Goal 2: Attract and Retain, Support and Develop Excellent Faculty.

Subgoal 1: Attract quality faculty.

Objectives:

• Recruit top faculty by offering competitive salaries, benefits, and other enticements.
• Develop effective strategies for identifying prospective faculty, inducing them to apply for positions, and interviewing them for teaching, research, and service roles.
• Increase the number of women and under-represented minority faculty and develop strategies to encourage their success.
• Enhance the availability, from all sources, of start-up funding for new faculty.
• Develop proactive approach to improving and increasing candidate pools.
• Review and evaluate various approaches to spousal accommodation, family assistance, child care and other avenues for making the university attractive to prospective employees.
• Increase the number of endowed professorships and chairs.

Subgoal 2:Retain and nurture faculty.

Objectives:

• Increase faculty salaries to be competitive nationally.
• Involve the faculty fully in the governance of the university.
• Enhance methods for evaluating, improving, and rewarding quality instruction.
• Increase and support mentoring of junior faculty by senior faculty.
• Expand the definition of teaching to include advising and other contacts with students outside the classroom, as well as scholarship on pedagogical topics.
• Define public service and reward it appropriately.
• Provide guidance to and support professional development for faculty, recognizing their different needs at different stages of their careers.
• Enhance departmental infrastructure and support structure.
• Educate the University’s publics with regard to the roles and duties of university faculty.
• Enhance development opportunities for department chairs.
• Develop and implement a standard post-tenure planning, evaluation, and feedback process.
• Improve departmental processes for allocating faculty teaching loads.
• Recognize and reward effective teaching.

Goal 3: Strengthen and Develop Graduate Programs.

Subgoal 1: Enhance graduate student enrollments, and recruit high quality graduate students.

Objectives:

• Develop and implement a comprehensive strategy to recruit quality and diverse graduate students.
• Develop and implement programs to assure successful and timely completion of graduate programs.
• Cultivate additional funding, both internal and external, for the further enhancement and growth of graduate programs.
• Assure the competitiveness of internally funded assistantships.

Subgoal 2: Strengthen the Graduate Program.

Objectives:

• Continuously evaluate, improve, and support graduate programs to ensure quality and relevance through the implementation of systematic internal and external program review processes, as well as through student outcomes assessment.
• Review and enhance programs that train teaching assistants in effective instructional approaches.
• Develop a University-wide graduate student orientation program.
• Enhance facilities and academic infrastructure commensurate with the growth of graduate programs.
• Encourage interdisciplinary research among doctoral students.
• Enhance student opportunities in international research, scholarship, and development.

Subgoal 3: Provide an environment that enhances the quality of graduate student life.

Objectives:

• Develop and implement programs to address deficiencies in areas such as office space, information services, and benefits.
• Improve the climate for women and underrepresented minority graduate students.
• Encourage professional development opportunities as well as social-political-cultural involvement.
• Provide a quality living environment for on-campus students.

Goal 4: Enhance and Expand Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity within the University.

Subgoal 1: Increase external funding in support of research activities.

Objectives:

• Enhance efforts in all areas and at all levels to increase the numbers of successful proposals for research support.
• Assure that submitted grants and contracts seek sufficient support for all direct and indirect costs of a research program.
• Continue to develop research ties with industries, government, and other educational institutions.
• Clarify and enhance the role of technology transfer and intellectual properties.
• Define roles and expectations for all research centers and research institutes.

Subgoal 2: Encourage interdisciplinary scholarship and research.

Objectives:

• Enhance development of the emphasis areas of materials science and engineering and environmental sciences and engineering.
• Select, through normal planning processes, other interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary areas for targeted emphasis in research and scholarship, and identify significant additional resources for those areas.
• Encourage the development of larger scale research programs, including interdisciplinary and team efforts.
• Remove barriers to interdisciplinary activities.

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