Memo - August 22, 2005
To: The FIT Community
From: Dr. Joyce F. Brown, President
Re: Strategic Planning
The following is an excerpt of President Joyce F. Browns address to the FIT community at Fall 2005 Convocation on August 22.
Good morning.
It gives me great pleasure to welcome you back today. I hope that this summer gave you ample opportunity to catch your breath because, as you know, this past year kept you about as intensely busy as is humanly possible. Between your so-called routine classroom and administrative responsibilities, your so-called routine committee and other extracurricular dutiesnever mind your so-called real lifeyou also engaged in a little activity we call strategic planning, an activity that was very real indeed, and not remotely routine.
That activity dominated our academic year. In committees large and small, in roundtables, focus groups, and endless other gatherings, we confronted questions of institutional identity, mission, and vision. We explored strengths and weaknesses, challenged one another, and in the process, I think we learned an enormous amount about the college and about ourselves. In strokes both tentative and bold, we laid the groundwork for the FIT of 2020 . . . the FIT of tomorrow. It was a rich and eventful year.
It was just the start, which is why I hope you got some rest over the summer. I would like to preview the plan with you, and discuss what we expect to do over the next year. It is still a draft, of course, and awaits approval from the steering committee.
First, however, I want to share with you the way in which this past years activities helped to crystallize my own thinking. You know, one of the things that I have always found challengingeven from my first days at FIThas been finding a way to create a strong, free flow of communication throughout the college. We are, of course, a large institution made up of schools and departments, offices, and endless other kinds of academic and administrative units. We have endless corners and crevices, endless councils, endless committees.
I sometimes think of uslovingly, I assure youas a kind of Rube Goldberg creation with parts going in every conceivable direction, earnestly trying to connect, but, alas, not always succeeding very well. I have felt cut off myself and have tried many methods to communicate better with you: departmental teas, monthly faculty meetings, luncheons for deans or chairs or staff members. None of this quite worked for me, nor, I suspect, for many of you.
Last year at this time, when I stood before you to launch the strategic planning process, I was determined to find a better way. I knew that to succeed, the process needed to be as fully participatory as possible. It was clear from its scope and ambitionand from the kind of self-scrutiny it would requirethat we would need as much ground-up, grass-roots involvement as the process could effectively handle. We needed a network of cross-disciplinary communication that allowed people from one end of that Goldberg creation to talkup close and personalwith people from another. We wanted a methodology that would filter that talk upwards so that those of us in the ether of the ninth floor, as you often call us, could hear you loud and clear. Indeed, we wanted a methodology that would allow that talk to filter up and down, throughout all of the corners, crevices, and byways of the college.
And I believe we succeeded. The process ultimately opened channels of communication and fostered dialogue within and among schools, departments, and offices. As a roundtable participant, I was inspired by the candor and vibrancy of the discussions. The enthusiastic, creative feedback we received from you over the year has been equally exciting and positive. Indeed, this level of communication is the model I have always envisioned for this community. Now, as we join together for the next round of the strategic planning process, I believe we have a real opportunity to maintain that level of communication and to maintain our momentum.
I know that you are vested in the strategic planning process, and as you will see, the plan itself is stimulating and strong. It reflects what over the year became a common understanding of our promise and possibilities. I believe it will make you proud of the exhausting, exhilarating work we did together last year. . . . And now, I would like to turn to the plan. Because I had so much news to convey, and our time is running short, I am going to give you an abbreviated version. Let me stress once more that it is still in draft form. The steering committee, which meets later this week, must review and ratify it, and it must be approved by the Board of Trustees. However, once these approvals are in place, you will all be provided with the full document.
Let me start up front by thanking all of you for your long, long hours over the last year, the outstanding quality of your work, and of course, your constant commitment to the college.
The plan, which our facilitators at The Learning Alliance call The FIT Challenge, achieves exactly what we wanted. While respecting our past, recognizing our present, acknowledging the accelerated climate of change in which we operate, it looks straight ahead, with clarity and rationality, and it brings our future into focus. It answers the questions we raised last year: Where will we bewho will we beten or fifteen years from today?
