On April 30, 2024 the Strategic Planning Committee hosted their final town hall! Members of the Eastern Washington University community were invited to provide their feedback on the strategies each working group created.
Below you will find a summary of the town hall feedback. If you would like to view a digital copy of the presentation you can click here. If you’d like to view the feedback in a digital format you can click here.
The instructions of the working group were as follows:
“Each group should appoint a recorder who will turn in a summary of the group discussion after reporting to the larger group. Use additional paper if necessary. Please make sure the responses are labeled clearly.
Each group should address the following two questions about the draft strategies. Please feel free to use the handout as provided as a refresher on goal statements.
- Are there any ideas or concepts in the statements that are not clear?
- What, if anything is still missing from the statements?
Goal One: Belonging through Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion
Below are the strategies of the Belonging through Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion working group
- Strategy 1: Establish the Inclusive Teaching Academy to meet the following timeline and participation rates (faculty):
- Year 1: Development and training for the initial participants
- Year 2-5: Deploy a train-the-trainer model where each trainer leads 2 teams of 8-10 faculty.
- Year 5: 25% of faculty have participated on an Inclusive Teaching Academy Team
- Strategy 2: Establish the inclusive Co-Curricular Education to meet the following timeline and participation rates:
- Year 1: Development and training for the initial participants
- Year 2-5: Deploy a train-the-trainer model where each trainer leads 2 teams of 8-10 staff; including ELT member’s participation.
- Strategy 3: By the end of the academic year 2026, EWU will complete an analysis of mentorship opportunities available through the institution and coordinate these opportunities to serve students better, leading to an increase in the number of students who participate in a university mentorship program by 10% and will have greater 2% outcomes (measured by retention and graduation) than those who do not.
- Strategy 4: By the end of the 2029 academic year, 100% of university units will complete an equity-minded audit to identify policies and practices contributing to inequitable outcomes for historically underrepresented students/faculty/staff and propose interventions to remedy those inequalities.
- Strategy 5: By 2029, EWU will complete an audit of all university and academic policies to identify systematic barriers that disproportionately affect historically underrepresented students/faculty/staff.
- Strategy 6: EWU will improve the recruitment and retention of historically underrepresented employees on campus. By 2029 the hiring of staff and faculty from historically underrepresented populations will improve by 5% and the proportion of historically underrepresented applicants will improve by 10%. Reduce the disparity in retention by 25%.
Town Hall Feedback
- Strategy One- 25% is too low (7)
- Some strategies are outcome statements (3)
- How can training be made mandatory (2)
- Mentorship strategy is good (2) How will it be measured?
- Train the trainer model is good (2)
- Co-Curricular Education is not clear (2)
- What is meant by integration? (2)
- How are staff included in strategies one and two? (2)
- More connective newsletters
- Highlight our successes
- Does reference to faculty include adjuncts/lecturers
- How do we identify underrepresented populations?
- Outcomes are not measurable
- What is an equity minded audit? Use outside source to do audit
- Will equity minded audit cause issues with some programs?
- Update student course review systemand evaluate the student perception of JEDI
- How does training academy connect to pedagogy and curriculum?
- Remove “policies” from university units bullet
- Strategy 6 – 5% is to low
- How does the Teaching Academy differ from Co-Curricular Education?
- Can Faculty Commons be expanded to Center for Teaching and Learning?
- Shorten audit time lines
- Strength – Not too many strategies
- Students need training in DEI
- Clarify what a unit means
- Do faculty participate in Co-Curricular Education?
Consultant Comments and Observations
Outcomes:
- Outcomes 1 and 2 are strategies. Outcome should state what will happen as a result of these strategies being implemented e.g “ By 2029 xxx per cent of the faculty will participate in a Culturally Responsive Teaching/Learning experience.
- Outcome 3: Suggest the following wording: By 2029 the number of students who participate in a university mentorship program will increase by 10% and will have 2% greater outcomes (measured by retention and graduation) than those who did not participate in a mentorship.
