Robel talks Strategic Plan, new career advising trials

Provost Lauren Robel announced the release of the IU Strategic Plan, answered the council’s questions and noted its concerns during the Bloomington Professional Council meeting Monday.

The plan, which outlines campus goals for the next five years as a lead-up to the bicentennial, is now open for public comment.

Robel said she wants faculty to focus on a long-term plan that helps every student.  
“I think that that’s all the way through, in every piece of this plan there will be professional staff will be able to say, ‘If we really think about high-impact practices, for instance, here are the kinds of actual implementation steps we ought to be taking,’”
Robel said.

Some council members were concerned about their part in the strategic plan.
As professionals at IU, they said they didn’t immediately see how the plan affected them.

“I think really just branching with professional staff in implementing the plans and bringing ideas to the table in how we can excel in these areas,” said Jennifer Pearl, director of global health partnerships in the School of Public Health.

Robel said there were professional staff members on the planning teams because she believes professionals implement new practices.

“What will appear in here is pretty meta, pretty macro level,” Robel said. “On the website there will also be a lot of reports of teams. Not all of that implementation is going to go into this plan.

“We will put together separate implementation reports for each of the elements of this plan, and someone’s got to own each of these objectives,” she said. “That’s the place where I could use your help a lot — in thinking about the what and the how.”
She said career advising in the new School of Global and International Studies and the Media School will be a trial run for the rest of the University.

“The way the college is thinking this through right now, if I understand it correctly, is they’re trying to take the new schools ... and build within those two entities a prototype for what career advising should look like across the college, and then do the more specific,” Robel said. “Divide the college up into manageable bites, because it is huge.”   

The plan includes efforts to expand the presence of arts and humanities on campus, Robel said. 

“There’s a proposal for a broad, campus-level center for the arts and humanities, and the goal of that is really to bring together the impact of all of the cultural institutions we have in Bloomington that are just phenomenal,” she said.

Robel said in many ways, an educator’s job is to ensure the arts and humanities are supported.

Tony Walker, a senior electronics engineer in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, said he supported the goals Robel discussed at the meeting.

“I think more exposure to diversity, sort of broader education is good, because the truth is that most people will not do the thing that they went to school for when they
graduate.”