12 ForOregonState.org/Stater VO I C E S DARING NEW THINKING PRESIDENT JAYATHI MURTHY ON OSU’S STRATEGIC PLAN, CREATIVITY AND LOOKING TO THE FUTURE. As told to Scholle McFarland The Board of Trustees accepted the university's new strategic plan this fall. Is there anything in it that makes you particularly proud ? What makes me excited is that it is really ambitious. First of all, it recognizes the things that we are good at. So there’s a baseline excellence, but then it sets some really high standards. So for example, we are going to push graduation rates up to 80% or higher. We are going to push our research expenditures from $367 to $600 million, and we are going to open up the whole innovation, entrepreneurship, workforce development space, which we haven’t yet done as a coordinated effort. If we hit these goals, there’s absolutely no question that it puts us on the map. Similarly, for Ecampus, if we were to truly more than double the number of students there and hit a 30,000 target, that would be a huge game changer. So these are big changes, and I’m excited for them, but also determined to see them through, to see them take hold and make a difference. What do you think is going to be the biggest challenge? It’s very easy to have the strategic plan sit in the president’s or provost’s office or both. What’s difficult about this plan, all the goals in it, is that they go deep down into the departments — in some cases, as deep as the individual classes. Take our 80% graduation rate goal. Now, there are certain things that can happen in my office or in [Provost] Ed Feser’s office or at the OSU Foundation. For example, there’s fundraising to support student scholarships. The Finish in Four scholarship program is presumably drivable by leadership. But what happens when you start to dig into failure rates in this or that class? The reasons for a high-failurerate class in engineering may be different from those for a College of Liberal Arts class. There’s a lot of granularity in some of these things, and they’re very college specific. So getting the colleges to set strong goals for themselves, to create metrics that they’re going to track, to fix the things that need fixing specific to their circumstances and needs — that’s a whole lot of work on the ground, starting with the individual professors and extending all the way to departments, schools and colleges. I haven’t seen that level of penetration in many places. With the push to more than double Ecampus, it seems like having a large group of students who aren’t physically on campus could pose challenges around creating community. The students are not physically on campus. That’s ↑ President Murthy presents the university’s strategic plan at its fall launch. Follow her on X at @OregonStatePres. Read the new plan at beav.es/plan.
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