College of Arts and Sciences

Developing a Vision for CAS

December 11, 2025

Our new College visioning task force met for the first time in December. I offer a big thank you to Michelle Blevins, Kelly Crowe, Dan Dwyer, Niamh O’Leary, and Stephen Skiles for taking on the task of developing a vision for CAS for the next five years and a strategic plan to get us there. Ideally, both will be in place by Spring 2027. There is a lot of work ahead.

If our main goal was simply having “a” vision, then we could turn to Chat, Claude, Copilot, & Co. Any LLM would deliver something perfectly adequate that we could post and move on. But our goal is not simply having “a” vision. We want to know: what should OUR college look like, five years from now, to be prepared, as well as possible, for the many challenges that OUR students, OUR faculty, and OUR staff are facing.

As we discussed in our late-Fall All-College meeting, a good vision

  1. is ambitious and (currently) out of reach,
  2. does not need to be attained fully to be considered successful,
  3. provides guidance to all OUR departments and programs,
  4. specifies the directions in which WE will develop and consequently the directions in which WE will not develop,
  5. is something that all/most of US are excited to support,
  6. is memorable,
  7. leads to a strategic plan with a reasonable timeline, milestones, and measurements of when/whether WE have made progress,
  8. complements Xavier University’s vision and strategic plan.
Developing such a vision is a challenge. The vision statements of many Colleges of Arts & Sciences, whether Jesuit, private, or public, are rather generic and sound more like mission statements. I have yet to find a college vision that speaks to me. The strategic plans that I have surveyed tend to be longish lists of bullet points that end up being all things to all people. But while “all things to all people” may have been a good outcome for Paul, it isn’t helpful for a college with limited financial resources and with faculty and staff who are already pulled in many directions. We are not developing a vision for HigherEd, because fixing HigherEd is beyond our abilities. We are also not defining the perfect college. Rather, we need to find out where we fall short currently, and then determine where we can and want to be in five years. Point 4 above is essential, and implementing it is going to be hard.

As with a good term-paper project, at least half the value of the visioning project lies in doing the research, in identifying the key issues, and in developing a meaningful structure. The other half lies in formulating the vision and the strategic plan, and in defending our work.

Throughout the upcoming year, the visioning task force will reach out to all of us for input and feedback. Please support them. The future of our college depends on it. I am very much looking forward to the outcome of their important project.

Best wishes for the Spring semester,
Florenz 

Florenz Plassmann
Dean, College of Arts and Sciences