The following illustrates principle components of a strategic plan for a contemporary public research university. This illustration is for class purposes only and applies to no real world institution (but if it did, wouldn't you want to be there?).

25 Year Strategic Plan: University for a New Culture
2011-2035

Vision Statement: Our knowledge, ideas, and values are dedicated to enlightened transformation of human culture to respect planetary limits, liberty and justice for people in all times and places, and enrichment and ennoblement of the creative spirit of human beings.

Mission Statement: We discover, transmit, and engage as a wellspring of transformative science, technology, and humanism dedicated to producing citizens for a new and enduring global culture.

Background: Knowledge, ideas, and our public voices must evolve rapidly in a century constrained by global environmental limits. Human demands exceed the capacities of the planet, which can no longer supply raw materials or energy in quantities needed by the numbers of people practicing current patterns of consumption; nor can the earth's climate system cope with the residuals of human industry, domestic settlements, transportation systems, and agriculture. The current trajectory threatens all of mankind, all species, and the capacities of the planet, considered as a gaian entity, to sustain life. To create a new generation of citizens with knowledge and philosophies appropriate for the 21st century, to persuade all citizen graduates of the need for permanent cultural change in global socioeconomic perspectives, and to model through engagement as active complex-problem solvers are the most important functions of all American universities in the age of planetary limits. Contemporary disciplines and curricula designed for the 20^th century must yield to new structures and pedagogies that address the crises of the 21^st, accelerating the cultural evolution that must take place if we are to save the earth.

We must develop a new educational focus on the evolution needed for a graceful and sustainable retreat from the overreach of the last century. We recognize our societal duty to assume a lead role in advancing our institution and our graduates as we lead an orderly and self-aware evolution to a constrained and less destructive human population living in a post fossil fuel yet possibly still high-energy society, redirected from destructive individualism into a far more compassionate, just, and sharing society.

Issues: Steady decline in support for public higher education, nationally and within the State, and reassessment of the social contract between the State and our flagship research University cause us to alter our traditional perception of ourselves, and to seek a new course for our future and a new role for the University as a public institution. While continuing our historical functions as a center of knowledge discovery and transmittal, and our critical mission as the State's principle forum for conservation and stewardship of the arts and humanities, we will now actively and consciously strive to evolve ourselves and to become a critical agent of persuasion, instilling a new ethic through creation of a broad array of cultural advances made necessary in a century of global constraints. In addition to our central cultural roles of epistemology and philosophy (knowledge and ideas), we will now recognize as a new primary role that of rhetoric (persuasion) aimed at improving the human and planetary condition. The University for a New Culture will become the State's principle public forum and its first epistemological, philosophical, and rhetorical University

Environmental analysis: Change is never easy: A significant set of perspectives and multiple trajectories exist within and external to our University. There are as many internal agendas as there are academics, as many external expectations as there are politicians. No matter: From pluralism, we must find unity. Some trends are negative, including the decline of public understanding and support for higher education in general. The external environment is fraught with threats that express themselves through strong signals of instability and general decline in the economy and through a broad array of negative global environmental indicators that bode ill for the planet and for all species, including our own. Still, we must be mindful of how we are affected by our environments—both internal and external to the University. —We must be aware of weaknesses and threats that may hinder progress, factors that are either subject to or beyond our control. With bold imagination and undaunted will we must capitalize on our strengths and take full advantage of opportunities to become a new kind of University, the University for a New Culture.

• Internal Environment: What do we know about our academy and about ourselves that will affect our progress toward our new vision? Within our walls, what do we have going for us, and what that may hold us back? What factors may we explore, if we act on them, and what is there about our institution that may prevent our success?
  • Strengths: Our greatest asset is our faculty and the reputations they have earned, the long-term source of our standing as a University, and of our student body, drawn to represent the intellectual and cultural richness of our society. Our diversity of backgrounds, experiences, perspectives, disciplines, approaches, ideas, and values, and our history of melding these into mutually respectful centers and parts of a self-governing whole teach us that we can come together for common cause. We have built the edifices and centers that support our work, created the alliances and good will with our granting agencies, private donors, and public advocates. We are networked and connected, and known in many circles for our relevance and importance. We are seen as a unique place within society, one that can rise above the private sector need for short-term profits, and the public sector drive for electability, to become the principle source of social wisdom and long-term vision, the ultimate wellspring of our social contract.
  • Weaknesses: The strength and intensity of individual scholarly pursuits too often narrows our focus and diminishes our appreciation for the diverse intellect that surrounds us. We are often territorial, parochial and intellectually self-important as we toil in isolated disciplinary silos. We need to identify common purpose and to work together more naturally. We must share the strengths of our discourse communities, using our rich disciplinary languages and philosophies intellectual exchanges that span and create a cultural commons.
  • Opportunities: We are aware of the complexity of the crowded world and of its need for solutions to the problems of overpopulation, climate change, vanishing energy stocks, and escalating disorder. These challenges create needs and hence opportunities for new cross-disciplinary interactions, including and integrating social and natural sciences for new academic hybrids. We may also profit from having engineers working with humanists on a dialog of building for a human future. We also see potentials for a reemergence of the old land grant philosophy of engagement for the public good; "we solve problems" could be our new connection with the public, the umbilicus of the critical mutual support that has been the social contract for American public higher education since the Morrill Act of 1862.
  • Threats: The greatest threat is failure to act from fear of change, retreating into comfortable old academic fiefdoms, sealing ourselves away from the turmoil that surrounds our ivy walls. To continue with focuses derived from a 20^th Century world view of unfettered global free markets for an imaginary planet of infinite resources and unlimited atmospheric and oceanic sinks would be to turn our backs on an enlightened understanding of the peril of our times, a betrayal of our social responsibilities and a selling out of the generation of our graduates.
• External Environment: We operate as a child of a democratic society, servant to public needs. As a most peculiar asset of our western experiment in civilization, we assume a primary role of public critic of that same nurturing society, recognized by that same society as being one of our most vital responsibilities. What is our relation to that society, and particularly to those aspects of that society which are beyond our immediate, albeit perhaps not ultimate, ability to influence?
  • Strengths: We build on a three-centuries tradition of enlightenment, continuing to nurture and contribute to a vast storehouse of human scientific and technical epistemology and its foundational ideas and philosophies, institutionalizing that which has served society well as a wellspring for a materially rich, morally diverse, and intellectually stimulating modern society. We are rooted in a land grant tradition with mature philosophies of teaching, discovery, and outreach, and general public respect for returning significantly on public investment. Our institution shares the characteristic concentration of diverse intellect and excited curiosity that is the hallmark of American higher education. We also stand on a rich inheritance from previous generations, on a mature campus with an aging but adequate physical plant, with the ability to maintain essential support for the many things we are called upon to do.
  • Weaknesses: We are aware of contemporary deep and residual challenges to the Age of Enlightenment from forces of intolerance and voices that are anti-scientific and cynically anti-intellectual. Broad weakness in public support debilitates our physical infrastructure through decades of deferred maintenance or delays in needed new construction. Staff is too lean and all are overworked to an extent that weakens community spirit and detracts from productivity. Traditions of disciplinary isolation that served us well in the previous century preclude meaningful integration and evolution between and within the disciplines, ironically threatening to interfere with our ability to respond appropriately to the multidisciplinary challenges of a complex society and a threatened planet.
  • Opportunities: Change and growth does not happen as easily in times of complacency and satisfaction as they do in periods of turmoil and restlessness. Ours are the more exciting times, times which demand responses that bring out our best qualities; aware of this, we are stimulated by myriad new awareness and recognition of many needs calling for new forms of action. We have the chance to reconceptualize our relation to the public, to evolve from a century of naive faith in growth and technology to face a century of limits and the realities of the arrogance of our assumptions of our competence to serve as planetary stewards. Being uncentered and at last humbled by our times, we may now begin to grow afresh. This self-knowledge alone should serve us well.
  • Threats: We live in the most dangerous of human epochs, a time of confrontation with our own mishandling of our freedoms, an age of coming face to face with our discounting of peoples distant in time and space. The greatest threat is . . . arrogance, holding to a dysfunctional world view from a previous era, failing to let go so that we may grasp the new human mandates and ubiquitous opportunities that lie before us. With arrogance comes a dulling of imagination, a stultified creativity, a confused intellect, and a wandering and divergent sense of direction.