- NOTE: Completing an analysis of existing mentorship opportunities is a strategy.
- Outcome 6: Eliminate the first sentence
Strategies:
- Strategy 3 _ “leading to an increase in the number of students……” is an outcome
- Strategy 4 – This is an outcome
- Strategy 5 – This is an outcome
- Strategy 6 – Regarding first sentence – How will recruitment and retention be improved?
- Strategy 6 – Second sentence is an outcome statement
Goal Two: Investing in Our People and Places
Below are the strategies of the Investing in Our People and Places working group
- Strategy 1: Identify factors that lead to faculty and staff turnover and develop, implement, and evaluate programs to improve recruitment and increase retention. The university will work to address factors such as equitable workloads, establishing and enhancing trust in working relationships, and career advancement.
- Strategy 2: Develop an effective onboarding experience for new employees that supports their successful integration, and understanding of their unit’s mission, systems and processes and the university culture. All employees will have access to benefits, both state and university-based, which can enhance their job satisfaction and loyalty.
- Strategy 3: Create an attractive, welcoming and sustainable campus environment for both Cheney and Spokane that supports excellence in education, fosters formal and informal collaboration, and is a model for other institutions.
- Strategy 4: Data-Driven comprehensive approach to enhance the well-being and resilience of faculty and staff so that they can achieve their fullest potential which will impact individual satisfaction, reduce burnout, increase skills, create a sense of belongingness, and provide opportunities for connection.
- Strategy 5: Establish a workplace culture where we invest in and provide resources for the continuous learning and professional development of all employees.
Town Hall Feedback
- Support improved onboarding process- make it personal; make first 90 days great; have department included (9}
- Support for professional development is great. More resources are needed (5)
- There needs to be a pay equity lens (3)
- Implement exit interviews (2)
- Strategy 1 – add pay equity, enhance psychological safety (2)
- Retention requires more competitive pay (2)
- Define “sustainable campus environment”
- Better training for staff employees
- Improve appearances of campus spaces
- Benefit ideas – Discount at Eagle store, employee day once a quarter, discount at dining locations
- Strategies 1 and 4 are similar – just worded differently
- Outcome 1: What does second sentence in the outcome statement mean?
- Outcome 2: Discuss meaning of this outcome. Is there an existing Tuition Waiver program?
- Outcome 3: What does roadmap mean
- How do you measure sense of belonging
- Tactic ideas – No meetings on Friday; 4/10’2 in summer
- No strategies to address sustainability
- Kitchen staff are overworked
- Train student workers
- Re-evaluate Catalyst – Difficult for Computer Science, Data Science and Math students
- Math and Music buildings are old and not taken care of
- Invest in building improvements such as more projectors that work
- Use data informed rather than data driven
- Support affinity spaces and gatherings
- EWU is not equipped to handle multiple generation in the workplace
- Have annual performance reviews that hold people accountable
- Need new residence halls
- Re-name counseling and wellness functions
- Trust employees who travel to use corporate credit cards
- Transparent pathways for staff to move up the ladder
- Use tuition waivers for self-support programs
- Create sleep pods for staff
- Flexibility for employees with children
- Opportunities for faculty and staff to be connected if they are not on the Cheney campus
- Strategies 3 and 5 sound more like goals
- Define unit
- Provide link to campus master plan so it is more transparent
- Improve accessibility for basketball courts and football field
- Strategies are very broad
- Climate survey data needs to be used
- Figure out a way to telework
- Add strategy regarding psychological safety
- Benefits of tuition waiver are “bait and switch”
- Restore staff in essential positions
- Clearer job descriptions
- Better price for faculty/staff parking
- More recognition for good work
Consultant Comments and Observations
Outcomes:
- Outcome 6: Is there a desired amount of financial support or is there a percentage increase desired?
