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PROGRESS & PLANS
The board and the community are responding to this vision with great enthusiasm. Real progress has been made in the first two years. The university administration has developed the groundwork and due diligence required to realize, efficiently and intelligently, an ambitious enterprise of Vision 2020’s magnitude.
This groundwork includes a Strategic Plan, developed by the whole community, that sets out five initiatives that will guide our Vision 2020 agenda. We shall: celebrate our Catholic identity in the inclusive Merton spirit as the foundation of our commitment to student fulfillment, global consciousness, and environmental sustainability; establish and sustain a climate of excellence throughout the University; integrate an international focus and sensibility into all curricular and co-curricular programs; enhance our reputation, expand our market, and dramatically grow our enrollment; and develop our financial, physical, and human resources to the level required to achieve our vision for the new Bellarmine University.
A 500-page operational plan with financial models brings programmatic and procedural detail to these initiatives.
The groundwork also includes a marketing plan to develop greater awareness; a capital campaign plan to develop the needed resources; and a master plan showing how our campus can physically accommodate Vision 2020 beautifully and well.
Excitement surrounding Vision 2020 helped us exceed our ambitious freshman enrollment goals for fall 2007. We had 432 freshmen in 2006 and hoped to increase that to at least 450 in 2007. We enrolled 570.
We have hired 20 new full-time faculty members and developed a multi-year plan for continued growth, and more diversity. We have added 44 new course sections, and we are developing an emphasis on retention. We are reducing the faculty teaching load and streamlining faculty committees to facilitate research and scholarship.
Our move to increase full-time faculty and reduce faculty course load is directly related to deepening our engagement with research and, in the process, improving teaching and further developing our faculty as we move to a doctoral/research-intensive institution.
Bellarmine is also creating task forces to conduct feasibility studies and market analyses for the new graduate and professional schools that Vision 2020 will build.
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