Athabasca University has recently released is 2024-2029 Strategic Plan, titled “Like No Other”. Like many strategic plans, this one is filled with a lot of aspirational words, lofty ideals, and precious few hard metrics.
Sometimes, this is okay. After all, as has been said, the moment you define something as a numerical metric to reach is the moment everything else gets dropped. You hear this in secondary education, with many teachers talking about how Diploma Exams encourage “teaching to the test,” as opposed to promoting learning. Sometimes it’s even a good thing, because it allows organizations to side-step short-sighted requirements from the powers that be (be they shareholders, members, or governments) so as to concentrate on things more worthwhile, such as the success indicator of “Growing community,” under their “Community Like No Other” metric. This is where AU can point to for those government ministers who may be deep in the pockets of developers focused on a small constituency and wanting them to devote effort toward propping up the town of Athabasca rather than educating their students. “See, we’ve got a focus on growing the Athabasca Township right here.”
Sometimes, however, it ends up becoming a word salad, where anything can be interpreted as meeting the goal. What, for example, is “Indigenous Inclusion,” one of the success indicators of AU’s “Access Like No Other” goal? Does it mean if they have an indigenous student, they can call it a success?
What’s important to remember about these strategic plans, however, is while they are very loosely a roadmap for where an organization may want to go, in the case of a public university, they’re as much (or more) an advertisement to government officials designed to give these officials something easy to point to when members of the public ask them what they’re doing about the problems at such and such university. After all, when looking back at previous strategic plans, they rarely seem to have their goals fulfilled by the end of the period.
That said, when it comes to dealing with AU, knowing what’s in the strategic plan can be helpful, as it’s always nice to be able to follow up a point with “And this will help you reach your goal of X that you mentioned in your strategic plan, remember that?”
Meanwhile, this week in The Voice Magazine, prompted by the idea of indigenous inclusion, I felt it important to feature our article about Metis Week, where members of the Indigenous Circle of AU spoke about what it means to be Metis and where they’re going with it.
We’re also featuring the second part of Alek Golijanin’s look at how different religions have supported faith, communication, and positive leadership. Long-time readers know that while I have little truck with the idea of faith (believing that it is responsible for so many ills in the world when you end up relying on a source of authority that nobody can verify) I do acknowledge that there are some good things that can come from it if it is thoughtfully applied. Alek’s series attempts to run with that, and maybe one day he’ll even convince me.
We’ve also got music reviews, a look at something to avoid the winter blahs, scholarships, events, ideas, inspiration and more! So enjoy the read!
