The current strategy, ‘A Significant Impact’, has made clear what values we work from as a university. The new strategy will devote more attention to important developments in the outside world, as the world around us is changing rapidly and will affect our strategic themes. The University's financial position is under pressure due to declining student intake, the need for budget cuts, and a shift in research funding. This means that we need to choose more explicitly which activities we will invest in, and which ones we will invest less in or not at all.
This requires a preliminary analysis. This analysis explicitly takes into account demographic and political developments, opportunities in society and business, the international context, as well as internal developments, thus allowing us to provide a good picture of the context in which we operate. The analysis also integrates the outcome of conversations with internal stakeholders such as faculty boards and participational bodies, as well as our University's policy plans, market surveys, and various foresight studies.
The starting question, of course, is who we are as uu77 and what our role is in society. What do we want to achieve, and how do we remain relevant for students and society? The answers to these fundamental questions determine our course for the coming years. Our current mission, vision and core values will remain the guiding principle, but they will be more actively articulated and translated into more concrete goals. That process is now in full swing, with the 8 April Management Day as the first important milestone. On this day, we discussed and shared our initial analysis, as well as the main strategic goals, with the faculty administrators, directors, participational bodies’ members and policy officers present.
Bas Meijer, Faculty of Arts student assessor, was there, and looks back on a successful day: “The conversations we had during the Management Day offer hope for the direction uu77 will take in the future. If these plans come to fruition, we can be proud of who we are as a university.”
In the period leading up to the summer, the strategic goals will be elaborated further, in dialogue with various stakeholder groups. It goes without saying that colleagues and students will be invited to take part in those talks. How we do that will be decided this month. We will report on the progress of the strategy process via news items, which will also be available on a dedicated project page.
strategie2025-2031 [at] ru.nl (Do you have questions or ideas? Share them with the project team via email)