Message from the Dean

Happy New Year to everyone in the Faculty. I anticipate that this will be an unusually busy term. In the next few months, we will be working on the budget, strategic enrollment planning, and prioritization. As well, the University has submitted a revised Strategic Mandate Agreement document to the Province, so negotiations will commence shortly with Dr. Paul C. Genest is the Deputy Minister Responsible for Francophone Affairs and Special Advisor: Strategic Mandate Agreements (Universities). Lastly, another iteration of our proposed strategic plan will be presented for discussion shortly.

I encourage faculty to participate in the working groups that will be struck to facilitate the prioritization and the strategic enrollment planning exercises. Both processes are being led by Higher Education Strategy Associates (HESA), and are funded by our successful Prioritization and Innovation Fund application. Many of you will have already met Alex Usher, the president of HESA, on one of his visits to campus. You should anticipate meeting him and his colleagues, as faculty will be consulted broadly at various stages in these enterprises.

For those of you unfamiliar with prioritization and strategic enrollment planning, let me briefly describe them. Prioritization is an exercise that allows us to examine how effectively we deliver programs. By looking at a number of metrics under the rubrics of efficiency, relevance, quality and opportunity, the university will be in a position to determine where resources should be deployed to assure the soundness of its program offerings (value for investment). The prioritization exercise itself, as it is constructed here at Nipissing University in 2014, will involve the development of a methodology that works well for us, so that it can be used routinely to review all programs. In this year, we will only have time and resources to review a subset of all programs with the assistance of HESA.

Strategic enrollment planning is a different exercise; it allows us to be forward looking rather than rooted in the historical constraints of what programs have done to date. Strategic enrollment planning mines data about future trends in scholarship, job creation, workforce analysis in order to allow us to project where best we can grow our programming to respond to future needs. In this exercise, we will note how our areas of strength correspond to and reflect future trends.

The membership of the PPC committee of Senate has been asked to sit as an ad hoc committee which will be interacting directly with HESA. If you have questions about the process, I am happy to speak with you about it and/or to take questions that arise up with HESA or Dr. Harley D’Entremont, VP Academic and Research.

Unrelatedly, the three deans met with Dr. Michael Hawes of Fulbright Canada and Scott Walker of the U.S. Consulate on 9 January 2014. The purpose of the meeting was to talk about opportunities for both faculty and students within the Fulbright suite of programs. I encourage you to review the programs now offered by Fulbright which include faculty exchanges to the U.S. in all scholarly areas, community development projects, GAP year (configured as the year between 4th year and graduate studies) projects. Fulbright Canada is sponsoring much much more than public policy exchanges which was their mandate a decade ago.