Strategic Framework Feedback Reporting
A note on this summary:
The feedback shared here has been condensed for brevity and readability and does not represent the full breadth of thoughtful input provided by our university community. All responses are being carefully analyzed in their entirety to ensure that no feedback is taken out of context or misrepresented. These summaries reflect an effort to make this information accessible, not to reduce or reframe what was shared. Raw data from stakeholder engagement is being reviewed holistically as part of the Our Bold Path Forward input and engagement process, and the full scope of community perspectives will inform the framework’s development.
Pillar 1: Extraordinary Teaching and Learning
Initial Feedback
- Teaching excellence is consistently described as critical thinking, ethics, creativity, communication, and human skills, not narrowly as workforce preparation.
- Strong support for experiential, applied, and research‑based learning, provided it is:
- equitably accessible,
- intentionally embedded in curriculum,
- supported by adequate staffing and time.
- Teaching occurs beyond the classroom (Student Life, advising, Extension), but institutional framing still centers formal instruction.
- AI and teaching is a major, pillar‑specific issue:
- desire for shared institutional guidance and ethics,
- concern about AI displacing learning rather than supporting it.
- Recognition that UNL serves a growing population of non‑traditional students, requiring flexible teaching models.
- Student success should be measured by quality, rigor, and integrity of the educational experience, not only by access, retention, and graduation rates.
Recognized Tension
Teaching is framed as central to the mission, yet workload, indicators, staffing constraints, and recent program eliminations undermine that commitment.
Pillar 2: Extraordinary Research and Creative Activity
Initial Feedback
- Faculty want stability and time to pursue long‑term research agendas.
- Basic, curiosity‑driven research is repeatedly emphasized as essential to R1/AAU identity.
- Creative activity, humanities, and community‑engaged scholarship are consistently undervalued.
- Interdisciplinary research is encouraged rhetorically but discouraged structurally.
- Strong anxiety around promotion and tenure alignment:
- concern that entrepreneurship and workforce development will crowd out rigor, mentoring, and discovery.
- Concern about aging faculty and thin hiring pipelines, threatening future research capacity.
- Evaluation frameworks need to be more discipline-sensitive, recognizing innovation and impact across all fields, not only externally funded outputs.
- Improve contingency planning when grant funding runs short and explore greater coordination and shared planning in the development of research centers and institutional initiatives.
Recognized Tension
Research excellence is promoted while the conditions needed to sustain it—staffing, support, freedom to fail—are being weakened, especially for foundational work.
Pillar 3: Extraordinary Partnerships and Engagement
Initial Feedback
- The Land‑Grant mission and Extension are repeatedly identified as a core identity, not an optional activity.
- Engagement is expected to be reciprocal, long‑term, and community‑defined, not transactional.
- Alumni, industry, and community partnerships are underutilized due to siloed systems and internal friction.
- Strong desire for better storytelling about UNL’s impact across Nebraska.
- Calls for partnership lifecycle management:
- tracking engagement from K–12 through alumni,
- centralized stakeholder systems,
- engagement coordinators embedded in colleges.
- Clear interest in positioning UNL as a civic and economic driver for the state.
- Collaboration is seen as a core value that should span all pillars, not be confined to a single pillar; structural barriers—contracts, IP agreements, workload models—must be simplified to support engagement.
- Calls for greater faculty involvement in student recruitment.
Recognized Tension
External engagement is expected to expand while internal systems (contracts, incentives, coordination) actively constrain it.
Pillar 4: Extraordinary Culture and Environment
Initial Feedback
- Trust is the prerequisite for success in all other pillars.
- Staff feel systematically invisible in language about excellence, hiring, and competitiveness.
- Morale is deeply impacted by budget cuts, program eliminations, fear of being “next,” and lack of accountability.
- Retention depends on pay, clarity, career pathways, and psychological safety—not culture statements alone.
- Explicit calls to rebuild trust as an institutional goal, not an assumed byproduct.
- Reassertion of “Every person, every interaction matters” as a meaningful and familiar anchor.
- Emphasis on staff advocacy time, feedback loops, and leadership accountability.
- Improving retention and onboarding is an urgent need: better onboarding, training systems, and structured career pathways, including reclassification support and equity corrections.
- Leadership continuity is a pressing concern; need for stability through permanent positions rather than prolonged interim leadership.
- Regular, transparent morale and trust measurement—with published results and accountability for improvement—is seen as essential to making culture a foundational priority rather than an aspiration.
Recognized Tension
Culture is framed aspirationally, but lived experience is dominated by uncertainty, fear, and fatigue.
Pillar 5: Extraordinary Stewardship and Effectiveness
Initial Feedback
- Near‑universal rejection of the phrase “do with excellence”, widely interpreted as “do more with less.”
- Strong demand for operational clarity, transparency, defined ownership, and accountability.
- Staffing shortages and outdated systems are seen as causing inefficiency, not preventing it.
- Clear calls to prioritize and simplify rather than add more initiatives.
- Desire for explicit trade‑offs (“what will we stop doing?”) and defined end‑states (“what does success look like?”).
- Interest in simplifying governance, policies, and administrative processes.
- Budget transparency is foundational to rebuilding trust; calls for clear and explicit assurances about future budget processes and timelines.
- Technology infrastructure is widely seen as outdated and fragmented; requests for modern systems with defined ownership, feedback mechanisms, and a coherent institutional approach to AI adoption.
- Programs and services should not be expanded without commensurate staffing or workload adjustment. Operational stability must be treated as an enabler of innovation, not a reward for it.
Recognized Tension
Stewardship promises clarity and excellence while persistent scarcity and unresolved past decisions undermine credibility.
Cross-Cutting Themes (Across All Pillars)
Themes Emerging Across Multiple Pillars
- In addition to faculty, staff, graduate students, and postdocs need to be named explicitly as essential contributors whose visibility in this framework—in language about excellence, hiring, development, and stewardship—must match their role in enabling every pillar.
- Clarity over complexity: Consistent calls for reducing language that is vague, aspirational, or additive. Our Bold Path Forward should name fewer, focused priorities with defined ownership, timelines, and success criteria.
- Misalignment between ambition and resourcing: Across all pillars, stakeholders warn that expanding expectations without corresponding investment in people, systems, and time erodes rather than advances excellence.
- Desire for follow-through and accountability: People express deep concern about “another plan” that is not implemented. Credibility requires visible early actions, annual progress reporting, and explicit acknowledgment of what the institution has learned from prior planning efforts.