October 26, 2023

‘Creating the future’: UCLA launches its new strategic plan

Academic Civic Engagement Faculty and Staff Global Outreach Students

This summer, UCLA’s Latin American Institute brought 18 Los Angeles teachers to Oaxaca, Mexico, to learn about Indigenous culture and bring that knowledge back to their classrooms. A month prior, a UCLA Engineering professor was awarded a campus grant to develop a course connecting undergraduates with local community groups to partner on environmental justice projects. And just a week ago, UCLA Law inaugurated its new Promise Institute Europe in The Hague to help extend its expertise, advocacy and teaching on human rights in the international arena.

What do these projects have in common? They’re representative of the ways in which UCLA, as a world-class public research university in one of the world’s most diverse and dynamic megacities, is effecting positive change on campus, in local communities and around the globe. And they’re emblematic of where UCLA is heading.

With the launch today of Creating the Future: UCLA’s 2023–28 Strategic Plan, the campus has made a commitment to deepening and expanding that impact. The plan, developed in consultation with faculty, students, staff, alumni, community members and other stakeholders, outlines five primary goals and provides a blueprint for reaching them over the next five years.

Those areas of focus are: deepening UCLA’s engagement with the global city in which it is located; expanding the university’s global influence; developing key structures and initiatives to help UCLA advance cutting-edge research and creative activities for the greater good; capitalizing on new teaching approaches and technology to elevate instruction; and adjusting UCLA processes, culture and infrastructure to help the university meet these other aims.

Tying together all of these goals is the concept of inclusive excellence, which recognizes that ‘the excellence UCLA has achieved thus far has not been shared in equal measure by people of all backgrounds and identities. But in the years ahead, by centering inclusivity, we can more meaningfully serve our communities and more fully meet our university’s public mandate,” Chancellor Gene Block and Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Darnell Hunt wrote in a message to the campus community.

“We are fortunate to be a public university in a place like Los Angeles, where there is no racial or ethnic majority. It is driven by people from all over the world,” Hunt said. “We are both a local and a global city, and we are taking advantage of these unique characteristics.”