Download a PDF of the 2017 Fall Planning Letter.

man wearing glasses and a tan suit smiling at the camera

Over the past year, we in the College of Arts & Letters have remained focused on advancing our commitment to cultivating practices of inclusion as a matter of institutional habit as we pursue three imperatives that support the scholarly productivity and pedagogical effectiveness of our faculty, elevate scholarship, and enhance student success. These imperatives require us to orient our activities toward:

  • Recruiting and retaining world-class faculty
  • Enhancing graduate education
  • Enriching the undergraduate experience

Our imperatives and the five top priorities through which they are advanced have not changed since our last strategic plan, although two of them are moving into a phase of sustainable performance excellence that should allow us to introduce two new top-tier priorities next year. Our current priorities remain: Critical Diversity in a Digital Age (faculty cluster hire); School of Language Sciences, Literatures, and CulturesCenter for Interdisciplinarity (C4I)Citizen Scholars ProgramThe Excel Network.

As we emphasized in this year’s Dean’s Report, a broad liberal arts education has been at the heart of the University since its inception. When I began my tenure as Dean of the College of Arts & Letters, we sought to weave our liberal arts scholarship, pedagogy, and creative activities more tightly into the fabric of the research and teaching mission of the University. The priorities we have outlined above provide us with a basis from which to accomplish this, but this year, we hope to advance this commitment by aligning our work more intentionally with the priorities of Michigan State University. The initiatives through which we plan to do this will be the focus of this strategic plan.