Approximately 250 faculty, staff, and students from California State University, Dominguez Hills joined top university administrators on Feb. 20 in the Loker Student Union Ballroom for a first in a series of town halls designed to provide participants with an opportunity to contribute suggestions and recommendations toward revising the campus’s current Strategic Plan.
Developed in 2009-2010, the original five-year Strategic Plan set for 2010-2015 is ready for an overhaul, said University President Willie J. Hagan.
“Now is really a perfect time to revisit that plan. …[T]hings have changed since that plan was put together,” he said, pointing to evolved enrollment, fiscal, and managerial situations that the university is now experiencing.
A reformulated University Strategic Planning Committee and two outside facilitators, CSU Northridge President Emeritus Jolene Koester and CSU Fresno President Emeritus John Welty, have been engaged to help ensure that the process of developing and implementing the revised Strategic Plan stays on course.
Seated in small groups, participants of the town hall were asked to review and generate suggestions for updates with the mindset: “If I were president for the next two hours, what are the top priorities I would identify as goals for the next three to five years? What needs to happen in our university in order for our university to progress and continue serving students in this region?”
Then the groups parsed and pared down 10 existing strategic goals to three, and more than 40 initiatives to 10. Group spokespersons used microphones set up throughout the ballroom to share what their group considered most critical in these areas.
Following the group exercise, using mobile devices, participants were able to post their individual selections to an online survey, which were tallied and projected onto the ballroom’s oversized screen.
Hagan remarked that the survey results indicated that participants, who came from throughout the campus, whether faculty, staff or students, were in accord identifying student success as a top priority.
“Collectively, it was made real clear that as a group we do know this campus. We do know the issues,” Hagan said of the survey results, adding, “Clearly the issues that are important to advance this campus are known by everybody. Which means, by definition, we know what the solutions are. We just need to have the willpower, the stick-to-it-iveness to actually make that happen.”
Those members of the campus community who were unable to attend the town hall meeting have the opportunity to contribute to the survey by visiting www.surveygizmo.com/s3/1553314/CSU-Dominguez-Hills-Town-Hall-Survey.
To learn more about the CSU Dominguez Hills Strategic Plan, visit www.csudh.edu/president/strategic-planning.