Assumptions: We assume that current patterns of population growth and material consumption, coupled with contemporary resource use, environmental contamination, land depletion, and various manifestations of exponential growth and planetary overshoot will result in collapse of global ecology and radical decline in the human population beginning in the middle of this century. Acceptable future scenarios require more accessible nonrenewable resources, pollution control technology, land yield enhancement, land erosion protection, and resource efficiency technology; these must also be coupled with efforts to secure a stable world population and stable industrial output per person.

We assume that higher education plays a critical role in creating a citizenry that can alter patterns of high consumption, unsustainable reproductive rates, and anti-social individualism such as characterized much of the world in the previous century. We assume that contemporary government and its political systems, and contemporary profit-mandated corporations can not respond appropriately to collective human or planetary needs without stimulus from public education, which must change course beginning at the top. We assume there is adequate institutional will, foresight, and intelligence to accomplish an internal morphing to precipitate this vital academic cultural change.

Performance goals: Our academic goal is to recognized as a leader (top 10 in the nation) in integration of science, technology, and humanism dedicated to transitioning to post-fossil fuels and in adapting to global climate change. We will target specific programs for national comparison as this plan unfolds, but these should include national rankings for programs in energy, community design and restructuring of urban and suburban infrastructure, and applied humanities-oriented social sciences (explained below). All graduates will understand and anticipate the major changes that will occur during the span of their professional and retirement lives, and this understanding is expected to shape their career choices and citizenship responsibilities.

Simultaneously, we seek to establish a campus culture and model physical plant for the community of tomorrow, with active demonstration centers in integrated nuclear power, solar and wind supplemental power, energy conservation in building design and retrofitting, and low impact electric based light rail and connecting vehicle prototypes, linked to university-stimulated local light rail public transportation hubs. The University should plan to develop on-campus a functioning nuclear, geothermal, or solar power plant as a principle campus heating system, with ancillary power made available (as electricity or steam, which can be pumped up to 20 miles using conventional technology). Over the life of this plan, our goal is to replace over half of local automotive transportation systems with combinations of clustered housing, connective rail, and improved pedestrian traffic and self or electric-powered (e.g. bicycle) vehicles. All campus buildings will be systematically retrofitted with energy saving electronics, insulation, roof heating panels where feasible, etc., with a goal of becoming a carbon-neutral workplace by 2035.

Operational Needs Analysis: The campus physical plant, built in phases uniformly over the last century, includes several older masonry and steel-framed structures with antiquated heating and climate control technologies. Simply put, many bleed energy through poorly insulated walls, roofs, windows, and entranceways. Recent energy audits have identified a decade's worth of cost-saving retrofitting, including upgrading of individual building hvac and lighting systems, and replacement windows on nearly all buildings built before 1990. An ongoing capital facilities inventory and planning process needs to place greater emphasis on developing the entire campus as a public model of state-of-the-art, energy-conscious retrofitting, taking advantage of state and federal energy conservation funds and state revenues and bonds when available; the emphasis should change from short-term operational expense reduction to long-term permanent reductions in overall campus carbon footprint.

