Dear Campus Community:
Welcome to Winter Term!
EWU's new strategic plan is almost finished. The plan reflects the vision, ideas, and priorities of over 800 people on and off campus. It also builds on EWU's 2012-2017 plan, which is focused on student success and has generated key initiatives such as re-thinking student advising, revising general education, and creating the Learning Commons.
From written feedback and dozens of listening sessions, the Strategic Planning Committee collated key words and themes. The word student, of course, is primary: student success is the reason the university exists. Our planning processes will always have a laser focus on supporting academic excellence and the work of EWU faculty and staff that enables students to learn, graduate, and be successful, productive citizens.
Access, learning, and completion are core values threaded through every aspect of EWU.
During the current strategic planning processes, participants also stressed the importance of EWU being a leader and model for diversity and inclusion, ensuring our campuses are safe, vibrant, welcoming communities that provide opportunities for a diversity of learners.
Participants in planning sessions also emphasized repeatedly the importance of defining and expanding our role as a regional public university, our responsibility to be recognized as a significant architect of the region. People articulated the critical need for EWU to partner with schools, businesses, and organizations in entrepreneurial and innovative ways; they emphasized that EWU should help fuel economic and workforce development, furthering the overall success of the communities we serve while providing students with practical experiences and knowledge.
Like our students, our university must learn and evolve. More than a plan, the new strategic document is a map or a compass, giving direction to help all of us continue to foster learning, academic excellence, and students' success in a rapidly changing world.
Over the coming weeks, I will send out brief reflections on aspects of the plan, which will be finalized next month. Providing context for the focus areas of the plan, these reflections will underscore why each of the plan's focus areas has been identified as crucial to EWU's success during the next five years and beyond.
I hope these reflections will also prove inspirational and informative as we continue the crucial work of our remarkable university.
Mary Cullinan
