New strategic planning website, U. endowment discussed at CPUC meeting
Daily Princetonian Staff and Anna WindemuthA new University websiteoutlining the roles of strategic planning task forces and their preliminary reports will allow community members to stay informed about the planning process and provide input, University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 said during this month’s Council of the Princeton University Community meeting. Eisgruber launched the strategic planning process in January with the purpose of creating a flexible, iterative and dynamic framework for future decision-making by January 2016. The new website will be updated periodically and includes summaries of each task force and a list of its members. “There will be both formal and informal opportunities to comment on what the task forces are doing,” Eisgruber said, noting that the community can contact task force members directly or submit a comment to the website, which will be redirected to the appropriate correspondent. “You’re free to make it your homepage,” Eisgruber said, spurring laughter from the audience. The final strategic planning document will highlight the University’s priorities; identify challenges, opportunities and risks; and describe the University’s resource envelope, Eisgruber said. “[The document] is a way to evaluate choices rather than a statement of what the choices are and will be,” Eisgruber said, adding that he expects different task forces to operate on varying timelines. The task force recommendations do not automatically become part of the campus plan but are first vetted and judged against the University framework, Eisgruber explained. Task force members were chosen based on their expertise regarding the specific issue and include undergraduate and graduate students for projects such as graduate student housing, Eisgruber said. He also said the University will be paying close attention to the opportunity costs of various decisions, especially given the recent impact of the financial crisis. “We need to be thinking about what sorts of options we have and how the selection of one option or another option is going to constrain choices in the future,” Eisgruber said. He said that individual departments also engage in planning on a regular basis and that he expects additional task forces to be formed in the future as new issues arise. University Provost David Lee GS ’99 said the University is currently in a solid financial position with a market endowment value of $21 billion as of June 2014 and a very solid credit rating. “We have for quite some time had a very generous donor base,” Lee said.
