Implementation

With the completion of UC Berkeley’s strategic plan in December 2018, our campus set the stage for another decade of excellence in teaching, research, and public service. Yet the release of the plan represents more of a beginning than a conclusion, as we now must turn strategic goals into actionable initiatives that bring about tangible change on the Berkeley campus.

Implementation of the strategic plan’s recommendations is structured around several priority areas: signature initiatives, diversity, finance reform, and student experience and enrollment. Please see the descriptions below to learn more about implementation plans in each of these areas.

Signature Initiatives

Led by Vice Provost for Academic Planning Lisa Alvarez-Cohen and Vice Chancellor for Research Randy Katz

After significant campus engagement and consensus building in spring 2018, six topics were identified in the campus’ strategic plan as key interdisciplinary ‘Signature Initiatives’ that Berkeley is well-positioned to address through its research, teaching, and outreach. An initial set of recommended topics was developed and shared with the campus community for input in spring 2018, and final versions were published in December.

To help the campus advance these ideas, six Signature Initiative Working Groups have been charged with elaborating upon the topic areas and considering how Berkeley should pursue these challenges, who on the campus is best positioned to do so, and with what resources we will support the efforts.

The six working groups are focused on the following themes:

  • Charting a New Course to Health & Wellbeing
  • Democracy, Values, Governance, and Freedom of Speech
  • Environmental Change, Sustainability, and Justice
  • Inclusive Intelligence
  • Inequality and Opportunity
  • Lighting the Way to the Public Research University of the Future

For more information about the working groups, visit the Signature Initiatives page on the Vice Chancellor for Research website.

Background documents:

Diversity

Led by Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion Oscar Dubón, Vice Chancellor for Undergraduate Education Cathy Koshland, and Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Steve Sutton

Berkeley will best serve its public mission by achieving greater diversity in all its forms and by ensuring that our underrepresented populations are welcomed and well served by the campus. We must also ensure that all students, staff and faculty are able to take advantage of the immense range of opportunities our campus has to offer.

Undergraduate Student Diversity Project

As a first step toward increasing diversity, improving the campus climate, and building equity of access to Berkeley’s offerings, the campus launched the Undergraduate Student Diversity Project in December 2018 to examine student diversity over the course of the 2018-2019 academic year. Study teams explored the topics of Admissions Outreach, Recruiting, Marketing, and Yield; Undergraduate Admissions Policy and Process; and the Campus Experience for Underrepresented Students. The findings of these groups will be used to inform additional efforts in the realms of faculty and staff diversity.

Publications:

Background documents:

Graduate Student Diversity Task Force

In September 2019, the university formed a Graduate Student Diversity Task Force to assess, develop, and implement a coordinated campus-wide strategy to expand the diversity of the Berkeley graduate student body. Over the course of nine months, this committee evaluated evidence-based research and set forth preliminary recommendations —both broad and specific —to increase the enrollment of underrepresented, low socioeconomic status, and first-generation graduate students and to improve the campus experience and academic outcomes for underrepresented graduate students across all of our graduate programs. Please read the full report of recommendations.

Finance Reform

Led by Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Paul Alivisatos

Foundational to Berkeley’s success in the next decade is the development of a sustainable financial model for our campus. After years of reduced public funding from the state of California, Berkeley is both diversifying its revenue sources as well as making changes to core financial structures and systems on campus. The goal of these efforts is to develop a campus budget model that is more simple, predictable, and transparent, as well as one that better aligns campus funding to workload, cost, productivity, and goals.

The finance reform implementation team is comprised of a leadership committee and three working groups examining the allocation of central revenue, the allocation of resources to units delivering common goods and administrative services, and revenue sharing agreements.

Background documents:

Student Experience and Enrollment

Led by Vice Chancellor for Undergraduate Education Catherine P. Koshland, PhD, and Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Stephen C. Sutton, EdD

In the future, Berkeley will be as well known for the quality of its student experience – both undergraduate and graduate – as it is for the excellence of its academic enterprise. This rededication to and investment in the student experience will require a host of curricular and co-curricular changes at Berkeley, from creating new academic frameworks that focus on discovery as the foundation of the undergraduate experience to addressing housing scarcity and other basic needs. Intricately tied to enacting improvements to the student experience is careful consideration of campus enrollment and enrollment distribution.

Implementation of these recommendations is led by the Undergraduate Experience Executive Steering Committee (UEESC). The UEESC has created a diverse committee to coordinate the working groups and teams that will be a part of this effort. A work group comprised of faculty is focused on defining “discovery” and building a framework for it in the curriculum. 

Background documents: