November 8, 2011
Dear Colleagues:
For the past two years, I have chosen on key occasions to discuss the importance of strategic planning to the future of the University of Hartford. We have arrived at a point in our history and the economy of the nation and world where it is evident that the growth in University revenues will increase only slightly but the need to increase our competitive quality is increasing dramatically. How, I have asked, can we increase the quality of the education we provide when our funding will be either steady state or only gradually increasing?
I am pleased to announce a key initiative that we will undertake within the next few weeks and execute over the next 12 to 18 months. This is not a strategic plan, but the basis on which our strategic plans will be built. We are calling it, therefore, Foundation of the Future.
Foundation of the Future is a process of program review and prioritization for all academic and administrative programs. It will be led by Sharon Vasquez, our provost, and Arosha Jayawickrema, vice president of finance and administration. Its goal is to identify programs on which we will focus our resources without increasing our overall budget. The key word in that sentence is, of course, focus.
Now I know that a phrase like "program review and prioritization" sometimes strikes fear into the hearts of faculty and staff. It sounds like a murky star-chamber procedure in which some secret group reviews programs and makes decisions on bases that are unknown to most people in the community. I am committed, as are all the officers of the University, to not allow this to happen. Foundation of the Future will be a thoughtful and transparent exercise, and we will make frequent reports as we progress.
To start that transparency, let me say that deciding on measurements and priorities will not be done by senior administrators but instead by 40 of our faculty and staff who will constitute two task forces—one for academic programs and one for administrative programs. They will provide recommendations to me, and in turn, I will decide which recommendations to endorse to the Board of Regents. A list of the task force cochairs and members will be provided in a few days.
I have already announced my first priority: reviewing and increasing, where necessary, faculty and staff compensation. Under the direction of Provost Vasquez, the President's Commission on Full-Time Faculty Compensation has already begun its work. Once their work has established parameters, we will follow a similar process for reviewing and increasing staff compensation.
And I have announced a second priority: increasing our institutional reputation and visibility. We are well under way in that process, too. An integrated marketing steering committee has been working, under the direction of Mildred McNeill, senior director of communication, and John Carson, vice president of University relations, with our consultants, Elizabeth Scarborough and Renee Daly from Simpson Scarborough, a nationally prominent marketing consulting firm. Their report is due this winter.
We actually began the preparation for Foundation of the Future last April, when 60 of us came together with Larry Goldstein, president of Campus Strategies LLC, for a daylong workshop on the connections between planning and resource allocation and evaluation. Larry will return to campus on November 17 and 18, 2011, to begin work with each task force—the administrative programs task force on Thursday, the 17th, and the academics programs task force on Friday, the 18th.
I am confident that Foundation of the Future will provide us with an effective and efficient way to review and evaluate our programs. As I reported to you two weeks ago, the NEASC visiting team left us with the first glimpse of a promising review of our current condition: Foundation of the Future will help us identify the way to the bright future that the NEASC team foresaw for us.
The NEASC team praised our "significant progress" over the past decade and our "pervading camaraderie." Building on that progress and our great sense of community, Foundation of the Future will go a long way to identifying our potential to be even better and finding the resources to make that possible. I look forward to achieving those goals.
Sincerely,
Walter Harrison
President
