The lower quad is seen against a purple and blue sky at sunset.

Planning Our Future Together: St. Thomas 2025

I am pleased to announce a new strategic planning process that will engage our community in developing our university priorities for the next five years. Community conversations around “St. Thomas 2025” will begin in January, and your voice is needed to help create the road map for our shared goals.

We are at an exciting inflection point in the history of St. Thomas.

First, we are in the final year of implementation of the St. Thomas 2020 strategic plan. Thanks to the steadfast work of so many of you, this plan has successfully guided the work of the university since 2015 and led to numerous important accomplishments.

Second, we have several significant initiatives underway, including a new undergraduate curriculum, the Morrison Family College of Health, a new conference for athletics, and a STEAM academic complex to spur interdisciplinary programs.

The 2025 strategic planning process will help us recommit to those priorities, discover creative new opportunities and intentionally build the future that we collectively envision for St. Thomas.

A Working 10-Year Aspiration

During the past few months, the President’s Cabinet, senior leaders and the Board of Trustees began to articulate a 10-year aspirational vision for St. Thomas. I believe that in order to frame our aspirational goals for the next five years, it is important that we look further into the future and boldly anticipate and envision what St. Thomas will need to become to flourish 10 years from now.

This “working vision” will be revised and finalized based on feedback gathered from the community throughout the strategic planning process:

“Widely recognized for forward-thinking, values-based education and inclusive excellence, the University of St. Thomas is a premier Catholic institution for learning, studying and working and a partner of choice for communities and organizations from the local to the global.”

Task Force will Facilitate Community Conversations

Executive Vice President and Provost Richard Plumb and I appointed a university-wide strategic planning task force which will be co-chaired by Dr. Ed Clark, vice president for Innovation Technology Services (ITS) and chief information officer and Dr. Katherina Pattit, associate professor of ethics and business law at Opus College of Business. Task force members will work with campus partners to lead inclusive and interdisciplinary community conversations throughout the university.

I am grateful to be part of a community that is constantly adapting and responding to an ever-changing world, while keeping our mission at the heart of all we do.

The ability to press forward is the St. Thomas way. Ever the optimist, our founder Archbishop John Ireland continues to inspire us, “I see no backwards voyage across the sea of time; I will ever press forward. I believe God intends the present to be better than the past and the future to be better than the present.”

I look forward to imagining and creating an even brighter future for St. Thomas with you. Please look for and respond to opportunities to participate in these important 2025 strategic planning conversations.