The core academic focus of the institution needs to incorporate long-term thinking driven by global ecosystem and resource awareness, replacing a management emphasis on short-term cash-flow and market analysis. As a new foundation for institutional planning, a central Institutional Futuring Institute will be created to extend current 2-5 year planning cycles through augmentation of major strategic initiatives based on a 30-100 year forecast. That is, the University will make long-term planning to anticipate and instruct future cultural changes the basis for its academic, outreach, and research thinking. The Institutional Futuring Center will tap existing world-watch and globalization economic centers but refocus their futuring capacities with a new focus on human and ecological decisionmaking, replacing traditional economic indicators (gross domestic product and other classless indicators of overall money wealth) with social-based indicators of human welfare as a basis for guiding institutional academic focus. That is, it will adopt a counter-market human social framework for valuing University contributions to society. The primary output of this Office will be studies of the future and recommendations for appropriate enabling capacities within the institution.

Restructuring of administrative units should be anticipated as a means toward an end of refocusing the institution on three academic division, each reflecting unique perspectives on transitional communities:

1. Science: The University uses a systems perspective to integrate its search for knowledge and to guide its cultural function of transmitting science to the next generation of students and to users of science throughout society. The utility of science is in part an economic stimulant, but our economic ideology extends beyond conventional short-term market-driven thinking by including long-term human social welfare, particularly in our consideration of factors tradtionally held to be external to market economies and corporate profit orientations. Science is also recognized as a set of related intellectual disciplines, intended to provide structure and enlightenment, drawn from western dedication to physical sciences as a basis for understanding natural and social knowledge. Our epistomology stems from our public mission and our practical, socially-responsible traditions of public engagement in the pursuit of understanding. Here, the long-term need is to develop an institutional direction to be used to select and direct long-term focus in the sciences.
2. Technology: The University fulfills its public social contract by solving problems. Our technologies include traditional engineering skill sets and the broad array of professions needed to meet the needs of our sponsoring society, including needs for technical training in health, education, environmental, government, and business professions. A characteristic of all of our professional and engineering graduates—and a guiding philosophy for focusing our research and outreach functions—is pragmatic awareness and engagement in addressing collective long-range problems of humans and their crowded planet. The operational need in the technologies is to balance short-term academic market thinking against the need to develop the next generation of graduates with skill sets for a transitional and transformative society.
3. Humanism: The knowing, building, and keeping of our sciences and technologies are built on a philosophy of enobling the human spirit and inspiring the best of human potentials. This is the platform sustaining our humanities, arts, and social sciences, including the human regulatory disciplines of politics, psychology, and economics. The University conserves the Enlightenment through cultural preservation and celebration of our histories, arts, and philosophical traditions. A new emphasis on fulfilling a mission as a public center for social thinking and artistic awareness includes recognition of a need for renewed infrastructural investment in facilities for the arts, both visual and performance, and for preservation of cultural artifacts in a coming age of public funding challenges.

Programs:

