12 May Huntington University’s New Strategic Plan

Huntington University unveiled a new strategic plan which includes doubling the enrollment to 2000 students by the year 2016. The plan resulted from a year-long effort by the University Innovation Task Force, a 24-member group of faculty, staff, students, administrators and trustees.
Other goals include doubling the endowment (currently valued at $21 million), raising the five-year graduation rate to 75 percent, strengthening the academic ethos of the campus, and reaching competitive compensation targets for faculty and staff (with salaries in the top 25 percent for the Coalition of Christian Colleges and Universities).

To achieve the plan’s goals, the university will pursue a series of strategies which include:

1. Implement a process for continuous planning and assessment. This includes a new “planning council” and a planning process, planning activities for each area and academic department, and a high level of faculty and staff involvement in the process.
2. Foster proposals for enriching and expanding the academic enterprise.
3. Ensure that all students have opportunities to learn by experience. They foresee up to 300 such opportunities (such as internships) every year. Some departments already require experiential learning, including teacher education, ministry, theatre, business, recreation management, and social work.
4. Collaborate in meaningful ways with strategic partners. Examples of current and potential partnerships include Youth for Christ, Parkview Hospital, and Pathfinder Services.
5. Establish a center for spiritual formation that engages the entire campus. This initiative, already being developed, would require a fulltime director and cost up to $250,000 a year. The written plan explains, “HU becomes the first university in the world with a spiritual formation program sequentially designed and developmentally, philosophically, and theologically based. More than other proposed strategies, this strategy is seen as one that necessarily must be fully embraced and funded in order to have a significant impact on the campus community….Because of its integrated nature, a center for spiritual formation is necessarily a large item. Special advancement and fundraising efforts to endow a center will probably be necessary in order to have success.”
6. Restructure adult and graduate programs to provide excellence in education and to take advantage of opportunities for appropriate growth. This includes a new administrative structure for adult and graduate programs.
7. Enrich our campus community by engaging persons from a variety of cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds, and exposing students, faculty and staff to cross-cultural environments. The components of this strategy, estimated to cost up to $300,000 a year, are:
• Give the equivalent of five full-tuition scholarships per year to increase access to students from a variety of backgrounds.
• Salary and benefits for a cross-cultural director.
• Enable each student to participate in a cross-cultural off-campus experience.
• Become more proactive in networking and collaboration in order to increase diversity among students, faculty, and staff.

The University anticipates that additional facilities and resources will be needed to accomplish the goals of the Strategic Plan. In 2002, the Christian liberal arts college adopted a long-range Facilities Master Plan to guide campus development and accommodate additional growth. President G. Blair Dowden indicates that the University is beginning to prepare for a multi-million capital campaign.
You can download a PDF copy of the complete Strategic Plan, as adopted in April by the HU Board of Trustees.