Academic Master Plan, Update #4

Friday, May 26, 2023, 2:15pm

TO: All Employees
FR: Karen Moranski, Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs

I write to provide our fourth update on the Academic Master Plan process as we wrap up the Spring semester and look forward to Summer. First and foremost, each of the Working Groups completed their recommendation reports, which you can read in full under each Working Group’s page on the Academic Master Plan website or by clicking on the following links:

A survey is open from now until August 31st that will allow the campus community to give feedback on the recommendations/interim reports. 

Each of the working groups put an enormous amount of effort into their final reports, and I am grateful for the work they did to support our future planning. I want to thank the Working Group members and Steering Committee members who took their charges seriously and produced challenging, thorough reports. I especially want to thank the co-chairs of each of the working groups who put in untold hours of work above and beyond their normal job duties to plan and facilitate the meetings and write the reports: Laura Alamillo, Stacey Bosick, Wendy Ostroff, Mike Visser, Rich Whitkus, and Julie Wood. Without their leadership in this process, we would not have been able to successfully move our Academic Master Plan forward.  

The work of Current and New Programs will continue in the fall as they take the metrics that they have created this semester and work with data that will be provided by Gray and Associates. The Learning Spaces and Academic Technology and Academic Support Services will start their work this fall. A draft of the charge and deliverables for those two groups will be found on the AMP website, as soon as they are finalized. The call for faculty, staff, and student participants for the Fall Working Groups has been sent out to the Schools, Staff Council, and Associated Students. Some of those elections and appointments have been finalized and others are still in progress. As soon as those groups are finalized, the membership list will be posted on the AMP website. 

This Summer, the AMP Executive Committee will compile the recommendations and use them to outline those portions of the Academic Master Plan for consideration by the . The final plan will outline how the Working Group recommendations will be implemented along with a timeline and resources for implementation. Additionally, we will plan tentative dates, times, and locations for open forums related to the work of the Academic Support Services and Learning Spaces and Technology Working Groups. We will seek guidance from the campus community in the fall on the work done this semester, and nothing will be finalized during the summer.

Opportunities to Get Involved and Give Feedback
There are many opportunities to get involved in the Academic Master Planning process and give feedback. A survey is open to give feedback on the recommendation/interim reports. Recordings of the open forums and slides from the Academic Senate and Staff Council presentations have been posted to the Academic Master Plan website. An anonymous Google feedback form is available if you want to provide feedback at any point. If you have any questions about this process, please do not hesitate to reach out to any members of the Executive Committee, Steering Committee, or Working Groups, or you can email AMP@sonoma.edu. We plan to engage students actively in the Fall 2023 working groups, working with Associated Students. We also plan to engage the community and key stakeholder groups outside the institution, particularly in discussions about our liberal arts and sciences identity and about our mix of current and future programs.