- Outcome 7: Developing and implementing an onboarding experience tracker……. is a strategy. Second sentence can be an outcome statement
Strategies:
- Strategy one – Second sentence would be strengthened as a strategy by indicating that University will undertake a review of the following areas by 2027 …..
- Second sentence in strategy 2 does not appear to relate to onboarding
- Strategy 3 – How will this be done?
Goal Three: Regional Anchor, Regional Impact
Below are the strategies of the Regional Anchor, Regional Impact working group
- Strategy 1: Develop a comprehensive database of experiential learning opportunities for students, including internships, community service, and research projects.
- Strategy 2: Integrate experiential learning into academic programs as a graduation requirement.
- Strategy 3: Provide financial support like scholarships for students engaging in these opportunities.
- Strategy 4: Establish a mentorship program connecting students with alumni and professionals.
- Strategy 5: Incorporate community engagement into faculty evaluations and promotion criteria.
- Strategy 6: Create a grant program for faculty-led community projects.
- Strategy 7: Recognize and reward faculty excelling in community engagement.
- Strategy 8: Offer professional development for faculty in community engagement pedagogy.
- Strategy 9: Foster interdisciplinary collaborations for community engagement projects.
- Strategy 10: Develop a joint urban planning framework aligning campus development with regional growth.
Town Hall Feedback
- Very important to generate financial support for students to participate in community service/research projects (3)
- How would community engagement work for a staff person?
- Community Service Project Day has to be part of the job not in addition.
- How will faculty be rewarded for working on projects of regional importance?
- Like the out of classroom engagement for students.
- There is overlap with Goal one’s focus on mentorship.
- Is it possible to require all students to do community engagement?
- Add a University Graduation requirement that includes a list of internship/community service/research project courses- create a master list of outside companies/school districts/pay students for involvement in these experiences (2).
- Look at ASU model for partnering with companies/region for experiential learning.
- Include development of community engagement office on campus (2).
- Really like meeting the needs of the community!
- A lot of community engagement activities are already being done in some parts of the campus (2).
- Eagle Career Network already exists (3).
- Strategy one – Avoid getting new software- purchase additional module and use Eagle Sync.
- Peer mentorship would get more buy in from students.
- Strategies are very faculty focused.
- Call out a specific Spokane strategy.
- Include staff along with faculty and students in these activities – Strategies 6, 7, 8
- Like Strategy 10.
- Strategies really lean into “Polytechnic” idea.
- One hundred per cent of students participating feels unrealistic to implement.
- Some students are already employed full time -perhaps give those students recognition for this work experience.
- Consider removing some other requirements if community engagement becomes a graduation requirement.
- This is a very good part of the strategic plan.
- Mentorship program ideas are a great idea.
- Consider barriers to internship involvement. How can we eliminate the barriers?
Consultant Comments and Observations
Outcomes:
- Outcome 1: First sentence is an outcome statement. Second sentence is a strategy.
- Outcome 2: First sentence is a strategy.
Suggest this wording: - By fall, 2029, 25% 0f the faculty will participate in community engagement in the areas of applied learning activities
- Outcome 3: First sentence is an outcome statement. Second sentence is a strategy
- Outcome 4: First sentence is an outcome statement – Do you wish to indicate a target number of participants or demonstrate a % increase each year?
- Second sentence is a strategy
- Outcome 5: Second sentence is a strategy.
- Outcome 6: This is a strategy statement
- Outcome 7: Might want to indicate by what year this outcome would occur Outcome 8: This is a strategy statement
Strategies:
- There are to many strategies identified.
- The list of strategies originally provided could be grouped into the following areas:
- Increase student involvement in internships, community engagement and research through following actions
- Increase service-learning experiences and support faculty engagement
- Development of strategic partnerships with businesses, government agencies, community organizations and school districts
- Engage alumni in support of community engagement and service learning
- The University will engage with the region in the following ways
- Lead in the development of selected sustainability initiatives
- The revised strategies presented to the town hall could be used with some modifications: A strategy to address outcome 7 should be included.
