CAPACITY AND READINESS TO PERFORM SERVICE AND DELIVERABLES AS DESCRIBED. Nearly a decade ago, well before the seismic disruptions of the 2020 pandemic, Virginia Tech University began planning to transform its organizational culture and experience for future generations.10 In calling for Beyond Boundaries in 2015, president Xxx Xxxxx and the Virginia Tech community foresaw an imminent need for the university to raise its own stakes, to challenge itself about which beliefs, funding patterns and learning principles would provide the university’s foundation for excellence and responsiveness by 2047 and beyond. Correspondingly, Virginia Tech has thought carefully and with the strong support of the faculty about what it values as a land-grant institution—chiefly to ensure that experiential learning and discovery remain at the heart of the mission; and it has confronted the difficult decision that profound organizational and operational changes will be necessary to achieve lasting excellence. Now the university is ready to cultivate its Beyond Boundaries initiative and new long-term strategic plan with the help of trusted external advisors. If there were ever a time and circumstance in which the old adage about the Chinese character for “crisis” – consisting of “danger” and “opportunity” – were applicable, this is it. Higher education now faces the greatest – perhaps existential – challenges in its history. Yet this can – and must – be approached as not just a threat but also as an opportunity: to reimagine what higher education can be and do, to take the lead in shaping that. By leading with a vision of what is possible, the Virginia Tech can more competitively meet the challenges of the 21st Century. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, public colleges faced serious challenges, including declining enrollments, increased costs, expanding alternatives, and decreasing confidence in the value of investing in current higher education models; these concerns struck even more deeply in the Northeast. The pandemic and accompanying economic recession have only exacerbated these threats, striking at traditional colleges’ core operating model, making higher education less affordable for the record number of families sinking into economic distress, decimating state budgets and thereby threatening necessary continued public support for higher education institutions. All these factors are further driving families and individuals toward alternative education 10 The impact of the Beyond Boundaries and other internal strategic dialogues is already bein...
