Thomas Jefferson s clear and unique vision gave the University of Virginia a strong foundation. His University, one of excep-tional architectural design, was conceived in the early nine- teenth century be a university, not a college. It was to be the capstone of public education in the nation and a force for political good in a young and vigorous country. In this academical village," students and faculty were to live and learn together in an orderly and serene environment, with a curriculum designed to promote learning in all the useful sciences" and to produce thoughtful, articulate, and public-spirited young leaders. For Jefferson, utility and science were defined broadly; that which was useful" was anything that improved the material or spiritual condition of humankind, while the scie nces" encompassed all branches of knowledge. In emphasizing an education for leadership and moral integrity, our founder understood the importance of broad intellectual exposure and the opportunity for unfettered inquiry into the nature of the universe.
Thomas Jefferson s University also embodied his understanding of and faith in change. As a product of the Enlightenment, he conceived that change informed by knowledge and understanding and driven by good will is progress. His University, constructed around these concepts, was to be a great manufactory of progress and prosperity for the Commonwealth and the nation.
As we move toward the twenty-first century, the world is changing dramatically, raising new intellectual, moral, and practical questions. Within recent generations, moreover, the University has broadened its vision to embrace many new branches of knowledge while diversifying its community of learners to include women, persons of all races and ethnic backgrounds, and international and nontraditional students. Our challenge in the 1990s is to reconceive the Jeffersonian idea of the academical village for the year 2000 and beyond, and to accommodate within this academic community the changing substance, style, and scope of higher education. The University must prepare individuals for a world characterized by heterogeneous and increasingly interdependent societies, a complex global economy, dr amatic political shifts, rapidly developing technology, environmental concerns, and a knowledge base swiftly expanding in range and volume. The nation s expectations for its universities are also changing: increasingly, universities are looked upon not only as places for reflection and contemplation but also as environments in which solutions for society s greatest problems may be f o u n d .
In planning for the University s future, we are attempting both to change in order to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century and to give renewed vitality to some of the institution's defining principles. We must reformulate our vision of education to ensure that its educational programs undergraduate, graduate, professional, and outreach create and teach both the broad knowledge and the specialized skills necessary for an effective citizenry while instilling in the nation s future civic, business, education, scientific, and professional leaders a lifelong inquisitiveness towards new conceptual frames of reference and new critical skills of mind. The University is committed to providing a premier undergraduate education as well as graduate and professional programs of distinction. It strives to be a model for undergraduate learning within the context of the modern research university as well as a place where theoretical and applied research take place simultaneously.
The University conceives of itself as a true community of learners, a place where students, faculty, and staff of varied backgrounds, interests, and aspirations are supported and encouraged in their common pursuit of thoughtful and creative inquiry, mastery of skills, and acquisition of appropriate values, all in the service of individual improvement and societal betterment. Such a community requires the willingness to cross-examine and test ideas, tolerate disagreement, appreciate pluralism and diversity, and commit to the moral life of the academic community.
At the heart of the University s mission are the discovery, preservation, dissemination, and application of knowledge and the fostering of creative endeavor, all with the purpose of increasing society s understanding of the dynamic physical, social, moral, economic, political, and philosophical forces of our changing world, and the interplay among them. The University must continue to strive for eminence as a center of higher learning as a balanced enterprise involving education, research, and service. This requires that we build deliberately upon our present disciplinary and interdisciplinary strengths and that we move, with equal deliberation, into selected new areas of inquiry and into collaborative partnerships with other institutions. It also requires that we reflect critically on what we currently do, to ensure that we not do it if we cannot do it well. As an institution committed to maintaining its moderate size, the University cannot hope to be truly comprehensive in academic scope.
Achieving eminence requires a renewed commitment to the highest standards of rigorous scholarship and challenging teaching. It requires a superb faculty committed to a professional life that joins and balances research, teaching, and service. It requires students who seek the intellectual traits of an educated citizenry and who are themselves eager to learn and to contribute. And it requires that the University, using its special talents, continue to assist society through significant public service.
Ultimately, the University pursues neither the discovery, the sharing, nor the application of knowledge for its own sake. Rather, both the substance and process of all the intellectual work generated within the University community are used to advance the frontiers of knowledge, to equip students to be leaders in society, and to contribute substantively to the betterment of our world and the human condition. By engaging simultaneously in teaching, research, and service, the University can provide succeeding generations of students with the analytical tools and practical skills necessary to ensure not only that they are prepared to make lifelong intellectual contributions to society but also that they embody the inquisitiveness and open-mindedness characteristic of the University Thomas Jefferson founded and of which we are today the trustees.á
The concept of the academical village detailed in Thomas Jefferson s intellectual and architectural scheme is the i d e a l toward which the University will strive as we approach the year 2000. This model is predicated on the assumption that the life of the mind is the common pursuit of all participants in the University, that learning is a lifelong and shared process, and that interaction between scholars and students enlivens the pursuit of knowledge. The University s core values are exemplified in its modern-day academical village" a diverse community whose members live and learn together, vigorously exploring ideas and seeking understanding in an intellectual environment characterized by tolerance, civility, and reason. We actively promote self-governance, the desire to serve, a commitment to good health, and the cultivation of creativity, analytical rigor, tolerance, and responsibility for learning and accountability for one s own actions and education. These core values extend to all citizens of the academical village faculty, students, staff, administrators, and alumni and create an environment in which scholarly, professional, and personal growth is fostered. In the pages that follow, we map our reconception of Thomas Jefferson s academical village for the twenty- first century. We begin with the process of education the academic experience" articulating the ways in which knowledge is created, disseminated, and applied in the context of a major university. We then discuss the participants here, the community of learners" comprised of faculty, students, staff, administrators, and alumni for realization and results. Finally, we consider the place the academic environment" that organizes and nurtures the life of the mind. Guiding Principles
As envisioned by Thomas Jefferson, the academical village is a community committed to the creation, dissemination, and application of knowledge in service to society. In this respect, his University combines the teaching-oriented British college with the research-oriented Germanic university. Our challenge is to be at the forefront of the creation and pursuit of unbounded knowledge, while becoming a national model for undergraduate learning within the context of a modern research university.
We perceive this challenge based on our belief that a university s research, teaching, and service the creation, dissemination, and application of knowledge are not separate functions that necessarily compete for attention but, rather, are integrated activities. The best research usually has the potential of enriching the classroom experience, just as teaching equally has the potential of reinforcing research. To be sure, there is a tension between these activities that derives not from the lack of potential synergy but from time and resource constraints. And yet we see a balance between teaching and research as healthy, even essential to the vigor of the institution. While competing in time, they are complementary in results. The life of the mind, for both students and faculty, sometimes requires private study and solitary reflection, while at other times it depends on public articulation, careful listening, and the refining influence of vigorous debate. We focus in turn on the creation, dissemination, and application of knowledge on the processes that, in combination, produce the invigorating a c a d e m i c e x p e r i e n c e .
THE CREATION OF KNOWLEDGE
Objectives
Knowledge is produced throughout society, in places as diverse as corporate research laboratories, governmental agencies, and individual homes. Universities have a special role, however, as the principal places where ideas can be tested and refined without artificial constraints and within an environment where the cross-fertilization of ideas from various disciplines and fields is nurtured. In addition, universities are almost unique in being the places where research is done jointly with the training of the next generation of scholars. University research and teaching are mutually reinforcing in all the disciplines the humanities, the social sciences, and the fine arts as well as the sciences, medicine, and technology. Our professional schools have a special role of creatively expanding knowledge in the service of their professions. The University functions as well as a source of exceptional talent prepared to assist governmental, civic, health, educational, scientific, and business leaders in solving society s pressing problems.
Knowledge at the University is arrived at in myriad ways. The study of documents and artifacts, the isolation of an enzyme in a laboratory, the creation of a musical composition, the collection of oral testimony,the development of metal stress tests, the exploration of ways in which cooperative or selfish behavior influence individuals, organizations, and society, are all examples of research in the context of a university; all create knowledge in the sense of building upon ideas that have come before. Work that expands the boundaries of current knowledge is often as painstaking and consuming as it is important and exhilarating. The creative enterprise requires time, talent, persistence, consultation, contemplation, and resources. As the University community engages in the creation of knowledge, we must generate an environment that will yield the most beneficial results.
We encourage the entire community of learners to participate in the process of creating knowledge and other parts of this plan will discuss how students and other constituencies share in this enterprise. It is most likely, however, that faculty, who have the deepest understanding of their fields and a lifelong commitment to intellectual exploration, are the ones who will make the most original and lasting contributions to the growing body of knowledge. As one of the nation s leading public institutions of higher learning, as well as the repository of the Jeffersonian ideal of producing discoveries for the benefit of society, the University has a deeply rooted obligation to explore the frontiers of knowledge. We plan to involve our students in this creative venture, both to acquaint them with the excitement and the process of discovery and to share with them both what is learned and how it might be used.
Strategies
1. Set Scholarly Priorities. The University will set a broadly conceived scholarship agenda for the institution by establishing as its academic priorities those scholarly areas of present or anticipated institutional strength as well as those areas where need and opportunities are joined. In doing this, we will set these priorities against the needs of society and the intellectual world, remaining cognizant of existing strengths of other i n s titutions. The University will direct its energies to obtaining and allocating the human and material resources necessary to the creation of knowledge in those fields that it has identified as its academic priorities. We will regularly review the status of our academic departments and schools, to identify those that can benefit dramatically from enhanced financial support and direct support in recruiting and retaining faculty members. To accomplish this, we intend to maintain and strengthen the existing system of peer review by visiting committees impaneled by the Center for Advanced Studies.
2. Promote Exceptionally Promising Scholarly Work. Through funding mechanisms such as the Academic Enhancement Program, the University endeavors to promote scholarly work in selected academic programs of high potential. In the past three years, such funding has supported ventures as important and varied as the neuroscience program, the Molecular Biology Institute, the Biodynamics Institute, the Carter G. Woodson Institute for Afro-American and African Studies, the Global Systems Analysis Program, and the Center on Aging and Health. We will continue to fund similar programs and will expand existing ones as opportunities occur.
3. Encourage Flexibility in Scholarship. The University seeks creative ways to maximize opportunities for both the creation and the dissemination of knowledge. Some faculty members function best, and some knowledge is best produced, in an environment where there is daily interplay between teaching and scholarship. For others, more intensive teaching for some periods of time followed by more intensive commitments to individual study and reflection may be most productive. For yet others, contact with those in business, applied science, or the professions open new research perspectives. As an institution committed to both the production and the dissemination of knowledge, the University will experiment with greater flexibility in faculty assignments with a goal of becoming more productive, efficient, and more individualized in the ways our faculty undertake their responsibilities.
4. Increase Endowed Leaves. Scholarship sometimes requires concentrated blocks of time. In addi tion, many faculty require time away from the Grounds in order to make their most significant scholarly contributions. Some require access to resources outside this institution, such as archives, laboratories, field study sites, or museums. Some need to travel nationally or internationally to study particular environments, texts, or techniques. In order to provide the time and solitude for new study, for the design of new courses and course materials, and for acquisition and rejuvenation of intellectual tools that will benefit research and teaching, the University endeavors to expand opportunities for paid leave for productive faculty while insisting on rigorous accounting by the faculty for that time.
5. Creatively Use the Center for Advanced Studies. Effective use of the Center for Advanced Studies will allow the University to promote the highest forms of scholarship. The University seeks the funds necessary to endow the center, which is an important mechanism for attracting and retaining our most distinguished faculty members.
6. Establish New Centers. The University seeks funding for the development and continuation of new initiatives such as the Commonwealth Centers that innovatively combine disciplines, draw on particular faculty interests and strengths, or generally offer an exceptional opportunity to move to the forefront of a particular field. An example is a proposed Center for New World Archeological Studies, that would draw on existing strengths while moving the University into the forefront of archeological studies of colonist development and allied areas, thus recognizing our strategic location to implement such studies.
7. Provide Necessary and Appropriate Tools. Laboratory equipment, facilities, and library resources are the traditional tools of scholars. In addition to ensuring that the University stays abreast of changes in these resources, the University must also invest in new generations of computers and their associated data bases, since they now provide the basis for much of the creation and exploration of knowledge in the humanities, the arts, and the professions as well as the theoretical and applied sciences. Through the Equipment Trust Fund, the Commonwealt h has recognized the importance of such tools; the University seeks to tap this, as well as new sources of funds, to ensure that its equipment is appropriate for its scholarly and teaching programs.
8. Foster Interdisciplinary Study. With the understanding that disciplinary boundaries are shifting and that new knowledge is at least as likely to develop between or beyond the established disciplines as within them, we seek to maintain strong departments while encouraging faculty and students to explore the many and novel ways in which knowledge crosses, transcends, and reconfigures disciplines. The University plans to facilitate this exchange of knowledge and the generation of new knowledge by encouraging participation in conferences, workshops, institutes, and centers, by ensuring that administrative structures can accommodate and facilitate creative interactions, and by funding new positions to be shared by different departments and schools. In addition, the University will seek donor support and endowments for faculty and student forums and special support systems devoted to interdisciplinary scholarship, including endowments for conferences and visiting scholars, research databases, equipment, and staffing.
9. Develop Global Perspectives. The University continues to recognize the interdependence of cultures and society s need to understand the common experience of cultural groups, through, among others, its programs in African-American studies, New World studies, and East Asian studies. In the coming decade, area study programs will be augmented. In addition, the University will explore the expansion of study-abroad opportunities and exchange programs, as well as an increase in the number of language houses.
10. Create Collaborative Partnerships. Recognizing the value of participating in interdepartmental and interschool activities, multiuniversity research consortia, innovative partnerships with corporate entities and public institutions, and electronic computing and library networks of regional, national, and global scale, the University will develop selective collaborative partnerships for research among its departments and schools and between the University and other institu tions. As one example, the University plans to explore the viability of creating a School of Health and Health Policy Studies to support, among other things, health services research, health economics, health policy studies, health informatics, and a statewide health data bank. Such a school, based in the Health Sciences Center, would accommodate academic programs in key health-related disciplines that belong strictly to neither medicine nor nursing and would give an academic home to present and projected programs in the allied health p r o f e s s i o n s .
THE DISSEMINATION OF KNOWLEDGE
Objectives
As the capstone of our nation s formal educational system, universities have an obligation to teach to disseminate both the knowledge they receive and the knowledge they create. In planning for this University in the twenty-first century, we must explore innovative ways to share knowledge. While the methods vary, the goal does not: to channel the diverse talents of the community into the communication of knowledge.
The balance between teaching and research at universities, at least as it involves the undergraduate curriculum, is the subject of ongoing examination, at this institution, at universities generally, and within society at large. Facile criticisms that suggest there is clearly too much research and not enough teaching may stem in part from a lack of appreciation of the qualitative benefits that accrue to undergraduates from an educated faculty engaged in the pursuit of knowledge of a modern university, qualities that set a university education apart from that available at a liberal arts college. The criticism is more warranted when it stems from our failure to find more creative ways to focus resources in the pursuit of gifted teaching, and we must ensure that we maximize the delivery of our existing resources. The question is one of striking the appropriate balance in time and attention; we do not believe there is an inherent conflict in principle between the discovery and the dissemination of knowledge to a community of learners. They are not isolated spheres, where improvements in one necessarily cause losses in the other. More often than not, the quality of teaching is enri ched and enlivened by an instructor s ability to go beyond the information provided in texts and to bring new information and novel perspectives to issues under discussion, perspectives and information that have been acquired in the process of scholarship.
We must provide to our undergraduates a rigorous education that includes maximum contact with instructors involved in both the generation and dissemination of knowledge. Simultaneously, we must provide to our professional students the perspectives and skills they will need to be contributing leaders of their professions, and provide to our graduate students the knowledge and skills they will need to be the intellectual leaders of future generations, as well as the classroom experience that will train outstanding teachers in the future.
There are many types of learners at a university. Faculty are engaged in lifelong learning through their scholarship and their interactions with collaborators, undergraduate, graduate, and professional students. Students are, quite obviously, learners, but they also share responsibility for the thoughtful use and transmission of the knowledge they have acquired. Students of all levels deserve excellent teaching, and in turn they must be encouraged to use their knowledge for the enrichment of society. Graduate students are apprentices in both research and teaching, and they must be accorded opportunities to practice and refine their skills.