Goal Four: Student Success and Student Experience
Below are the strategies of the Student Success and Student Experience working group:
- Strategy 1: Revamping First Year Experience, starting with strong pre-student programming, including New Student Orientation and Summer Bridge Programs Comprehensive, required First Year Experience course(s) in conjunction with programming infused with opportunities for self-exploration/self-understanding of values, identities, cultural heritage, and career paths as well as strong relationship building and support in transitioning to EWU and feeling a sense of belonging.
- Strategy 2: Strengthen support for student clubs, student programming and student support systems that take into consideration the diverse needs of BIPOC students, LGBTQ+ students and students who have heavy responsibilities from work, family and community.
- Strategy 3: Build a strong infrastructure for administrators, staff and faculty professional development centering on a holistic, decolonial, people-centered model that prioritizes well-being, student success, and best practices for retention, especially knowledge and skills essential for addressing systemic racism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, and other forms of oppression and effectively serving minoritized students.
- Strategy 4: Engage and collaborate with parents and families to aid transition to EWU, especially for parents and family members who may not be familiar with college experiences in the United States
- Strategy 5: Increase capacity/compensation/expectation for faculty to meet one-on-one or in small groups with students in their classes to provide adequate time for relationship building
- Strategy 6: Increase tutoring and academic support.
- Strategy 7: Improve data collection methods to assess and evaluate student success indicators, especially for minoritized students and those that may not be adequately represented by numbers alone.
- Strategy 8: Increased compensation, professional development, and support for academic advising so that they are more in a position to support students, especially minoritized students, and to support multidimensional well-being and self-exploration/understanding.
- Strategy 9: Legislative ask for funds tied to general curriculum and staffing to meet student needs for the strategies we laid out on improving First Year Experience.
- Strategy 10: Investigate and evaluate racism and the culture of whiteness at EWU and determine strategies for directly addressing racism at the individual and institutional level.
- Strategy 11: Systematic and continuous professional development for faculty and staff that target specific issues (e.g., academic preparedness, reading and writing skills, quantitative skills) that contribute to equity gaps in retention and graduation and hamper student success.
- Strategy 12: Increase cultural humility and anti-oppression awareness across campus, including students, staff, faculty, and administration.
- Strategy 13: Create a certificate/coursework that is a degree requirement that supports students in developing their multidimensional well-being and aids them in being aware of the resources available.
- Strategy 14: Expanding access by building a counseling and wellness model that can go beyond 6 visits as well as accelerating and simplifying the process (reduce barriers) for students to get seen for counseling.
- Strategy 15: Mandatory 2–3-day orientation before Fall enrollment (or before each fall/spring) that more robustly introduces students to campus resources and aids students in building relationships.
- Strategy 16: Do a cultural audit to listen actively and thoroughly to minoritized students, staff, and faculty on the culture and experiences at EWU and commit time and resources to following up on concerns and needs to address challenges and issues of racism and other forms of oppression on campus.
- Strategy 17: Repair relationships with BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ students and communities and comprehensively address harm that has been done recently and over time.
- Strategy 18: Embed self-exploration and self-understanding within academic experiences, including identity development and sociopolitical awareness across race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, religion, citizenship status, and more.
- Strategy 19: Provide high quality and equitably accessible experiential learning opportunities including undergraduate research, paid internship, study abroad, etc.
- Strategy 20: Robust financial and institutional support for academic departments that specifically address issues of identity, equity, and inclusion, specifically: GWSS, American Indian Studies, Africana Studies, Chicano/a/x Studies, and Disability Studies. Create and support, in the same fashion as above, Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies with proper funding.
- Strategy 21: Robust financial and institutional support for university services that further contribute to this exploration and understanding of social/cultural identities, such as the Multicultural Center, the Pride Center, the Veterans Resource Center, and the DEI office.
