Chapter 19:

 Strategic Plan Implementation - From Where We Are To Where We Want To Be

.

INTRODUCTION

.
Though the eighteen chapters that have preceded this concluding one give every indication of San Francisco State University’s successes in the implementation of its 1998 strategic plan, Envisioning Our Second Century, this statement must be placed in an appropriate context. The strategic planning process undertaken by the Commission on University Strategic Planning (CUSP) was a lengthy one. From the choosing of commissioners and the beginning of discussions in Fall 1995, to the approval of the final plan by President Corrigan in August 1998, hundreds of hours of meetings with hundreds of individuals ultimately produced 156 recommendations. With this in mind, it might have appeared presumptuous of us to even suggest that we would focus our self-study on successes after only two years of implementation.

.
Nevertheless, this is what we negotiated with WASC to do; and this is what we have done. And the bottom line is that, even after only two years, we have had much success to report. The campus has been making, and it continues to make, major strides in the implementation of its strategic plan. It has been allocating resources where necessary (and where possible); and it has been expending time and energy where the allocation of resources was not necessary (or possible). The preceding chapters and additional ones to come in Parts Two and Three clearly demonstrate good faith efforts to turn plans into action and to engage in systematic, meaningful assessment of student learning outcomes and levels of satisfaction.

.
This chapter will not spend much time summarizing our successes, as that has been well done in the preceding eighteen. It will instead attempt to summarize what is yet to be done to implement the strategic plan of 1998, with the caveat being that any strategic plan is, in some ways, already outdated the moment it gets into print. Universities and their strategic plans are not static entities. Any recommendations put on paper immediately need to be recast in the context of changing environments and of changing institutional conceptions and capabilities. What was thought at one point to be important to an institution’s future may ultimately turn out to be imprudent, impolitic, or impossible. On the other hand, new situations may provide new opportunities for new directions.

.
Nevertheless, a strategic plan does provide the best indication of the thinking of a campus at a point in time; and SFSU’s strategic plan provided ours. Thus it is important to look back to the strategic plan to see what has not yet been accomplished, in order that determinations may be made regarding how to proceed and indeed whether one wishes to continue to proceed in the manner envisioned. Using the six themes of the strategic plan which provided the structure for Part One, this chapter will selectively indicate major areas where work is still needed; but it will not attempt to make those determinations. That will be the task of hundreds of additional individuals over hundreds of additional hours.

.

An Academically Excellent University

.
San Francisco State has fully engaged in a comprehensive endeavor to assess the quality of student learning, both in its major programs and in General Education. Those endeavors are discussed in detail in Part Two of this self-study. This is, of course, an ongoing activity, as programs attempt to develop and implement appropriate assessment strategies. These endeavors need to continue, with heightened attention to using the assessment results for program improvement.

.
 Additionally, while much institutional attention is being paid to improving the basic skills of incoming students, whether they be incoming freshmen or graduate students, native students or foreign born, there needs to be continued discussion of how these basic skills can be enhanced throughout the curriculum and a heightened focus on assessing their attainment. Additionally, now that the campus has made a major commitment to providing all freshmen with a structured orientation and first-year experience, it will be important to undertake a systematic assessment of the quality of that experience and of student satisfaction with it. With what is learned from the freshmen experience, a determination can then be made about developing a similar experience for incoming transfer students.

.
The university’s retention efforts and services for students already on campus have been well chronicled earlier in the self-study. Nevertheless, there is a continuing need for a more coordinated effort among programs providing these services and more campus education regarding the services provided.

.
In the area of advising, the university’s mandatory advising program is well under way, with all academic programs having developed and having begun implementing their advising plans. Furthermore, funding given to colleges by the provost for their advising endeavors included the requirement of systematic assessment and reporting of implementation success. Now, as the strategic plan recommended, there is a need to institutionalize a training program for both faculty and staff advisors and a recognition program to honor quality advising.

