Formulating the Plan: How We Prepare for UC San Diego’s Future
UC San Diego’s founders established a tradition of excellence that led us on an upward trajectory of growth and success over our first five decades. Their vision led us to where we are today – one of the world’s premier public research universities.
Now it’s time for us to plan what’s next for UC San Diego.
We are at a critical turning point, as we’ve passed our milestone golden anniversary and state funds continue to decrease each year. We need to ask ourselves: How can we build on the strong momentum of our first 50 years so that we compound and amplify our positive impact on our community and world? How can we respond to current and future fiscal challenges so that we embark on another 50 years of dynamic leadership and transformational research and scholarship?
The time is right in our history to assess where we are and where we want to be so that we will continue to educate the next generation of leaders and produce meaningful innovation to improve our world and drive our local, national and global economies.
Over the coming months, we will embark on a strategic planning process to establish a unifying shared vision for our entire campus. This will be the first time our campus has undergone such an initiative. We will conduct a fundamental exploration of the role we want to play in the world and create a roadmap of shared goals that will guide us as we continue to work together to solve society’s most pressing global challenges. Our strategic plan will establish clear priorities to assist in decision making and prioritization so that we ensure the achievement of our goals, while positioning ourselves to anticipate and respond to the rapidly evolving state, national and international higher education landscape.
Our strategic planning process will be bottom-up, inclusive and collaborative. Everyone on the General Campus, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and the UC San Diego Health System will have an opportunity to share ideas and give input –faculty, staff, students, alumni, university supporters and community friends. There will be multiple avenues for participation and involvement such as interviews, focus groups, workshops, town hall meetings and surveys.
The strategic planning journey is expected to take about eight months. We are currently designing the process. Between November and February, we will gather data and information from campus and community members. Our visioning process will take place through mid-March, and we will develop our shared strategy and goals by April. The final step will be to set milestones so we can monitor our progress. We aim to complete this process by the end of the 2012-2013 academic year.
UC San Diego is a single campus with multiple pillars of excellence.
By setting forth a transformative vision, and charting our path and success, we will ensure UC San Diego’s position as a preeminent global research university in the 21st century. I look forward to your involvement for this important journey.
Pradeep K. Khosla
Pradeep K. Khosla
Chancellor