Strategic Plan
Direction One: Focus on multiple aspects of the development of the whole student.
At Western New England, all students enter a supportive social as well as academic environment providing curriculum offerings, collaborative cocurricular programming, and a campus culture and practice, that will help prepare them to be effective and engaged citizens in their local communities and the world. Students here will find multiple opportunities to learn and exercise leadership qualities in partnership with faculty as well as with other students and community members. In this way, we develop a sense of global citizenship and responsibility within each student both inside and outside the classroom. In order to accomplish this, we will do the following:
- Maintain an interactive environment among students, faculty, and staff and support a culture that values a personal relationship within a network of mentoring possibilities
- Support faculty in development of opportunities for association with students and student groups inside and outside of class
- Encourage faculty and staff in the opportunity for mentoring students through the secondary school/undergraduate transition and in their daily lives
- Support the cognitive and emotional transition points in students’ lives, e.g., senior year transition to life after Western New England
- Foster experiences outside the classroom
- Consider integration of internships or similar experiences for all majors
- Investigate additional opportunities with respect to diversity, global, and sustainability issues for learning beyond the classroom experiences
- Draw on the alumni as a resource for offering internships and other career development activities
- Expand the range of performing arts opportunities available to students
- Through better provision of campus space for the arts
- Through improved support of programming in the arts
- Develop and support cocurricular programs and services in order to encourage and promote campus engagement and development of life skills among students
- Maintain and build the strength of current student leadership programs
- Continue to enhance the College’s NCAA Division III athletic programs
- Continue to enhance intramural athletic programs
- Develop global citizenship and leadership capacities in our students
- Expand career development programs and services
- Increase programs to facilitate graduate and professional school preparation opportunities
- Ensure student access to a Western New England educational experience by increasing the endowed scholarship funds available
Direction Two: Continue to elevate the academic excellence of the Western New England undergraduate education drawing upon our heritage of integrated liberal and professional learning opportunities.
For the past 10 years, an important facet of the Vision for Western New England has been elevation—elevating the institution in terms of recognition for excellence among all those interested in higher education. Elevation begins with the undergraduate education that we provide to our traditional full-time undergraduate students. To succeed in this goal, we must continue to recruit and support a well-qualified and well-recognized faculty whose accomplishments in their classroom and research endeavors have attracted positive attention in academia. Accreditations by national and international professional associations have helped us recruit such faculty. It is very important that we support these faculty members in every feasible way in order to continue to elevate our presence within the national and international academic environments. Student support services as well as administration members play a crucial role in helping faculty achieve positive faculty-student relationships. The student services administrators and staff are important developmental and instructional partners in this process. The Office of the Provost supervises many developmental activities for faculty and must have the resources available to fund and facilitate such activities if the elevation of undergraduate education is to continue to be one of the most important goals of the institution. In order to accomplish this, we will do the following:
- Continue to build and maintain a high quality faculty
- Assure that attention continues to be given to issues of faculty salaries, including salary compression among ranks
- Provide the pedagogy, laboratory, and technology facilities to allow faculty to excel in their fields
- Recognize, value, and support faculty research and scholarship in support of undergraduate education
- Encourage faculty to engage in active research agendas and programs by providing release time as well as financial and physical resources to support increased conference, summer, and year-long scholarly opportunities
- Provide the expanded research tools necessary for undergraduate education, such as databases, journals, books, and specialized software
- Encourage faculty to develop research opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students
- Sustain academic quality throughout the curriculum
- Maintain small class sizes
- Provide the highest level of available technology
- Encourage increased inclusion of sustainability issues in the curriculum
- Provide greater opportunity for the study of foreign languages and cultures
- Develop the breadth of our arts curriculum
- Continue to encourage integration of information literacy and writing across the curriculum
- Incorporate learning beyond the classroom opportunities throughout the curriculum
- Elevate our continuous assessment activities with respect to curriculum
- Maintain or improve our ratio of full-time faculty to adjunct faculty
- Continue to encourage joint curricula programs across the schools
- Expand our commitment to faculty-centered student advising while continuing to enhance student support through further development of an academic support center with full-time staffing
- Create a handbook for academic advising
- Develop additional advising resources and training opportunities
- Strengthen collaboration among faculty, staff, and administration to support the elevation of the student
Direction Three: Increase our focus on excellence in graduate and professional education, research, and scholarship, calling on our strength as a comprehensive institution.
