Colleagues,
I'm writing today to let you know that you'll have several opportunities in the coming months to literally help us draw the roadmaps to our future.
As you know, since July 2020, our universities have been operating together with unified accreditation. How well we meet NECHE's Standards for Accreditation is now judged by how well our universities work together as a unified System to meet those nationally-recognized standards for higher education quality and effectiveness.
With contributions from more than 130 of your colleagues around the System, a first draft self-study document was posted for review and comment last September, and considering the comments we received from that, we've made edits to that draft now and trimmed the document down to be closer to NECHE's 100-page limit.
Second, I wanted you to know how you can help write the University of Maine System's next strategic plan.
You might remember that our Board of Trustees asked me to prepare a five-year vision and strategic plan for how we can meet our teaching, research, and public service missions to Maine and beyond. We've partnered with Huron Consulting Group now and they are starting to schedule interviews for university presidents and Maine Law's Dean to share their vision for our future.
There will be a number of opportunities over the next few months for you to share your own views, through campus-level focus groups, interviews, surveys, and town hall meetings. Most importantly, I hope you'll come out to meet our Huron partners when I visit all of our campuses in late March and April. During those visits, faculty, staff, and university leaders will each have time with our System leaders and separately with the Huron team to talk more about your vision for our future.
Among the best of traditions in higher education are shared governance and transparency. They are principles that we strive for in doing our work, and in working together. Everything we are doing with unified accreditation, and everything we will do to write our UMS strategic plan, will be open to you, and will be better if you participate and contribute to our collective efforts to make them successful.
I'm conscious of how busy we all are, and that the seemingly never-ending pandemic continues to cast a shadow of anxiety and stress over so much of what we all do. I'm grateful for how hard you've all been working through these unprecedented times. I hope the goodwill that comes from working together to chart our future continues to lift us all up and carry us forward.
Sincerely,
