Western adopts 2023-2028 strategic plan

(Photo by Jacob Spetzler)

After nearly a year of deliberation, the Western Colorado University Board of Trustees has adopted its 2023-2028 Strategic Plan. The plan specifically calls for improving student and staff well-being, making the school more affordable, enhancing academic offerings and ensuring the university’s financial strength. Trustees adopted the plan at a board meeting on June 22.

The university welcomes over 3,000 students each year and is tasked with not only offering competitive academic opportunities, but shaping student priorities as they prepare to take on post-college lives. To define these priorities, the university looks to its strategic plan, a master planning document where senior administrators and trustees — with the help of community input — lay out the institution’s guiding principles for the next half decade. 

“In order for us to accomplish anything in what we set out to do, we need to have everybody engaged, bought in and all working towards the same goals,” Western President Brad Baca said in a regular Gunnison County Commissioners meeting on June 20. 

Baca said the new plan includes some initiatives that are significantly different from what the university had in the past. Those changes could include more unique academic programming, like stackable credits, micro-credentials and “upside-down degrees,” a structure which has students start with technical certifications and delay general education until the end. 

But new programs will continue to be underpinned by a liberal arts focus, which Commissioner Jonathan Houck called a “bedrock” of the Gunnison Valley. 

“One of the reasons I think our community often excels in problem solving and coming up with good answers is because the very skills that make up the foundation of liberal arts education is what we see a lot of folks in our community … and a lot of them received that foundation at Western,” Houck said. 

Thanasis Kinias, faculty representative on the strategic plan steering committee, said the most promising change on the academic side is the possibility of developing a new General Education (GE) core. Instead of having students check disparate boxes on a GE list, the university hopes to offer more curated requirements, including sustainability, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Justice Plus (DEIJ+), global outlook and even local environmental studies. 

“The GE core would be less generic and really represent what Western is as an institution,” Kinias said.

Making Western more affordable is another focus. Demographics are trending towards more diverse, less affluent and more first-generation students, all while the overall cost of attendance at Western continues to increase. For that reason, the plan prioritizes making scholarships available to more students and reducing overall student debt.

“As a first-generation college graduate, I would not be where I am today without the transformational impacts of higher education. And that was only made possible by the generosity of a lot of people, the institution and the donors that supported that in terms of making it affordable for me,” Baca said in the commissioners meeting. 

The university’s own financial well-being can be improved through a number of plans, Baca added, like an enrollment management plan, a marketing plan that better communicates Western’s strengths and fine-tuning the annual budget process.

Granular goals

The strategic planning process started about a year ago at a July board retreat. The board approved goals in October and appointed a steering committee, who worked over the following nine months to finalize those goals, develop an implementation plan and identify metrics for success. All along the way, the administration gathered community input to make sure the plan reflected real-time needs. 

The strategic plan prioritizes student well-being, which includes “security, access to mental health resources and personal connection in order for all to thrive,” the plan states. Instead of letting those efforts live in a silo with the Student Affairs department, the intent is to build those efforts into the curriculum.

“If you follow anything about higher education these days, you will know we are in crisis mode on our campuses,” Baca said. “Mental health resources and mental health needs are consuming more and more of our time and more and more of our resources.”

According to a June 7 board meeting memo, housing remains a big concern, and that initiative drew a lot of conversation from faculty, staff and students. For students, those comments centered on everything associated with upkeep, cleanliness, condition of on-campus housing as well as availability and cost of off-campus housing. The final plan includes short- and long-term solutions like multi-unit lease agreements, new construction and renovations to lessen the housing burden on employees and students 

Regarding DEIJ+, comments were somewhat more critical. “[The] sense that we don’t have a good baseline to measure progress from, and that efforts have been somewhat superficial in nature and have not gone far enough,” the memo stated.

But the university is well underway to tackle those issues. Months ago, it hired Steven Parker, Western’s inaugural vice president of inclusivity. Since then, Parker has been involved in the strategic planning process. 

“DEIJ+ seems to be centered. It seems to be a primary focus of this strategic plan, and interwoven with inclusivity at the center  … folks have been very inclusive as it relates to developing the goals, and developing the priorities that will live out those goals,” Parker told the Times.

Some of those programs include the first 2SLGBTQIA+ (Two-spirit, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Asexual Plus) scholarship, a multi-faith space for students and staff to gather and a formal Division for Justice and Inclusion, meant to centralize the university’s DEIJ+ efforts.

“This means that we have multiple professionals focusing their attention intentionally on diversity, equity, inclusion and justice plus work in a unified way,” he said. 

For faculty, the plan lays out an interest in “empowering the voices of faculty” and creating a comprehensive compensation plan for all Western employees. Innovating titles, salary structures, contracts and benefits is meant to foster a culture of value for non-tenure track faculty and staff.

“The faculty didn’t have a lot of criticisms of the plan, so this could be interpreted as general support for it … I think it is a positive strategic plan that has wonderful guiding principles (sustainability, diversity-equity-inclusivity-justice, global outlook, and sense of place) that align with Western’s values (courage, growth, integrity, stewardship and inclusivity),” Faculty Senate Chair Patrick McGee wrote in an email statement to the Times.

There is still some work to be done on the implementation plan, including articulating cost estimates and timing for the different initiatives Baca said. This work will occur over the summer. 

(Abby Harrison can be contacted at 970.641.1414 or abby@gunnisontimes.com.)