Many of our programs and departments are achieving national distinction. To ensure excellence in graduate school programming it will be essential to build on our current successes and raise the expectations for excellence across all departments in all schools. Success in our graduate programs will be dependent on the continued hiring of outstanding faculty who can demonstrate excellence in the classroom as well as a viable research program. Recognizing the increased need for multidisciplinary programming and degrees, we must continue to encourage interdisciplinary degree programs and research activities across departments and schools. In order to accomplish this, we will do the following:
- Encourage the development of existing and new graduate and professional programs at the master’s and doctoral levels in order to achieve further breadth of curriculum offerings and to achieve depth and specialization in selected areas and disciplines
- Develop a fully accredited and fully functioning Pharmacy program graduating our first class of Doctor of Pharmacy students by 2015
- Continue to support the exploration and implementation of new graduate and professional degree programs throughout the institution while refining existing ones
- Consider instituting additional graduate and professional school programming specifically for full-time students
- Recognize, value and support faculty research and scholarship in support of graduate and professional education
- Encourage faculty to engage in active research agendas and programs by providing additional release time as well as financial and physical resources to support increased conference, summer, and year-long scholarly opportunities
- Support expanded library research tools necessary for graduate and professional education, such as databases, journals, books, and specialized software
- Support student services in our expanded part-time and full-time graduate and professional programs
Direction Four: Promote and support Western New England’s distinctive vision for internationalization throughout our entire community.
The 21st century is rapidly progressing on a global stage economically, politically, and socially. Advances in technology, transportation, and communication have helped formerly less developed countries become part of the international agenda hosted by the more developed countries, and education has become an international endeavor. If Western New England wants to play a role in helping set and contribute to the educational agenda, we must support, promote, and increase the opportunity for faculty and students to seek educational experiences abroad. Reciprocally, we must encourage and support international students and faculty to come to our campus. In addition, faculty must be provided incentives to do research and otherwise contribute within an international educational environment that now penetrates regional communities in new ways. In order to accomplish this, we will do the following:
- Develop structural enhancements
- Establish an Office of International Programs headed by a person with the appropriate organizational leadership position and authority
- Establish an International Programs Coordinating Council made up of representatives from relevant academic and administrative units
- Extend study and work abroad programs
- Grow and support our international student population
- Support faculty international research and/or teaching
- Encourage curricular and interdisciplinary internationalization enhancements
Direction Five: Develop and practice our vision of diversity and pluralism on campus.
The Western New England community believes that education should both enable and empower all community members to live and work in an environment sensitive to diversity in ethnicity, gender, geographic origin, life circumstance, physical or intellectual ability, political inclination, race, religion, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic status. In addition to increasing diversity in our student body and faculty, we need to increase diversity in academic, administrative, and staff leadership positions. It is also apparent that we need to cultivate a deeper pluralistic understanding of diversity, to encourage a world-view embracing differing ideas and positions, and to make an increased effort to create inclusiveness throughout the campus. In order to foster a living and learning environment that promotes independent and tolerant thinking and that brings divergent voices into the learning dialogue through both curricular and out of class experiences, we need to build a community defined by its differences and characterized as safe, positive, and supportive. In order to accomplish this, we will do the following:
- Create a campus environment in which all students experience the richness of diversity and pluralism as they are defined and understood in our Commitment to Diversity statement.
- Address all students’ rights by building a safe, supportive environment for diverse students
- Celebrate individual differences across campus
- Introduce curricular initiatives related to diversity and pluralism
- Support diversity values to encourage pluralistic understanding and tolerance
- Assure that the persons staffing the diversity office have appropriate organizational position and authority within the institution
- Develop through Human Resources an affinity support group for faculty and staff of underrepresented populations
Direction Six: Build upon a physical and operational environment that will support our status as a pre-eminent comprehensive institution.
Technology has advanced at an accelerating pace since eleven years ago when the Strategic Plan for 1999-2008 was developed, In order to outpace our competitors and reach the level of our aspirant institutions, it is mandatory that we increase the utilization and capacity of the technology resources that we offer to students, faculty, and the entire campus. Every part of the educational enterprise is affected by the advance of technological hardware, software, and networking capacities. Looking into the future, a number of technological initiatives will enable us to deliver better educational experiences to more students in more ways, especially through online methods. Students are coming to Western New England with more technological expertise than ever before, and we must find ways to partner with them in a community-wide effort to enhance educational outcomes.
In addition to the expansion of technological opportunities at Western New England, we are committed to expansion of the physical facilities in order to accommodate new programs such as Pharmacy and new needs such as those in residential life. At the same time, construction techniques as well as everyday maintenance requirements increasingly demand serious attention to sustainability principles as the world finds itself becoming depleted of natural resources and polluted by unwise and wasteful human practices. We must not only be part of the solution to these problems, but as a leading educational institution, we must provide a model for our various constituencies and communities. At the same time, we must carefully plan the expansion and development of our physical campus space to take advantage of our 215 acres and the expertise of our facilities management teams. In order to accomplish this, we will do the following:
- Technology—Increase the capacity of the technology infrastructure needed for a comprehensive institution.