1. Sustainable Infrastructure:
   • Zero-carbon campus buildings: Here the program is to attain a zero-carbon campus footprint by the end of this planning period. All campus buildings will be retrofitted for automatic heat and light sensing; building and window insulation; reconstruction or future replacement.
   • Campus food production: The University's four (Agronomy, Fruit, Range, and Horticultural) Farms and woodlands will be developed as primary sources of campus food, supplying on-campus needs for potatoes, processable vegetables (green beans, tomatos, fruit preserves, etc.). Students will earn credits toward graduation and enjoy employment opportunities in growing and processing edible food stores.
   • On-campus power generation: Planning will be completed and initial construction begun to create on-campus wind, solar, and nuclear power generation to meet full campus needs for steam and electricity, including power for light rail on-campus and connecting transportation systems.
   • Campus transportation: Electric-based transport of people and all operating supplies will be complete by the end of this plan. No internal-combustion engine vehicles will operate on campus after 2035.
2. Academics for a New Culture:
   • Transformative Sciences: Focus will shift from creation of commercializable products with potential as a revenue source for campus (a.k.a. "engine of economic development") to an integrated mix of pragmatic research agendas intent on providing the knowledge base for a transitional society, one exiting the fossil fuel era and adjusting to the era of residual climatic change. The disciplinary base will emphasize agroecosystem integrated management technology for a low-input system capable of maximizing food production within the constraints of mandates for zero soil degradation and loss (i.e., zero loss of nutrient and moisture-holding qualities as well as no loss of net soil quantity; agricultural production will also exten to production of animal-based protein through aquaculture, again in a low-input-sustainable basis. Programs include creation of farm infrastructures and technologies capable of perpetual productivity with no fossil-fuel energy inputs, including gas or oil-derived fertilizers. This base includes biological, agronomic, insect and pathogen management, and aquacultural applied sciences, with integrated basic research components.
     The science base programs also include core environmental and resource sciences, as well as human-related sciences (pharmacology, health sciences). The base also includes human behavioral sciences, with an emphasis on those capable of guiding social transitions, including sociology and political science, psychology, communications (broadly), and environmental economics (sensu Daly).
   • Transitional Technologies: Engineering and professional training programs will be prioritized on the basis of meeting and anticipating practical problem solving for a world that addresses post-peak fossil-fuels and the restrictions imposed under increasing mandates to mitigate further climate decline. The common theme here is that future technologies will depend on dramatically reduced and ultimately non-existent conventional energy sources. Engineering departments will focus on addressing power generation and conservation, and on solving the world's needs for increased material recycling, and the construction of localized, resilient systems for production, processing, and distribution of food and fiber resources, and on the reconstruction of human domestic settlements designed for a post-automotive age.
   • Transcending Humanism: The University will address a new need to serve as a conservator of public culture in an era of decreasing resources. Program needs include construction of facilities for conservation of public visual arts and for the perpetuation of various forms of performing art, including music and theatre. The humanities will also serve as a wellspring for new philosophies, and as a rhetorical home, underlying radical societal changes needed to build functioning, collaborative communities, and to persuade change to a smaller and less consuming population, working with the social sciences to effect widespread cultural change.
3. Institutional Futuring Center: A new Center will be created to directly address and to maintain institutional focus on the problem of envisioning a radically different approach in higher education as an agent of public change. The primary purpose of this Center will be do provide an interdisciplinary forum and impetus for development of useful knowledge of the future and the implications for broad societal change. The nature of shortcomings in 20^th Century approaches to 21^st Century challenges includes, but is not limited to, these characteristics:
   • The problem statements are one-dimensional. Climate change, population, natural resources, and food (as examples) are examples of very complex phenomena. The human ability to place simple labels on them, or to express them as simple poles in bimodal analyses (problem is true or not; solution is act or not) masks significant complexity. Climate change is far more than temperature increases, changes in greenhouse gas, or indeed effects on the atmosphere or oceans. Climate change is also ecological (effect on ecosystems and populations of plants and animals), economic, and immensely complex scientifically and technically.
   • The degree of certainty of the validity of the problem (or of its many components) is taken to be deterministic (that is, measured by an estimable probability of occurring) when in fact the problems are inherently stochastic (uncertain, with a range of probabilities of likeliness of occurrence). We approach the problem as though we could ascertain whether or not it will come to pass, rather than from a perspective that captures the true degree of uncertainty we have. This focuses our attention on a true-false argument rather than a more likely-less likely understanding; this diversion stalls understanding and inhibits action. While we wait for the mirage of "sound science" (ever more studies, additional data, and years of delay in pursuit of greater certainty), we may pass critical thresholds marking points where remedy is beyond our ability (we discover we were right that the bright light rushing at us is a speeding locomotive, too late to jump off of the tracks).
   • Our assessment of future risk is biased by a cultural positive asymmetry, meaning we tend to see positive outcomes (an idealistic future) and to shun negative or threatening perspectives. While there are pessimists and unpleasant Cassandra's, in our public dealings with forecasts or predictions (or even with the meekest academic discussions) we denigrate or deny the negative, setting us at risk of being unable to properly prepare for what objective assessments tell us are likely future states (the fate of mythical Cassandra).

