11/4/18: strategic plan

11/4/18: strategic plan

As many of you saw/mentioned last week, the actual agenda of the HSS meeting which students crashed was tabled due to you all being "uninvited guests" ... but on the docket was Laura's presentation of the Strategic Plan to HSS faculty.

In any case, she presented a version of the Strategic Plan to alumni on Thursday, which was livestreamed here. As far as I know, this is the first public presentation of these materials:

https://livestream.com/cooperalumni/Nov2018Meeting/videos/182930721

It's just over an hour-and-a-half long, beginning around 0:02:30 and ending around 1:39:00.

I'd love to discuss with you all, if you can give it a listen. You'll probably get your own presentation of this soon as students, but I often find it useful with these types of things to watch the different versions and track what stays the same and what changes between presentations to different groups and across time.

I typed out these two parts which I found especially significant:

[1:11:53, on data]

LAURA: …just sort of continuing on this notion of rebuilding community engagement — and really eager to hear your thoughts on this. you know the second bullet is about continuing to increase transparency. i think the board and i are very aware that a significant sense of distrust really built up over a sense of a lack of transparency and we’re really committed to trying to continue to increase transparency and then developing external commitment with our neighborhood and our city, our state, and the industries that we are sending students into.

using internal and external data to improve the academic program. so i’ve been really struck by how many decisions we make based on anecdotal information, and we’ve had interesting conversations internally about data. i think there has been kind of a resistance from some about reducing everything to data. and to be clear i think of data in many different forms. some of it’s quantitative some of it’s qualitative, but hopefully it’s all information that can then inform a set of actions.

so, for example, we were talking earlier about the issues around diversity and representation. well, it’s really hard to identify it as an issue and then to understand the implications of it if we’re not tracking over time what our trends look like. when we talked earlier about the focus on student retention and student success. you know, this is a small place so it’s very easy to kind of explain away, oh this student left the school because he had family issues, or this student left because she wanted to take a break and do something else for a period of time. and especially in a small place everybody has individualized issues and we can explain that away.

if we’re not aggregating information about students leaving or failing or when they do well, then we can’t really know how we’re doing, and we can’t be honest with ourselves and hold ourselves accountable about the things that we could be doing better. so i think we need to spend more time at reallylooking in an objective way at how we’re doing.

and then obviously we have other kinds of data points, like we have a whole report from our middle states evaluators that gives us ideas and suggestions of things we could do.

[1:27:50, in response to Josiah (but not really answering the question?) touching on technology, AI, and democracy .... and perhaps alluding to that Netflix series]

JOSIAH: …what would democracy look like at cooper union?

LAURA: So, I think we’re still figuring out what it could look like. I could give you a few ideas of things that it could look like: It could for example — Rachel and I were talking the other day about Peter Cooper’s goal of bringing all of the governors into the Great Hall to figure out what the heck to do with the country. It could look something like that. It could be, we’ve been talking internally about, as we’ve been talking about the potential for computer science in the school of engineering, we’ve been talking about the broader issues around the impacts that technology has had on our democracy and what are we doing to explore those issues. So it could be for example bringing experts together to have a debate in the Great Hall, in the Rose, about what do we do in a society that is now, almost everything we do is defined by machine learning and artificial intelligence, and what are the benefits of that and what are the ways it doesn’t benefit us? We’ve talked about it mostly in the context of the Great Hall because that is what has catalyzed this thinking but we’ve also talked a lot about the fact that so many people don’t come to venues anymore, and are there ways of engaging people around important social issues that don’t live in a physical space. But I think our thinking is very early on that. Does that help?

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