In today’s Tribune, you will find information on MCC’s Draft Strategic Plan 2012-2016 and a request for your comments. In my message today, you will find me underscoring, bolding, highlighting, and capitalizing this request. Why? Because, paraphrasing an old car ad, this is not your father’s strategic plan … for several reasons.
1) It includes a revision of MCC’s vision and mission statements and a new articulation of the college’s values.
As a member of the MCC community, you should see in each of these what brought you to and keeps you at the college. When you read them, you should be able to say -- proudly, “This is MCC.” These elements set the stage for all that follows and define our terms of engagement with all of our communities. Of course, in addition to these noble aspirations, they also need to meet the needs of our accrediting agencies and SUNY (which is why they are not as pithy as they might be).
2) It recasts MCC’s strategic directions as a shorter list of areas of college emphasis that capture where we anticipate the majority of our collective effort and resources will be spent over the next five years.
The directions are as follows (in order): Learning First, Workforce Education and Career Pathways, Partnerships, and Effectiveness, Efficiency and Accountability. You should see yourself and your work within one or more of these areas. Each relates to an essential way in which we live out our mission, to how we serve our students, our community, and even ourselves. And, their order matters. First and foremost, we are an institution of higher learning committed to excellence.
3) It rests on broader, more flexible goals directly related to everyday practice at MCC.
They address how our work, collectively, moves our students, our community, and our college forward -- across disciplines, departments, and divisions. Significantly, these goals are also designed to be measurable and quantifiable. We may not agree with the accountability measures being established outside MCC for MCC and the work we do, but we cannot escape the growing calls for accountability and the ways in which our funding is increasingly attached to performance measures of all shapes and stripes. Each of our new goals ties directly back to our values, and truthfully, we should be accountable for living these out through our work.
For all of these reasons, and more, I encourage you to take some time to review the draft plan and offer your feedback to the Strategic Planning Team via the link provided in their article. You are welcome to share your overall thoughts on the blog.
Anne Kress
President's Message
12/07/2011 |