Presidential Perspectives
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Headwinds: Can Strategic Plans and Budget Cuts Coexist? |
Two-and-a-half years ago, when we published our new Strategic Plan for 2008-2013, my colleagues and I at UT Chattanooga were excited! The plan emphasizes strategic partnerships; partnerships with our metropolitan network of businesses and agencies, with our community and state leaders, but also partnerships with our students, our staff, our faculty, and our alumni. To arrive at this plan, a broad cross section of our campus community, along with corporate, education, nonprofit and government leaders, had met repeatedly for over a year in small groups and large to discuss what our university means to its constituents and how we could continue to build its influence and benefits to even higher levels. The plans, dreams, and hopes were running high.
By the middle of 2008, it was clear that the snowballing national economic crisis would strike state higher education in Tennessee very hard. Over the ensuing three fiscal years, the state has been forced to reduce the base appropriations budget to UTC by over 20 percent. So obviously, all strategic plans must be placed on hold, right? No, of course not.
In times of resource scarcity, we all are called upon to be more creative, more efficient, and more focused on our core missions than we are at any other time. I believe strongly that this would be the worst possible time to stop planning, dreaming, and innovating for the future of our students, their families, and our metropolitan communities. In fact, these times call for us to be even more central to the search for the paths forward and to be bold in goal-setting, accepting institutional accountability, and providing examples of perseverance and optimism.
Recently, noted arts consultant Thomas Wolf of WolfBrown in Cambridge, Massachusetts, told a consortium of arts organizations in Chattanooga that fiscal times like these call for an intense and hard-nosed focus on sustainability in the embattled cultural arts. He listed among the urgent requirements of such a focus: strategic alliances, smarter and more flexible use of technology, the definition and pursuit of community-wide goals, and the realization that we will move forward as systems of institutions working together, not as individual organizations. I was struck, but should not have been surprised, at how closely his diagnosis for community arts organizations fits together with the dynamics of metropolitan universities.
So, on our campus, like at so many other CUMU institutions, we are directing our energy toward alliances with community college and private sector partners to deliver cooperative, highly-relevant programs of superior quality. We are implementing further instructional and administrative technology to cut waste and duplication and to enhance student access. We are working harder to demonstrate to our individual and corporate donors that their support is good business as well as great philanthropy. We are seeking to harness the power of partnerships in ways that seemed more like idealistic rhetoric than a sustainable business model just a few short years ago.
So, is the “Great Recession of 2009-10” the best time to be a CUMU president or chancellor? Probably not. But, I have come to understand that running into a headwind builds strength and endurance, and it gives us one more way to provide models for living to our students, our colleagues, and the communities who depend upon us.
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