Mapping out the future of academic programs is an essential part of running an institution. As of Fall 2022, Colorado Mesa University (CMU) has been planning how the school will look and operate through its Forming the Future Committee to ensure programs and classes offered at the university remain relevant. 

The goal of the committee is to strategically plan how the university will carry out its values and what is important and valuable to the CMU community, which it accomplishes by synthesizing student, faculty, and staff feedback. 

CMU typically engages in these planning strategies every five-six years, with their final strategic plan proposal being ratified by the Board of Trustees in 2015. However, the university has put a greater emphasis on the feedback it receives from surveys and general outreach. 

“We’ve handled this [committee] differently, in the sense that we’ve reached out a lot to faculty, students and staff. It’s not like that never happened at all in the past, but we’ve been much more methodical about that process this time,” Chair of the Forming the Future Initiative Planning Committee and English professor Kurt Haas said. 

CMU administration constructed a draft of initial values in August of 2022, which they then shared with the committee. The committee gradually worked with the campus to figure out what the school’s priorities should be and how the school could best implement them. 

“We’ve sent several surveys around campus, and one that I was really proud of, was the student body. We also had a student experience workshop, which was pretty well attended, where we talked about what the ideal student experience would be. Ultimately, in the next five years, while we never may be perfect, we want to get to that ideal student experience,” Haas said.

Hass relayed that a lot of the student feedback the committee received centers around ways that CMU can deepen their sense of belonging. Other concerns focused on cost, availability of different programs and a healthy work-life balance. 

“There is a general desire for more space for various purposes like individual groups or clubs, space for non-traditional students who might be commuting or who might have kids,” Sense of Belongings team member and professor of History Erika Jackson said. “We also tackled issues of retention and how we can promote a sense of belonging so we can keep our students.”

As a culmination of those efforts, CMU hosted the Forming the Future Summit on March 2. The aim of the campus-wide meeting was to introduce the values identified by the committee and allow a diversity of input as to how to achieve them.

CMU’s seven strategic planning values are power, love, dignity, curiosity, resilience, courage and humility. If these values seem a little broad, that is the intention. During the meeting, the committee expressed that intentionally broad values are meant to elicit an array of strategies. 

“This metaphor of [hiking to the] summit- loading up our values on our shoulders and doing the work and ascending to new heights- makes a lot of sense from where we are as a university,” CMU President John Marshall said. “During my first few years as president, we’ve been exploring this concept of a human-scale university […] Together, we’ve created a definition for what it means to be a human-scale university. A human-scale university exists when our campus community becomes a model of the world we want to create.” 

The summit meeting featured “climbing stations” which featured different topics related to the Forming the Future Initiative: building a sense of belonging for students; ensuring an array of academic programs; cultivating collaboration and innovation among students. 

Meeting attendees walked from station to station and left sticky-note suggestions on how to implement strategies for each topic and how to assess whether the school is efficiently executing these ideas.

“It’s important that there are multiple voices for things like this, because not everyone is always heard and it’s [generally] hard to address everything. We can really do something that is going to benefit everybody, not just a certain population,” sophomore in surgical technology Jaden Lopez said. 

The committee and CMU administration intend to present their plan to the Board of Trustees during an upcoming meeting in March. If ratified, the plan will then be integrated into the school.