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RIT STRATEGIC GOALS

In July 1994, RIT completed a strategic plan designed to help us realize our vision and mission over the next ten years. The strategic plan identified the following nine strategic goals:

Goal 1: Career Discovery

RIT will be known for its ability to identify emerging career areas, to contribute to the redefining of existing career areas, to enable students to make individual career choices, and to prepare graduates to adapt to the changing environments of the future.

Students come to RIT because of our track record in cooperative education and job placement upon graduation. While this must remain an essential component of our educational mission, it is no longer sufficient in itself. We must educate students for career adaptability, social and community responsibility, and lifelong education. Forward-looking faculty scholarship is an essential component in advising and mentoring students. Moreover, students need opportunities to acquire generic core competencies, to explore different and expanding career areas, and to customize their own professional expertise.

Our faculty and staff, through scholarship and partnerships with business and industry, will identify, shape and create new career areas which will drive the development and implementation of curriculum, programs, and services at RIT. In all of this, we must be careful not to lose touch with the current needs of business, industry, and our graduates for initial job placements.

Goal 2: Teaching and Learning

RIT students, faculty, and staff will work together to produce quality learning experiences for students.

Learning is the essence of RIT. The primary responsibility of faculty is to create learning opportunities for students, while the primary responsibility for students is to engage these opportunities as fully as possible. Faculty must continue to learn throughout their careers through maintaining a program of scholarly activity. Staff and administration must facilitate these learning processes at all levels. Student, faculty, and staff evaluation and reward systems must promote the primacy of student learning, with appropriate means for assessing learning outcomes and Institute performance.

Active participation in scholarship (including research, artistic production, and professional consulting) must be the sine qua non of effective teaching. Scholarship at RIT enriches the educational experience of all students, stimulates the creativity of faculty, and improves the competitive position of industrial and governmental partners. Faculty scholarship is of most value when directly related to student learning and career development. Faculty who teach in graduate programs are expected to place appropriately more emphasis on research, and a department with a Ph.D. program needs some faculty whose primary responsibility is research, without diminishing the overall importance of teaching.

Goal 3: Student Experience

RIT will offer students a university experience that provides intellectual, personal, and social integration into the community, and that enables them to reach their full potential.

Learning is not restricted to the classroom. Faculty and staff must contribute fully to the total educational experiences of students as members of a university community in which personal and social development are as important as intellectual mastery of curricular knowledge. The role of faculty and staff as advisors and mentors to students is an essential component of student learning and development. The quality of residential life must also complement and enhance the total student experience.

At RIT, the richness of the student experience is grounded in our celebration of cultural diversity, most evident through the presence of NTID; every graduate of RIT, deaf or hearing alike, is better prepared to succeed in a pluralistic society as a result of our multicultural community. We must enhance these benefits of pluralism by increasing the diversity of our traditional and non-traditional populations and providing a supportive community environment for all persons.

Goal 4: Learning Populations

RIT will increase the overall size and diversity of the student population.

In a highly competitive and shrinking market of traditional students, we are choosing to increase total university enrollment by 6% through recruitment and retention. We will increase the diversity of our student populations and make multicultural pluralism an integral part of our total educational enterprise. Further, our overhead and fixed costs are such that downsizing our student population would require prohibitive tuition increases from a smaller base.

Careful assessment of the external environment indicates that through a program-based strategic focus on recruiting and retaining under-represented and non-traditional populations, we can indeed moderately increase our size; this can be done in a manner which serves the needs of traditional and non-traditional populations alike, which enhances the unique significance of deafness at RIT, and which contributes educationally to the overall sense of a world community at RIT.

Goal 5: Program Portfolio

RIT will earn national and international recognition for distinctive, quality academic programs in four intersecting clusters: Technology, Engineering/Sciences, Arts, and Management/Social Sciences.

The four clusters represent existing areas of strength for RIT, each of which will be sustained and enhanced over the next decade. No new clusters will be added, but within each cluster individual degree programs can be added, consolidated with other programs, or discontinued at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. Each cluster will have a few programs of national and international reputation which serve as "attractors" for the rest of the cluster. Most programs in each cluster will have regional distinctiveness, while some may be designed solely for local constituencies.

A traditional strength of our programs has been the early immersion of students into specialized professional courses. The cluster approach will sustain this strength while facilitating easier accessibility within and among clusters through the development of common core competencies (math, science, liberal arts) appropriate to each cluster. The cluster approach is likewise designed to promote greater cooperation among programs of similar nature in the allocation of institutional resources and in the strategic management of the total RIT program portfolio.

Goal 6: A Seamless University

RIT will become a seamless university in order to eliminate barriers that impede the cooperative success and satisfaction of students, faculty, staff, and external partners.

RIT's highly vertical program curricula have led to silo structures that often create wasteful and self-defeating barriers. Nearly half of our first-year students do not graduate in their initial program, yet students are severely limited in accessing courses outside their immediate program areas. Bureaucratic structures, including our accounting systems, often make cross-departmental cooperation among faculty and staff extremely difficult, and extensive duplication occurs in courses, services, and other functions of the Institute. Institutional responsibility for student needs is so compartmentalized that problems noted in one area are seldom communicated to those best equipped to respond.

We must operate through collaborative teamwork models (rather than through competing parochial and proprietary interests), while retaining our ability to develop new initiatives in a timely and responsive manner. We also must add horizontal flexibility to our curricular structures without diluting the traditional strength of highly specialized vertical program opportunities for those students served well by such structures.

Goal 7: Collegiality and Community

RIT will create an environment which fosters a lifelong affinity for the Institute community.

A sense of academic collegiality and community lies at the heart of the total student experience; it is also central to faculty and staff morale. We must create an intellectual, physical, and social environment which fosters a climate supportive of graduate and undergraduate students, traditional and non-traditional populations, qualitative and quantitative disciplines, deaf and hearing persons, and members of all races and religions from throughout the world. Enhancing shared governance and mutual trust, improving internal communications, and investing in appropriate university community spaces, services, and traditions are key to achieving lifelong affinity for RIT.

Goal 8: External Partnerships

Every aspect of the university will be enhanced and sustained by responsive, successful, and mutually beneficial partnerships.

Our historical success has in part depended upon forming mutually beneficial external partnerships with business, industry, and government. We must sustain and enhance this tradition, especially in light of the changing economic circumstances and social responsibilities we will encounter. We must especially foster the experiential benefits our students receive from these partnerships. Models of cooperation and collaboration must also be created for our numerous internal constituencies, which include alumni, trustees, and the families of our students.

Goal 9: Productivity

In order to provide high quality, accessible, and affordable education, RIT will improve its productivity through the most effective and efficient use and development of its human, physical, and financial resources.

Our external assumptions show that RIT's continued viability depends upon improved productivity. Moreover, in order to fund the changes necessary to implement the above goals, we must find ways of increasing revenue with the current cost base and/or performing our current level of services from a lower cost base. Clearly, we will not be able to implement action steps to achieve our other eight goals unless we have reclaimed and reallocated the resources to do so. Since 70% of our discretionary budget is personnel, this means that we will overall have fewer faculty, staff, and administration over the next decade. We expect that most of this decrease will come through attrition and retirement.

We can achieve improved quality and efficiency in our total operation by establishing a collaborative work environment, flattening our total organizational structure, measuring effectively what we do and how well we do it, properly rewarding and compensating our successes, and appropriately allocating our resources.

Approved July 15, 1994