.
Given the significant attention we are paying to students with remedial needs, it is also important to pay greater attention to the needs of our more capable undergraduate students. We are certainly doing so for our Presidential Scholars; but there is need to reach out to a wider group of our better prepared students with honors courses (and perhaps even an honors program) and with support and assistance as they prepare themselves for graduate programs and seek scholarship and fellowship aid.

.
At the graduate level, the university can be pleased regarding the significant increase in the diversity of its student population (30% non-White in Fall 1992 to 43% non-White in Fall 2000). As the strategic plan indicated, additional attention is needed to increase funding sources for graduate students and to provide support for faculty involved in graduate education, especially those serving as thesis advisors.

.
A key issue for discussion at the graduate level is the "critical mass" one—how many students, faculty, graduate-level courses, and annual degree recipients are needed for a quality graduate program. For the first time, necessary data have been compiled on all graduate programs. Now the question is what to do with the data. Much discussion in the Graduate Council and in the colleges is needed to respond to the "critical mass" concerns raised in the strategic plan and to agree upon how to define a "quality" graduate program and determine the relationship between critical mass and quality.

.
Regarding the institution’s curriculum in general, the strategic plan did not focus in any explicit fashion on whether the university is offering academic programs appropriate both to the university’s own conception of its mission and to the changing needs of our twenty-first century society. Nevertheless, as was indicated in the concluding section of the chapter on curriculum, this is an important issue; and questions do need to be asked about whether and how to reshape the curriculum in ways to better reflect and implement the university’s mission and its academic priorities.

.
As President Corrigan indicated in his speech to the faculty at the start of the 2000-2001 academic year: "Not even the best funded of universities can be all things to all people. We cannot maintain high quality programs across the board and we must be more creative and selective in how we approach the maintenance of existing programs. We must be willing to downsize or eliminate programs of lesser quality or importance to the students and the community we serve." Here too, however, even if agreement could be reached to move in this direction, definitions of "quality" and "importance" would also have to be agreed upon.

.

A Learning-Centered University

.
The strategic plan, while explicit in calling for the creation of an active learning environment, was equally explicit in affirming the central role of the faculty in fostering such an environment. The chapter on teaching and learning not only articulated how an active learning environment is being created on the campus but also gave excellent examples of individual faculty endeavors. The university, noted for the quality of its teaching, is becoming equally noted for the innovativeness of its delivery of instruction.

.
There is widespread interest in and enthusiasm for endeavors to enhance teaching. However, as was noted in the strategic plan, there is an increasing need to "maximize" faculty time by finding new ways to provide or facilitate housing, spousal support, child care, and professional development; to establish a formal mentoring program for new faculty (and to train the mentors); and to increase support for the institution’s hundreds of lecturers. Greater support is needed for faculty curricular development and reform, with rewards to faculty for teaching innovations and for participating in community partnerships. The technology infrastructure must be upgraded and support expanded as the demand for on-line delivery of courses and course materials increases. Attention to teaching innovation and enhancement must move from the level of individual faculty doing good things individually to the level of department faculty engaged in these endeavors collectively. And departments demonstrating effective disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to teaching and learning must be recognized and supported for their endeavors. Support for faculty (and especially the newer faculty) needs to be holistic, with various campus offices (and even off-campus entities) coming together to collectively determine what the needs are (e.g., spousal support) and collectively developing a planned response.

.
With increased support comes increased expectations. In an environment focused on rewarding merit over longevity, the criteria for evaluating faculty must be both clear and consensually arrived at. The university prides itself in its primary focus on teaching. Traditionally, however, evaluations of teaching effectiveness have been highly decentralized, with as many different evaluation instruments as departments. This is changing, with a new approach aimed at establishing a core set of university-wide teaching evaluation items. This new approach is consistent with the strategic plan’s emphasis on the primacy of teaching. The next step would be to move in the direction of correlating the assessment of teaching effectiveness with the assessment of student learning.

.
The strategic plan also called for broader definitions of all criteria used to evaluate faculty. The model developed for the assessment of the impact of faculty involvement in community service learning is certainly an important step in this direction. Additional steps are needed, including evaluations focused on technology-meditated instruction and delivering education at a distance; on user-friendliness; and on the infusion of multicultural and international perspectives in the curriculum.

