University of Virginia, College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences

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College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences
2005-2015 Strategic Plan

A Community of Discovery

The University of Virginia is unique as a public university, engaged in the full range of research and discovery, yet small and cohesive enough to sustain a unifying focus on undergraduate education. That is the University’s identity, and Arts & Sciences embodies that identity.

Our goal is to become known as the university that best fuses research and teaching, that integrates lower-division students, majors, honors programs, graduate students, teaching faculty, and researchers into a community of inquiry. Building on the success of our programs in undergraduate research, in the preparation of young scientists, in study abroad, in Common Courses, in the January Term, in the College Guide program, and in similar initiatives, we will integrate the excitement of discovery into our entire enterprise.

Recognizing that discovery takes place across the entire range of creativity, scholarship, and research, a set of interrelated principles guide our plan:

we must sustain the health of our departments and programs as they evolve
we must add as many faculty as we can afford, both to reduce the student: faculty ratio and to build research capacity
we must improve support for the graduate students who make a research-intensive teaching institution possible
we must increase the amount and quality of instructional and research space in the College
we must be willing to challenge fundamental aspects of what we do, from advising and teaching to advanced research initiatives
we must encourage programs that integrate discovery and teaching at all levels and across traditional boundaries

The following ten-year strategic plan for Arts & Sciences is part of a long-term planning process that began in 2004-2005 and continued over the course of the following academic year. During 2004-2005, every program in the College wrote its own strategic plan. Many initiatives from those plans have been incorporated into the final document, which represents an effort to interweave them into a coherent whole.

The strategic plan provides the rationale for our fundraising efforts in the Campaign for the College. Not all our strategic priorities are addressed by the campaign; some of them will instead be achieved with resources from tuition and fees, or from research dollars. This strategic plan is therefore not a fundraising document, but a broad framework for capturing the major areas the College aspires to improve. As such, it is critical that it be attentive to both the general welfare and the individual good, that it be both flexible and yet disciplined, and that it aim to strengthen the College as a whole at the same time that it is focused on targeted initiatives.