Links in this article are preserved for historical purposes, but the destination sources may have changed.

Thursday, February 25, 2021
Written by: Office of Strategic Communication

After implementing many positive changes on campus as a result of the Strategic Plan 2016–2021, the University of Iowa is now focused on updating the plan for the next five years.

The UI Strategic Plan 2022–2027 will focus on developing Iowa into a destination university—the first choice for students, faculty, and staff—and a new team is forming to develop, implement, and evaluate the new plan.

The UI Strategy Team, appointed by President Bruce Harreld, will consist of members from academic leadership and administration. Executive Vice President and Provost Kevin Kregel and Vice President for Research Marty Scholtz have been appointed by Harreld as co-chairs of the team.

“This is the next step for our university to infuse input from across campus into our strategic planning process,” says Harreld. “This group will serve a critical role in seeing our next strategic plan through from development to implementation, and finally to evaluation.”

The strategy team, which has not yet been appointed, will include representatives from:

  • Faculty
  • Staff
  • Central administration
  • Collegiate deans
  • UI Health Care
  • UI Center for Advancement

“The strategy team, while consisting of a cross-section of our campus, will lead our efforts to implement and evaluate our strategic plan while connecting the plan to investable resources such as the utility public-private partnership,” says Harreld. “Their collective efforts over the next five years will undoubtedly maintain the successful momentum created by our Path Forward teams.”

The strategy team will appoint and work with four Strategic Planning Development Teams, focused on four key areas:

  • Student success;
  • Faculty and staff success;
  • Diversity, equity, and inclusion; and
  • Research and discovery.

Engagement, which is a stand-alone priority area in the university’s current strategic plan, will be embedded in each of the four key areas of the new plan.

Members of the development teams will be appointed by the co-chairs and will include:

  • Student representation in consultation with team leads and Undergraduate Student Government and Graduate and Professional Student Government,
  • Faculty representation in consultation with team leads and Faculty Senate,
  • Staff representation in consultation with team leads and Staff Council, and
  • Dean representation in consultation with the Council of Deans.

Development of the plan will take place over the course of 2021 and during the first half of 2022, with the goal of implementing the Strategic Plan 2022–2027 on July 1, 2022.

The university began working on its next strategic plan in early 2020, but the process was put on hold as campus responded to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Strategic Plan 2016–2021 and Path Forward

During spring and summer 2016, the UI community met to outline the university’s strategic plan, which was finalized in December 2016.

The Strategic Plan 2016–2021 was more streamlined than previous strategic plans and was designed to be reviewed and potentially adjusted annually.

The implementation of the Strategic Plan 2016–2021 was carried out by the original Path Forward teams—the Strategy Implementation Team (SIT) and Operations Team (OT), which eventually morphed into the UI’s current Path Forward work groups, which encompassed four key areas:

Plans and actions taken by the Path Forward work groups over the past three years have led to positive results for the university, including: