Academic Excellence

Goal 1

Recruit, retain, and support an outstanding and diverse faculty and staff

Strategies:

1. Place a priority on addressing faculty shortages in academic programs.
2. Offer nationally competitive faculty and staff compensation packages.
3. Increase departmental recurring funding for faculty development activities.
4. Create a centralized unit that provides resources to support faculty teaching and research.
5. Increase tenured and tenure-track faculty diversity through intentional recruiting approaches/practices.
6. Recruit, retain, and reward well-qualified faculty and staff with inclusive and diverse mindsets in thought and practice with a strong affinity for interacting with students.
7. Authorize and provide the necessary resources for Academic Affairs to conduct and manage faculty hiring processes.
8. Review and improve the onboarding training plan for faculty and staff.

Goal 2

Offer innovative, high-quality, effectively delivered academic programs that attract and retain students and promote academic success

Strategies:

1. Offer courses that are of high quality, grounded in theory, and delivered with excellent pedagogy.
2. Develop more extensive on-campus summer programming that might include programs such as requiring underprepared students to attend the Summer Success Academy.
3. Enhance the Honors Program.
4. Evaluate current academic program offerings - maintain programs that are consistent with MSU’s mission, grow high-quality programs and develop new programs that produce successful graduates.
5. Retain and provide funding for current accreditations and attainment of new accreditations.
6. Develop and maintain a cohesive General Education program.
7. Increase the number and quality of programs and courses delivered online.
8. Enhance the learning experience for online students, developing an engaging university experience for online students and ensuring that online faculty have proper resources and support.
9. Develop a robust course scheduling approach that integrates multiple terms and sessions.

Goal 3

Provide coordination for high-quality, high-impact, co-curricular and experiential learning opportunities as a distinctive feature of students’ learning experience

Strategies:

1. Create a center for high-impact learning.
2. Evaluate the possibility of providing University-wide academic credit for high-impact experiences.
3. Develop a robust system to track student participation in all high-impact practices.
4. Ensure that faculty are rewarded with workload credit for participation in high-impact activities.
5. Ensure that departments/colleges are granted latitude in creating high-impact activities.

Goal 4

Enhance physical learning environments, core instructional infrastructure, and faculty teaching capacity

Strategies:

1. Create and maintain high-quality learning spaces for all academic programs.
2. Provide and maintain high-quality IT infrastructure and support for academic programs.

Goal 5

Foster a culture of research, scholarship and creative activity that supports and rewards faculty involvement and engages students and external partners

Strategies:

1. Develop a process to document, recognize, and disseminate faculty scholarship, research and creative activities, especially scholarly activities with students.
2. Enhance support for faculty research/creative capacity and output.
3. Increase engagement of staff in research activity by maximizing staff and related personnel supported by grant money.
4. Encourage cross-collaboration of faculty and staff in research endeavors through identifying existing space for interaction.
5. Ensure scholarly activity is valued through the development of uniform faculty evaluation plans.
6. Incentivize faculty scholarship by revising the indirect distribution formula to return research funds to the research accounts of the faculty members who generated those funds.