Strategies:

1. Sustainable Infrastructure:
   • Zero-carbon campus buildings: The current inventory and capital facilities planning process identifies building improvements over the next decade, with projects funded five years out. This listing has deliberately targeted energy conservation projects, with a primary goal of saving operating expenses; currently, estimates of carbon impact are included in the measures of system performance for this process. This process needs to be given greater visibility and championed by the University as a model for state infrastructure redesign. Over the life of this plan, the process needs to be intensified, which can be done by setting challenging but feasible goals for substantive reduction in campus energy use; the goal for the 25 year life of this plan must be to cut the campus building and transportation carbon-based fuel requirements to a bare minimum, meaning zero if possible. This can be done through building retrofitting, including electronics to shut off lights in empty rooms and corridors, replacements of antiquated and energy-loosing windows (e.g., single pane glass in aluminum frame windows replaced with triple panes and insulated frames), installation of roof-top solar heating units, etc.
   • Campus food production: An inventory of campus lands and soils will be used to develop a long-term plan for the production of a substantive proportion of campus food for on-campus consumption, making use of the existing farm, orchard, and aquacultural capacities and building on these. The purpose of this strategy is not to create an independent food base for the University, as this can not be done with the existing acreage of the entire institution, but rather to engage students in practical experience of growing and processing (storage and canning) their own food, and to make all students critically aware of the limitations of available land as a foundation for local food production.
   • On-campus power generation: A long-term master plan for on-campus power stations, using available wind and solar energy, and an eventual nuclear power plant, will be undertaken within the first five years of this plan. Subsequently, funds will be sought and construction begun on demonstration, pilot, and full capacity wind and solar electrical generating stations, with additional roof-top solar collectors installed wherever feasible on campus buildings. Within 10 years, plans should be underway and funding channels identified for an on-campus nuclear fission station capable of being constructed and running during the 15-20th years of this plan.
   • Campus transportation:
     • Replace vehicles with high-mileage, lightweight internal combustion alternatives for near-term. All vehicle replacements during the next five years will be with hybrid or low miles-per-gallon engines as a high priority on specifications.
     • Open office of alternative campus transportation, with a mission to develop feasible non-automotive transportation systems for on-campus and near-campus transportation systems, replacing use of cars and trucks with low emissions buses (a mixed size array), light rail, and other forms of electrified public tranportation that is decreasingly dependent on fossil fuels for power.
     • Take an active role with local and regional government or private sector developers to promote replacement of automobile-centered transportation with public alternatives, emphasizing a major system of light rail commuting.
   • Academics for a New Culture:
     • Transformative Sciences:
       • Relating: Before anything, the campus community needs to address its relation to the governing society that supports us (sending us taxpayer dollars and students, for example), specifically asking whether our social contract obligates us to prepare generations of students for life in the world they will live in. Our current system continues to emphasize curiosity-driven (versus outcome-oriented) individualistic research which is highly opportunistic (i.e., responsive to grants) at all levels (faculty, administration, governing boards) yet not coordinated for any specific broad social mission. The University is largely delusional in its presumptions of "economic engine" dogma. The research mission of the University needs to be focused on meeting specific long-term needs of society—beginning with adapting to climate change and the end of the fossil fuel era, with their myriad crisis-generating implications. Specific questions, for example, include an evaluation of the University's capacity to support critical public needs for science-based food production, restructuring of domestic (i.e., suburban and urban) infrastructure, social-science engineering to create a public ready for collective engagement in a dynamic and highly reactive progressive social response to planetary crises, etc.
       • Flexing: Only after broad and deep (scholarly) reflections on our social contract and long-term commitments, the University needs to review its organizational concepts, derived during (and serving the needs of) the 19^th and 20^th centuries: these structures do not provide the necessary multi-and cross-disciplinary framework for addressing the complex system-oriented thinking of the 21^st century. Accordingly, what concepts would give the University ultimate flexibility, and how do we integrate this thinking into our intellectual organization for purposes of conducting necessary research? Specific strategies include consideration of outcomes of University research: how are we positioned to effect broad public changes appropriate for a new culture for the 21^st century through integration of our natural and social sciences and with consideration of the role of humanism as a driver of social change?
       • Moving: The University needs to establish institution-wide priorities for research and to systematically free and move resources, and to vigorously encourage a reversal of previous decades of resource depletion (i.e., steady decline in state and federal support lasting since the 1970s). Part of the strategy for doing this is to define in a meaningful way, as a basis for immediate action, sets of critical enabling technologies and partnerships to support research missions, mindful of goals of relating and flexing.
     • Transitional Technologies:
       • Engineering: Traditional engineering departments need a review, similar to those of the sciences (previous item) of how they relate to the needs of the next (post-fossil-fuel) generation, how they address climate change, etc., and to mechanisms for enhancing flexibility and integration across campus; they then need to move into the 21^st century to address global energy alternatives and conservation. Specific needs include greatly enhanced focus on energy generation (solar, tidal, wind); electrification of domestic heating, industry, and transportation; conservation technologies (lighting, heating; and transportation.
