Not so strategic for students

The Campus Strategic Plan, drafted by Provost Lauren Robel, is supposed to usher in a new era of programs and strategies for improving the University in the future.
What’s unclear is how these changes will actually affect student life. The vagueness of the plan, and the relative ineffectiveness of previous changes, make me skeptical as to how these changes will matter.

A draft of the plan was released to the public, supposedly for the students to read and submit revisions of the policies. The report starts with a list of additions and improvements that have already been added to campus since 2011. This list can be used as an example of how this future plan will be implemented.

For starters, I noticed only a handful of these changes before reading them the plan. The multiple combinations of different majors to create more diverse and inclusive schools were a major theme of the last improvement plan.  Perhaps it’s because I am not involved in some of the fields directly affected, but I had heard of only a few of these changes prior to seeing them listed.

Of the few new schools I have heard of, I saw little elaboration regarding their future. The Media School — a combination of journalism and the departments of telecommunications and communication and culture — is notoriously mysterious.

Students remain unclear as to what the combination of these majors into a new school will entail for them, and there has been negligible effort to inform them. Regardless of this lack of information, the idea of it remains unpopular.

As for the School of Public Health, the only change I’ve been able to ascertain is that I have to be corrected every time I say I’m going to the HPER.  

As for the other school collaborations, I know even less about them. And that, as you can tell, means I know nothing about them. The plan itself didn’t help, either.

These changes, from what I can tell, have not had a profound affect on student life because students remain unaware of them and of their purpose.    

This lack of publicized information about these supposedly large and successful leaps forward for the University does not bode well for the Strategic Plan. The especially vague wording doesn’t do the plan any favors either.  

Most of the objectives seem to affect attitudes rather than concrete institutions. Phrases like “(we) will esteem” and “we will inspire” populate the Undergraduate objectives. What concrete actions do these phrases suggest? Will any of these changes actually have a noticeable affect on student life, or will the only difference be noticed when identified in next year’s plan?

If your asking for revisions, my one request would be, in specific and clear terms, to answer this question: What does this plan actually do for students?

­— jordrile@indiana.edu
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