Beyond Boundaries, the university’s strategic plan, has an updated interactive website that the Board of Trustees recently endorsed unanimously.
The website’s changes include a new home page, the plan’s narrative overview, objective and tactics specific to each theme, slide presentation, downloadable flyer and promotional video.
In his announcement, University President Michael Lovell attributed the website’s improvements to campus leadership.
“The significant progress we’re making is truly a team effort, and I’m excited to end the academic year on such a high note,” Lovell said.
Lovell announced the plan’s new goal theme, A Culture of Inclusion, to promote more diversity on campus. He also introduced online dashboards to measure the strategic plan’s progress.
The updated website includes a dashboard for each goal theme — Academic Excellence, Research in Action, A Culture of Inclusion, Social Responsibility, Formation of Minds and Hearts and Sustainability of Valuable Resources — that allows students to see the respective goals’ data based on students’ academic levels, races and genders.
Dashboard metrics for Marquette are then compared to data from 22 other private universities including St. Louis University, Boston University and Tulane University in Louisiana.
“These institutions will be used as aspirant comparisons,” said Marya Leatherwood, vice provost for strategic and academic planning.
Dashboard creators – the Strategic Plan Coordinating Team, the Office of Institutional Research and Analysis and the Office of Marketing and Communication – chose institutions that have similar or better data than Marquette’s, according to Leatherwood.
Each theme’s page displays a list of objectives that, when clicked on, presents several tactics the university will use to achieve these objectives.
“The tactics are what needs to happen in order for us to make changes that will help us move forward,” Leatherwood said.
She also said faculty members and student organizations such as Marquette Student Government and the President’s Task Force on Equity and Inclusion played a role in creating and writing those objective and tactics.
“The next step for Beyond Boundaries is educating the university’s new deans on the plan and its objectives and tactics and providing all deans with a set of scorecards to report their college’s progress each year,” Leatherwood said.
