Dean's Message
A more private conversation

Dean Paul Voakes

It was bound to happen, sooner or later. Academic programs, including journalism schools, are going to have to embrace a concept that's about as familiar to some faculty and students as the atmospheric components of Pluto. It's the concept of the strategic plan.

It's the concept the School's faculty and staff have spent a lot of time and energy exploring this year. And we're still only at the beginning of what promises to be a long (and I hope meaningful) relationship with a unique document.

In simpler times (when higher education was a higher priority with state governments), detailed, ambitious planning seemed unnecessary. Need a new building? Make the request. Need a few more faculty members? Make the request. But those days are over — especially in Colorado.

CU, by necessity, has begun to think more like a private university, and that means its schools and colleges have begun thinking likewise. If we want to continue to improve as a School, to nurture and sustain a national reputation for excellence, we cannot wait around for pots of money to be dropped in from Denver. We need to make our case and then take it to the world. In that task, the private sector is light-years ahead of us.

The strategic plan is a staple of the business world. It declares your reason for being; it explains what you do that's unique; it sets out a long-term vision and then short-term goals and objectives for achieving that vision. It even sets timetables for achieving the goals and metrics to gauge success, and it holds certain people accountable for getting the group to those goals on time. Internally, it serves as a guide for the allocation of our precious resources: what kind of faculty to hire, how best to remodel our limited space, what kind of new programs to create, etc.

Externally, the strategic plan is essential to development and fund-raising. Alumni and others will be more excited about supporting a School that can clearly show how distinct it is from the rest of the journalism schools and can show that it's not about to rest on its laurels but instead has a set of interesting plans.

Fortunately, we didn't have to start from scratch. My predecessor, Dean Del Brinkman, assigned a faculty group to write a strategic plan in 2001, but with his premature retirement for health reasons, he was unable to see the project through. What endures is a strong statement of the mission and values of the School, which the faculty this year has embraced as its starting point. But the 2002 document never got to the details of goals, objectives and timetables, and that's what we're grappling with this fall.

Fortunately again, we've got help. With the generous gift of an Advisory Board member, we were able to engage the consulting services of Kay Sprinkel Grace. There are dozens of excellent strategic consultants for colleges and nonprofit organizations, but Kay Grace has been just right for us. She has a journalism degree from Stanford and has worked with media organizations as well as colleges; in fact, her major client this year has been the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. In four visits to Boulder, she has steered us along a path to a strong plan without imposing any of her views of what an excellent School should look like. That's our job.

She led us (faculty, Advisory Board, staff and student leaders) through a day of brainstorming in late August that produced a number of what she calls "common themes and uncommon ideas." A faculty committee distilled all those ideas into three overarching themes:

• Innovation: By exploring new approaches, new technologies and different (though not necessarily new) values, we can assume a leadership role in the transformation of today's journalism and mass communication.
• Empowerment through social responsibility: By instilling in our students a sense of both the power and responsibility inherent in media professions, we can help create media that better enable our society to realize its democratic ideals.
• Excellence: In everything we do, we will not settle for "pretty good." In particular, we will continue to develop nationally prominent expertise in specialized areas.

That's still in rough, rough form, and the goals and objectives to make those abstractions concrete will have to be determined over the next few months. But I'm excited about our progress thus far. By the next Bylines, we'll be able to share the School's message in a form that I hope is so succinct and so intriguing that each alum will be able to describe the School's strengths and ambitions — during any given elevator ride from one floor to the next.

Re-accreditation news is all good

P.S. I realize I left you hanging with my last column about the School's re-accreditation. The national Accrediting Council for Journalism and Mass Communication would convene two weeks after you received last spring's Bylines. As we were all hoping, the result (May 7, 2005) was the unanimous re-accreditation of the School. What a terrific national affirmation of our faculty, staff and students!