Dec. 5, 2024

One MSU for student success

By Mark Largent, vice provost & dean of Undergraduate Education

Portrait photo of Mark LargentAt MSU we believe student success is a measure of an institution’s ability to meet its students’ needs in an accessible and equitable manner. Over the last couple of months, I have had the opportunity to reflect on and list some of our accomplishments in advancing our vision for student success since we started the current phase of this work in 2017. 

We have done so much to make MSU a leader in student success. Over the last seven years, we have:

Throughout all these changes, we have focused on scope, scale, access, and all students' success. And we did all of this through the COVID-19 pandemic, Feb. 13, and more than a dozen university presidents and provosts. We have accomplished so much and are certainly justified in being proud of our work. And, as former Provost and Interim President Woodruff frequently reminded us, we should be happy but not yet satisfied, for there is much more to do to help make MSU even more accessible and equitable and to realize the highest, boldest aspirations of our mission as Michigan’s state university.

As the campus begins efforts to re-fresh its 2030 strategic goals and plans, we have been pressing ourselves to work even harder for student success. Earlier this fall, we brought together executive leaders at the highest level to better support a student-centered culture that enacts the commitments outlined in the Spartan Undergraduate Experience Resource Guide. The group, which we named the Spartan Undergraduate Experience Strategy (SUES) Executive Committee, met for the first time last month.

The purpose of the SUES Executive Committee is to enhance the institutional coordination and communication of MSU undergraduate student success projects to better support our colleagues as they improve MSU. The responsibilities of this group will include

  1. high-level leadership, problem identification, and problem solving;
  2. identification of other strategic planning efforts that intersect with undergraduate student success strategic objectives;
  3. communicating goals, progress, and expectations to the units they lead; and
  4. collaborating with their colleagues so that we can move forward as one team.

Our first meeting brought together 26 executive leaders, who were charged by President Guskiewicz to

  • create “One MSU” for our students and engaging in operational strategies for excellence through centralized and coordinated distributed support,
  • develop a set of principles, using the framework of an organizational growth mindset, to help our teams make decisions around complex and difficult challenges so that every student can learn, thrive, and graduate.

The president asked us to identify and seek strategies to overcome complex problems that hindered student success. To do so, he told us we needed to collaborate by adopting a “One MSU” approach, to operate from an agreed upon set of values and principles, and to adopt and institutionalize an organizational “growth mindset.” He also set some deadlines for us. By February, he asked us to identify and describe two to four complex problems the campus and our students face, and by May he would like strategies to resolve them designed and ready to implement.

While there are always many policy, practice, and culture challenges we are working to resolve, President Guskiewicz asked us to prioritize particularly complex challenges that required shared governance, coordinated effort, progressive change over time, and shared agreements among potentially conflicting perspectives, values, and/or desired outcomes. These are sometimes called “wicked problems,” and they have a particular set of features that make them both difficult to solve and their solution critical to our success. They include

  • incomplete or changing information;
  • varying perspectives of stakeholders;
  • not inclusive of lived experience of undergrad students;
  • deep roots;
  • multiple interdependencies;
  • requirements for alternative problem framings and solution approaches;
  • potential for new problems to arise when solving for the current problem;
  • potential for significant negative consequences; and
  • lack of clear solution point that is perhaps “beyond the cognitive capacity of any one mind to diagnose or comprehend.”

Over the next two months, we will be engaging the campus community in helping identify some of MSU’s most complex challenges that we need to address so that every undergraduate student can learn, thrive, and graduate. We will do this through our established meetings – like UGAAD and CSSG – and through a survey created by the SUES team.  While we are looking for the big, wicked problems in this effort we also hope to identify smaller problems – papercuts as I like to call them – that we can identify and remedy. As we launch this effort, we hope you will take advantage of these opportunities to help guide this work.

In February the SUES Executive Committee meets again with President Guskiewicz to prioritize a small number of complex problems that we believe will help us achieve our goals for undergraduate student success. By May, we will have plan for how to begin tackling those problems. We appreciate the time, involvement, and perspectives of the leaders who committed their time to come together to function as One MSU.