- Strategy 22: Robust financial and institutional support for academic departments/programs that support language development (e.g., for both foreign languages or heritage languages), including increased support for/creation of indigenous language programs here and in the wider community.
- Strategy 23: Robust financial and institutional support for co-curricular supports, such as panels, speakers, presentations, especially those that bring underrepresented voices to campus.
- Strategy 24: Recognition, time and compensation to faculty and staff with regards to creating and implementing co-curricular events, and for faculty embedding self-exploration and understanding into curricula, including incorporating these into workload expectations and tenure requirements.
- Strategy 25: Robust financial and institutional support for multiple spaces across campus for marginalized and minoritized students to gather, connect, find respite, and get support.
- Strategy 26: Expand and equalize access to internships by creating an infrastructure to provide career guidance and preparation through courses and support services for (1) students in majors (such as arts, humanities, social science and natural sciences) and (2) student populations that need more career guidance or are less likely to pursue internship) that do not have a narrow career focus. Work with local employers to increase paid internships for student in these majors.
Town Hall Feedback
- Number of strategies must be reduced (7)
- Strategy three overlaps with BJEDI strategies (2)
- Strategy suggests First Year Experience(FYE) should be “enhanced”. However, it does not appear that we actually have a FYE currently
- Most of the summarized strategies appear to be goals not strategies.
- It is not clear how data would be used.
- There should be a focus on three core areas that we know impact student success/define a path to student success.
- Adopt student success model used at Gonzaga (ZAG360).
- Decolonial has a negative connotation -there are other ways of explaining without using this word.
- Strategy 4 – use term first generation rather than “those unfamiliar with U.S’ college experiences”.
- Strategy 8 – More clearly define cultural humility and oppression.
- Develop an early alert system.
- Develop a well being task force to come up with strategies.
- There are no strategies to address the academic experience.
- Develop a culture of assessment.
- Assumption is that we are dealing with 18-24 year olds – EWU has a high enrollment of non-traditional older students.
- Better, affordable food options including vegan/vegetarian options.
- Better structure and organization regarding advising and counseling for students.
- More support for students who aren’t prepared for college as a result of the pandemic – writing center.
- Focus in three areas: Campus activities; classroom experiences; pathways to graduation.
- Robust investment for what services – How does this align with SRA process?
- Help students get to class.
- Academic departments should focus on academic success.
- FYE programs are great – need to have similar experience for transfer students and non-traditional students (2).
- Create more opportunities for academic programs to connect services with students where they are at.
- What is adequate funding vs robust funding.
- How does academic discovery differ from personal discovery?
- Adding more courses to existing requirements is not realistic. Need to eliminate some courses of others are added.
- There are resources available that students don’t know about.
- There are no strategies focused on increasing student enrollment.
- Specifically call out the need for parent/family support in languages other than English.
- Identify policies that create barriers to continuation and graduation.
- Connections at department level must be addressed.
- Advising needs to be addressed.
- More aggressively seek out students to prevent dropping out.
- Use peer mentoring.
- Get more feedback from students in this process – so necessary and currently lacking.
- No more mandatory living on campus.
- If data is collected it needs to be used in decision making!
Consultant Comments and Observations
Outcomes:
- Suggest the elimination of the phrase” With adequate funding, personnel and resources” in each of the outcomes. The strategies should address what is needed in order to achieve the outcomes identified.
- Outcome 1: Eliminate aspire and state “we will ……..”
- Outcomes 3 and 4: These are strategy statements
- Desired outcome 7: Suggest the following statement:
- Increase new student enrollment in the following student sub-populations as follows…
Strategies:
- There are to many strategies. Should be no more than 6-8 strategies for goal area. The focus should be on the most important steps which must be taken in order to achieve the goal and outcome areas. As the plan is implemented over the five year period changes in strategies can be made based upon what is learned from implementing identified strategies.
- If strategies are not reduced it is likely that no significant progress will be made in addressing the goal and the outcomes.
