Fulfilling the Promise: Our Commitment in Action
A Message from Chancellor Charles Bantz
History will record 2013-2014 as a landmark year in the unfolding story of IUPUI’s development as an institution. We concluded the most successful fundraising campaign in Indiana University’s history. We welcomed the largest and best-qualified entering freshman class and the most diverse overall student body in IUPUI history. We graduated our largest senior class ever. We celebrated the grand opening of University Tower and Hine Hall, addressing shortages of residential and classroom space to serve the needs of our students. We dedicated the Science and Engineering Laboratory Building, a magnificent research facility that will open new possibilities for interdisciplinary discovery and help us contribute to Indiana’s economic vitality.
I am also pleased to announce that IUPUI successfully applied for renewed inclusion in the Community Engagement Classification of U.S. universities sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Our selection for the classification affirms our commitment to serving and engaging with our local community, as well as with more remote communities around the world. In its response to our application, the Carnegie Foundation cited IUPUI’s “dynamic and noteworthy community engagement,” and commended us for documenting our community engagement “in a coherent and compelling response.” IUPUI was one of the first campuses selected for the classification in 2006.
I thank everyone—IUPUI faculty, staff, students, alumni, and our community supporters—who contributed to these important accomplishments. We are proud of them. But we know that we must do much more to fulfill our promise to our city, our state, and beyond. That is why, in 2012, we began work on a new strategic plan, Our Commitment to Indiana and Beyond. (Visit strategicplan.iupui.edu for the complete plan.)
Last year’s IUPUI Performance Report introduced Our Commitment. It described our collaboration with hundreds of campus and community stakeholders to craft a plan that built on IUPUI’s distinctive strengths, aligned with the Indiana University Bicentennial Strategic Plan, and responded to Indiana’s urgent needs for a more educated citizenry and an improved quality of life. It summarized the three priorities—supporting the success of our students, advancing the health and life sciences, and contributing to the well-being of people in our city, region, state, and beyond—and ten strategic goals that we will use as a roadmap for continuing to advance and transform our institution, our city, our state, and beyond.
Our Commitment is a dynamic plan that will respond to changing needs within and outside IUPUI. As we developed it, we were guided by a vision of a future IUPUI that includes:
- Better prepared, more diverse students who choose IUPUI first for its vibrant urban location, leading academic programs, and culture of learning in engagement with local, regional, national, and global communities
- A stunning, sustainable, and accessible physical campus in the heart of downtown Indianapolis, with a flexible and robust suite of information technologies to expand our reach to learners, researchers, and partners across the city, state, nation, and beyond
- A health and life sciences enterprise of quality and scope that supports effective teaching and learning, leading-edge research, and healthy patient outcomes, as well as interprofessional education and practice
- A dynamic, multi-disciplinary research environment whose infrastructure supports student and faculty collaboration with external partners to solve real-world problems and improve the quality of life
- A culture of engagement that serves as a model of reciprocity and enables students, faculty, and staff to work with community partners, learning with and from each other to address urban needs
- Recognition locally, nationally, and globally as an employer of choice that serves as a magnet of talent to Indianapolis.
In this 2013-2014 Performance Report, we show you how we have begun to put Our Commitment into action—initial steps taken as well as initial successes. We have organized the report around the plan’s three priorities and ten goals, reporting on progress made on each element of the plan. Where evidence is sufficient, we have used the red, green, and yellow “traffic lights” familiar to friends of IUPUI to indicate satisfactory and unsatisfactory progress.
Above all, this report demonstrates that Our Commitment was not created to sit on a shelf. We intend to achieve our goals and to be accountable for the results of our work. In future reports, every goal in the plan will have a traffic light indicating progress. Transparency and accountability are a part of our institutional identity at IUPUI that we take great pride in. Fulfilling the promise to Indianapolis, Indiana, and beyond demands no less of us.
Charles R. Bantz
Chancellor of IUPUI