Dear Faculty, Staff, and Students,
At last week’s Board of Trustees meeting, we took the next step forward to finalize the Designing DePaul strategic plans--our framework for driving our university forward to serve as a national model for high-quality education. We are centering all our strategic planning work around our Catholic, Vincentian mission and meeting the needs of our current and future students.
Over the past two years, we have seen Designing DePaul come to life across the university. Every college, school, and administrative unit has used its framework to develop individual draft strategic plans to identify priorities and chart paths forward. Key pieces of Designing DePaul, such as the digital transformation and philanthropic expansion, are well underway.
Our roadmap
From the start, we created Designing DePaul in collaboration with our faculty, staff, students, alumni and trustees. Based on these discussions and planning sessions, we established five key pillars:
- Institutional Effectiveness & Vincentian Pragmatism
- Program Distinction & Expansion
- Geographic & Community Expansion
- Digital Presence
- Philanthropy
- Guided by these pillars, every college, school, and administrative unit developed individual draft strategic plans in the 2023-24 academic year.
We shared the draft plans with the university community in fall 2024 and kicked off an open comment period. We received more than 200 individual pieces of important feedback and incorporated your input during this past winter quarter. I’m grateful to the many faculty, staff, and students who took the time to review the draft plans. Thank you for sharing your valuable input.
University-wide opportunities
As we reviewed your feedback for the draft strategic plans, key themes emerged that connect our academic and administrative units together. Based on those themes, we refined our initiatives to develop a set of university-wide opportunities that will best serve our students and position DePaul as a national leader. Those opportunities are focused on:
- Mission
- Retention
- Career services
- Academic advising
- Interdisciplinary programming
- Bridgebuilding and belonging
- Comprehensive campaign
- Technology (digital transformation + technology partner)
- Space utilization
For example, all colleges, schools, and administrative units requested greater access to technology to extend the academic capacities of the university. The digital transformation project is one piece of this equation. A partnership with a technology company could break down barriers even further for such things as faculty research and applied interdisciplinary work. For this reason, we’re currently assessing bringing on a technology partner as a university-wide opportunity.
Last week’s board meeting kicked off the review process for the university-wide opportunities in the final strategic plans.
Next steps
The 5-year financial analysis is underway and will be reviewed by the Board of Trustees in early summer. From there, we will have a detailed path forward to continue driving initiatives that are already in process – such as the launch of the comprehensive capital campaign this fall – and begin implementing new ones – such as student success programs to support belonging and thriving.
To allow adequate time for review, the Designing DePaul strategic plans will be launched later than our original May date. Instead, the final Designing DePaul strategic plans will be shared in early September, following Academic Convocation 2025.
I am proud of our progress, and I know there is more to do to ensure we remain responsive to the needs of our current and future students, faculty, staff, and community. We are at a moment in time where our needs are evolving. We must continue to be agile to adapt today and be ready for tomorrow.
I thank all of you for your efforts in helping DePaul remain successful and for all that you do for our university community.
Sincerely,
Robert L. Manuel
President