C A M P U S From left, Chris Cook and Nathan Urban C H R I S T A N E U Lehigh’s Strategic Planning Process: A Conversation with Nathan Urban and Chris Cook “Our Lehigh, Our Future—an open dialogue on thestrategic direction of the university” is now under way, with members of the Lehigh community sharing their ideas with university leaders and each other and working groups helping to fush out and refne ideas. The strategic planning efort is being led by Provost Nathan Urban and Vice President of Strategic Planning and Initiatives Chris Cook. Here they talk about the themes, the process, generating ideas and getting involved. FOUR THEMES EMERGED TO GUIDE THE STRATEGIC PLANNING PROCESS: RESEARCH WITH IMPACT, EDUCATION WITH PURPOSE, SMART GROWTH AND LEHIGH USER EXPERIENCE. WHY THOSE THEMES? Urban: We got to those themes through an interesting process. We started of with a pretty blank slate, asking diferent groups of people—mostly deans, people in leadership roles across the university—what are your big ideas, your thoughts about the future? There were 300-plus diferent ideas that emerged through that process. We then looked at that set of ideas and said, what are some of the themes that seem to be emerging? Some of those ideas were problems to be solved. Some were opportunities. Some were ways in which people thought we could diferentiate Lehigh from similar universities across the country or world. … We had a set of conversations over the course of the summer with a number of diferent groups, including some groups of faculty recommended by the Faculty Senate … as we tried to gauge people’s level of enthusiasm. From that feedback, we refned the thematic areas and the questions that we’re asking around these diferent thematic areas. Cook: It wasn’t just that these themes were emerging; it was that there was really shared and consistent interest in these particular themes that those 95 people (at meetings over the summer) really thought were the important things to talk about. WHAT KIND OF IDEAS ARE YOU LOOKING FOR? Urban: That has been a question that’s come up a couple of times …Here’smy current versionof that answer. If you think about the last 50 or 100 years, what are some of the biggest, most important changes that have happened here at Lehigh? Well, I would put a few things in that bucket. One is, 50 years ago, we started admitting women as undergraduates. Over the last fve years we’ve developed the College of Health as a new college. Some 25 years ago, we acquired the Mountaintop Campus and began to develop that as a new, diferent type of campus for the universi1 0 | L E H I G H B U L L E T I N 1 0 | L E H I G H B U L L E T I N
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