       • Agriculture and Ecology: Without fossil fuels for mechanical power, irrigation, nitrogenous fertilizers, and without an ability to transport farm produce rapidly over great distances (think of the packages of salad on local grocery shelvers that arrive daily from California's central valley, even in the middle of winter), localization or regionalization of food producting and processing must soon get underway (it gets interesting when local foods compete with mass-produced conventional agriculture once production and transportation costs increase). We will, in short, need to significantly augment local production of vegetables and grains in the growing season, and to process (can) reserves to help us get through the winter. The proportion of the population that now produces food (about 1.5%) will shortly begin to expand, reaching into nearly every backyard soil patch by the end of the century, and employing a steadily increasing mass of farm laborers (perhaps 40% of people will have their primary occupation in some form of food production by 2100, or starve). At the same time, we cannot remove the last of our forests in a futile effort to build houses or to warm them with wood stoves in the winter. Coupled with new infrastructure and a dedicated program of producing token amounts of food on campus farms, for on-campus consumption, the simple tasks of food growing and environmental stewardship need renewed importance in supportive academics.
       • Sustainable professions: The University will integrate its campus-wide focus on development of learning for a new culture into the programs of all former professional schools. This includes a renewed look at health care, product design (engineering, textiles), education (extending the University's new culture into elementary and secondary schools is an obvious purpose for our social contract), and particularly business. Product development must replace corporate profit thinking with new emphasis on product environmental footprint (how much material and energy is required to make, use, and dispose of this thing?) and on durability (ending the throw-away culture).
     • Transcending Humanism: The gift of the Enlightenment was humanity's ability to extend the new freedom of scientific (versus theocratic) thinking—in a search toward (not from) truth—into the human social and regulatory sciences. The expression of this enlightened thinking was ultimately grounded in moral philosophy, art, and literature. The industrial age replaced social class with economic class, creating a new organizing principle of economic power to replace ruling class power, but the threat to the enlightenment from corporate rule has returned as a major threat to democracies and humanity in our age, creating a major distraction from our need to focus on long-term planetary issues.
       The University needs to develop a strategic plan for its humanities. Here the vision should be pragmatic and public, dedicated to enscribing a human face on a time of unprecedented transformation of human society. This leads to a mission of developing awareness of what it means to be human, in an ennobling sense, and to live in forward-thinking, caring communities that respect people distant in time and space. We ask that the humanities remind us of what it means to be contemplative and reflective, mindful of our potentials as a species. We need the inspiration of our arts—performance and visual—to overcome our crass consumeristic nature, to balance our capitalist, corporate mind-set. Specific strategies include planning and development of new physical plant to support proper conservation and display of cultural, artistic artifacts and treasures (with capacities capable of enduring prolonged regional power outages), and for major public performances and celebrations of music, theatre, and public oratory. As we are relatively isolated from the cultural physical plant of the closest cites, it becomes fitting to install a leading center for the arts, featuring at least two major public venues (museum, performance hall) conjoined with student centers (studios, rehearsal rooms and halls).
2. Institutional Futuring Institute: A novel component of this plan is the creation of a new institute at a high administrative level, a center capable of bridging academic and physical plant organizational barriers while also developing its own academic teaching, outreach, and research agenda. Major functions include:
   • Systematic and consistent futuring as a component of campus academic and physical plant planning: We can do better than to simply ignore the future, or to face it with a plan to simply manage its challenges as they arise. Rather, we need to imagine (which is different from fantasizing) and anticipate the future, and to begin acting to address its challenges well in advance of critical future circumstances, when action may be proscribed because it is simply (for myriad and often unforeseeable reasons) too late to effect desired changes to the degree necessary to avert crisis or catastrophe.
   • Anticipatory academics: We must go beyond contemporary platitudes that acknowledge that future technologies and ways of operating mean that our graduates will increasingly work in fields that do not exist yet. We can be smarter than that, preparing an advanced guard of technical experts capable of designing in advance the physical life support systems (agriculture, settlements, industries, transportation) of the post-peak world in which our graduates and their children will live.
   • Change-precipitating outreach: Our age demands that we go beyond the traditional role of instigator of broader use of existing leading-edge science and technology in the society surrounding our campus. We need to become an effective agent for broad social change, preparing a generation that will down-size its families and consumerism, demand less from its environment, and integrate more effectively with the supporting natural systems upon which life on earth depends.
   • Systems thinking: Above all, we need an institutional capacity to create and nurture substantive integrated intellectual responses to complex, uncertain, and most likely disturbing and rapid changes in the planet and the societies that occupy it. Traditional academic organizations and missions lack the sophistication, systems skill sets, and future consciousness to fulfill this need. We can no longer afford to tolerate an on-campus attitude that is forgiving of a collective inability to imagine and prepare for the future (I recently heard a high-level planner say we would have to seek off-campus expertise if we wanted to do this): The future is our business—our only business.

