Acadia 2025: Tracking progress

Acadia 2025 was approved and adopted by Acadia’s Board of Governors and Senate in early March of 2020 following an extensive and broad-based consultation process involving internal and external stakeholders. The formal launch of the plan followed later in 2020 but rather than a signal to begin work, the release

An overview of the framework

Caring for our students and employees

Goals:

Transformational student experiences focused on academic and personal success

An inclusive and supportive community campus culture

A campus culture passionate about professionalism, inclusion, service excellence, and leadership

Caring for our community’s safety, health and wellness

Msit No’kmaq - Advancing Acadia’s contributions to truth, reconciliation and decolonization of the Acadia 2025 framework provided a means to connect and organize the vast of array campus activities and achievements toward an over-arching goal: by 2025 to establish Acadia as a university that is clearly differentiated within the Canadian post-secondary landscape.

Strategic Direction and Goals

Caring for our planet

Goals: Environmental stewardship and sustainability are signature institutional features of Acadia Make measurable progress and establish a target date for achieving net carbon neutrality

Revitalizing our academic core

Goals: Embrace a 21st century liberal education model that is central to Acadia’s vision and mission

Enhanced support for teaching and learning excellence

Maximizing our impact regionally and globally

Goals: New partnerships and collaboration to drive regional development and educational opportunities

Leadership and impact in environmental, rural and coastal research and innovation

Acadia’s research is impactful regionally, nationally and globally

Sustaining our institutional future

Goals: Achieve optimal rates of student enrolment to ensure institutional and campus community sustainability

Establish a culture of sustained fundraising and giving Enhance infrastructure renewal and campus development to meet priority needs

Progress toward our goals can be measured in two ways – quantitative and qualitative.

There are clearly some measures that are purely statistical. For instance, have we reduced our output of greenhouse gases or achieved optimal student enrolment? On the other hand, statistics alone cannot be used to measure the positive impact work performed by academic researchers is having on families living in poverty or on efforts to reduce pollution in the Arctic. However, by capturing both quantitative and qualitative information as a means of measuring progress, we can create a narrative about Acadia that will determine whether we have achieved our over-arching goal by 2025.

Of course, we also need to be realistic in our assessment of progress. The challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic are real and have hampered our ability to make certain investments, undertake new partnerships, and even to recruit students. On the other hand, some work has proceeded almost unimpeded by the pandemic and new opportunities, such as an accelerated move to on-line and virtual learning, have arisen. In short, our progress can best be described as uneven, but there is progress nonetheless and this needs to be celebrated while serving as a guide to where and how we might allocate resources over the next 24 to 36 months.