Transformational Goals for the 21st Century
"Substantial challenges face public higher education everywhere, many related to issues of access, affordability, and quality. Even more importantly, the magnitude and difficulty of the global challenges of the 21st century are, in several ways, unprecedented. These realities compel the University to assess and transform our approaches to teaching, research, and service so that we can prepare students for a rapidly changing world and, in so doing, help our state, our nation, and our world to thrive. To succeed, we must constantly ask how we can do more and do it better; and we must engage the world and its diverse cultures, viewpoints, and lifestyles."
-- Pres. David M. Dooley
Create a 21st Century 24/7 Learning Environment.
It is time to recognize that learning outside the classroom is as important as learning inside the classroom. Students must have more meaningful opportunities for experiential learning through research, creative work, and scholarship, and more chances to learn and work across academic disciplines and fields of knowledge. "Hands-on" learning in research laboratories, fieldwork, and internships is essential, not only to discovery and innovation, but also to giving students the strongest possible advantages for competing in the workplace. Our faculty must assume expanded and redefined roles as partners and educators. To graduate the best-prepared students imaginable, URI must take full advantage of the most advanced educational tools, technologies, and practices. An emerging flexibility, improved advising, and innovative curricula will ensure that undergraduates complete their studies in the traditional four years while allowing the ambitious among them to reach the finish line more quickly.
Increase the Magnitude, Prominence, and Impact of Research, Scholarship, and Creative Work.
URI must emphasize and be clear about our core mission of research, scholarship, and creative work if we are to help build a new Rhode Island economy and provide knowledge, understanding, and insights to the marketplace of ideas. A significantly larger pool of outstanding graduate students (a key component of any preeminent research enterprise) will facilitate the work of our talented faculty.
This will, in turn, energize the University's research engine and spark increased funding and discovery. Additional research dollars will lead to tangible business development opportunities, job growth, and an expanded tax base. Research and creative work need to become integral components of the undergraduate experience, whether students are majoring in the sciences or the humanities. Fostering a collective and individual propensity for inquiry among undergraduates will build a population of citizens, future graduate students and research scholars whose curiosity and success will serve Rhode Island, the nation, and the world.
Internationalize and Globalize the University of Rhode Island.
Our world is shrinking as technology breaks down borders and time zones, allowing businesses and communities, large and small, to develop new relationships on the other side of the globe. Our students must be prepared to live and work in an increasingly globalized economy. By expanding the scope of our international research and education partnerships, increasing the number of graduates fluent in languages other than English, encouraging more URI students to study abroad, and tripling our population of international undergraduate and graduate students, we break down our own borders, strengthen everyone's knowledge of the cultures, politics, and history of other peoples, and enable our students to prosper in this expanding global marketplace.
Build a Community at the University of Rhode Island that Values and Embraces Equity and Diversity.
If our graduates are to succeed and lead in the 21st century world, with its wide diversity of cultures, lifestyles, beliefs, religions, political systems, and philosophies, we must help them develop the ability to communicate, understand, and engage productively with people very different from themselves. The most influential university will be the one that is unified in its acknowledgement and valuing of these differences as essential to a more enriched community and a more relevant education. Here, every member must feel welcomed, supported, and valued as part of the larger campus community. As our reputation grows as a safe and inviting place with a breadth and depth of cultures, ethnicities, lifestyles, and values, we will attract an even broader diversity of students, furthering our successes in producing graduates capable of working across cultures, languages, and traditions.
President's Message
The University of Rhode Island believes deeply in the value of celebrating differences. From its very beginning under Roger Williams, Rhode Islanders were different: independent in thought and action and tolerant of the beliefs of others. As a state, we are "a lively experiment"!
