President Lois B. DeFleur and the heads of Binghamton University’s five divisions unveiled this year’s Strategic Plan to members of the faculty and staff last Tuesday, at the annual University Forum. The presentations outlined the administration’s vision for Binghamton University over the next five years, focusing on expansion in faculty and undergraduate and graduate programs, and most importantly, increasing funding to meet their goals.
The plan, entitled “Excellence in a Climate of Change,” details the strategies and goals of the University and sets forth a methodology for reaching them over the next five years.
According to President DeFleur, most of the goals look down the road toward BU’s future over the next several years, rather than focusing on immediate change.
“If you look at the Strategic Plan, you’ll see that the most important agenda items, I would say, are not one year, they’re multiple years,” she said.
The Strategic Plan includes steps for maintaining a competitive and distinguished University in a climate of increasing expectations and ever-shrinking budgets. DeFleur emphasized the importance of maintaining BU’s faculty by offering competitive salaries and higher stipends for graduate students.
“Our faculty are very, very good, and last year we experienced other universities trying to recruit them away from Binghamton,” she said.
But with New York State funding dwindling away “rather substantially,” DeFleur said, the University must look to other sources in order to achieve its goals. Last year’s plan placed more fundraising responsibility on BU’s individual schools, asking them to look to outside sources to bring in funding, and this year’s plan emphasizes that message.
“We’re asking them to do more,” President Defleur said.
This year’s Strategic Plan calls for the amount of funding from outside sponsoring agencies to increase twofold over the next five years. The plan states that “we intend to advance the expectation that all faculty will diligently seek out and aggressively pursue every opportunity to grow sponsored research, scholarship and creative activity on our campus.”
Additionally, funding has been redirected to academics from other areas in order to meet the needs of individual departments.
“We are trying to diversify our revenues, reallocating away from other areas such as the basic facilities and administrative area, to the academic area,” she added.
DeFleur also mentioned the importance of working with the state to deal with the $81-million gap left by the governor’s tuition-increase proposal.
“We need to ensure more support this year to help us with our funding,” she said.
Perhaps the most ambitious component of the strategic plan is the proposal to increase the faculty by 20 percent over five years, lowering the student/facutly ratio to 20-1. The plan emphasizes the importance of maintaining professors who are both skilled in teaching and distinguished in their areas of study. The president noted that expanding “scholarship and research” is an important component of BU’s growth.
“We hire faculty to teach,” she said, “but we also want faculty who are on the frontiers of their fields. We want to make sure our students are working with some of the best in their fields.”
One requirement of bringing more research to the University is offering more graduate programs, and increasing stipends of graduate students; accordingly the increase was reflected in this year’s budget. Every year the University allocates about a half a million dollars to graduate-student stipends, but this year that amount was increased to $1 million.
New majors and degrees have also been added in recent years, including social work and bioengineering. But eventually, the University hopes to add a sixth school, dividing the School of Education and Human Development into two separate colleges. The first would be a school of education, and the second would be a college of “Community and Public Affairs.” The new school would offer degrees in social work, human development and a master’s degree in public administration.
Other points mentioned in the plan included ways of responding to the needs of alumni and adult learners by adding more distance-learning classes and using educational technology to appeal to a wider-reaching group of students. The plan also touches on a number of other issues, including increasing diversity in the student body and communicating new ideas and technologies to the Binghamton community.