dean’s Office
  • Set of Strategies
    • primary contact: BAC / Dean’s Office

We will be holding several fora, listening sessions, and small gatherings throughout the semester. At those venues and via email, we will provide details on how faculty and staff can provide feedback and get more involved. By late May, the data model and principles will become ‘working documents.’ At that time, (1) we will use the data model to produce differentiated guidelines for those departments who haven’t begun the process of curriculum review; and (2) BAC will submit a compiled list of analyzed strategies. All of these together will form a blueprint for our long-term planning, which we will continue to analyze over the summer and begin working with the community to roll out implementation efforts in the Fall.

Town Hall Recordings and Slides

Long Term Planning - February 24, 2021

Data Model Open Session - March 4, 2021