UW-Green Bay Chancellor Gary L. Miller sent the following memorandum via e-mail to the UW-Green Bay Employees, Chancellor’s Council of Trustees, and UPIC members on Friday, February 27, 2015:
In order to ensure the best ideas from Invent the Future are available as we undertake the budget reduction process, at my request, the workgroups wrapped up their consideration and completed their reports on a compressed schedule. The Steering Committee has prepared an excellent summary of the workgroup reports. The reports and the Steering Committee report may be found on the Chancellor’s web page.
Over one hundred faculty, staff and students worked to generate a fantastic collection of ideas, innovations and recommendations for us to consider. Our goal now is to sift through these ideas and identify some for further consideration and possible implementation. The University Planning and Innovation Committee (UPIC) will take the lead in this vetting process.
The UPIC will, in consultation with their constituent groups:
- Identify ideas from the workgroup reports having potential to support university growth.
- Identify ideas having the potential to more sharply define and deploy the unique interdisciplinary foundation of the university.
- Identify ideas having the potential to support faculty research and strategic growth of graduate programming.
- Identify ideas having the potential to more purposefully and forcefully project the university in community partnerships.
In addition to the UPIC, I will ask the Council of Trustees Program and Initiatives Advisory Committee (PIAC) to review the workgroup reports and provide their opinion regarding ideas for future consideration. Students will be asked to provide their thoughts regarding the reports. Academic units are encouraged to conduct their own reviews and to transmit their thoughts to the UPIC. The workgroups themselves may want to undertake a prioritization of their ideas and recommendations for use by the UPIC.
We will spend a few weeks on this process and then I will asked the original workgroups to reconvene to begin a deeper consideration of a selected number of ideas with the hope of operationalizing some of them for consideration by shared governance and, ultimately, deployment.
The Invent the Future process has generated vast amounts of creative energy focused on the future of UWGB. I hope you will work with us as we move through the next phase of this important process.