Nancy Brickhouse and Tiffany Hogue

Transcript

Derek Smith:
Hello and welcome to Baylor Connections, a conversation series with the people shaping our future. Each week we go in depth with Baylor leaders, professors, and more discussing important topics in higher education, research and student life. I'm Derek Smith, and today we will be discussing Baylor's new strategic plan. Baylor In Deeds is here, the new strategic plan to guide the university through 2030.
Over the last year, thousands of faculty, staff, students, alumni, and many others have participated in the plan's development process through listening sessions, interviews, online submissions, white papers, and more to shape the plan that builds on the successes of Illuminate, a common idea developed from this effort. Baylor has a significant opportunity to adopt a global perspective that also fulfills its scriptural calling.
Today we are visiting with Provost Nancy Brickhouse and Chief of Staff Tiffany Hogue. They've served as co-chairs of the strategic planning group, and they're going to take us inside Baylor In Deeds, its commitments, its imperatives and visible elements that the Baylor family is going to see in the months ahead.
Well, Dr. Brickhouse and Tiffany, thanks so much for joining us. I was looking back, it was exactly a year ago this week that we had you on to talk about the process of just getting here, and now we're here. So that's exciting. It's great to have you both back here.

Nancy Brickhouse:
Great to be back.

Tiffany Hogue:
Well, thank you. Glad to be here.

Derek Smith:
How does it feel to be able to look at it from this side of things after all the work that's gone in?

Nancy Brickhouse:
I would say it feels really exciting. The fun part is always in the execution. It's so good to have the kind of support that we have around this plan and the excitement, enthusiasm for the plan that will just make the execution all that much more fun.

Derek Smith:
Tiffany, I'm sure you'd agree. Would you add to that?

Tiffany Hogue:
I would. I would just add that we are thrilled to finally be at the point where we can unveil the plan to our students, our faculty and staff, but then the larger Baylor family audience, which includes our alumni, our parents and friends of the university. Provost Brickhouse and I were really a honored to co-chair the planning process, and we worked hard to create a plan that we think is inspirational, aspirational, and inclusive.

Derek Smith:
Well, it is, and we're going to dive into that here. Glad we have this time to unpack together. Let's start broadly. Dr. Brickhouse, why is Baylor In Deed and that is Baylor in and then deed, so it's a play on words a little bit. Why is that the right plan for Baylor right now?

Nancy Brickhouse:
The thing that I think makes it the right plan for now is that it really draws heavily on prior plans. It builds on a lot of the aspirations that were set out in Baylor 2012. More specifically, if you look at Illuminate, a lot of the initiatives that were begun there, you see some continuity and the new plan as well as some new things in the new plan.
I mean, for example, Baylor in Latin America was an initiative in Illuminate. In this plan we are keeping that, but also building on it. In fact, adding to our motto, Pro Ecclesia, Pro Texana, Pro Mundo. So for the church, for Texas and for the world. So we're kind of almost expanding out.
Latin America continues of course, to be incredibly important for us being a Texas school, but we're looking bigger than that. After all, the Kingdom, the Christian Kingdom is a global community and we want to be a part of that community.

Derek Smith:
Baylor has so much to offer that we're going to be talking about here. Tiffany, let me ask you, you said this has been a long process. Who all has been a part of bringing it where it is now?

Tiffany Hogue:
Sure. Well, I'm glad to give you just a brief overview of the last year. So in February of 2023, President Livingstone asked Provost Brickhouse and me to co-chair the strategic planning group. Then the three of us spent quite a bit of time putting together the members of that terrific group. So we selected 20 faculty members, staff members, and even students. We had our undergraduate student body president and our graduate student association president serve on that group.
Within the group, we really try to create a lot of disciplinary diversity as well as diversity and roles at Baylor. So we had first year faculty members as well as faculty members who'd been here for more than 35 years. We also had some newer staff members and of course staff members who'd been here for quite a while. We also really tried to reflect Baylor of today. So there was beautiful gender, racial, ethnic diversity in the group as well.
What we hoped for and then were so grateful to experience was that the group gelled very quickly and they were all deeply committed to the work. We asked them not to represent their area, but really to elevate their thinking and think about the institution's needs and what our strategies and what our priorities should be for the next five years.
So we spent the summer figuring out how we would collect data, and then we began a listening session experience that began with our Board of Regents last July. Then we conducted 93 listening sessions throughout the fall. So every faculty member, student, staff member was invited to participate in a listening session. We had more than 2,300 participants in that process, so that was great. Strategic planning group member facilitated each of those sessions. So it was a heavy lift and it was very worthwhile.
We also created a white paper process and we asked our faculty, staff, and students to think about multidisciplinary big ideas and put proposals together. We didn't know what to expect in that process. We received 114 white papers and 521 faculty, staff, and students contributed to at least one white paper. So fall of gathering data in multiple ways.
Then in December we began analyzing that data. We put together some big concepts. We were working very closely with the President's Council, President Livingstone's senior leadership team, and we also worked closely with our board throughout the process. So they participated in the first listening session back in the summer, and then we updated them at each of their regular meetings and then also had a special called meeting with them both in March and May of last year. That led to the affirmation of the plan in May of 2024.

