Lazarus reveals university's revised strategic plan
Jodi Dickens/Editor in Chief
Issue date: 3/23/05 Section: News
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"We now have an approved version that the trustees actually put their hands in the air and said 'Aye, I could live with this,'" Lazarus said. The approved version is the ninth revision of the original plan.
The Need for a Strategic Plan
Lazarus warned that strategic plans are not stagnant but must be continually updated as the needs of the university change.
"A strategic plan is not something that you write once, put on the shelf, and don't think about for the next five years until you have to do another one," he said. "You're always putting in new terminology trying better to explain what you are."
Purpose of the Plan
Lazarus explained to a room of approximately 50 students the two major reasons for the strategic plan: planning for the future and seeking financial support.
"Good stewardship means you're always going to be looking ahead to see what the institution is going to do...so that you can be prepared for things that otherwise would hit you as unforeseen disasters," he said.
A strategic plan helps avoid such disasters by anticipating and preparing for the future, Lazarus said.
Lazarus called this forward thinking the "first and best reason" for strategic planning.
The Need for Support
By making a strategic plan, a university tries to explain itself and make a case for why someone would want to support it, Lazarus said.
"For many colleges and universities these other reasons have actually become predominant. They have become more important than just preparing for unforeseen opportunities or threats," he said.
Lazarus admitted that much of UD's desire for a strategic plan stemmed from this second reason.
A Five Year Plan
Lazarus explained how UD produced the strategic plan.
The first step was to decide on the scope. The university's strategic plan has a scope of five years, which Lazarus said was the longest amount of time one could plan into the future.
"Five years you can control. You have an idea of what I'm going to do this year and the next year, some indication of the year after that, then the last two years generally become aspirations," he said.
Structuring the Plan
The second step was choosing a structure for the plan. Lazarus said the traditional plan structure in an academic setting includes a statement of philosophy. UD's statement of philosophy was divided into a vision statement, mission statement, and statement of core values.
"Those three things determine essentially: what you do, your mission statement; what you would like to do or become in the future, your vision statement; and the qualities of life at the institution that constitute its identity and that help you determine how to ensure that the institution fulfills its mission and makes its way toward its vision," he said.
UD Mission Statement
UD has at least two mission statements, Lazarus said, and he felt that writing a new one would be too laborious and require too much time.
Both of UD's mission statements were very long, Lazarus said. One was a page and a half and the other was a page long.
"Mission statements are meant to be written on a coffee cup or on a bumper sticker," he said.
Lazarus found the solution by combining and shortening the two statements into a summary.
"We put [the two mission statements] together, and we ended up with about 55 or 60 words," he said. "So not too bad."
UD Vision Statement
The vision statement is brand new, Lazarus said.
"It recognizes that we've got both an undergraduate and a graduate division. It says we're Catholic. It says we have an aspiration to be very good, and in the school of business we really want to be a first class school," he said after reading the vision statement to the audience.
Expressing Values
The five primary core values, Lazarus said, came out of the mission statement and other university documents.
"We put together the five that we thought caught the spirit of what the university is and what binds through time as sort of the values we all share that go into our educational enterprises," he said.
The five core values expressed that UD is a Catholic liberal arts school that seeks to educate the whole person in an ecumenical environment.
These values also emphasized the importance of intellectual freedom and the desire for a communal spirit between the liberal arts and professional and graduate education.
Inconclusive Survey
As part of the strategic plan, the university conducted an environmental analysis in which they surveyed 700 people.
"We got 400 responses. That's a terrific response rate for the social sciences," he said.
Lazarus said the environmental study was not included in the strategic plan because he deemed it inconclusive.
"What I did was I cut it out. I took the whole section, and I did a dolos. I just left it out," he said.
Dolos is a Greek word meaning deceit, but it does not have the connotation of wrongdoing, Lazarus said.
"Just to avoid endless discussion about that section of the plan, we're going to take that out of the final. It was too long to put in anyway," he said noting that no one would read a 15-page strategic plan. The approved plan is six pages long.
Planning Committees
The strategic plan was created by four committees. Each committee had at least one trustee, three faculty members, an alumnus, and a member of the staff. Two of the committees had a student representative. Junior and vice president of the Senate Nick Tammaro was a member of the goals and objectives committee.
"These committees worked like Trojans; they were great," Lazarus said.