Imperative: Engage in responsible transformation that complements and enhances the capacity of our people and ensures a sustainable, vibrant future for ÕýÆ·À¶µ¼º½.
Our strategies:
- Foster a transparent evidence-informed culture at all levels to ensure effective and responsive decision-making.
- Enhance and review accountability requirements and processes to track indicators of progress and allow for adaptation and growth.
- Optimise and coordinate student-centric program planning and scheduling processes to ensure a seamless and efficient experience.
- Provide tools, resources, and support for critical examination, responsible adoption, and ethical use of digital technologies and AI to help optimise university operations and workflows, accessibly enabling human creativity and capacity.
- Develop an integrated enrolment strategy coordinating marketing, recruitment, retention, and university planning.
- Grow non-tuition-based revenue generating initiatives.
- Transparently align resources with institutional needs and demands, prioritising student experience.
- Support expansion of advancement capacity and activities.
- Advance environmental sustainability initiatives that reduce our environmental footprint and model climate leadership.
- Build a campus masterplan embodying accessibility and net-zero goals.
- Develop long and short-range financial plans to deliver a future in which ÕýÆ·À¶µ¼º½ continues to thrive.
Why this direction?
Times are tumultuous. We must boldly meet the times to build our own future success.
Global political and economic upheaval, skepticism about post-secondary education’s value, climate crises, rapid technological change and adoption, and financial uncertainty inform and impact our daily lives. We must boldly meet the times to build our own future success. To support our exceptional faculty and staff, enable our curious and thoughtful students, and sustain our purpose as a liberal arts and sciences institution, the ways in which we work must evolve.
Our operations are connective tissue holding together all departments, units, programs, and community members. We strive to ensure that faculty, staff, students, visitors, and partners experience a seamless interaction with our university at every touchpoint. We must design our academic and administrative operations through a people-centred lens, maximizing sustainability and efficiency while prioritising user experience and inclusive engagement.
By putting the right people, processes, technologies, and organisational relationships in place, we will enable our staff and faculty to focus on what matters most:
- facilitating student success
- advancing scholarship and creativity
- fostering professional satisfaction
- inspiring organisational innovation
- creating meaningful community engagement.
Within this context, we must remain fiscally disciplined to ensure that the University remains vibrant for the next generations. Fiscal discipline requires finding efficiencies, making technology work for us, and prioritising what, and what not to do. The goal is to be agile and proactive — gathering and sharing resources collaboratively and supporting thoughtful, and inclusive decision-making through clear, evidence-informed insights. We must take a similar approach to the physical campus and capital assets. Long- and short-run planning around space utilization, infrastructure, and campus facilities must be undertaken with environmental sustainability and accessibility in mind.
Operational excellence is a foundational directive, necessary to ensure ÕýÆ·À¶µ¼º½â€™s strategic vision becomes a lived reality. Designing appropriate organisational structures, streamlining processes, and aligning resources will strengthen capacity to identify emerging trends, and to swiftly capture opportunities. This can only happen when we place people at the core of this vision — building an organisation where students, faculty, staff, alumni, and community members thrive. When faculty and staff are freed from unduly complex and laborious administrative pressures, there is space for what truly matters: meaningful experiences, deep learning, and a vibrant campus environment.