Strategies
1. Provide Incentives for Superior Teaching. The University places great value on the quality of instruction at all levels of the curriculum. Some of the current public debate about higher education stems from a belief that universities, through their own internal mechanisms as well as external forces, provide incentives that emphasize research at the expense of teaching. Just as this institution rejects the notion that superior teaching should be separated from creative scholarship, it also recognizes a need to ensure that outstanding teaching is recognized and rewarded so that the appropriate balance can be struck and maintained. The creation of endowed chairs that recognize distinguished teaching, such as the Cavaliers Distinguished T e a c h i n g P r o f e s s orship, is one important element of this strategy, as are funded teaching awards and summer curricular grants. Appropriate career recognition mechanisms that acknowledge and reward distinction in teaching toward the end of a c a r e e r w i l l a l s o b e e x p l o r e d .
2. Evaluate and Monitor Teaching to Ensure Excellence. This University will continue to encourage excellence, vitality, rigor, and innovation in instruction through regular assessment of teaching. The institution will provide training and support to assure that teaching by faculty at all levels and by advanced graduate and postdoctoral students is effective. The strong competitive position of the University means that it has a right to insist in the tenure process on distinguished teaching as well as distinguished scholarship. The University intends to use evaluation tools that will ensure the careful assessment and appropriate weighting of teaching in the tenure process.
3. Assess Curriculum Against Articulated Goals. Since formal education should be more than a series of random encounters, the University supports the establishment of articulated goals as to what particular schools and programs hope to accomplish through their undergraduate curricula and teaching. The institution will then engage in rigorous and ongoing assessment of how well these goals are being met. The University views the articulation and assessment of educational goals as mutually reinforcing and a necessary part of an evolving process.
4. Examine Teaching Strategies. The University should explore diverse pedagogical strategies for the sharing and delivery of knowledge. In doing this, it is important to attempt to match the method of delivery with the coherence and depth of the subject matter, in order to avoid superficial approaches that are at odds with the concept of higher education. Examples of the kind of innovative teaching initiatives the University will explore include:
5. Increase Interaction Between Faculty and Students. Students acquire a love of learning through more than the formal classroom experience. One of the advantages of being a student at a research university is the opportunity to interact with faculty members and graduate students whose own inquisitive spirits and examples can spark in the student a similar lifelong intellectual quest. Opportunities to discuss faculty members scholarship in informal settings are accordingly an important part of the educational environment, particularly at this University, with its rich heritage of the academical village. The University will seek opportunities, such as informal colloquia in residential colleges and o ther interactive forums, to ensure that the educational environment extends beyond the walls of the classrooms.
6. Maximize Available Teaching Resources. Resources for teaching faculty, like all resources today, are constrained. Within the limits of available resources, the University seeks to maximize contact between students and faculty, expecting that such interaction will lead to innovative teaching and to involving students in the excitement, challenge, and satisfaction of creating and applying knowledge. This may involve carefully planned use of technological innovations, such as interactive video teaching and computer software, for the dissemination of knowledge in specific areas or disciplines that lend themselves to these methods, in order to free up time and resources needed for more intensive student-faculty interaction in other areas.
7. Recognize and Support Differential Teaching Efforts. Within schools and departments, similar expectations for the amount and type of teaching apply to all faculty, except where outside funding or other compelling reasons (such as administrative assignments) justify reducing a faculty member s teaching loads. Cognizant that the optimal balance between teaching and research for a faculty member may not be invariant over a career, and that greater quantities of teaching (and lesser quantities of scholarship) may be more appropriate for individual faculty at some points in their academic careers than at others, the University plans to explore the use of teaching contracts that take such variations into account, and, where appropriate, reward faculty decisions to teach more. The University seeks to focus as well on other ways to reward superior teaching and to prompt gifted teachers to offer additional courses, such as by awarding summer grants to such faculty members.
8. Creatively Use Graduate Students. The University believes that the availability not only of faculty members who are renowned in their fields but also of graduate students who themselves are acquiring and producing important knowledge is one of the distinctive benefits of acquiring an undergraduate education at a major research university. The University is committed to usin g graduate students more effectively as teachers, both because this increases the scope of educational opportunities for the undergraduate students and because it fulfills the institution s obligation to prepare graduate students for their own careers. Such opportunities for undergraduates include seminars and other forms of close involvement with graduate students in their specialty fields of research. The University will continue to undertake serious efforts to make its graduate students effective teachers through the Teaching Resource Center and the active commitment of the faculty to provide the n e c e s s a r y t r a i n i n g .
9. Emphasize the Linkages Among the Creation, Dissemination, and Application of Knowledge. The University seeks to emphasize in curricula across the University the dynamic interdependency of research, teaching, and service. A prime example of this interdependency occurs in the fine arts. The Bayly Museum, for example, involves students in its activities by offering internships and museum-based academic courses that introduce students to issues in curatorial responsibility. Similarly, other fine arts, such as music and the visual and dramatic arts link theory to performance and exhibition and require resources for adequate practice, studio, and performance facilities and for the sustenance of quality performing groups.
10. Promote the Publication of Scholarship. As a means to share scholarship, disseminate information, and train graduate students, the University will continue to support noteworthy publication projects. Journals such as Callaloo and the Virginia Quarterly Review, will be encouraged, as will the continued editing of the Papers of George Washington and the Papers of James Madison. Through the University Press, we strive to gain recognition as a purveyor of original and important scholarship. We seek the resources to maintain and expand this kind of publishing.
11. Accommodate Cross-Enrollment. The University encourages the cross-enrollment of learners among schools and departments. The institution sees study outside one s major department or school as a part of the preparation of a well-rounded citizenry and hopes to publicize such opportunities and to reduce administrative barriers to such cross-registration.
12. Equip Students to Meet Society's Evolving Needs. As the University has a dual responsibility to its students and to society to prepare students for productive careers, the University will continually monitor and reexamine its academic programs, enrollment patterns, and curricular goals in light of anticipated workforce needs and qualification requirements for the various professions for which the University prepares students.
13. Support Clinch Valley College in Becoming a Comprehensive Institution. Clinch Valley College, the branch campus of the University of Virginia, gained four- year status in 1968. The challenge now for Clinch Valley is to become a comprehensive institution with programs in the arts, health, technology, and graduate education, thereby enlarging the educational opportunities available to the residents of Southwest Virginia and the Commonwealth.
THE APPLICATION OF KNOWLEDGE
Objectives
The larger community, especially the Commonwealth of Virginia and the nation, is a major beneficiary of the knowledge that is created and disseminated by the University. Some of this benefit is implicit in the process and product of the University s dual missions of teaching and research. Universities are uniquely situated to provide the wider community with the knowledge necessary to fashion intelligent solutions as well as the education of leaders who will implement those solutions. Public service that applies knowledge is rendered both by individual members of the University community, including faculty, students, staff, and alumni, and by the University as an institution.
The University is a place where the frontiers of knowledge are pushed outward. The diverse products of this University s schools and departments include technological innovations, new diagnostic and therapeutic procedures, scientific and social theories, and skilled analysis of economic, social, cultural, educational, ethical, and legal problems, all of which shape and change society in profound ways. In a fundamental sense, all our students acquire intellectual skills and traits of an educated citizenry that s e r v e t h e m a l l t h e i r l i v e s and that equip them to become contributing members of society and of their professions. Our students in professional programs in architecture, business, education, engineering, nursing, law, and medicine employ their knowledge gained within the Grounds to the resolutions of issues in the world beyond. Such programs remind us of the direct ways in which dissemination of knowledge leads to its application.
The University supports service that is consistent with its mission and scholarly priorities and that is cognizant of the needs of society. Service rendered by the University takes many forms, such as through the provision of comprehensive health care; consultative services for government, industry, and education; continuing education for government, business, and the professions; library, data, research, and evaluative services; engineering and technology development; licensing and certification services; applied research to improve education, government, health, and the environment; cultural and intellectual enrichment; and fine arts events and activities. For all of these service initiatives, our mission remains that defined by Thomas Jefferson for this institution: to use our knowledge for the prosperity, health, and happiness of the human race.
