Strategic Plan

Tactics:

• Offer a life-changing experience for OU students, both inside and outside the classroom. With high academic standards, regular interaction with great teachers, innovative curricula, and an unrivaled in-person collegiate experience, empower students who are broad in knowledge and skills, ready to lead, and prepared for success in a rapidly changing world.
• Ensure OU’s excellence is affordable and attainable by:
  • Securing $500 million in endowment funds for scholarships, fellowships, and student support via the Lead On Campaign.
  • Fully funding tuition and fees for qualified Oklahoma’s Promise students and eliminate net tuition/fees for Oklahoma students with adjusted gross income at or below $75,000.
  • Raising graduate student stipends to be competitive with peer institutions*. 
  • Work with the state government to reach public funding dollars at levels equal to the AAU peer average.

Tactics:

• From first recruitment to graduation, ensure that OU fulfills the role of public universities to provide opportunity for any student with motivation and ability, regardless of their economic, geographic, or other circumstances.
• Unlock potential by recruiting, supporting, and retaining first-generation students, veterans, and students from rural and other underrepresented communities.
• Create a University-wide culture of student success and belonging, always setting a high bar and uplifting students to meet it.
• Expand educational opportunities by growing enrollment to 40,000 total students across all campuses while providing OU’s distinctive collegiate experience:
  • Increase OU Norman’s (first-time, full-time) freshman enrollment by 3% annually.
  • Grow enrollments for University of Oklahoma Health programs by an average of 7% annually to meet the health care workforce needs of the state.
  • Increase enrollment at OU-Tulsa by 3% annually.
  • Grow enrollment for OU Online to over 10,000 students.
  • Grow enrollment in OU Polytechnic Institute programs to over 1,000 students.
  • Expand OU’s transfer student population by 3% annually.

Tactics:

• Set the highest bar in the country for the meaningful partnership between a public flagship University and state and local government, federal delegation, private sector, non-profits, and Tribal Nations. Use the unique capabilities of OU to play a bold leadership role in developing, coordinating, and executing a “strategic plan” for the state of Oklahoma.
• Drive Oklahoma’s economy forward with research, innovation, commercialization, and talent development, including the creation of a new biotechnology hub strategic plan.
• Improve the health of Oklahomans by drawing from the resources of all three campuses and network partners, serving as the most comprehensive provider in the state, offering medical care that can be found only in an academic health system, and addressing systemic health disparities.
• Support the development of community-engaged research activities, emphasizing outcomes that positively impact rural and Tribal Nation communities.
• Collaborate with the K-12 education system and other stakeholders to enhance educational outcomes statewide.
• Enrich the quality of life across Oklahoma via the arts, athletics, lifelong learning, and programs that inspire and engage citizens beyond the campuses.

Tactics:

• Win championships, innovating in an era of disruptive change, to carry OU's distinctive legacy of athletic excellence into the next generation.
• Ensure that OU Athletics continues to uplift the entire University with budgetary self-sufficiency and acts as a beacon for the OU brand.
• Foster the holistic well-being and lifelong success of all student-athletes, including the delivery of a comprehensive athletic health care program.
• Enrich the student experience and engage alumni and fans of all ages via distinctly exciting and positive experiences with OU Athletics.
• Relentlessly and proudly tell the OU story through a dynamic multimedia marketing campaign aimed at increasing the national and international perception of OU.
• Promote a championship culture across all parts of the University, measured by victories:
  • In the student experience, by student academic success, student satisfaction, and career outcomes,
  • By AAU-level research outcomes for faculty and top 50 rankings for academic programs and departments,
  • By improved health outcomes for the state driven by world-class patient-centered care, clinical and basic research, and health care workforce development,
  • By employee engagement, satisfaction, and success, and
  • With alumni, by a lifetime of connected success, learning, and discovery.

Tactics:

• Adhere to OU’s commitment to academic freedom, freedom of speech, unfettered exploration, and intellectual independence, as affirmed in the Chicago Principles.
• Build a culture of robust civil conversation, affirming that the University can serve as a vital forum for dialogue, cultivating skills and habits that prepare students for active life in a democracy.
• Confront the polarization of American society by fostering both intellectual diversity and academic independence through curricular and extracurricular programs that are designed to equip students for citizenship and build trust and affinity with stakeholders on campus and beyond.

Tactics:

• Develop and enhance events and resources that build community and provide opportunities for intentional engagement, collaboration, and support.
• Pilot and assess a new mentoring initiative, pairing new students and employees with mentors from similar backgrounds or with similar goals.
• Ensure that all OU campuses are safe, accessible, and welcoming to people of all backgrounds and abilities.

