AMBITION AND OPPORTUNITY
Strategic Vision For Columbia Arts and Sciences
MESSAGE FROM THE DEAN
The Arts and Sciences Strategic Vision is a framework to guide the essential teaching and research at the heart of our academic mission. The culmination of more than a year of engagement with over 200 of our faculty members, our strategic vision embodies the ideas, aspirations, and excitement of our community to build on our remarkable legacy of educational and scholarly achievement, and to magnify our impact over the next five years.
Our strategic vision is anchored by five overarching priorities, each supported by a set of related goals and strategies shaped by key insights from our visioning discussions and grounded in our fundamental values. Guided by our strategic vision, we will pursue hard questions across disciplines. We will seek new ways to support student and faculty success. We will continue to build the foundations of human knowledge and drive understanding of our complex society. And we will accelerate our reach and impact in frontier areas of science, as we have done for centuries.
As we seize these new opportunities, we will also foster improvements to our operations, and lead in areas fundamental to who we are. We thank the many faculty who contributed their time and ideas to the vision. Their commitment to our students, and the pathbreaking teaching and research we are known for throughout the world, is the bedrock upon which this vision stands and from which the Arts and Sciences will continue to thrive in the years ahead.
Yours,
Amy E. Hungerford
Dean and Executive Vice President
Faculty of Arts and Sciences
MISSION, VISION, AND VALUES
OUR MISSION
Columbia Arts & Sciences’ mission is to pursue research and teaching at the highest level of ambition in a broad range of fields, in the context of an intergenerational and international community rooted in the city of New York.
OUR VISION
We seek to build the foundations of human knowledge and form people who will learn and innovate for their whole lives, in service to the world’s communities.
OUR FUNDAMENTAL VALUES AND COMMITMENTS
- Always center our work in our core mission
- Fulfill our role as a great university by pursuing goals that transcend the current moment
- Attract and cultivate talent from the broadest range of human communities
- Compete tenaciously where it counts most
- Attend to the well-being of our people
- Reflect the value of community through spaces fit for use
- Steward our resources to serve our highest priorities
- Constantly learn and evolve, as we have for centuries
KEY INSIGHTS
Five areas of distinctive strength were identified during our strategic visioning discussions, which present new opportunities for growth and ambition
RESEARCH EXCELLENCE: A&S has exceptional research capacity; we should advance it further in cross-cutting areas and locate it more centrally in undergraduate education.
STUDENT EXPERIENCE: Our undergraduate and graduate programs are best-in-class and attract exceptional students. We must continue to innovate in key areas to offer an even higher level of student experience.
GLOBAL ENGAGEMENT: Columbia is a global institution in a global city. We must connect our students’ education to their aspirations in life; connect our research to global and local challenges; and leverage our strengths in languages and the arts to engage global thought and culture.
OUTWARD LOOKING: We have a long history of public figures in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and arts who speak broadly to society. Our influence in the public sphere should be celebrated and extended.
SERVICE TO THE WORLD: We must lead in remaking the relationship between higher education and society – to build trust, solve problems that matter, and contribute to a better world.
STRATEGIC PRIORITIES
PRIORITY #1
Prioritize the Pursuit of Hard Questions Affecting Multiple Disciplines and Global Issues
GOAL: We will prioritize the hard questions within and across our disciplines, to enable new breakthroughs and to better understand the world’s complexity.
PRIORITY #2
Invest in Students’ Experience in Educational Programs to Make These the Best of Their Kind
GOAL: We will launch new initiatives to ensure Columbia’s long tradition of excellence in liberal arts education is stronger than ever, meets the needs of today’s students, and prepares them for careers of the future.
PRIORITY #3
Build the Foundations of Human Knowledge to Form People Who Will Learn Their Entire Lives
GOAL: We will lift up the humanities in new ways: learning from the past, the unfamiliar, from writing and the arts, to form people who will learn and innovate for their whole lives.
PRIORITY #4
Drive Understanding of Society with New Approaches for an Increasingly Complex World
GOAL: We will bring new approaches to the study of our interconnected world – leveraging our historic strengths in social science research and education to deepen understanding of our society.
PRIORITY #5
Accelerate our Reach and Impact in Frontier Areas of Science Where Columbia Can Innovate and Lead
GOAL: We will leverage our eminence in the sciences to pursue new interdisciplinary projects, expand collaborations in the New York City area, and build the infrastructure to enable new scientific discovery.
CROSS-CUTTING FUNDAMENTALS
Lead With Academic Freedom, Shared Governance, Civil Discourse, and Mutual Understanding
STRATEGIES
- Sustain a curriculum and research program that engages our own history and values (Slavery Seminar, SHIFT study, “History of the Present” seminars, and other areas).
- Bring shared governance to the next level: revitalize engagement with the Senate; cultivate newer Policy and Planning Committee functions; build department chairs as a body of elected leaders; cultivate faculty partnership in resource decisions.
- Develop structures to help us learn from, and work with, those we disagree with.
- Review existing governance committees; consider where they should evolve.
- Contribute to the university in new ways through the renewed presence of A&S leaders in university leadership settings.
- Thoughtfully consider workload, representativeness, redundancy, and ideal size for all committees.
Foster Operational Excellence to Support Research and Learning
STRATEGIES
- Reimagine administrative support structures to improve delivery of services and establish new training opportunities for administrators around budgetary and hiring practices and procedures.
- Launch a new effort to identify operational efficiencies within departments through annual meetings with chairs, focused on data-driven analysis of instructional and curricular work, graduate mentoring, monitoring, and adjustment.
- Establish a new grants support office within the Office of the Dean and EVP to provide more centralized guidance, best practices, and support to faculty and departments seeking large-scale government and foundation grants.
- Explore areas where centralization of functions could realize efficiencies, lower costs, and reduce bottlenecks.
- Partner with University leadership to reimagine the budget model supporting A&S, internally and within the university.
IMPLEMENTATION PLANNING
In keeping with our two cross-cutting fundamentals, implementation will succeed best as a partnership between Arts and Sciences faculty governance and decanal leadership.
STRATEGIES
- Identify “owners” for each priority, tasked with planning a coordinated effort to develop and advance strategies for making progress over time.
- In partnership with faculty leadership, develop and prioritize the first strategies for progress.
- Create timelines and a rhythm of reporting to the faculty on progress and initiatives arising from these priorities.
- Mount programming and communications to raise the profile of the work in the five priorities and two fundamental areas, and to attract new partners.
- Use the priorities to guide and focus fundraising strategies.
- Use the priorities routinely in moments of significant decision-making within A&S, to maintain focus on the important as well as the urgent, in times of constraint and in times of plenty.