Academic Strategic Planning Implementation

With the Board of Trustees' September 2021 approval of the university strategic plan, work on our academic strategic plan implementation is moving forward, in support of aligning academic planning efforts with the university strategic plan and its broader institutional goals.

Dr. Dave Weatherspoon, vice provost of enrollment and academic strategic planning, is leading academic strategic implementation initiatives. As part of this process, groups have been charged by the Office of the Provost to focus on implementation and engagement efforts. Each group, the Deans Group, and the Vice Provosts, Associate Deans, Assistant Deans, and unit leaders (APAAD) group, has been working through academic strategic plan implementation and engaging the broader audiences within the Office of the Provost and academic units.

The Office of the Provost is responsible for providing leadership for matters that affect academic programs, research and outreach involving faculty, students, and staff. The provost oversees the quality of programs of instruction and research through collaborative work with deans, departmental chairs and other vice presidents, addressing issues such as effective planning, good management, and program reviews. Consequently, all colleges and units reporting to an assistant or vice provost (and the faculty, academic staff, and support staff within them) ultimately report to the Office of the Provost.

This allows the academic strategic plan implementation initiative to achieve alignment on a grand scale, while building on and learning from the efforts of those colleges and units doing work related to the goals of the university strategic plan.

What’s Driving Us

The Office of the Provost is committed to fostering a welcoming culture and climate. Participation in our academic strategic plan implementation process will greatly shape and influence the work and learning outcomes of our faculty, staff, and students. To that end, we are interested in the personal interests of our broader community.

Our approach is:

Collaborative and connective: we are sincerely looking to empower people, from the individual to the college level, to realize their own goals within the larger academic strategic plan framework
Transparent and genuine about progress and obstacles: we, as a university community, are in this together, and candor about success and setbacks should be the norm
Inclusive: we welcome collaboration with people of all backgrounds, identities, from all levels of academic experience, and across disciplines
Dedicated to valuing and elevating the work of contributors and project leads: many at MSU have been working on initiatives outlined in the strategic plan, and we want to amplify and catalyze those
Assuming good intentions and meaningful outcomes: we know that units at MSU are composed of people endeavoring to do good work with integrity, and will act accordingly

To comport with the values listed above, we are designing our strategies and tactics around academic strategic plan implementation to be encouraging, honest, frequent, digestible, visible, and searchable.

The Office of the Provost intends to solicit input and facilitate collaboration across the entirety of the office’s purview, which includes all colleges and units reporting to an assistant or associate provost, and the faculty, academic staff and support staff within. There is no requirement to participate in these efforts or attend our summits. We hope that through this transparent process, we gain further momentum across the Office of the Provost in how we move MSU into the future.

Advancing Proposals

Congratulations to the authors and co-authors of the proposals which have been selected to advance as part of our academic strategic planning implementation efforts. These ideas impact our local MSU community and align with MSU’s core values and strategic priorities.

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Academic Strategic Planning Implementation