Society now looks to universities as sources of practical assistance, as data banks, as public service agencies, as laboratories for problem-solving, as direct providers of essential services, and as a model for social change without social upheaval. And we respond to these increased societal requests and obligations from the unique perspective of a university that of a dispassionate provider of knowledge and its products.
A key question for the 1990s is how the University should balance the challenges of service, our relationships and responsibilities to society, the needs of our internal student groups, and the talents and commitments of our faculty and staff. During this decade, we intend to develop more effective mechanisms for applying the knowledge generated inside the institution to the world outside, recognizing always that the application of knowledge is a corollary of, and not a competitor with, the creation and dissemina t i o n o f k n o w l e d g e .
Strategies
1. Integrate Service into Instructional Programs. At the school and departmental levels, public service opportunities for students and faculty can link service initiatives thematically to elements of the curriculum. Such initiatives can include academic credit for academically-based, faculty- supervised public service projects, the expansion of academic internship and field study opportunities in areas that are derived from and reinforce the University s scholarly strengths and priorities, and the use of new programs such as University reading holidays and short courses for this purpose. Such linkage of scholarship and service acquaints students with the real-life implications o f t h e i r s t u d i e s .
2. Recognize and Reward Service. The application of knowledge, when integrated with its creation and dissemination, is appropriately an element of the promotion and tenure process, and the University will develop meaningful ways to measure and evaluate such service, while continuing to require that faculty given tenure have met the highest standards of teaching and research.
3. Offer the Learning Resources of the University Throughout the Commonwealth. Through the Division of Continuing Education, the professional schools, specialized centers and institutes, and the libraries, the University will create increased opportunities for lifelong learning and leadership development for members of the professions, for corporate and government executives, for alumni, and for the general public. Through centers such as the Southwest Center in Abingdon and the joint centers this University has established in Northern Virginia, Hampton, and Roanoke with Virginia Polytechnic Institute, the University will offer appropriate, strategically located courses to interested audiences throughout the Commonwealth. In addition, through interactive video and computer technology, the University will expand its outreach programs to cover additional geographical areas within the Commonwealth.
4. Assist Education Throughout the Commonwealth. Education is a lifelong venture. Just as the University prepares an educated and responsible citizenry, so, too, the future success of the Universi ty in fulfilling its missions will depend on the kinds of educational training our students bring with them when they arrive. The University will develop programs to extend the talents of the faculty to other educational institutions throughout the Commonwealth, particularly public schools and community colleges, and to assist public K-12 schools and their teachers in improving the quality and effectiveness of precollege educational process.
5. Assist State and Local Governance Throughout the Commonwealth. Many of the University s service initiatives involve municipal, county, and state governance issues. Through the Center for Public Service, the Institute of Law, Psychiatry, and Public Policy, and programs in a number of schools and departments, the University intends to continue to serve the Commonwealth and its agencies, legislative bodies, and communities. Among the services we provide are the collection and analysis of demographic, economic, health, and environmental statistics and projections for planning purposes, business forecasting, networked advising on public administration, consultative assistance to governmental commissions, and assistance with the drafting of legislation and the formulating of public policy.
6. Enhance Health Care Throughout the Commonwealth. One of the University s chief forms of service is health care. As we approach the year 2000, the institution will maintain its commitment to make comprehensive health care services available to the people of the Commonwealth and the mid- Atlantic region and, in certain specialties, to people from around the nation and the world. We will also maintain our commitment to the sciences that are fundamental to the exploration of human health and disease and to the discovery of new means of preserving or restoring health. We will focus our health care programs to meet the particular needs of our society and to address critical issues of health policy and health education for the Commonwealth and the nation. We will bring our research and clinical strengths to bear on devising better means of delivering efficacious, cost-effective health care, on assessing the use of technology and the outcomes of care, on adapting instructional programs and clinical facilities to accommodate greater demands for ambulatory and community- based care, on linking the University by electronic means with underserved areas of the Commonwealth, and on testing in this region of Virginia new organizational and delivery models for assuring all citizens access to basic health c a r e .
7. Promote Conferences on Policy Issues Involving Both Scholarship and Service. Taking advantage of its heritage and proximity to the capitals of the Commonwealth and the nation, the University intends to establish and promote itself as a special setting for conferences on policy issues of local, state, national, and global importance that involve both scholarship and service, and to embed these activities into academic programs.
8. Link the University with Other Institutions and Communities. The University plans to apply its knowledge- based resources by improving electronic communication and computer networks that link us with other institutions, agencies, and individuals. These networks provide access throughout the Commonwealth to the University s libraries, computing and information services, health care services, and research and consultative services, and will support educational and professional services in disadvantaged and underserved areas.
9. Cultivate Collaborative Ventures. The University seeks to cultivate ties with the public and private sectors in areas where collaboration can benefit all parties. These ventures conjoin research, teaching, and service, and may involve both faculty and students. Virginia s Center for Innovative Technology, of which the University is a prominent member, and the Newport News Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility, whose design originated in a University laboratory, demonstrate the value of partnerships involving the University with the state, industry, and other universities.
10. Integrate Research and Service. The University encourages service initiatives that make explicit the linkage between the laboratory, classroom, and society. For example, the Commonwealth Plan for the Health of Virginians, an initiative that integrates service and scholarship, basic research and clinical practice, a nd marshals these resources for improving the health status of the people of Virginia, was established in 1989 as a partnership between Virginia Commonwealth University/Medical College of Virginia and the University of Virginia. This program proposes to develop two institutions basic and clinical research initiatives together. The Commonwealth Plan establishes explicit and powerful linkage between research and patient care, extending the expertise of the laboratory into both the clinical and the public health arenas in a dozen targeted areas. The University seeks resources to implement the Commonwealth Plan.
11. Involve the University in the Local Community. The University will continue to reach out to the surrounding community and to promote dialogue and cooperation with it. Specifically, the institution is committed to cooperative planning with the community for accommodation of possible modest enrollment growth, expansion of facilities, management of safety-related and transportation services, and implementation of the University s facilities master plan. Through the Citizen-Scholar Program, many of the University s regular course offerings are open to adults in the community as are a wide variety of non-credit courses and conferences. Moreover, the University will continue to make available to the public its cultural and athletic programs and expanded fine arts programs as well as its programs for comprehensive health care, wellness, and fitness and will support innovative extracurricular activities, including joint University-community initiatives.
12. Expand Summer and Other Special Course Offerings. The University will explore creating additional courses, seminars, workshops, and institutes through summer session and other special offerings for teachers, business executives, elementary, middle-school, and high-school students in both enrichment and upward-bound activities, and alumni.
The Community of Learners
< B > G u i d i n g P r i n c i p l e s
As conceived for the academical village, the life of the mind encompasses a community of diverse learners, all of whom are engaged in what Thomas Jefferson described as generating, sharing, and testing knowledge that is useful and beneficial to a self-governing people. The process of learning here is an active, lifelong pursuit that depends on the qualities of the participants and that creates an informed and responsible citizenry prepared for leadership.
Our principal goal is to create and sustain a community of learners, free to engage in the wide-ranging exercise of creating, sharing, and applying knowledge. We do so according to the norm of inquiry defined by Thomas Jefferson: We are not afraid to follow the truth, wherever it may lead, nor tolerate any error so long as reason is l e f t f r e e t o c o m b a t i t . & # 3 4 ;
We champion diversity in our thinking and discourse as well as in the composition of our community. We recognize that individuals and groups make contributions to the University community and to constituencies beyond the boundaries of the academical village, reflecting varied talents, assumptions, heritages, and accomplishments. We believe that a community that is intellectually and culturally heterogeneous, and willing to engage in the academic rigor of discussing and testing conflicting views, is necessary both to meet the highest aspirations of a national university and to prepare our students to become productive citizens in a rapidly changing and increasingly globalized society. The new international community requires all participants to possess broad general knowledge, an understanding of the global economy, an ability to bridge cultures and sociopolitical systems, an appreciation of the global ecosystem, and a willingness to work collaboratively on common problems. We must also be vigilant to make our classrooms, offices, and other facilities accessible to those with physical disabilities and learning attainable for those with communication and specific learning disabilities.
