Graduate education at RIT is a relatively young
endeavor. From a few niche advanced degrees
just fifty years ago, it has grown steadily into a diverse and high-quality portfolio
that trains skilled and innovative professionals highly desired by industry, MBA
and MFA graduates who continue to push the frontiers of creative and innovative
expression and advanced degree researchers capable of worldwide leadership
roles in industry, academia, and government.
Our graduate portfolio will continue to grow and evolve in ways we are
just beginning to imagine.
In fall 2012, Provost Jeremy Haefner charged a
campus-wide task force with crafting a strategic vision for graduate education. In the spirit of shared governance, I
co-chaired the task force with Dr. Agamemnon Crassidis as a faculty-driven effort
representing all colleges and key stakeholders.
After a year of outreach, benchmarking and campus-wide feedback, the
strategic plan was endorsed at the Board of Trustees meeting last November. The document,
"Imagine: A Strategic Plan for Graduate Education at RIT: Vision 2020”, is
posted on the Provost’s and Graduate Studies websites (1). I thank the members of the task force for
their deep commitment to the future of graduate education and for their courage
to discuss difficult and complex issues in the best tradition of collegiality
and open and transparent dialogue.
As we move into the immediate next steps
(integration with the University-wide strategic plan and implementation of initial
goals), we should consider the three major principles that guide the plan: the
pursuit of excellence, the creation of a truly enriching graduate experience, and
the purposeful integration of all the cultures of graduate education at RIT
(arts, humanities, business and STEM disciplines). They are all informed and enriched by the
respectful and deep mutual understanding of the varied disciplines in our
graduate portfolio, and support the five strategic themes:
1.
Academic
Excellence - striving to be the very best we can be.
2.
Structure
and Administration - strategic University-wide evolution of graduate education.
3.
Cost and
Revenue - promoting academic drivers for self-sufficiency
4.
Data-driven
Planning and Assessment
5.
Graduate
Student Experience - creating an inclusive, diverse and integrated graduate
culture
The future of graduate education at RIT is
entirely up to us, a community of teachers/scholars and leaders/creators/innovators-in-training.
Creating the future is worrisome and
hopeful, maddening and exhilarating − a path with many puddles and perhaps a Walden
Pond. The task force presents the
elements of this strategic plan to the RIT community as a conscientious and
deliberative framework to engage all of us in respectful, selfless, and
transparent dialogue on how to create this future. We hope that our five integrated, interdependent
and iterative strategic themes will hopefully get us to a place that elicits
collective pride. As with any plan, it will be modified and improved, but not
upset, by the proverbial devil in the details.
We
extend an open invitation to the RIT community to join us in the path toward excellence
in graduate education.
I believe that the most important
value of a strategic plan lies in renewing our sense of what is possible and in
reaffirming out communal commitment to MAKE it possible. I discovered Emily Dickinson during my days
of doctoral study at Yale (Neruda, Vallejo and Mistral were my poetic icons
then). Her capacity to synthesize and
integrate the abstract, the dreamlike and the real has very few peers. Dickinson’s poetic art is innovation as its
best, and this quality being one of RIT’s strongest assets, I end these
thoughts on graduate education with her wondrous imagery:
“I dwell in
Possibility
A fairer House
than Prose
More numerous of
Windows
Superior for
Doors”
Emily Dickinson