- Modify governance and organization structure to include a new position with appropriate authority responsible for leading the Technology function within the institution and working closely with both an internal board constituted to represent campus stakeholders and an external advisory board with the mission of providing expertise and counsel
- Improve User Information Technology support, including the establishment of assessment processes, establishment of a Learning Commons within the libraries, and establishment of a large student Information Technology support group
- Upgrade wireless access to include all public areas of the campus and to support a variety of hardware devices, including computers
- Modify and integrate communication infrastructure
- Adopt integrated administrative software
- Strengthen Information Technology training of the institutional community based on a needs assessment with special attention to integrating technology in teaching and curricular delivery
- Upgrade classroom technology throughout the campus
- Establish a central data warehouse available to all appropriate stakeholders within the institution
- Upgrade web capabilities and content to assure improved comprehensiveness and accuracy
- Create a knowledge bank to store, disseminate, and preserve the institution’s digital information assets, such as articles, datasets, working papers, audiovisual files, and electronic publications
- Facilities Planning
- Proceed with plans to build a new academic building to support pharmacy and science programs
- Continue to update and renovate classrooms
- Invest in high quality science and engineering laboratories
- Fulfill the need for suitable work spaces for faculty and staff, including individual office space
- Increase areas for student interaction in academic buildings
- Plan to provide facilities to support the Fine Arts Program
- Proceed with plans to build and renovate residential space
- Increase physical accessibility of buildings/classrooms/laboratories
- Expand the number of recreational and athletic fields
- Sustainability—Pursue sustainability initiatives in all building, renovating, and ongoing maintenance infrastructure activities
- Institute a Sustainability Council comprised of members from the entire campus community to develop and determine the metrics we should use to measure and manage our sustainability
- Provide a position of appropriate authority to lead an Environmental Standards Office in connection with facilities planning and to advise faculty in connection with curricular initiatives in this area
- Inventory our existing sustainability initiatives both within and outside the curriculum
- Support and encourage programming on sustainability issues
Direction Seven: Engage the institution more fully in integrated collaborative partnerships and alliances within the campus as well as beyond the campus with alumni and local, regional, national, and international communities.
Recognizing that our campus community is affected by a broad range of external forces, we will establish and strengthen strategic partnerships and identify priorities that mutually serve the interests of Western New England, its stakeholders, and the local and regional communities. Although we have engaged our alumni in many ways, we recognize the need to expand our connections with alumni by developing more opportunities to draw alumni back to campus and to help them celebrate their pride in being essential members of the Western New England community. To do this, we must improve our communication and collaboration with all our many alumni constituencies. Importantly, we will continue to honor our roots in Springfield through the development of closer and more numerous community links to find and promote innovative and sustainable solutions to community challenges. In order to accomplish this, we will do the following:
- Improve our alumni involvement and development activities
- Strengthen and broaden the lifelong connection of alumni to Western New England by keeping alive its rich traditions and heritage and working with alumni to develop new traditions
- Enhance and develop dynamic alumni activities that engage, enrich and bring alumni closer to the campus community
- Develop networking opportunities and enhance career management programs and services that meet the expectations of our alumni
- Engage alumni and Alumni Relations in national and international promotion of the institution
- Continue to develop the vitality and energy of our fundraising efforts by proactively identifying, cultivating, soliciting, and stewarding gifts from alumni, friends, foundations, corporations and other prospective donors to meet the identified needs of the institution
- Strengthen our relationship with the City of Springfield
- Launch urban service immersion initiatives within First Year Program
- Expand our partnerships with the Springfield School System
- Explore providing more consulting services to the City
- Further develop partnerships to enhance community relations with the City
- Encourage diversity initiatives from our institution within the local and regional communities
Direction Eight: In order to facilitate the success of the individual strategic initiatives proposed in this Strategic Plan as well as to fulfill our potential as a regional and national leader, pursue changing our institutional status from that of a College to that of a University.
While sacrificing none of the character of the College of the last half of its first century, none of the personal attention to students, none of the informal collegial atmosphere of the campus, none of the flexibility of a relatively small institution, becoming a university better reflects our growth, our diversity, our expanded graduate offerings and our comprehensive nature. It allows us to compete more effectively with our many peer institutions that have become universities and with which we share common student applicants. It allows us to be more attractive for foreign exchange programs and foreign students in a global environment, given the different definition of “college” outside the U.S. and an international perception that a “university” represents the highest level of educational institution possible. Finally, as a university, we can expect to be better positioned to fulfill our ongoing commitment to be a leader regionally and recognized nationally. As a university, granting degrees at the highest level of education, we can expect to gain respect and credibility from the national and international academic communities, increasing the visibility and perceived value of education at Western New England. All of this helps add value to the diploma of both existing and future alumni. Therefore, we must do the following:
- Meet the state requirements for achieving university status
- Increase the breadth and depth of our graduate and undergraduate curricula, in addition to developing additional Ph.D. programs
- Create a University Attainment Committee to identify and monitor what is necessary to achieve and implement university status and shepherd the transition process from college to university.
Over the next decade, we expect to reach and maintain a full-time undergraduate student body population of approximately 3,000 students. Full-time and part-time law students are expected to remain approximately 500. Our other student populations—graduate students and undergraduate nontraditional students—are populations whose numbers we actively seek to increase. We will continue active recruitment of undergraduate students from areas beyond our primary and secondary markets while maintaining the quality of the student body in each of our Schools.
