It’s hard to imagine too many of us working stiffs mucking through the entire draft report of recommendations from the [da da dum!] Commission on the Future. So to save us all some hassle, C-VILLE sifted through the river of verbiage to extract what golden proposals are buried in its depths.
As a bit of background, commissions on the future [da da dum!] have only been convened on two other occasions in the University’s history: the first, when UVA began integrating minorities and women in the 1960s; the second, when the Commonwealth decided to cut funding for state universities in the 1990s.
The crisis now seems to be one born from successfully navigating the last crisis: UVA did such a good job with fundraising, and restructuring its relationship with the state to get greater autonomy, that it has to figure out just what kind of beast it now is—public? private? public-private? private-public?—as well as how to crack that US News & World Report top 10 (currently it’s tied for No. 2 public school, otherwise known as No. 24).
Here are some of the big ideas from the subcommittees (we’ve weeded out abstractions like "the University needs to develop a culture that makes full use of the potential of computational science and engineering"). Final recommendations are due November 1. The Board of Visitors is scheduled to get a plan in January.
Money matters
•Increase annual spending from the endowment
•Find new donors, like "grateful patients," nonalumni parents and unaffiliated "friends"
Students
•Give all freshmen peer advisors and revamp first-year colleges
•Create a program to help with transfers, particularly those from community colleges
•Create an honors college for smart upperclassmen
•Make public service part of the academic requirements
•Build a central graduate student facility
Faculty
•Increase faculty by 300
•Create a mentoring program for faculty
Programs and initiatives
•Research database: would include research and scholarship of every faculty member and student
•"Big Ideas Initiative": a process for vetting and fleshing out such proposals, complete with a committee, a website and workshops
•Institute on sustainable communities: "sustainable" is, after all, the hottest buzzword out there
•Center for computational science: someone’s gotta figure out what to do with the
world’s data
•Office for strategic initiatives and planning: because, according to the subcommittee on faculty, "planning is not perceived as a core institutional strength at U.Va."
For more information: Want to read the report yourself? A PDF version of the draft report is available here.
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