The composition of society is changing in both the Commonwealth and the nation. Demographic projections indicate that the in-state college-age populatio n, after declining in the early 1990s, will increase dramatically by the end of the decade. At the same time, the Commonwealth s elderly population is growing rapidly, especially since Virginia continues to attract retirees from other regions of the country. Population groups now defined as minorities will, as an aggregate, be the majority in many regions of the United States by the year 2000. Changes in demography alter society s needs for what universities can provide in education, research and scholarship, professional training and career development, health care, cultural enrichment, and arts advancement. The University is committed to a curriculum and to a faculty with expertise that will address the interests and needs of this population. Preparing our students for the twenty-first c e n t u r y d e m a n d s n o l e s s .
< B > O b j e c t i v e s
The principal wealth of a great university resides neither in its bricks and mortar nor in its tangible equipment, but in its faculty. We must ensure that those who are equipped to discover knowledge are equally prepared to disseminate it, for the University s preeminent goal for the year 2000 is to sustain and further develop a distinguished faculty superbly prepared to discover, create, and communicate. The obligation of the university scholar is not to do work in the abstract, but to work in the context of communicating that work to students, other faculty, and society at large.
The heart of a national university is the faculty it attracts and retains. This is not just because of the institutional reputation that will follow. Without a faculty of the first-rank, we cannot begin to fulfill our ambitions for either the creation, the dissemination, or the application of knowledge. And, without a faculty of the first rank, we cannot hope to attract those students who will be the future leaders of our society and who will make their own significant contributions to the Commonwealth, the nation, and the world. Thus, the University places great value on its faculty and supports them in participating fully in the life of the academical village, in contributing in substantial ways to knowledge in their areas of inquiry throughout their professional lives, a nd in meeting always the highest standards of excellence in their teaching, scholarship, and service.
< B > S t r a t e g i e s
1. Focus on Faculty Recruiting and Retention. The University aggressively plans to retain and recruit distinguished faculty of all ranks, deliberately using endowed professorships, the Center for Advanced Studies, Commonwealth Centers created by the state, and other mechanisms. Efforts will focus particularly on disciplines that have been determined through strategic planning to be essential either to sustaining or achieving academic e x c e l l e n c e .
2. Provide the Necessary Material Resources. To sustain and further develop a distinguished faculty, the University must be prepared to provide the necessary material resources. To compete successfully for faculty, the University must provide working conditions that compare favorably to those at the best institutions in the country. This will require substantial investment in the form of endowed professorships, competitive salaries and benefits, research funds, endowed Sesquicentennial Associates and other faculty research leave programs, technological equipment, library resources, personnel and services, and adequate office and laboratory space.
3. Recruit and Retain a Diverse Faculty. As student populations become more diverse, and as world communities and cultures become more interdependent, the University must actively seek to recruit a heterogeneous faculty committed to the goals of equal opportunity. The institution also must involve more women and minority persons in the administrative functions and governance of the University and its schools, departments, and committees. The perspectives of faculty of different races, genders, and cultures will fortify the curriculum, enrich its institutional governance, and facilitate the rigorous exploration and testing of ideas.
4. Recognize and Reward Evolving Career Strengths. Faculty members interests and optimal talents often change over time, and the patterns of such career cycles vary both individually and by specialty field. The University must be aware of, and respond appropriately to, the faculty s evolving career strengths. This must be regarded as a positive good, optimall y deploying the institution s resources across the creation, dissemination, and application of knowledge, and should be rewarded accordingly. While research is a major responsibility of the faculty, so too are its sharing and application. Some faculty are better able to create knowledge at one stage of their careers than another. Some find renewed vitality in teaching graduate students after periods of intense advanced research. Others grow into master teachers as they mature and develop a wealth of specialized expertise. The University endeavors to use the best strengths of tenured faculty throughout their careers and to reward varied and productive use of talents. We strive to support in creative ways those faculty who at mid- career wish to redirect their scholarly work and may require new skills, additional education, or protected time in order to establish their new career directions. As such flexibility also requires accountability, the University will ensure systematic review of the processes and products.
5. Stimulate and Reward Diverse Measures of Productivity. The University seeks to generate processes for faculty performance review that take into consideration and reward distinction that invigorates and strengthens our community. Areas of distinction might include the production of scholarship that tangibly improves teaching, scholarly service both within and outside the University, innovative curriculum development, exciting teaching, and participation in activities that foster student development and intellectual engagement outside the traditional classroom setting. In a diverse community of learners, the University pursues multiple means for stimulating faculty productivity and endeavors to raise the resources necessary to support the faculty s development of innovative activities.
6. Recognize Distinct Contributions in Different Fields. Just as individual faculty members may vary in their optimal balance of creating, disseminating, and applying knowledge, so, too, do different fields and departments perceive the basic balance differently. The contributions of the philosopher through scholarship to society are as important, though perhaps not as direct, as are the day- to-day services of the health care professional, who directly brings the University s resources to bear on improving the health of the Commonwealth s citizens. That we consider the one to be more heavily engaged in research" and the other in service" points up the essential arbitrariness of these categories. Thus, flexible packaging of teaching, research, and service should be encouraged. The University aspires to apply rigorous, fair, and yet flexible standards for tenure, promotion, and other rewards consistent with its multiple mission.
7. Provide a Supportive Environment. The University must foster collegiality and cooperative ventures among the faculty of the different departments and schools. A pervasive spirit of inquisitiveness and mutual support is as important in the long run to the ability of the faculty to meet the institution s goals as are the material elements of support. The University will also continue to support the efforts of faculty and academic units to obtain external funding for their scholarly endeavors, including grants and fellowships and study and teaching at other institutions. In addition, the University must be able to attract diverse and talented students of all levels to ensure that faculty members have the kind of student support necessary to meet the institution s goals. Finally, faculty also have career cycles in terms of their work, home, and family responsibilities. The University wants to work creatively to assure appropriate flexibility for faculty and for general faculty and staff to accommodate these important concerns.
8. Use the Strengths of Emeritus Faculty. The University s retired faculty constitutes a distinguished, talented, and wise group of individuals. Many emeritus faculty are eager to contribute to the larger life of the community. The University endeavors to find the resources to tap the strengths of this group in meeting the multiple demands on the institution. Among other possibilities, retired faculty may be able to offer specialized instruction in particular areas and in special formats, such as short courses, reading holidays, and informal exchanges that occur in residential colleges and other settings outside the clas s r o o m .
Objectives
Our undergraduate student body currently is one of the most highly qualified and exciting enrolled at any public institution of higher learning. We are challenged by the quality of our undergraduate students and proud of the opportunities we provide them for personal and academic growth. Our system of self-governance, our honor system that insists on personal and public integrity, our emphasis on life outside the classroom, our programs for leadership development, have all created and sustained the University s reputation for a rich undergraduate experience. Such programs are predicated on the belief that much practical learning occurs beyond the classroom. Moreover, by encouraging students to have close contact with the providers of knowledge faculty and graduate students alike the University creates an environment in which students encounter high expectations and great intellectual excitement; it is the University s job to ensure that undergraduates become acculturated to these features of a research university.
Our academic programs are varied, involving both the College and the professional undergraduate schools with various curricular approaches and styles of instruction. Learning here takes place in large lecture halls, in seminars, through internships, in research labs, and through independent study. We seek to diversify the undergraduate learning experience further by developing opportunities both inside and outside the University to reach more populations and to stimulate more students here to explore new areas of learning.
A major goal is to attract a highly qualified, motivated, and heterogeneous undergraduate student body. We seek in our students diversity of background as well as variety of talent, recognizing that the breadth and depth of the aggregate undergraduate experience contribute significantly to the excellence of the University.
< B > S t r a t e g i e s
1. Provide Financial Resources to Assemble and Retain a Talented and Diverse Student Body. The University seeks to assemble an undergraduate community comprising the most highly qualified men and women of diverse backgrounds. We want to enrich our population with more Afri can-American, Asian, and Hispanic students, more students from abroad and from disadvantaged areas of the Commonwealth, as well as students gifted in sciences, humanities, and the performing and fine arts. To create a truly diverse community, the University must provide full need-based undergraduate grant, loan, and work-study assistance and must provide the financial, advisory, and other resources necessary to assure their success here. The University must enhance its existing scholarship programs, while particularly seeking new funds for need-based scholarships. We hope to support students studying and working abroad and to encourage cooperative education as a form of student employment in faculty research projects, with such students alternating work terms with study terms.
