The following principles and best-practices are used by the institutional work groups as they plan the details of consolidation.
Mission and identity:
Promote a common institutional identity across all locations while recognizing the need for flexibility, creativity, innovation, and autonomy.
- Remain focused on institutional mission while establishing missions for each location.
- Establish best practices to ensure consistency and quality regardless of location, and strive to consistently deliver a common experience to constituents in all locations.
- Recognize that student demographics will be different at different locations; therefore, flexibility is needed to best serve the needs of our students, employees and community.
Communication and collaboration:
Intentionally build an institution-wide culture of collaboration and communication within and across campuses, reporting structures and departments/units.
- Develop training, orientation, and personnel development methodologies to allow University wide cultural norms to be understood and practiced across all locations.
- Establish frequent and open collaboration between and among divisions and functional areas.
- Facilitate opportunities for faculty and staff to work on different campuses when practicable and to the extent possible/desired by individual employees.
- Establish processes for faculty/staff/students from different locations to interact (e.g., events, professional development, committees, service-learning projects, research, awards ceremonies, or honors societies).
- Actively communicate the institutional brand to constituencies within and outside the institution.
Serving the needs of the university and the community:
Deliver equitable access to services and resources for students, staff, and faculty in the context of the needs of our local, regional and global community.
- Establish collaborative partnerships for mutual benefit, encouraging community ownership and investment.
- Seek equitable faculty and staff compensation and ensure funding within departments across campuses for travel, professional development, facilities maintenance, supplies, etc.
- Ensure that students have the opportunity to be engaged with the university in multiple locations, without undue barriers.
Decisions, governance and planning:
Develop structures to facilitate responsible decision-making in a multi-campus environment.
- Clarify and implement decision-making authority at each location within their functional areas to ensure consistent application of institutional policies, and establish governance and organizational structures that allow appropriate decisions to be made at the (branch) campus level.
- Make decisions at the institutional and campus levels that are data-driven.
- Create processes that take into account the available resources, space, and needs specific to each location.
- Define and systematically review objectives for the institution and each location.
