The London Free Press recently published a summary of Western’s new draft strategic plan (there’s a longer version on Western’s website, but it’s password protected).  I urge you to read it.  It’s not uniquely bad by any means – there are lots of other institutions who have published similar sorts of documents – but it nevertheless represents a kind of quintessence of what’s wrong with university strategic plans.  It is a Stepford Wife of a strategy.  Nothing about it says, “Western”.  You could slap pretty much any mid-sized university’s name on it and no one would be any wiser.

Apparently, Western is going to become “world-class” by “hiring the best people”, and will invest in research by creating 50 new research chairs.   They’re also going to be, “educating students to succeed” (better than the alternative, I suppose) by expanding graduate programs (increased research-intensity, under another name), and establishing new professional graduates programs (a new synonym for “cash cow”).  They’re also going improve relations with alumni and London-area stakeholders (neither of which has any intrinsic relationship to world-classness); and finally – this one’s my favourite – they will “find new funding sources”.

(There are a couple of bones in here to undergraduates, but the old mission of offering “the best undergraduate experience at a research-intensive university” is nowhere in evidence).

I hope for Western’s sake that the actual draft document is more nuanced than the Free Press’ summary.  If strategy is about finding your unique strengths, and building on them, then this little list is the exact opposite of strategy.  There are no ideas here which haven’t already been used by several hundred other universities around the world.  There’s no unique value proposition, nothing that would allow Western to say “we’re different, and here’s why”.  Just rote genuflection at the altar of more research, and more grad students.

(Again, let me be clear – Western is hardly the country’s only offender on this score.  There are many other institutions out there with equally Stepford-Wife-like strategies.  They know who they are).

World-class research-intensiveness is not achieved by much other than sheer financial firepower (Korea’s Seoul National University and KAIST come to mind).  Bluntly, there is no chance that Western’s resources over the next decade are sufficiently large to succeed in that league. Mid-sized, public universities who mindlessly go down the “more research, more grad students” road are entering a fight for prestige they can’t possibly win.

Trying to excel by being like everyone else is a weak strategy.  Standing out and gaining prestige in a crowded field relies in part on being prepared to take audacious risks that challenge orthodoxy.  Before this plan moves from “Draft” to “Final”, let’s hope Western figures out which risks it should take.