GETTING THE MISSION RIGHT. Another post that I started some time ago was a reaction to last September's State of the University address, which continued the theme I noted, favorably, in the 2006 address.

So much depends on our ability to establish and maintain a clear identity: student recruitment … alumni affiliation … corporate and private investment … the ability to attract top faculty … even the workplace value of an NIU degree. All of these imperatives depend on our ability to establish a clear institutional identity in the marketplace.

The Northern Star summary of the speech is still available online. The major focus of the speech, and of much behind the scenes work on campus this year, has been on strategic planning.

Task force efforts culminated in June 2007 with issuance of a report that identified four strategic imperatives to guide NIU’s planning efforts: 1) Preserve, strengthen and extend NIU’s teaching and learning environment; 2) Develop a strategy for investing in multidisciplinary scholarship and artistic clusters that complements NIU’s focus on individual scholarly and artistic achievement; 3) Strengthen and extend NIU’s global/regional impact; and 4) Make NIU an institution of ‘first choice’ for faculty, students and staff.

A weekend editorial in the DeKalb Daily Chronicle suggests challenges, as well as reasons for optimism, in that strategic plan.

Whereas last spring's commencement occurred less than a month after an event that served to divide the university from the community, this year's commencement took place as the university had begun to return the community's embrace.

Last May, four NIU students had been charged, one with murder and the others with aggravated battery, following events that led to the death of Luis Noriega outside a DeKalb bar. Many in the community generalized and lumped all students - NIU students in particular - into the category of the criminally undisciplined. Unfair to be sure, but prejudice is never fair. Fear and distrust crowd out what is fair.

That fatal beating took place in the wake of a year of frat-boy yobbery. "University of 'first choice'" is meaningless without reference to the kinds of individuals: the ambitious, the party animals, the time-servers? who are ranking their choices. We had a different kind of trouble this year.

This spring's commencement, held in the wake of the Feb. 14 shootings that took the lives of five NIU students, occurred as those on campus were making demonstrable steps to say “Thank you” to a community that had reached out to hug them back in February. Hugs are just plain better when you're hugged in return.

The memorial issue of the alumni magazine includes some observations that ought be part of Northern Illinois's, or any university's strategic plan, whether there is excess demand for perceived prestige, or not. The preface notes,

In 1895, at the cornerstone-laying ceremony for the new Northern Illinois State Normal School, Governor John Peter Altgeld set out the core values of the school that was to become Northern Illinois University. “Above all things,” he said, “we want this institution to stand on the basic principle that all people are born equal, and that only industry, intelligence, and effort shall lead to preferment.”

That's a far cry from "all have won, and all must be given prizes."

The president of the alumni association sees in our fallen students a representative sample of the people we serve.

They were five very special individualswhose collective face embodied what NIU has stood for over its long, rich history. First-generation college students, veterans, and hard-working kids from middle class families seeking a better life through higher education—that’s who they represented.

Far from the positional arms-race anxieties among the well-heeled, it still matters that higher education equip its charges to hold their own with the graduates of the more famous or more selective if not necessarily more rigorous institutions. Industry, intelligence, effort.