Welcome to the Academic Planning webpage! As Brandon University celebrates its 125^th year, I have been charged by the BU Senate to lead the re-development of our Academic Plan alongside an academic planning committee. We have worked diligently as a committee to determine a work plan and we are now ready to engage our communities through our first survey. This is the first of three rounds of planned consultations with both internal and external stakeholders, and we invite your robust participation in this process.

On the left of this page, you will see a series of links. The second, “Background Materials” contains a series of documents made available to the committee, which informed our work plan and the nature of the questions in the first survey. We include these documents to ensure that our various stakeholders have access to the same documents available to the committee, as you consider your responses to the survey. The third link, “Timeline and Consultations,” lists the proposed timeline, consultation phases, and specific external stakeholders who will be asked to participate in this survey. If you have suggestions for further stakeholders to be consulted, please send them to Shannon Downey, Executive Officer to the Provost and Vice-President (Academic) (downeys@brandonu.ca). The fourth link will take you to the survey itself.

While survey results will be anonymous to the committee, in order to protect the integrity of the feedback process members of the BU community will be required to sign in with their BU credentials; external stakeholders will be sent a link to the survey that does not require the same validation. You will also be able to save your answers to the survey questions at any point, so that you may return to the document as often as you like until the deadline. While we encourage fulsome participation in this process and hope for robust feedback, please feel free to answer as many or as few of the questions as you like; the only required field will ask you to note your role in the BU community (faculty, student, staff, administrator, Board member, etc.) – this field must be completed before you can save your survey responses. 

The committee thanks you in advance for your contributions to this process. We intend to create a document which will not simply sit on a desk somewhere, but which will be a true plan that can be used to guide decision-making in terms of budgeting, capital planning, the allocation of positions throughout the institution, future planning, student supports and success, student recruitment and retention, alumni and community engagement, identifying priority areas for fundraising, and much more. As Provost, I also intend that this Academic Plan will serve as the basis for the creation of a detailed Strategic Enrollment Management plan to guide and reinvigorate our engagement with students, from the time we first make contact with them by way of our recruitment processes, through their time with us on campus, and into their time as alumni of BU. We hope this Academic Plan will be as transformative for the institution as our recent round of collective bargaining with BUFA, and that can only happen with widespread, engaged, and informed participation by as many members of our internal and external communities as possible. As such, we strongly encourage you all to participate in this process as deeply as you are able, to help us ensure that this plan represents a truly collegially-defined vision for the future of our collective academic life here at Brandon University.

In order to ensure that everyone has sufficient time to engage as robustly as they would like, this survey will remain open until September 30^th.

Best wishes,

Kofi Campbell, Provost and Vice-President (Academic) – Chair, Academic Strategic Planning Committee
Dr. Emily Holland, Faculty of Arts (Anthropology)
Dr. Velvet Maud, Faculty of Arts (Native Studies)
Dr. Candy Jones, Faculty of Education (Curriculum & Pedagogy)
Dr. Burcu Ntelioglou, Faculty of Education (Curriculum & Pedagogy)
Prof. Karen Batson, Faculty of Health Studies (Psychiatric Nursing)
Prof. Andrea Thomson, Faculty of Health Studies (Psychiatric Nursing)
Dr. Alex Koiter, Faculty of Science (Geography & Environment)
Dr. Mousumi Majumder, Faculty of Science (Biology)
Dr. Jon-Tomas Godin, School of Music (Music Research)
Prof. Sarah Hall, School of Music (Applied)
Dr. David Rowland, representative elected by and from Student Services
Mr. Chris Lagimodiere, Associate Vice-President (Indigenous Initiatives)
Mr. Greg Gatien, Academic Dean appointed by Deans’ Council
Dr. Christophe LeMoine, Academic Dean appointed by Deans’ Council
Mr. Charles Adamu, Student Senator
Ms. Joy Chikezie, Student Senator
Ms. Melanie Sucha, Chief Information Officer (consulting)
Ms. Andrea McDaniel, University Registrar (consulting)