While the plan is pervasive and multifaceted, its core elements are made up of five essential goals. They will be familiar to you, for it is out of our own efforts that they emerged. When realized, they will project what has become our collective vision of FIT in 2020: A college that is academically strong as well as student-centered, a college that builds on the energy and creativity of New York City, and a college that exhibits the global reach that is the hallmark of the nations best universities. In short, a college that is innovative, globally connected and purposefully diverse.
Every component of this vision can be found to some extent at FIT today, but it is our challengeThe FIT Challengeto actively and purposefully apply our resources to reach these strategic goals. Let me name them and then enlarge a bit upon each of them.
First: Strengthen the academic core.
Second: Commit to a culture of student-centeredness.
Third: Actively explore the concept of FIT as a creative hub.
Fourth: Engage in strategic recruitment.
Fifth: Establish a process for administrative support of the plan.
The first goal, to strengthen our academic core, has three parts, or initiatives. First, we must conduct a comprehensive, collegewide review and redesign of our two-year and four-year curricula.
Let me emphasize that the plan, and the vision, fully affirm our ongoing commitment to the two-year associate degree programs. I know that there has been some underlying nervousness on that score. But as you will see, the plan requires us to provide a rich array of the kind of AAS programs that will lead our graduates to immediate employment. At the same time, we must rethink and re-examine the design of our baccalaureate programs to provide our four-year students with substantive, rigorous, and coherent pathways to their degrees.
Secondly, we must strengthen the liberal arts component of an FIT education. The liberal arts have historically been a part of the FIT curriculum, but as a college, we have always focused on our two principal schools: art and design and business and technology. Nevertheless, over this past year you determined that we have an obligation to turn out students who have the capacity and the breadth of knowledge to meet the changing challenges of their professions, to grasp the geopolitical and cultural settings in which they operate, and to deal with issues that go beyond their major fields of study.
To do that, we must invest new energy in our school of liberal arts. Indeed, we must rethink the way in which all of us, as educators, regard the liberal arts and the ways in which we will integrate them into our programs.
We must also increase the number of full-time faculty. This was a major initiative in our first strategic plan and we did, indeed, make important strides in rebuilding a sadly depleted bank of full-time faculty, but that job is not done. We need a substantial number of core faculty members who view FIT as their primary responsibility, and who, as part of their multifaceted roles, can provide continuity as we tackle The FIT Challenge.
This is not to discount the value of and necessity for part-time and adjunct faculty. I believe we all recognize, however, our need for more full-time faculty. This will be a hugely expensive undertaking, and as part of our planning we will need to determine how, over the coming years, we will pace and pay for that growth.
Our second strategic goal is to commit to a culture of student-centeredness. It seems odd that this would be necessary at an institution whose entire raison dtre is to serve students. Clearly, though, we know we have not done this well enough. The message that emerged over the year from focus groups, planning committees, and roundtables is that, as a culture, we must show our students more respect. That does not mean lowering standards or turning classes into happy hours. However, it is our responsibility to conceive FIT from the perspective of a student, to examine seriously the quality of education and services that students receive, as well as the facilities and equipment available for them to pursue their work.
Another major initiative to support this goal is to build far better relations with our alumni, whose value to the college in every way is incalculable.
Our third goal is to actively explore the concept of FIT as a creative hub. That, of course, is rather how we think of ourselves today. We pride ourselves on being an institution that serves as a creative magnet, drawing together industry leaders with faculty and students, and fostering interdisciplinary initiatives that explore new possibilities. But the vision we have spun for 2020 takes this concept even further, so that FIT becomes an internationally renowned nucleus of creative innovation and interaction.
Indeed, the plan envisions a strong graduate school with a clearly defined mission and an appropriately configured organizational structure, so that it will become a beacon of advanced study and research. Some of the other creative hub initiatives include: a top-ranked and financially successful program of executive education, a broadly conceived digital repository that serves industry as well as our own schools, and a stronger investment in our museum and library, ensuring their abilities not only to fulfill their vital existing missions, but also to be active components of the creative hub.