2. Ensure Individual Learning Experiences. All students should be exposed to educational experiences that push the limits of their personal capabilities and thereby help them identify, test, and begin to refine their own unique talents, skills, and aspirations. This requires careful attention to the needs of individual students, as well as innovative pedagogical offerings and technologies. We encourage students to develop intellectual autonomy and direct their own learning.
3. Provide Comprehensive First-Year Living Experiences. The University endeavors to integrate first-year students into the University community by continuing to require on-Grounds residence in an atmosphere of increased collegiality and responsible behavior.
4. Improve Advising Structures and Academic Support Programs. The University will continue to develop academic advising structures and other academic support programs sufficient to meet student need and to enable increased retention of all students. Interaction among students, staff, and faculty on matters of academic, personal, and career choice is important for the total growth of students. We will make information available to students about competitive scholarships and other awards for study at other institutions, and encourage students to apply for them.
5. Foster the Tradition of Self-Governance and Appreciation of the Honor System. The University aspires to cultivate among new gen erations of students both undergraduate and graduate a critical understanding of and support for the honor system, an essential program of self-government within the student body. The honor system is the University s most effective tool for teaching theoretical and applied ethics and personal responsibility. In addition, the University encourages the tradition of student responsibility for educational, cultural, and recreational programs.
6. Provide Practical Education about Contemporary Issues. Through orientation and peer-education programs, residence hall-based co-curricular education, sorority and fraternity programs, and other means, the University endeavors to provide practical education about contemporary social and ethical issues. These include, but are not limited to, a greater sensitivity to issues of racial harmony, drug and alcohol abuse, sexual assault, sexual behavior and health issues, and forms of harassment and abuse. Such programs are part of the education that occurs outside the classroom with the intent of preparing citizens to respond responsibly to contemporary issues, where debate in encouraged and ideas freely explored.
7. Encourage Student Public Service. Since students are participating in a process that will prepare them to become society s leaders, the University encourages students to remain engaged in the surrounding world. It thus seeks additional endowment support for public service enterprises and hopes to expand funding for student-initiated public service ventures such as Madison House.
Graduate and Professional Learners
< B > O b j e c t i v e s
Approximately 35 percent of the University s current full-time student population consists of post-baccalaureate learners. These individuals comprise a highly educated, focused, and disciplined group of learners who have come to the University to explore in depth their chosen field. These students serve the entire community of learners in a dual capacity.
Many graduate students are apprentice faculty, requiring time and resources to develop their expertise in teaching and research, but they also serve as research assistants to the faculty and as mentors and role models to undergraduates. They serve in the class rooms and in the laboratories even as they are creating new knowledge in their disciplines. These students add to a rich curricular and intellectual environment, and are one of the distinguishing strengths of a modern research university. As effective training of graduate students in research as well as in teaching is a major responsibility of the faculty charged with the development of the next generation s scholars, we plan to draw increasingly on our graduate students in setting our institutional agenda.
Professional students also have an important presence in the University setting. These students in law, medicine, business, engineering, nursing, education, and architecture are developing the skills to apply their knowledge in direct ways that will improve the quality of life for the citizenry. The professional schools are enriched by the University s creativity and their place among the community of learners. The perspectives that professional students acquire and the ways of inquiry that they learn are important for the advancement of their professions. At the same time, these students serve as a bridge between the academy and the outside environment.
Strategies
1. Provide the Resources to Attract Distinguished Graduate and Professional Students. The University will aggressively recruit the most talented graduate and professional students. Its ability to attract such students enriches the environment, not just for the undergraduates, who are the beneficiaries of their wisdom and excitement, but also the faculty, who are sustained by their close working contact with students whose intellectual interests are focused and advanced. In addition, top graduate students usually are offered impressive financial packages from competing institutions. The University endeavors to provide the resources that will enable it to offer competitive fellowships, scholarships, teaching assistantships, and f i n a n c i a l a i d .
2. Attract Minority Students. The University will develop comprehensive strategies to recruit minority students for graduate and professional study that begin with the undergraduate populations at this and other institutions. These populations include African-Americans, Asia ns, Hispanics, and students from underserved areas of the Commonwealth, the nation, and the world. We hope to develop interuniversity programs to cultivate interest among minority populations in graduate and professional education. Further, we will seek funds to attract highly qualified minority students to graduate and professional programs a l i k e .
3. Provide Training of Graduate Students as Future Educators. The University will ensure that programs exist to train graduate students well to be the educators of the future. The Teaching Resource Center is one example of a recent innovation that addresses the needs of both graduate students and faculty.
4. Promote Interaction Among Graduate and Professional Students. Adequate facilities must be provided to encourage interaction among graduate and professional students enrolled in highly specialized curricula. Students in law, medicine, and business, attending classes in separate schools, often feel separated one from another. Graduate and post-doctoral students in arts and sciences, education, architecture, and engineering often feel isolated from the remainder of the student body. The University hopes to integrate them into the larger community by promoting for them interdisciplinary academic and social programs and governance structures. Physical space must also be provided to facilitate these interactions.
5. Integrate Graduate and Professional Students into the University Community. The University will explore opportunities to include graduate and professional students more fully in the life of the academical village. This will require providing more living spaces for some of these students in residential colleges and dormitories, creating opportunities for these students to serve as tutors and to teach seminars and short courses in their areas of expertise, assuring greater graduate and professional student representation in student governance, and the like. In short, the University intends to find ways to reconceive the academical village so as to more fully integrate living and learning for undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students.
6. Expand Programming and Resources for International Graduate and Professional Student s. International students at the graduate and professional levels contribute to the quality of the community of learners. Students from other countries bring with them new perspectives of different cultures. Foreign students at the graduate and professional levels often times need services to acclimate them to a different culture. The University must increase programming and resources for this population through the International Student Center, educational and cultural opportunities for spouses of foreign students, and personal connections with the broader community. Moreover, the University must ensure that such students are proficient in English before they s e r v e a s t e a c h i n g a s s i s t a n t s .
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Objectives
The University of Virginia s community of learners, beyond its faculty and undergraduate, graduate, and professional student populations, includes a highly committed and qualified staff, loyal alumni, and publics within the Commonwealth and throughout the nation.
The University could not accomplish its educational mission without the staff who often function as hidden partners in the academic enterprise. Serving on front lines with students and faculty, maintaining the structures in which the University functions, providing the human resources that facilitate all of the University s objectives, they are indispensable to the learning process. We must find positive ways to recognize the many contributions of the staff to this community, while nurturing their personal and p r o f e s s i o n a l g r o w t h .
The University s alumni support the University by their continued enthusiasm for what we do, by their participation in the academical village, and by their active interest in the future of this institution. And the publics beyond the serpentine walls help us to remember our responsibility to society, participating at the same time with us in the active creation, dissemination, and application of knowledge. Approximately ten percent of our current student population consists of part-time postbaccalaureate learners. Many of these adults are enrolled in off-Grounds masters degree programs.
These learners, like our graduate and professional students, remind us of the wisdom of T homas Jefferson s belief that we are simultaneously teachers and students throughout life. As we look to the twenty-first century, we must do a better job of drawing these communities of lifelong learners into our common enterprise.
Strategies
1. Provide Professional and Personal Advancement for Staff. The University recognizes the need to maintain a highly qualified support staff and foster their continued growth and development. The University is committed to exploring ways to engage qualified staff in learning opportunities for their professional and personal advancement. Such advancement opportunities may involve development of benefits packages, career counseling services, tuition remission plans, agreements with community colleges within the Commonwealth, workshops provided on Grounds, advising programs, and the like.
2. Involve Alumni in On-Grounds Educational Experiences. Through existing resources such as the Division of Continuing Education, the Office of Career Planning and Placement, and the Alumni Association, the University will seek to provide and expand opportunities to bring alumni back to the University and engage them in the lifelong quest for knowledge that is at the heart of the University s mission. Alumni offer expertise in many capacities and hereby provide a resource for interactive learning that will benefit the entire community. The University will institute additional means to provide meaningful lifelong learning opportunities for alumni through summer classes, institutes, and workshops.
3. Make Available University Resources to the Public. The publics at large, whether or not they have been affiliated previously with the University, should be considered a part of the University s broad community. This institution currently serves these publics through many outreach programs offered by the Division of Continuing Education and the various schools and through our technological networks of educational programs and library resources. In the future, enhanced computer and telecommunication resources will allow the University to service these publics in even more varied ways. Further, the University will consider more flexible educational programming so that it might accommodate a broader array of learners in its e d u c a t i o n a l p r o g r a m s .
As a center of higher learning a university must be committed to the acquisition of new knowledge as well as to the dissemination of existing knowledge to its students. A scholar can sustain excellence in teaching through the years only by remaining a student himself." President Frank L. Hereford, Jr., 1981
In advising the course of [students ] reading, I endeavor to keep their attention fixed on the main objects of all science, the freedom and happiness of man. So that coming to bear a share in the councils and government of their country, they will keep ever in view the sole objects of all legitimate government." Thomas Jefferson, 1810
The Academic Environment
Guiding Principles
Thomas Jefferson created his academical village through the configuration of the buildings that flank and enclose the Lawn. Pavilions housed faculty members and classrooms and were connected by a range of dormitories;" at the head of it all was the Rotunda housing a library and other public space. At the south end of the Lawn, which offered views of the mountains, was a grassy expanse reserved by Jefferson for the students daily physical exercise and recreation. Jefferson s academical village was a place that joined educational and residential purposes in a tranquil and well-proportioned environment. His intent was to configure space to promote the useful exchange of ideas within a community of learners, and to actively integrate the useful arts" including architecture, music, and drawing with the useful sciences" the original subjects taught into the learning environment.
The scale and diversity of the University s learning environment has grown, as it has become the home for slightly more than 18,000 students (as contrasted with the original 68 students in 1825), more than 1,600 full-time faculty members (as contrasted with the original eight), and some 7,600 support staff. Our entire University community now numbers approximately 27,000 persons.
Despite these changes in the scale and complexity of the institution, much of Jefferson s original vision still guides our planning for the future. We still believe that academic knowledge and learning should not be divorced from daily life. We still contend that learning will be enhanced and will have the greatest possibility of being used for the public good if it has personal application to social, moral, ethical, and political issues. We still believe that the means to personalize education reside in the physical spaces we establish for learning. We still believe it essential that faculty of all disciplines interact frequently and informally so that there is useful exchange of knowledge and cross-fertilization of ideas. Devising opportunities for interaction among faculty and students, providing physical access to information through libraries and educational technologies, designi ng living arrangements that help foster a sense of community, are all important means of stimulating the exchange of ideas among diverse members of our community, thereby rejoining and extending Jefferson s vision into the twenty-first century. A particular and pressing challenge is how to accommodate all the functions of a modern research university within national historic spaces.
O b j e c t i v e s
The Lawn was by design a residential college. Linking function and style, this physical environment organized and sustained community life on the Grounds. To the extent that we can accomplish it within our existing physical plant, we will extend this conceptual model and rejoin Thomas Jefferson s original vision of integrated living and learning as basic to the intellectual activity of a university.
Strategies
1. Establish New Residential Colleges. The University intends to create new residential colleges with an academic focus and with diversified programs and physical settings. We will explore locating seminar rooms, computer workstations, and other academic spaces in the residential facilities.These colleges will be one of several housing o p t i o n s a v a i a b l e t o s t u d e n t s .
2. Explore Extending the Residential College Concept to Other Groups. With a focus on residential life and new residential colleges, the University will seek to incorporate within the residential college system new opportunities for language houses and other academic- interest groups, and will explore adapting this model to include other group housing, including sorority and fraternity housing, thus providing them with an important academic core. Further, the University endeavors to develop additional ways to integrate living and learning for those students who do not reside on Grounds, including most graduate, postdoctoral, and professional students.
3. Provide Opportunities for Further Interaction Between Faculty and Students. The University wishes to ensure that students in the residential colleges will have substantial opportunities for faculty contact, through resident faculty and others who share meals and special functions with the students. In addition, the University will sponsor gr aduate students in different disciplines to live in dormitories and residential colleges as junior fellows or resident tutors, ensuring that undergraduate learners have ample opportunities for informal contact with graduate l e a r n e r s .
4. Develop Shared Faculty Space. The faculty must have physical spaces in which to meet to share ideas, to promote the useful exchange of knowledge, and to transcend traditional boundaries between disciplines. While University faculty originally lived in proximity to one another on the Lawn, this is no longer the case. To recapture Jefferson s vision of an academy of scholars, the University will seek funds to develop an appropriate faculty club that will bring together faculty members from its various schools and departments.
5. Expand a Central Student-Activities Space. To facilitate interaction among students who are pursuing different degrees and interests, the University seeks resources to renovate and expand Newcomb Hall, the centrally-located student activities space, to accommodate growth in the size of the student body and to support an even broader range of student activities and interests.
6. Design and Renovate Space to Accommodate Disabilities. All students, faculty, staff, and visitors with disabilities should have full and equal access to all University programs and facilities. The University will assure this access, even within its historic facilities.
7. Ensure Safety on Grounds. All members of the community can most effectively integrate learning and living through an environment that ensures personal safety. The University endeavors to provide such an environment, through upgrading the safety and security features of our physical facilities, a responsive and responsible police department, effective student government, and educational programs designed to increase community and individual awareness of safety concerns.
< B > O b j e c t i v e s
As the steward of Jefferson s inestimable architectural heritage, the University recognizes the importance of the learning experience. Ironically, with the priceless historic Central Grounds comes an inherent tension between the preservation and conservation of our academical villa ge and modern pressures for space allocation and growth. Justifying our need for additional space often conflicts with formulaic state guidelines for institutions of higher learning. Yet many of our historic buildings do not allow for the most pragmatic and flexible use of the structures and facilities surrounding the Lawn. We willingly devote resources to maintenance of the historic Central Grounds, but doing so leaves us with fewer resources with which to create new structures elsewhere. Moreover, whatever new buildings we intend to construct must be planned so as not to detract from the quality and style of the historic e n v i r o n m e n t .
A major objective for the twenty-first century is to carefully balance the preservation of our historic structures with the maintenance of newer facilities and the planning for the additional space we need. Today, the University has more than 500 buildings in Charlottesville and Albemarle, and more than 4,500 acres to manage. Yet, we have outgrown many of our facilities, and now find many faculty without private offices, adequate laboratories and studios, or efficiently situated clinical facilities. As we plan for the future, our physical structures must aid, not impede, the processes of creation, dissemination, and a p p l i c a t i o n o f k n o w l e d g e .
The University actively pursues new and innovative ways to manage, assign, and use space. Scheduling of classes, use of facilities for extracurricular activities, allocation of space for nontraditional learners, including external audiences, must all be balanced against competing needs. Our learners represent communities with multiple demands on their time; as a residential university, we must support them in their requirements for growth outside of the classroom and the curriculum, and we must remain flexible in our expectations of them. Intercollegiate athletics, extracurricular programs through which experiential learning occurs, fine arts events, public lectures, are a few examples of competing demands. It is our responsibility to provide the necessary space resources to foster this enriching environment.
Strategies
1. Acquire Appropriate Space. Many parts of the University are critically short in basic spac e, requiring educationally and competitively unsound compromises such as placing two faculty members in small offices, as occurs in our highly-rated English Department. The University recognizes the significant need to acquire, allocate, and maintain appropriate space for classrooms, faculty offices, laboratories, libraries, and similar facilities, and plans to seek the funding necessary to allow it to design and construct such facilities in ways that will enhance research, improve the formal educational environment, and facilitate the numerous informal interactions that make up the learning experience.
2. Maintain Existing Space. Constructing and renovating educational facilities account for only part of the expense of University structure. We seek appropriate resources from the Commonwealth and other sources to cover the considerable, and ongoing costs of maintaining the various elements of our physical plant.
3. Creatively Use Existing Space. The University seeks innovative ways to manage, assign, and use space, such as making more intensive use of University-wide classroom facilities by assigning available space to classes regardless of school affiliation.
4. Retain the Academic and Residential Character of the Lawn. The University is committed to treating the historic Central Grounds as both academic and residential space, and must renovate, restore, and maintain it as such.
