With the inauguration of Chancellor Chopp on Sept. 18, our university takes a bold leap in a new direction. At the forefront of the University’s transformation to tackle the challenges of the 21st Century is DU Impact 2025, a strategic plan born out of the Imagine DU initiative.
This auspicious plan is exactly what the university needs to move forward and tackle the challenges of the future. It is a clear vision of what DU will be, defined by tangible goals that seek to enhance the student experience inside and outside the classroom, while setting students up for success in a complex world.
Among the many proposed ideas, a few stand out as being the most promising for students in the future. This plan seeks to support students at DU by increasing financial aid to meet the needs of all undergraduate students. Also, Impact 2025 supports students by creating mentorship programs to guide students on their long path through college in order to set them up for future opportunities after graduation. Most excitingly, this plan rightfully aims to build a greater community on campus by transforming the Driscoll Student Center into a student hub that is always actively used, instead of just being used as a bridge to reach different sides of campus. As a student who constantly uses Driscoll for socializing and work with the Clarion, the prospect of an expanded and better utilized Driscoll is very exciting and long overdue.
Although DU is now shifting in a very exciting direction, there are substantial pitfalls this plan could collapse into. DU Impact 2025 is a very lengthy plan that has many initiatives, so funding and executing everything may not be possible, and communicating to the DU student body about what this plan is about may be difficult. It is essential that over the next couple of months, when this plan is solidified, the administration receive student input about how DU should proceed into the future in order to prioritize what is important to students. As with any vision, without the buy-in of major stakeholders into this plan, it will not succeed, because students will not be willing or able to be apart of these essential programs.
Forging the future of DU starts at the most basic level—the student level—and it is critical that the student body engages in this process by providing input for this plan, so we can create a brighter future for ourselves and the students that follow.