Tactics:

• Strengthen our culture of engagement with a comprehensive new employee orientation, mentoring initiative, and a recognition program that celebrates achievements, contributions, and innovations.
• Use annual employee engagement survey to create a cycle of honest assessment and active improvement.
• Continue annual merit-based salary programs to ensure that salary and benefits packages for high-performing faculty and staff are highly competitive with peer institutions.
• Develop a structured incentive program to recognize and reward faculty and staff for outstanding contributions aligned with the University’s Strategic Plan.
• Develop and implement a faculty and staff retention plan that standardizes best practices across the University.
• Establish a staff position on each campus focused on advancing best practices in employee engagement.
• Pursue opportunities to enhance employee quality of life, using the full resources and benefits of a comprehensive university, including a study on the potential for improved childcare services or support.

Tactics:

• Develop and operationalize a multi-year financial pro forma that aligns with the Strategic Plan and is updated annually.
• Adopt a balanced annual budget that is transparently communicated to key stakeholders and monitored regularly to ensure financial goals are achieved.
• Ensure sufficient operating reserves and resources to invest in the Strategic Plan, while implementing long-term capital planning efforts across all campuses to support growth and stewardship of campus resources and infrastructure.
• Conduct a thorough review of facility use and class schedules to ensure classrooms, meeting spaces, and other facilities are fully and efficiently utilized across OU’s campuses.
• Launch an initiative to modernize OU’s information technology systems to enhance data-driven decision-making across OU’s campuses.
• Support a robust strategic planning program that is integrated and scaled across all campuses.

Tactics:

• Strengthen alumni engagement initiatives, focusing on new alumni events, a new Young Alumni Network, enhancements to existing alumni chapters, and expanded student mentoring opportunities, professional development, and social events/experiences.
• Expand OU’s lifelong learning programs for alumni, friends, and community members.
• Achieve $2 billion via the comprehensive Lead On Campaign by 2027 to advance the University’s Strategic Plan.

Tactics:

• Invest in OU’s strategic Research Verticals to achieve recognized global excellence in areas of institutional strength, such as: energy, environment, weather, health, aerospace and defense, and community and societal well-being.
• Support interdisciplinary scholarship to address grand societal challenges that draw on creative and cultural expertise and scholars from arts, humanities, and social sciences.
• Facilitate cross-campus collaboration to further advance a robust health research ecosystem, leveraging OU’s biomedical, clinical, and community-based research strengths.
• Build OU’s capacity as a world-leading center for solving global energy and environmental challenges and grow collaborations between researchers with expertise in fundamental, technical, and social-behavioral domains. 
• Position Oklahoma to be a leader in the ongoing revolution in computational fields such as artificial intelligence, pursuing an ambitious university that utilizes existing assets and identifies strategic opportunities across the University.
• Leverage OU’s AI-related expertise across disciplines and in research centers and institutes, combining data and computational science expertise with leading scholars focused on AI's ethical, social, and cultural dimensions.

Tactics:

• Invest in high-risk, high-payoff big ideas from multidisciplinary faculty teams and with enhanced financial incentives for faculty research excellence.
• Create a President’s Moonshot program to generate energy, collaboration, and investment around areas of strategic opportunity.
• Support the Big Idea Challenge program and make it a recurring event every two years.
• Strengthen the Office of Innovation and Corporate Partnerships to translate big ideas and discoveries into Oklahoma’s economic growth through patents, licensing, technology commercialization, and start-up creation.

Tactics:

• Significantly increase the scale and performance of OU’s high-performance research computing capabilities to support emerging computational and data science computing needs. Create a secure (CUI) computing environment that is robust and easily accessible to faculty, students, and staff.
• Raise capital and establish state-of-the-art research facilities and cores in critical areas, such as nanofabrication, materials characterization, advanced manufacturing, transportation, data science, artificial intelligence/machine learning, life sciences, and biotechnology.
• Support and expand research facilities in areas of OU strength where growth depends on new infrastructure.

Tactics:

• Optimize administrative support for research, scholarly, and creative activity to minimize the administrative burden on faculty while ensuring compliance with federal and state regulations.
• Appropriately resource and staff both pre-award and post-award services to ensure seamless, timely, and compliant execution of the University’s research and creative activity endeavors.
• Implement user-friendly processes and software for grant submissions, reporting, and compliance tracking.