5. Seek Changes in Space Planning Guidelines. In order to obtain the necessary state resources to provide the space this University currently needs, and will increasingly need in the future, the University will advocate changes in the state s space planning guidelines whenever the guidelines do not fully respond to contemporary teaching and research needs, the realities of this University s physical layout (including its national historic buildings), competitive pressures from peer institutions, or the contributions of private funding to the University s present and future construction.
6. Create Responsible Planning Principles and Design Standards. To ensure that its space is appropriate to the academical village of the twenty-first century, the University will adopt planning principles and design standar ds to support the development of cohesive, effective, and unified precincts within the University. To this end, the University has appointed an officer,known as the University Architect, who has overall responsibility for design and physical planning.
7. Cooperate with Neighboring Communities. The University will continue to pursue joint planning and to maintain formal agreements with neighboring communities. It will make available to the community proposals for architectural changes through the proposed University precincts model, regularly seek community advice about development, and actively participate in planning for the communities adjacent to the Grounds. As planning proceeds for new residential colleges, such as a possible college on West Main Street, we will continue exploring with the community possibilities for collaboration on construction and financing of new buildings or renovation and adaptation of existing structures.
The Information Infrastructure
A . L i b r a r i e s
Objectives
When Thomas Jefferson created the University of Virginia, he placed the library in the Rotunda and personally selected the 7,000 books around which learning would occur. Today, the University s facilities include the University Library and its twelve branches; three independent professional school libraries for health sciences, law, and business; and twenty-seven auxiliary departmental libraries. The combined holdings of the libraries include more than 25,000 journals, three million books, one million government documents, two million pieces in the University archives, and ten million manuscripts.
The ways in which we acquire, store, and disseminate information will multiply in the future; in addition to the traditional hard copy" method of storing information, we will rely increasingly on computerized storage and retrieval. This almost certainly means that we will spend comparatively greater sums acquiring access to databases held elsewhere while, at the same time, ensuring that we acquire the kinds of materials that the University needs to own. The 1989 Report of the Commission on the University of the 21st Century envisions an integrated network of resources t h a t s u p p o r t s a c a d e m i c e x cellence. Libraries are the heart of that network a critical link in the generation, preservation, and transmission of knowledge, the fostering of global perspectives, and the development of scientific and t e c h n i c a l l i t e r a c y .
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Strategies
1. Provide Access to Knowledge. The University needs to provide and maintain sufficient space, top-quality facilities, and the requisite resources, technology, and services to build and sustain nationally competitive programs of scholarship, particularly in those disciplines that reflect the University s academic priorities. A significant institutional commitment to the research and instructional infrastructures is essential if the University is to become a model research institution, attract superb scholars to its faculty, and generate excitement in its l e a r n e r s .
2. Provide Access When and Where Needed. For our internal communities, the University plans to be able to deliver requested information directly to the user when and where needed in the most readily accessible format. To this end, the library hopes to expand text retrieval services and to establish electronic information access centers in residential colleges.
3. Create an Effective Mix of Information Access. The University intends to provide cost-effective access to information by achieving a balance among the development of on-site collections and computer facilities, the purchase or creation of specialized databases, and the provision of remote access on an as-needed basis to resources available around the world.
4. Provide Training in Information Resources and Management. The University must ensure that faculty, students, and staff have the skills and knowledge necessary to make effective use of the institution s information resources. To this end, we will increase the education role of librarians and integrate the management of information, especially by computer, into the curricula.
5. Adapt the Library s Infrastructure. The University seeks to ensure that the libraries physical space including the technological infrastructure, properly controlled storage and stack areas, study areas, and electronic classrooms and information centers supports academic excellence.
6. Implem ent Library Evaluation Standards. The University plans to evaluate library services and collections in terms of the difference they make to its community of learners. To do so, the University must implement library evaluation strategies that focus on outcomes, developing a system to track the materials needed and used, and integrating the data into planning, budget development, and other decision making o p p o r t u n i t i e s .
7. Develop Networks and Other Cooperative Arrangements. The University seeks resources to play a leadership role in developing and strengthening the local, state, and national networks and other cooperative arrangements needed to manage information most effectively, with attention to the technology as well as to information-access policies, standards, guidelines, and costs.
8. Strategically Develop Special Collections. The University endeavors to construct a special collections library that will enhance the institution s role as a preeminent national center for the study of history and literature. We must be prepared to welcome scholars from around the world who will come to our special collections, including the Barrett Collection of American Literature.
9. Preserve Existing Material. To assist in national efforts to preserve the records of our society s intellectual heritage, the University hopes to expand its efforts to preserve deteriorating library materials.
B. Information, Technology, and Communications
Objectives
Scholarship is based on the ability to understand, critically evaluate, and communicate information. In educating students, we must equip them with these abilities. The creation of new knowledge includes reasoning about current wisdom. The ability to accomplish these important tasks, basic to the mission of the University, is becoming increasingly dependent on technology. Information sources are growing in number and in richness of content. Text, data, images, and voice are all important for scholarship. Entire fields of study have emerged that depend on computing and communication technologies. The understanding of the human genetic code, the creation of large-scale integrated circuits, many areas of medical advancement, computer- assisted design, and the study of astronomical phenomena are but a few of the fields that would not be possible without this technology. Too, our ability to communicate with the external world is being transformed by technological advances in c o m m u n i c a t i o n .
The computerized, electronic library is becoming a central resource for the University. Electronic media, electronic searching, and electronic navigation through local, national, and worldwide libraries are adding a new dimension to the sources available to scholars. Learners can now gain access to collections of information from their homes, offices, clinics, and any other location in which there is a computer connection to a network.
Technology also affects the organization and outfitting of classrooms, laboratories, and studios, reconfigures the patterns of student work, and has the potential to transform the learning process. The availability of new technology to merge modes of learning, to extend the walls of the University, and to provide unparalleled interaction among the worldwide community, opens immense possibilities for greater understanding and sharing of knowledge. A strong infrastructure must exist for the University to operate efficiently and to be able to provide proper service to students, an adequate working environment for its faculty and staff, health care to patients, a resource for the community, and a world-class academic environment for the pursuit of scholarship. As we move toward the year 2000, we must define this infrastructure to allow us to move with agility through what is one of the fastest changing revolutions that society has experienced. We hope to be able to fully support the academic enterprise by applying computing and communication technologies to the educational, research, and service activities of the University.
< B > S t r a t e g i e s
1. Create an Appropriate Informational Infrastructure. The University intends to build an infrastructure to support the highest quality of scholarship and teaching. It must include the ability to communicate text, data, voice, and video. A wide range of computing platforms from the largest, fastest, high-speed computers so essential in areas such as physics, engineering, textual analy sis of literary works, and computer-aided architectural design to individualized workstations, available to the learners in all areas of the University, should be readily available. The University aspires to integrate the newest technologies into the environment not because it is an end in itself, but because it is a crucial means by which the University seeks to solidify its position as a preeminent center for the creation, dissemination, and application of k n o w l e d g e .
2. Equip Classrooms, Laboratories, and Offices. The University plans to adapt its classrooms and laboratories to accommodate new computing and communications technology for teaching, research, and service. In addition, the University seeks to provide faculty and students with electronic access to scholarly material in their classrooms, laboratories, homes, and residence halls.
3. Apply Information Technology to Health Care. The connection between technology and modern-day health care is critical. The University must sustain its position of national leadership in applying information technology to health care. It will also complete the integrated academic information management system in the health sciences center, as well as implement new technologies in the organization, management, and assessment of health care and health-care systems.
4. Creatively Use Technologies to Streamline the University. To improve the University s efficiency, the University plans to continue to computerize our business and administrative activities. Taking advantage of interactive computing technologies, the University also hopes to find ways of reducing the administrative workload of its faculty, provide better decision-making tools to faculty and administrators alike, and allow efficient use of resources by all members of the academic community. 5. Use Technology to Facilitate Student Access to Services. The University will initiate on-line computer applications to enhance services to students. Using modern communications technologies, the University plans to improve student registration, access to grades, billing, and similar services. á
The academic organization of arts and sciences was established in 1824 and first began offering instruction in 1825. It assumed its present form in the mid-1950s. Arts and sciences departments contain both undergraduate and graduate programs, and faculty ordinarily teach both undergraduate and graduate students. A separate report on matters specific to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences follows this section.
Arts and sciences includes disciplines that comprise four groups: (1) the humanities, cont