Dear WVU Faculty:
Last year, many of you participated in the Strategic Transformation process at WVU. It was an effort designed to engage the University community in identifying our institution's strengths and points of differentiation and collectively imagine future opportunities and possibilities.
In total, nearly 1,000 faculty, administrators and selected staff members participated in the process through a series of unit-level visioning sessions facilitated by leaders trained by the ADVANCE Center team.
The results of those conversations were coded, analyzed and organized into a document that will serve as a blueprint for future growth and a guide for the University’s strategic direction. It is not a traditional “strategic plan,” per se, but rather a high-level summary statement of our shared vision and purpose.
What you may not realize is that there was a great deal of work that happened on the backend of this process. In January, then-Provost Joyce McConnell tasked me and Melissa Latimer with convening a Strategic Transformation Team, which comprised faculty and administrators from across our campuses who had been identified as creative, strategic and innovative thinkers.
Those individuals spent the Spring 2019 semester doing a deep dive into the current and future higher education landscape and learning about the particular challenges we face at WVU. They also helped shape the vision statement and goals that came out of the visioning sessions. I am grateful for their hard work, dedication and enthusiastic approach to this important effort.
To honor their efforts and provide the campus with additional information, we have created a web page that provides an overview of the Strategic Transformation process, a summary of the document’s vision and goals and a preliminary outline of next steps.
Because this exercise was done primarily at the academic unit level, the majority of participants were faculty. Please be sure to share this with other members of the WVU community who participated, including staff and non-academic leaders.
To everyone who participated last year, thank you for the time, effort and passion you gave to envisioning a brighter future for WVU. I was inspired by our shared pride for this institution and commitment to owning and shaping its future direction. I hope and trust that you will be inspired, too.
Sincerely,
Maryanne Reed
Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs