Focus on Strategic Positioning
By Terry Collins, General College interim dean
Editor’s note: This column originally appeared in the Fall 2005 issue of Access, the General College magazine.
It’s our first chilly morning of the new season, a nice dew-wet Minneapolis sunrise. At Oak and Washington I rest my bicycle at the stoplight and I notice a young woman walking by, whistling a Bob Marley song and wearing a Gopher sweatshirt, a wonderfully full ballet tutu, zebra-striped leggings, and tall sheepskin boots, all topped by a cardboard glittered tiara glistening in the early light. It’s late September, and it’s really good to be back at school.
The University of Minnesota is a wonderful place, full of surprises and serious people doing serious work. For 153 years, the state has privileged those who come here to study, and over the past year, many members of our community have argued that the University needs to be careful that it does not re-invent itself as a place where only the already-privileged come to study. Indeed, three-fourths of Minnesotans polled by the University point to broad access as a central value they hold for our state’s flagship institution of higher learning. It’s an important moment in the University’s history, as we struggle with the sometimes conflicting demands embedded in the notion of access and excellence.
In his strategic positioning plan, adopted by the Board of Regents in June 2005, President Bob Bruininks has challenged the University to change. The Regents have set the bar high for academic improvements, with a 10-year aspiration that the University emerge as one of the top three public research universities in the world. That Strategic Positioning Initiative (www.umn.edu/systemwide/strategic_positioning/) makes 40 recommendations affecting nearly every corner of the Twin Cities campus, including the merger of six colleges into three. Under the plan, General College will become a department in a transformed College of Education and Human Development.
The goal for the new college is to bring together a group of faculty and students to form the premier unit in the nation focused on human development across the lifespan. The new college will be composed of current College of Education and Human Development departments and centers, the Family Social Sciences Department and the School of Social Work (both currently in the College of Human Ecology), and the General College. The potential for this to be a positive change is immense. Our students should find fewer barriers to degree programs and better opportunities for stronger graduation outcomes. Our faculty will find themselves in a highly productive and more diverse research milieu (see the profiles of Professors Steve Yussen, Andrew Collins, and Joan Garfield in this issue). Much of our work this fall is to help insure a smooth transition to our new home.
Currently, some 34 task forces are at work to implement the proposed changes in the University. The task force on the restructuring of GC into the new College of Education and Human Development is chaired by Professors Laura Koch and Robert Serfass. They hope to hear from as many members of the GC community of students, staff, alumni, friends, and donors as possible. You can give the task force comments by e-mailing Professor Koch (koch@umn.edu) or write to her by regular mail at our GC address. Your ideas and hopes for an accessible and high-performing new unit will be welcomed by the task force, but they need to hear from you well before their December 10 deadline.
Task force draft reports will be posted in mid-December for a 30-day period of public comment. Please check the strategic positioning Web site, noted above, in mid-December to review the recommendations and provide further input. The task force process is your best chance to help form the future University of Minnesota to reflect your ideas and your values.
In the midst of this planning, the students have returned and the semester is in full swing. Lively talk, engaged young people, and good academic work make it a joy to be on campus in Appleby Hall. I hope you will take a moment to consider the scholarship funds outlined by Deb Wilkens-Costello in her development office column.
This issue features a wonderful profile of Malcolm MacLean, the founding director of General College. We’ll be publishing more such historical vignettes in our final year of Access magazine. The MacLean piece is a good reminder that GC was once a new college, full of hope and vision. I know that we can bring some of that same visionary, optimistic perspective to our work of creating a new department as we close up GC in its final year as a college. Great things can happen in a place where autumn’s first dawn includes a whistling young woman in a tiara and tutu.
Terry Collins joined the General College faculty in 1976. He is a Morse-Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor of Writing and Literature and serves as interim dean of the college through June 2006.
|
Return
to: U of M Home