.

A Diverse University

.
San Francisco State takes its commitment to diversity and multiculturalism seriously. Our diverse student body reflects that commitment, as our faculty increasingly does. And our curriculum is taking on an increasingly multicultural (in the very broadest sense of the term) orientation.

.
Nevertheless, as the strategic plan recommended, it is important that all faculty and staff be made fully aware of the legal and social consequences of their behavior in dealing with a diverse student population. It is important that, while we are clearly in the forefront of higher education institutions confronting the daunting task of responding creatively and meaningfully to disability-related concerns, we further sensitize the campus to these issues and to the need for increased responsiveness. It is important that we pay increased attention to creative modes of conflict resolution in a setting which can, at times, be highly conflictual and litigious.

.
It has become increasingly clear within the university community that multiculturalism is one of the most important ideological and educational foundations of the institution. However, multiculturalism must increasingly be viewed in its very broadest sense, with its scope expanded for full inclusion of disability, gender, and sexuality-related concerns. The university can be proud of its track-record here; but the track is getting longer and more complex.

.
A User-Friendly University

.
The university’s commitment to increased user-friendliness is unmistakable. From having all university policies easily accessible on the web; to holding comprehensive orientation programs for all new faculty and staff; to providing students with a one-stop location for support services; to increasing eating facilities and campus benches; to providing campus signage within and between buildings; to assessing student satisfaction on a regular basis, user-friendliness is not only a goal but a reality. Even our significant student housing problem—stemming originally from the closure of Verducci Hall as a result of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake—has resulted in the building of the very user-friendly Village at Centennial Square.

.
But as user-friendliness becomes more and more a reality, it becomes more and more a goal. And there is still much to be done. We have established excellent orientation programs for new faculty and staff, but we do not yet have an institutionalized, university-wide, faculty mentorship program. We have succeeded admirably in placing all our policies on the web, but we now need to move to a systematic review of them for currency and enforceability. We have emphasized the importance of employee contributions to user-friendliness, but we are only beginning to reward those contributions publicly and systematically. We have asked students what they think and how satisfied they are, but we are only beginning to develop our capabilities both to get the results to those who are in a position to make necessary improvements and to assess implementation success. And, as indicated in the chapter on user-friendliness, when we do make changes which themselves may be stressful, we may not be sufficiently attentive to examining the user-friendliness of the processes we employ to bring those changes about.

.

A Community-Oriented University

.
The university is clearly a leader, both within the CSU and in the larger higher education community, in its support of community service and community service learning. Our best information suggests that, at the point of graduation, approximately 20% of our students have had at least one community service learning experience. But there is clearly an institutional need and an institutional commitment to increase that percentage; to increase faculty participation in the development of community service learning curricula; and to increase student-faculty collaboration in community service and community service learning endeavors. There is also a need and a commitment to increase both public-public and public-private partnerships which will enable the university to become both more visible in meeting and better prepared to meet the needs of its students, its faculty, and its external communities and constituencies. Most importantly, there is a need and a commitment to move the entire campus from discrete community service endeavors to an institutional posture of addiction to civic engagement—a posture which mobilizes both students and staff to a heightened understanding of their civic responsibilities and to a heightened desire and determination to work collaboratively with relevant community groups to find solutions to societal problems.

.
As was clear in the strategic plan, the university must recognize that the implementation of all of these commitments is time-intensive. Faculty and staff need to be rewarded for their endeavors; and tenure-track faculty, especially, need to have these endeavors recognized in tenure and promotion processes. Furthermore, there is no way around the fact that funding is needed to develop projects that will enhance campus engagement to, with, and in the community. As was seen in the chapter on external partnerships and community service, these very points were made forcefully by President Corrigan in his keynote address to the Western Campus Compact Consortium Conference in April 2000.

.

An Internationalized University

.
The strategic plan devoted a good deal of attention to recommendations for internationalizing the university; and the university has devoted a good deal of attention to implementing these recommendations. We now have more international students on campus than ever in our history. We also have twice as many domestic students going abroad to study than we did in 1992, even though the number still remains extremely small. Our Office of International Programs has undergone major expansion—in services, in space, and in staff. International perspectives permeate the curriculum.

.
The above being said, there is still more to be done. In the curricular arena, the strategic plan recommendation concerning increasing the second language proficiency of SFSU students has not been acted upon. While debated intensively within the strategic planning commission, it has not profited (or suffered) from an equally intensive debate within the larger campus community.

.
Other recommendations similarly await action. Though students coming to us directly from high school are required to have some second language proficiency, the "transfer loophole" permits students coming to us from community colleges to escape this requirement. Systemwide action would be needed to close this loophole; but SFSU could take a leadership position here if it wished to. One area in which action is being taken involves the increased sharing of language resources across CSU campuses. This is a welcomed move as it will permit students to access more language courses than is presently possible. However, this is also an area ripe for expanded activity. Finally, there was a call for an M.A. in Global Education; but an interdisciplinary working group would have to be formed to determine need and potential viability, and this is yet to be done.

.
Turning to the recommendations regarding international students, the strategic plan called for more students and more services. The university has accomplished both. However, in doing so, specific issues have arisen regarding the provision of more English language training for them; and general issues are arising regarding how many international students would be "optimal" for the campus and what, if any, should the balance be between undergraduate and graduate students and among students from different parts of the world.

.
Regarding our own students going abroad to study, there clearly is a desire to increase numbers; but such an increase may well depend on finding funding sources for students presently unable to afford the expense and increasing resources to provide relevant support services. Questions also need to be addressed regarding the types of bilateral exchange programs to be offered (e.g., programs which focus on joint student/faculty research and training); the geographic location of those programs (e.g., programs in Africa and Central and South America in addition to those presently offered in Europe and Asia); and the institution of control mechanisms to ensure program quality (e.g., site visits to bilateral program areas). Should we envisage moving further in the study abroad arena, a comprehensive plan for the future of bilateral exchanges is probably called for.

.
The two major remaining areas of strategic plan concern were faculty and facilities. Regarding faculty, much has been accomplished. A permanent university advisory committee on international programs has been established. Interested faculty have been brought together in geographic area interest groups. Funding for international professional travel, research, and service learning endeavors has been allocated. Yet there is more to be done to fully implement the strategic plan’s recommendations on establishing a university-wide faculty group on international education; developing faculty research and professional opportunities abroad; and creating tripartite relationships among university faculty, Bay Area community groups, and international institutions/agencies.

.
Finally, there is the matter of the International Center. There clearly is a consensus regarding the need for such a building on campus. A major push for a physical facility occurred, with no success, in the mid-1980s. For there to be an International Center in the next five to ten years, substantial private funding would be required and a working group would need to be established to pursue it.

.

CONCLUSION

.
The 1992 WASC visiting team had major concerns about the university’s lack of planning. It would be impossible for a new team to make the same statement. As this first part of our self-study has demonstrated (and as the next two parts will continue to demonstrate), San Francisco State University has engaged in meaningful planning; it has established priorities; it has made decisions based on those plans and priorities; it has allocated resources based on those decisions; and it has begun making a concerted effort to assess its success.

.
The strategic plan was, and for the most part remains, a highly realistic blueprint for the university’s second century. The recommendations in it were developed by CUSP and received by the university community as action items worthy of being acted upon. The first eighteen chapters of this first part of the self-study make abundantly clear that, over the two-year period since the plan’s promulgation, they have been acted upon. The institution has much to be proud of as it displays its evidence of successful implementation in all six of the plan’s thematic areas.

.
This final chapter has indicated areas in which increased attention is needed, assuming (an assumption open to discussion and debate) continued university interest in their pursuit. It is precisely the questioning of decisions (or, in this case, recommendations) previously made—and the formulation of new ones—which makes the strategic planning and implementation enterprise exciting, complex, and continually challenging for San Francisco State University.

Return to Section H: Conclusions and Recommendations | Return to Accreditation | SFSU Home | Top of page

 

.