Office of the PresidentPresident Cantwell’s MessagesLetter to WSU CommunityUnderstanding WSU’s Systemwide Redesign

Understanding WSU’s Systemwide Redesign

Dear Colleagues,

At last week’s Board of Regents meeting, I provided the first public briefing on WSU’s system-wide redesign. I want to follow-up on that briefing to provide clarity about what this work is, the process that has brought us to this point, and how we will move forward.

The system-wide redesign is fundamentally about how we prepare WSU for the future.

We are operating in a period of significant change for higher education. The needs of our students and the communities we serve are changing. Across WSU, there are opportunities to reduce complexity, create greater clarity in operations, and remove friction within the WSU system so we can be excellent in how we deliver on our public service mission.

I have said from the beginning that we have a choice. We can wait for changes to come upon us and make decisions in response, or we can design our future and move deliberately in that direction. We have chosen to design our future.

That is the purpose of the redesign.

The six strategic pillars are the North Star for this work:

  • Access and Student Success
  • Academic Excellence and Modernization
  • Innovation and Use-Inspired Research
  • System-wide Integration and Institutional Agility
  • WSU as a 21st-century Land-Grant University
  • Elevate the Cougar Identity and Brand.

With the pillars as our guide, the redesign began with a broad discovery phase gathering data through listening sessions, a survey with more than 1,700 responses, and town halls. The Co-Design Council, a diverse group of WSU leaders, faculty and staff working together to co-create the university’s system-wide redesign through dialogue, experimentation, and shared vision, then analyzed these findings to identify themes and develop initial concepts which were tested through interviews with subject matter experts and refined based on what they learned.

That process resulted in five strategic recommendations.

Three address how WSU operates: establishing clearer decision authority and responsibility; creating more coordinated and consistent organizational and operational structures while preserving local execution; and strengthening how we use data, measures, and investment decisions across the system.

The other two focus on the value we create through our mission: building a more seamless WSU experience that allows learners to move across programs, campuses, and modalities with less friction, and creating a more coordinated approach to serving the different regions and communities of Washington.

These recommendations give us a framework for the work ahead. They do not answer every implementation question, and there is more work to do with input from experts across the system as we translate them into specific actions. As that happens, we will continue bringing this work to our university community and connecting decisions back to the purpose and priorities of the redesign.

I encourage you to watch the Board of Regents briefing here (1:01:47 – 1:22:20). You can also find background information about the systemwide redesign and recent developments within the university on the WSU New Chapter website.

Thank you for your continued engagement in this important work and for all you do to strengthen WSU. I look forward to what we will accomplish together.

Go Cougs!

Sincerely,

BETSY CANTWELL
President, Washington State University