Fall semester update from President Weber

LETTER FROM PRESIDENT WEBER

This first semester of our second century is a new beginning that holds tremendous promise and opportunity for SDSU and the communities we serve. We can all take pride in being members of a vibrant and vital learning community and be grateful for the opportunity to contribute our intellect, talent, and caring to such important work.

I am particularly proud of the shared effort and thoughtful dedication that brought our community together during the spring semester to build a "Shared Vision" of the SDSU we intend to create. We undertake these new initiatives, not because we are "broken", but because we know that we are capable of educational leadership. The work you accomplished, beginning with our 'conversations' and culminating in SDSU's first Future Search Conference, allowed us to articulate our institution's core values, consider the challenges and opportunities of our time and place, and prepared us to move forward together. The fine work of our colleagues who participated in the Future Search Conference provides us with a common point of departure: nine core issues of SDSU's next decade.

To guide and support the process as we move our core issues into action, we have established a Shared Vision steering committee. The steering committee's charge is to bring forth, by the end of the fall semester, "actionable" ideas and proposals that will address SDSU's core issues in the next ten years. The Shared Vision steering committee is currently composed of the nine conveners and four vice presidents.

The committee and I anticipate proposals from the working groups (one for each issue) that will capture the synergy of cross-divisional collaboration, community partnerships and will be responsive to the broad range of San Diego State stakeholders in their planning and implementation. Proposals will be considered through the normal governance procedures and, with input from a second Future Search Conference follow-up meeting, we will establish priorities and allocate the necessary funding support to initiate the selected projects.

I hope every member of the San Diego State family will become involved in this process and will share his or her ideas as to how we can best realize the potential of our university and by so doing better serve our students and society. Please visit and revisit this Web site , follow the progress, and participate in developing SDSU's core issues into projects that we can look back at with pride in 2007, as our legacy to the students and communities we serve.

to Shared Vision Index