Roadmap Progress Update

The CLA Roadmap process is moving forward on schedule with all five of the Roadmap Goal Teams wrapping up their meetings by the end of this week. More than 95 faculty, staff, students, and alumni make up the five Roadmap Goal Teams that have been meeting the past three months.

The Roadmap Steering Group will be formally presenting the recommendations to the dean on March 5. The Roadmap Steering Group consists of the chairs of each of the five goal teams that include: Readiness, Professor Laura Gurak; Research, Professor Mark Snyder; Grand Challenges Leadership, Associate Professor Catherine Squires; Diversity, Professor Josephine Lee; and Engagement, Professor Phyllis Moen. (See an example of the presentation template.)

The Roadmap will be posted on the CLA website during the week of March 23. This will also mark the beginning of open meetings with the CLA community to gather additional feedback. The final plan will be presented to the provost by mid-April followed by the naming of a Roadmap Implementation Team to begin turning the recommendations into action.

A Culture of Engagement and the CLA Roadmap

The College of Liberal Arts does not end at the borders of our campus. As the liberal arts heart of Minnesota’s flagship university, CLA has deep ties to multiple communities: those who work and study with us; those who support us; and those who occupy spaces, both physical and theoretical, with connections to us. The CLA Roadmap promises as one of its five goals that CLA will deepen a culture of engagement for our alumni, community, and state. In a practical sense, this commitment means dedicating time and resources to increasing access in both directions—our access to the community, and theirs to us.

Extensive two-way community engagement and sharing of what we have to offer in CLA is vitally important. It is not only important to us as a college per se, but the work we do here matters and needs to be shared broadly. The liberal arts are central to the work of this land grant institution and they contribute significantly to the Twin Cities, the state, and beyond. We need to communicate better what we already do—many units and individuals in our college are deeply engaged beyond campus, but we do not have adequate tracking to show the extent of this involvement.

Diversity and the CLA Roadmap

One of the concerns I heard from many of you prior to arriving on campus was that the college had made some progress, but not enough, on diversity. While there has been some positive news on student success (for example, retention and graduation rates), in other areas, such as retaining faculty, there was great concern.

To truly engage with the community, CLA must be a reflection of the community. To make better decisions and to be first rate in identifying emerging research questions, we need diverse perspectives. And to maintain the gains we achieve, we must establish a supportive, welcoming, and encouraging climate that attracts diverse faculty, students, and staff and enables them to thrive. Diversity at all levels is a critical challenge and priority and diversity is, accordingly, one of the five major goals on the CLA Roadmap as we pursue our vision of becoming a destination college. Our Diversity Goal Team has begun meeting to map out recommendations on how we make meaningful advancement toward achieving our diversity goals.

Grand Challenges Leadership and the CLA Roadmap

When the University chose “grand challenges” as the organizing theme for the strategic plan, it called on all collegiate units to draw on their strengths in order to engage society’s most pressing issues in more meaningful ways. For CLA, this presented a great opportunity not only to showcase our existing areas of excellence, but also to consider new and creative ways to apply our unique talents for the greater good of our state, our nation, and our world.

The depth and breadth of our research and curricular strength make CLA particularly well-positioned to respond to the University’s call, most notably around the challenge of building vibrant communities that enhance human potential and collective well-being in a diverse and changing society.

We also have much to contribute to the grand challenges on sustainable, healthy, secure food; as well as environmental protection and economic development. Moreover, CLA can and should be active participants in defining additional grand challenges around which the university can focus sustained research and curricular attention. CLA will participate enthusiastically whenever and wherever the college can make a significant contribution to these efforts.

Why identify participation in the grand challenges agenda as one of the five goals of the CLA Roadmap?

Research and Creative Excellence and the CLA Roadmap

The CLA Roadmap promises a relentless focus on research and creative excellence. This focus fits our position as a land grant institution, a liberal arts college, and is critically important in our quest to achieve our vision of becoming a destination college.

The essentials of a land grant public research university are world-class research, outstanding instruction, and service and outreach to the state. But these are not only essential elements of a land grant research institution. They are essential elements of the liberal arts as well. I have been emphasizing repeatedly that whether on campus or off campus, we will be on offense—and not defense—when talking about the College and the liberal arts. We will advocate, not apologize.

The liberal arts at a land-grant research institution must be rooted in a community of world-class scholars who infuse their research and expertise into their teaching and their service and outreach. Research and creative excellence are vital for what they do off campus. They contribute to the understanding and solution of important problems and they advance human knowledge. Research excellence is, then, the foundation for the liberal arts at a land grant institution. The stronger we are in research, the better we serve students and the public.

Student Readiness and the Liberal Arts

The CLA Roadmap calls for CLA alumni to be superbly prepared for the next stage of life after campus. In addition to educating our students to be well prepared to engage in civic life, we must also give them the confidence that their liberal arts training has left them well prepared embark on their career path. Students—and prospective students—who know we are deeply committed to their readiness will consider CLA a prime destination. We need to attract large numbers of high-achieving, CLA-first-choice students by offering them something different and better.

When we think about the liberal arts we quite rightly often emphasize their value in teaching students to think critically, to excel in communication, to develop problem-solving skills, to ask new questions, and to gather and evaluate evidence from multiple sources, among other skills.

But the liberal arts do more.

Roadmap Goal Teams

In my Road Ahead address on October 22, I shared my vision for CLA to become a destination college, and outlined five goals for the College that will enable us to achieve this vision. On October 28, we released the CLA Roadmap, which serves as the canvas upon which we begin to detail how we reach these goals.

Each goal has a Roadmap Goal Team composed primarily of faculty, staff, and students, who will deliberate and share their thoughts and guidance around the goal, and begin to shape our path toward it through a series of specific recommendations. We aimed to build teams that were representative of our major intellectual traditions, without becoming unwieldy in size, so that we gain in our deliberations from a variety of insights and perspectives. At the same time, the Goal Teams were built with a sense that this is a collegiate process, and not a process to lobby or advocate or represent any particular narrow interest.

The underlying focus for each team is the same: What will make the College great on this goal?