The campus’s strategic plan may be newly written — not an easy task in itself — but the hardest part lies ahead: implementing it.

“If we get a clear picture of where we want to go — and what’s working, what’s not and what resources are needed — chances increase we’ll get there,” business consultant and UC Davis alumnus Robert Lorber told about 140 participants in the Sept. 18-19 “Implementing Our Vision During Challenging Times” Chancellor’s Fall Conference. “But the real work is implementation.”

A “passion to implement and execute” is needed if the campus is to take advantage of the strategic planning it’s already done, he said.

Receptivity to change is key to the plan’s success, Lorber said. Change starts with knowledge, then attitude (“Attitude has more to do with success than anything else”), then individual behavior (“What are a few things I’m going to do to make this happen, to achieve our goals?”), which leads to organizational change, he said.

“This place is so rich with resources that aren’t fully utilized,” Lorber said. The strategic plan, if successfully implemented, can help the campus use its resources to best advantage to achieve its goals, he said.

Lessons from business

While the university is not a business, “we can act in a more business-like way,” guest speaker Robert Dickeson, senior vice president of the Lumina Foundation, told conference-goers. Prioritizing of programs — and of strategic plan initiatives — needs to be done routinely, “during lean years and good,” he said, with investment made in areas that hold the greatest promise.

Structural deficits in 39 states — “budgets that won’t be fixed by just waiting for the next cycle to come around” — make the need for prioritization particularly acute, Dickeson said. Adding to the challenge are costs that are escalating beyond tuition and fund-raising capacities, increased enrollment demand, shortages of space, and new demands for accountability, he said.

The most likely source for needed resources is reallocation of existing resources, “not tuition increases, or the Legislature marching in, or rich donors,” he said.

Most campuses “strive to be all things to all people,” rather than focusing. The result, Dickeson said, is “growing incongruence between programs and the resources to mount them with quality.”

Dickeson noted that the campus points to its “unequaled breadth” as a distinct strength. “But at what cost?” he asked. He recommended 10 criteria for evaluating a program:

• Its history, development and expectations;
• External demand;
• Internal demand;
• Quality of program inputs and processes;
• Quality of program outcomes;
• Its size, scope and productivity;
• Revenue and other resources generated;
• Costs and other associated expenses;
• Impact, justification and overall essentiality; and
• Opportunity analysis — “What difference would just a little bit of money make in your program? What return on investment would there be?”

Asked how to define successful campus outcomes, Dickeson equated student success with institutional success. “Enunciate why students come and measure the degree to which we help them succeed.”

Noting that the best universities strike the right balance in their teaching, research and service missions, he said legislators “don’t really care as much about research. We have to go in the direction the horse is headed — toward students and parents.”

Acknowledging that many businesses fail, Dickeson added, “It’s incumbent upon us to make sure the decisions we make are the right decisions. What you have at stake here is a university in balance; it’s a precious thing.”

Strategic Plan priorities

Agreeing that “we can’t do it all at once,” Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Virginia Hinshaw asked conference participants to prioritize the strategic plan’s initiatives for achieving three main goals related to learning, discovery and engagement. (The plan is online at http://strategicplan.ucdavis.edu.)

“Making change is not easy,” Hinshaw said. “The campus needs your leadership and enthusiasm in achieving its aspirations.”

Discussion groups selected one strategic priority for each area and recommended specific actions the campus should take. Among their recommendations:

Learning priorities — Ensure that the campus maintains and develops high-caliber courses, curricula and academic programs by:

• Increased hiring of excellent faculty;
• Paying more attention to candidates’ teaching abilities;
• Paying more attention to undergraduates’ writing, information literacy and quantitative skills;
• Paying more attention to class size;
• Simplifying the course approval process and personnel process; and
• One-time investments to improve electronic capabilities, expand teaching assistant and reader budgets, increase teaching awards, and renew classroom and laboratory facilities.

Discovery priorities — Invest in targeted areas of established and emerging excellence and distinction by:

• Evaluating previous initiatives to learn how best to fund future initiatives;
• Creating a bottom-up, campus-wide evaluation process for new initiatives;
• Building more bridges from the social sciences to disciplines with greater funding;
• Pursuing larger faculty research grants, especially for multi-disciplinary initiatives;
• Facilitating proposal creation through faculty release time, space assignment, matching funds, staff support, fostering a “can do” attitude and crediting all participants in multi-disciplinary proposals;
• Targeting promising areas; and
• One-time investments to provide resources for interdisciplinary programs, projects and grants; streamline time-wasting burdens on faculty and staff; target fund raising for graduate students and key research areas; coordinate development and public information efforts; adopt best practices at other universities; improve core infrastructure; induce retirements of less-productive faculty.

Engagement priorities — Contribute to the solution of society’s most pressing problems locally and around the globe through disciplinary and interdisciplinary research, life-long education and community partnerships by:

• First understanding what “engagement” means in order to set priorities;
• Gathering information on all current engagement activities;
• Communicating to internal and external constituencies what the campus is already doing;
• Listening to the community;
• Rewarding engagement activities;
• Taking advantage of UC Davis’ proximity to the State Capitol by matching the campus’s intellectual resources to the state’s needs (creating, for example, a public policy institute); and
• One-time investments in communications (Web site, instructional technology, campus signage, etc.), in seed funding for initiatives, in rewards of time (for sabbaticals and other leaves), and for student-led, student-driven research and engagement activities.

Next steps

Discussion of conference-goers’ recommendations will continue this fall, as deans are paired with other academic administrators to develop baseline and achievement measures for each goal. Hinshaw cautioned that, given already full plates, time recovery is essential if the plan is to be successfully implemented. “This will only happen if we take some risks, if we do some things in a different way.”

She noted that the strategic plan was developed “without the creation of a single new committee, but rather by using existing committees to gain valuable input.”

Initiated 34 years ago, the Chancellor’s Fall Conference gathers together faculty, student, staff and alumni leaders to brainstorm campus issues and jumpstart initiatives. Granlibakken Lodge in Tahoe City is usually the conference site, but to save costs this year — and to reinforce the need to “do things differently” — the meeting was held at the Mondavi Center and at the UC Davis Medical Center. Conference costs are underwritten by the UC Davis Foundation.