Performance targets: Performance targets include a broad array of both physical, organizational, and substantive academic markers, each to be specified in the specific sub plans used to implement this master plan. Specifically, the institutional capital facilities inventory and planning process needs to be updated to emphasize our more ambitious agenda of becoming a carbon-neutral campus near the end of this plan; this includes upgrading plans for campus buildings and transportation systems, extending local transportation to tie in to local and regional upgrades, modification and development of campus non-carbon-based energy generating and conservation capacities, and development of meaningful levels of on-campus food production and processing. Academic planning targets include simultaneous creation and development of the Futuring Institute—notably within the first five years of the plan—and an extended period of planning for reconceptualizing, refocusing, and reorganizing academic units. These exercises will provide detailed specification of performance targets.

Milestones and Schedules: Again, individual schedules and critical milestones need to follow in detail from the creation of sub plans, as above. Certainly, a critical milestone for year one of this plan is adoption by University faculty through formal governance mechanisms, and endorsement by either the President, who would assume leadership, or by the Provost, as leader, with the blessing of the President. The Board of Overseers, of course, would also have to be brought on board, as would, eventually, legislators, alumni donors, students, and faculty.

How Partners Can Help: In a public university, it will be critical to receive formal recognition and support for the plan from a wide and diverse group of stakeholders, including the legislature and governor, leaders in the private sector, leaders of influential political groups (churches, labor unions, political parties), etc. Details on how each of these stakeholders will be approached and for what types of support will be forthcoming as the planning procedure unfolds.

Measuring success: There are several obvious measures of success, beginning with measurable results from efforts to develop a carbon-neutral campus. Simply, the only critical one will be whether the campus is able to continue operations well past mid-century when supplies of fossil fuels and stable electricity are problematic without widespread implementation of plans like this one. More details will be included as part of sub plans.