Goal four is to engage in strategic recruitment. You may recall that when our facilitators from TLA arrived last year, they did a comprehensive analysis of our demographics, and the picture that emerged was quite surprising to many of us. We have changed over the past decade. Our student body has become more national in origin, more middle class, more full-time, and more committed to earning a four-year degree. Our New York City enrollment has declined.
We have certainly not lacked for students. As you know, we are at full capacity. However, this shift in our demographics occurred under the radar, almost willy-nilly. Our challenge now is to develop a purposeful strategic enrollment plan for students in several markets; a plan based on whom we decide we want to teach, using both academic and demographic criteria. At the same time, we must focus some strategies specifically on New York City.
I was pleased to see the strong commitment to New York City and its students in our planning meetings and roundtables. You may recall that one of my own more recent mandates to the college was to recruit a student population that more closely reflected the face of New York City, our own very diverse community. And in fact, our Office of Student Affairs has been quite active on that front, engaging in a growing number of recruitment activities throughout the five boroughs. This plan demands even more, so that by 2020, FIT will have a strong and steady stream of talented New Yorkers as a stable part of our total student population.
The fifth and final goal is to provide the administrative support that will ensure steady coherent progress to achieve all of our strategic goals. And through some of the changes I announced this morning, I believe we have made a start. However, we have much more to do. We will need to explore models for best business practices, so that FIT has, as soon as possible, a structure that ensures real communication among schools, departments, and other administrative units, and facilitates timely and effective decision making, both in our day-to-day activities and in fulfillment of the strategic plan.
So, after more than a year of work together, we are ready to move forward. The steering committee will continue its critical work over the course of this year, starting with a review and ratification of the draft. Our planning committees will reconvene to work out detailed school plans, along with the related metrics and priorities. Initiatives will be evaluated in terms of costs. We will, once again, have roundtables, which will help us, as they did so well last year, think through the priorities we have laid out. Indeed, it is my hope that we can put some of our initiatives into place even by the spring.
Many of the initiatives of this plan have major resource implications. But our mandate to you in conceiving it was to think big, and not worry about the price tag. As Max Weber once wrote: Man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible. But I know you are all realists, and everyone who participated in this process recognized from the start that the plan is very expensive. It will require substantial efforts to fund. However, the very work of identifying major institutional priorities and understanding their costs will position us to address the resource questions more effectively.
At the same time, the planning process made clear that some steps we should take are more operational than strategic in nature, and involve things we would need to do under any circumstances. Some of the initiatives themselves do not require more money, and in some ways, they are even more difficult. They are actions that require a change in culture, a willingness to rethink ways of working together to strengthen the curriculum or to provide a heightened level of service to students and others across the college.
I am confident that these are changes that are well within our grasp. As I said earlier, the quality of communication that we achieved over this past year was inspiring and demonstrated the unifying impact of the strategic planning process, of building together.
What also emerged over this past year are a stronger, more informed sense of institutional identity, and a more universal understanding of our growth and development since our founding. Perhaps most bracingand excitingis what we have learned about the ways we have changed in recent years. FIT, as I believe you now know, is so much in demand by prospective students that we have an opportunity rare indeed in higher education: the opportunity to choose whom we want to teach and what we want to teach. We have an opportunity to choose our own future.
The strategic plan provides us the blueprint for doing so. It is exciting. It is ambitious. It isdare I say itgalvanizing. But it will require us to be active, resolute, purposeful, and persistent to achieve its goals.
Well, boldness, resolution, persistence . . . chutzpah: these qualities are part of our institutional heritage, they're part of the FIT DNA. Perhaps more than any other such institution, FIT was actively willed into being by men and women with their own powerful vision. Now it is our opportunity to honor our historic mission by actively taking up The FIT Challenge to choose our own future, to create the FIT for 2020 and beyond.
I thank you once again for bringing us to this point, I and look forward to another rich and eventful year.