Dear Maverick Community,

The University of Texas at Arlington is making important progress on our new strategic plan, and I am excited to share the latest news and ask for your active participation in the process.

I have spent time hearing from our faculty and staff, students, alumni, and community partners about what makes UTA so great and where we should set our sights next for this institution. It was a sincere pleasure to meet with every college and business unit over the past 11 months. You asked a lot of great questions, and your input has been invaluable. I appreciate your insight. My team has compiled the thousands of comments and ideas I received and will be using those to inform the ongoing strategic planning process.

The feedback you provided has already been very important, as it helped me establish our initial actions in our five key strategic themes for UTA: people and culture, student success, alumni and community engagement, research and innovation, and finance and infrastructure.

We are now at the phase where we will build out the plan to include clear goals, strategies, and tactics. Leaders representing units across UTA met in January to begin this process, and we have now also established our UTA Strategic Planning Committee.

I want to invite you to visit our new Strategic Plan webpage, which includes more information and recent updates on our strategic themes, the timeline for the strategic planning process, and our Strategic Planning Committee members. I encourage you to bookmark this page, as it will be where you can check out the latest updates and progress related to our strategic planning process, submit feedback, and view the archived plans. We will regularly update this site as we move forward.

I also strongly encourage you to utilize the feedback form at the bottom of the webpage to provide your input to our strategic plan. This form can be used at any time during the planning process if you have ideas or feedback that you want the committee to consider while they develop our goals, strategies, and tactics. It will take all of us to accomplish those goals, and we want you to be part of their development.

Our assistant vice president of strategic initiatives, Nicholas Viator, is actively reviewing all of the input that has been gathered from the recent leadership session and is coordinating with the Strategic Planning Committee and workgroups. The committee will serve as your point of contact for faculty and staff across campus. We have a broad array of representation from across departments and colleges, and I look forward to providing you more updates as they develop our plan.

This is truly an exciting time for UTA, as we have an opportunity to make progress around our talent development, research and innovation, and unique place in Dallas-Fort Worth. I appreciate your support of this process and am confident we can meet the big goals ahead for UTA.