Initiative 1: Build an Agile Student-Centered Academic Enterprise

We will reshape SLU’s academic enterprise: our program portfolio, our organizational structure, and the processes for creating, improving and concluding programs. Our aim is an enterprise that is simpler for prospective and current students to understand and navigate, consistently stronger in academic quality and outcomes, more responsive to emerging opportunities for growth, and financially sustainable over time.

We will concentrate our programs in areas where SLU’s mission and strengths in teaching and research can produce genuine distinction, create academic units with the scale and specialized administrative support needed to thrive, and reduce unnecessary complexity and duplication. We will take up this work in a deliberate order: decisions about what SLU teaches and researches will come first, and decisions about how the University is organized will follow from them.

This work is not limited to restructuring what already exists. We will invest in offerings that demonstrate clear educational value and sustainable demand; connect the liberal arts even more intentionally with professional, STEM, health, graduate, and lifelong education; continue to develop and improve the University Core; and strengthen shared curricular foundations at the graduate level.

Health Sciences to Lead the Way

The health sciences will be a priority application of this work because of their importance to SLU’s identity and future. Few universities of SLU’s size bring together such a broad range of health-related disciplines, a medical school, a full complement of professional health programs, and a major academic-clinical partnership. Demand in these fields continues to grow as the need for caregivers expands and technology transforms the practice of care without replacing its essential human dimensions.

Together, these assets and this demand give SLU an opportunity to define health sciences excellence at a radically student-centered Jesuit research university — one that prepares students for work grounded in human judgment, presence, and trust, while advancing our calling to care for the whole person, body and soul.

Few universities of SLU’s size bring together such a broad range of health-related disciplines, a medical school, a full complement of professional health programs, and a major academic-clinical partnership.

 

Simplifying Our Organization to Increase Impact

Our health sciences assets will reach their full potential only if we organize them around shared priorities rather than disciplinary silos. Over the next four years, guided by a shared organizational, academic, and physical master plan, we will build a more integrated health sciences enterprise that draws strength from the liberal arts core.

That work will create clearer pathways for undergraduate, graduate, professional, and lifelong learners; expand interprofessional education and research; deepen clinical partnerships, including our partnership with SSM Health; support workforce development; and connect teaching, research, and clinical education more directly to the needs of St. Louis. Success will mean stronger collaboration across the health professions and an integrated platform for clinical and community partnerships that visibly serves patients and the region.

These health sciences commitments illustrate a broader principle at work throughout the initiative. Focusing our work and simplifying our organization will help protect our capacity to provide distinctively Jesuit intellectual formation. A university divided into too many programs and units, with administrative support spread too thinly, cannot sustain a strong liberal arts foundation, faculty roles that integrate teaching and research responsibilities, or high-quality graduate instruction and mentoring over the long term. A simpler, better-supported organization can, because it gives faculty and programs the scale and coordination that both program-specific and shared curricula require.

Success will mean fewer and stronger academic units; degree paths students can understand and complete without unnecessary detours; a sustained capacity to deliver the University Core and other shared curricula; and portfolio decisions made on a regular cycle rather than only when financial pressures force them.

Actions

Action 1.1	Complete a university-wide academic portfolio review and implement the resulting decisions. Build on work already complete or underway, including ongoing demand and market analyses and the findings of prior program reviews. Assess every undergraduate, graduate, and professional program against mission alignment, academic quality and student outcomes, demand, and financial sustainability, and determine where SLU will invest, sustain, consolidate or conclude.
Action 1.2	Redesign SLU’s academic organization to deliver the portfolio determined in Action 1.1: reduce the number of academic units and the administrative complexity and overhead they carry, create academic units with the scale and specialized administrative support they need to thrive, and make degree paths simpler for students to understand and navigate. Prioritize health sciences as a particularly important area of application, guided by a shared organizational, academic, and physical master plan.
Action 1.3	Establish a continuous academic portfolio management capability with transparent decision criteria; shared data on demand, cost, quality, and student outcomes; and simpler processes for creating, evolving, consolidating, and concluding programs. Make investment in emerging areas and conclusion of programs whose demand and performance no longer warrant continued support routine parts of academic planning.