Below is a summary of the discussion by WSU faculty on two of the five strategic directions contained in the current plan. The two directions focus on the learning experience and achieving pre-eminence in research and scholarship.
1. Learning experience: Establish and sustain a superlative learning experience that builds upon the unique values and attributes of WSU.
Faculty members offered the following suggestions for revising this objective:
- Reduce class sizes.
- Enhance and increase support staff to improve faculty productivity and effectiveness.
- Provide high-quality academic advising and require that undergraduates maintain regular contact with a faculty advisor until they declare a major.
- Address retention issue.
- Offer additional learning communities and upgrade student support services.
- Using the social relevance perspective, communicate to students the importance of making a contribution to society as a result of a university education.
- Ensure that students are taking courses in sequence and fulfilling course prerequisites.
- Consider increasing admission standards.
- Offer more Friday classes allowing for more efficient utilization of faculty and university facilities.
- Add BANNER software that assists students who are creating class schedules, prompting them to fulfill general education requirements and providing scheduling information. Automated systems can free up academic advisors.
- Provide enhanced remedial and advising services to struggling students to improve retention and graduation rates.
2. Pre-eminence in research and scholarship: Strengthen our performance as a nationally recognized research university by focusing on our competitive advantages, enhancing our scholarship, emphasizing a multidisciplinary approach to research, and collaborating with government, industry and other institutions to enhance economic growth and the quality of life.
Faculty stakeholders had these suggestions for updating this goal:
- Use other standards other than NSF ranking and amount of funded research to determine research productivity.
- Measure non-funded research productivity by looking at publications, citations, journals and media coverage.
- Make internal funding available for non-scientific research.
- Bring well-known scholars, scientists and writers to campus for varying periods of time to enhance WSU’s reputation and strengthen graduate programs.
- Construct a state-of-the-art hotel/conference center for academic conferences and workshops.
- Upgrade post-doctoral program by creating a new three-year position offering enhanced compensation.
- Create internal post-doctoral positions for select WSU PhDs to boost their careers and productivity.
- Increase emphasis on following through on major projects and initiatives to ensure implementation of goals and objectives.