The Strategic Planning Process in Context

Not yet two decades old, the CUNY School of Professional Studies has always been the focus of remarkable change and growth.

Much of it has been unprecedented, including the first online degrees offered within the City University of New York, and the upsurge in enrollments and programs that followed. Yet even for CUNY SPS, the time spent on the development of its latest strategic plan has been marked by drastic changes, both locally and nationally.

As the planning began in 2019, CUNY SPS was undergoingMiddle States accreditation review as oneof six institutions affiliated with the CUNY GraduateSchool and University Center. The culmination of thismulti-year process would mark, for CUNY SPS, theprospect of pursuing its independence as a freestandingdegree-granting school. The accreditationteam’s visit was to be March 2020.

That is when the COVID-19 pandemic forced CUNYto declare a University-wide shift from in-person toremote learning, with all staff working remotely. AtCUNY SPS, all but three of the degree programs werealready online, so impact on instruction was morelimited than in the rest of CUNY, though not withoutchallenges (including the delay of the Middle Statessite visit).

The shift to remote instruction throughout the rest of CUNY was not a shift to online learning, which is distinguished by the careful planning of resource-rich course sites and the scheduling flexibility of asynchronous online learning. (By contrast, almost all-remote instruction in CUNY was done by synchronous video at the times classes had been scheduled to meet at the spring term’s start.)

The CUNY Office of Academic Affairs reached out to CUNY SPS (and specifically its Office of Faculty Development and Instructional Technology) for help. As the 2020 spring term ended and summer began, the OFDIT team gave multi-week workshops in online learning practices to multiple cohorts of up to 700 CUNY faculty at a time.

Effects on CUNY SPS and on CUNY generally ranged well beyond the pandemic. Most notably, the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, galvanized the nation. Deaths of people of color detained by police were far from new, but 9 minutes of harrowing video sparked a heightened sense of social injustice, and protests raged across the nation. Demands for redress of deep-rooted wrongs had special urgency in an election year. Institutions had to reflect on their resistance to or complicity with social injustice—including institutions of higher education.

It was in such a climate that a new academic year began. CUNY SPS students had access to online instruction, but their lives were disrupted by layoffs and furloughs, by strains caused by remote work and home schooling, and above all by the health crisis created by COVID. Outreach efforts to the whole CUNY SPS community were made through virtual town halls as well as online communication. Impacts on the economy began to manifest, as well as drops in enrollments in CUNY and across the nation. Reductions in state revenue streams and tuition revenue precipitated a hiring freeze, even as CUNY SPS saw enrollments continue to grow.

Crisis management did not prevent re-engagement with the strategic planning process. But that, too, required some pivoting of focus and effort. The steering committee was now seeing shifts in the economic landscape—changes in the workforce, in consumer behavior, in higher education—that needed to be addressed by the strategic plan, as did the tensions reflecting social divisions that simmered and flared. Thinking coalesced around guiding concepts and key areas that became, as the Fall 2020 term ended, the focus of several working groups.

With the start of a new calendar year that began with the promise of vaccines and a new presidency but also an attack on the Capitol highlighting persistent deep divisions, the working groups consulted with the Committee on Institutional Equity and Diversity and an advisory group of workforce experts to draft strategic commitments and goals. These were presented and responded to in multiple meetings of Deans and Directors, with the Student Association, and in Faculty and Staff Town Halls, now with the added awareness that the founding dean, John Mogulescu, would be leaving the School over the summer.

As the Spring 2021 term came to a close, the steering committee came to a consensus that too much work remained to finalize the plan. The working groups needed time to digest feedback and make revisions, and not enough input had been had from the students and the adjunct faculty, both key stakeholder groups. A climate survey on diversity, equity, and inclusion had been conducted, but the findings were not yet available. The process needed more time. Dean Mogulescu concurred, allowing that the engagement of the new dean would be a good thing.

When Jorge Silva-Puras came on as interim dean in August 2021, and John Mogulescu stepped away, a final phase of feedback and revision began. Interviews and focus groups of students and adjunct faculty were held, and further revisions to working groups’ outlines were proposed. At the time, CUNY SPS was starting its first fall term ever with a decline in enrollment compared to the prior fall. Dean Silva-Puras was now engaging with the plan, offering his own suggestions. Further meetings and Town Halls made note of revisions underway and additional input from the students and adjunct faculty, as well as the climate survey. These meetings were held against a backdrop of continuing changes wrought by a pandemic not yet over, ongoing social unrest, and renewed questions about the future of higher education.

One emergent answer to those questions was an interest in CUNY Online, a proposed plan to support the development of online degrees across CUNY led by CUNY SPS and supported by funding from the CUNY Chancellery. Presentations in late December 2021 and January 2022 to the Council of Presidents and the Academic Council generated significant interest from the leadership of CUNY colleges, and the ambitious project began to move forward by soliciting formal proposals from interested colleges.

This is the context in which the strategic plan was developed and finalized. Reviewing it drives home the accelerating pace of change, requiring that the strategic plan be a living document, subject to the input of the community and adjustments to changing circumstances. Early in the strategic planning process, for instance, the steering committee affirmed the existing Mission and Vision statements, but events since, and the recent release and review of the campus climate survey by the Committee on Institutional Equity and Diversity, forced the realization that those statements must be explicit about the School’s commitment to racial equity and social justice. A joint subcommittee of the CIED and the steering committee has already initiated that work, which will now go through the full process of community input and review. That undertaking, and there will be others like it, reminds us that the strategic plan cannot remain static as it is implemented. It must be able to adapt to the transformative changes wrought by extraordinarily changeful times.