Flight in Progress: How Ball State Is Fulfilling Its Plan for a Bright Future
Strategic Plan Flight Path 5 Goals
Goal 1: Undergraduate Excellence and Innovation
Goal 2: Graduate Education and Lifetime Learning
Goal 3: Community Engagement and Impact
Goal 4: Scholarship and Societal Impact
Goal 5: Institutional and Inclusive Excellence
On December 14, 2018, the University made an enormous step in ensuring its bright future.
On that day, the Board of Trustees endorsed a new strategic plan for Ball State University. The approval—happening during the University’s Centennial celebration—culminated a months-long process to determine on how best to plan for our second century.
A 10-person steering committee appointed by President Geoffrey S. Mearns designed and led the planning process. Its work was guided by a set of principles: it would be collaborative, transparent, data-supported, relevant, actionable, focused, aligned with state goals, and ambitious but also realistic.
The committee’s direction was informed by surveys, working groups, and forums involving hundreds of faculty, staff, students, alumni, community partners, and benefactors who shared their ideas, hopes, and dreams for Ball State’s future.
A draft of the strategic plan, titled Destination 2040: Our Flight Path, was widely distributed. Revisions based on feedback led to the final document that received Board approval.
A new mission statement guides the plan: “We engage students in educational, research, and creative endeavors that empower our graduates to have fulfilling careers and meaningful lives enriched by lifelong learning and service, while we enhance the economic, environmental, and social vitality of our community, our state, and our world.”
Destination 2040 also articulates our enduring values, represented by Beneficence: excellence, innovation, courage, integrity, inclusiveness, social responsibility, and gratitude.
The plan provides five long-term goals for 2040 and a small set of strategic imperatives to be executed by 2024. The entire University is now striving to fulfill those goals and imperatives in ways that reflect the mission statement as well as the unique perspectives and strengths of individual colleges and divisions.
The following pages feature a few of the hundreds of projects being planned or now underway that were inspired by the strategic plan. All of these projects and objectives aspire, in distinctive ways, to transform students’ lives, strengthen communities, provide economic and social benefit to our region and state, and offer leadership by example across the country and around the world.
Each brings our University closer to a destination that is both clear and bright.
