Planning Process

A strategic plan cannot succeed without the support of the community; for this reason, the voices of the Seaver College and Pepperdine University communities were intentionally included and considered in the development of this plan. These groups provided critical insight throughout the process, including the approximately 175 Seaver faculty, staff, and students who participated in the Community Day strategic planning event in January 2020. The thoughtful feedback provided that day was layered upon a skeleton created by the Planning Core Team (see below) to form the foundation of this plan.

From this origin, two leadership groups, the Planning Core Team and the Planning Leadership Team, drafted and shaped the content of the plan throughout 2020 and early 2021. The Planning Core Team consisted of 10 members and consisted of the leaders of the primary functional areas of the college, the Director of the University’s Center for Faith and Learning, and a representative from the Seaver Faculty Association (SFA) (Appendix D). The Planning Leadership Team was a larger group, with 31 members from each of the college’s primary constituent groups. Its membership consisted of all Core Team members, the Seaver College Cabinet, five faculty representatives, including the SFA President and the chairperson of the Seaver College Diversity Council, and two student representatives (Appendix D).

After the plan’s initial drafting, each of these groups provided in-depth feedback resulting in the initial draft of this strategic plan. In November 2020, the plan was shared publicly with the university community, including faculty, staff, students, alumni, and college boards. Public forums with key constituent groups were held to receive feedback from the following groups.

Community feedback was also received via email from individuals from across the university. Over 200 unique suggested revisions were provided and each was considered as a second draft of the plan was prepared.

The second and near-final draft of the plan was shared with the Seaver College community on a public-facing web site on February 3, 2021. That date also was the first day of a 30-day review and comment period that allowed the community to provide additional feedback on the plan by sending comments to seaverstrategicplan@pepperdine.edu. The review and comment period closed on March 5, 2021 and will be followed by a review period for senior University leadership and the Board of Regents. To incorporate feedback from these two important groups and ensure alignment with the University strategic plan, the final draft of the Seaver College strategic plan will be released to the college and university communities in the spring of 2022.

In its entirety, the strategic plan identifies the critical initiatives the College must address over the next ten years. Every goal and objective in the plan is of critical importance, but all cannot be acted upon and implemented at once. The College can undertake only a finite number of projects of strategic importance at any one time while also continuing to deliver its signature academic and co-curricular experiences to our students. This is particularly true when the projects are of tremendous scope and magnitude. For this reason, a timeline for addressing the primary goals and objectives articulated in the strategic plan is provided in Appendix A.  

The timeline is critical to the success of the strategic plan because it prioritizes projects of great urgency, allows for necessary preparatory work to be completed for some initiatives, aligns other projects to occur in parallel with related university initiatives, and distributes the plan implementation workload over the decade for the college community. The timeline indicates when the community will engage in a focused effort to implement or fulfill each goal or objective. Preparatory work will begin immediately for items slated to be addressed later in the current decade. Once all development work on an item is completed, the initiative will move immediately into its implementation phase where the college will act to bring it to realization.

The entire Seaver College community will participate in the process of realizing each goal and objective stated in the plan. The Seaver College Dean’s Office will have primary responsibility to fulfill the goals and objectives of the plan, but will act in partnership with stakeholders from across the university and in accordance with the university’s vision of shared governance to implement the plan. To ensure that the appropriate primary stakeholders are engaged for each objective, they are listed in Appendix B. 

To gauge the College’s success in developing and implementing all aspects of the plan, ongoing, regular, and public reporting will be used to track representative metrics associated with most every initiative listed in the strategic plan. These metrics are listed in Appendix C. 

Details on each plan-based initiative will be posted on the Seaver College Strategic Plan website. On this page, information on each metric will be updated annually and breakout pages will detail the progress of the community toward fulfilling each initiative. Community engagement has been central to the strategic planning process from its onset and it will remain a central commitment throughout the current decade. In a similar vein, the College is equally committed to accountability and transparency in reporting our progress toward implementing and realizing each initiative detailed in the plan. The plan’s goals, metrics, and progress will be readily available to the community as we advance the mission of Seaver College in the weeks, months, and years ahead.