Derek Smith:
Now here we are getting to discuss it. It is called Baylor In Deeds as we visit with Baylor Provost, Dr. Nancy Brickhouse and Chief of Staff Tiffany Hogue. So Baylor In Deeds, let's tie it into a scriptural reference that's meant something to Baylor here. Matthew 5:16 states, "In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven." Dr. Brickhouse, in what ways does that verse serve as a foundation institutionally and certainly for this plan Baylor In Deeds?

Nancy Brickhouse:
So I love this scripture and I love the way that it positions the current plan, the current new strategic plan along with Illuminate. The scripture just connects the idea that we are to be a light in the world and that we will be known as Christians by the good work that we do. Baylor In Deeds is a very action oriented plan.
If you look at the initiatives in that plan, there are strong verbs in there. That I take is this is the work that we are collectively going to do in order to honor our Father in heaven. So I think it's just, again, it connects Illuminate and the scriptural references that we use there with the notion of how do we serve God? How do we be that light in the world? How do we love our neighbor, with love being a verb? These are the things that we do. So I think it's a beautiful reference.
A lot of the new branding of the strategic plan also takes a lot of the language from the Beatitudes. It does it in a way that's very, see, how do I want to say, it's very impressionistic, but the sort of thing that Christian people throughout the globe will recognize.
It sounds like the Beatitudes. It's not a literal recitation of it, but it sounds like the Beatitudes. So I think it's just beautiful. I think it's one of the reasons why I feel like the plan is being embraced by so many in the community is they love the branding on it.

Derek Smith:
One question I have really for either one of you, and you could tell me if what I hear, if that's right or if there's other directions to go with it too. When I hear what we're talking about with this idea of Baylor In Deeds and these imperatives, I think the last few years so many people have pulled together to elevate the university, that seat at the table that we've talked about.
We always said that was never the finish line. Is there a sense of we've worked hard, we've been really blessed in those efforts, and now we're further stewarding say, what are we going to do with these places, these opportunities we've earned?

Tiffany Hogue:
Yes.

Nancy Brickhouse:
One of the questions that we continuously revisited within the strategic planning group was to take the quote that President Livingstone in her inaugural address said that the world needs a Baylor. So it's like this question then gets more specific because the question is, so why does the world need the Baylor? What does the world need Baylor to do?
So again, there's that continuity between Illuminate and Baylor In Deeds that just feels like the right kind of progression. It raises our sights, but it doesn't take us in a different direction. It continues a lot of the great work that we've already done.

Derek Smith:
Visiting with Dr. Nancy Brickhouse and Tiffany Hogue here on Baylor Connections. Let's talk about the commitments embedded within Baylor In Deeds. There's four main commitments. Equipping students to flourish, broadening interdisciplinary research and impact, building a vibrant, caring global community and demonstrating Christian stewardship.
So we can talk about each of those a little bit and go further inside. Tiffany, let's go with that first one, equipping students to flourish. What are some of the ideas there?

Tiffany Hogue:
Sure. Well, we have a number of strategies that are too numerous to explain this afternoon. So I would encourage anyone who's interested to find the plan and read it online. So I'll highlight just a few. Although I love them all. It's kind of like naming your children.
One of our key strategies in this commitment is to prioritize character formation, leadership development, spiritual growth, and holistic well-being throughout the student experience. We have really done some wonderful work in student life with the redesign of chapel. We've expanded what was a very traditional chapel for many of us who went to Baylor several decades ago to now a chapel that has 60 different offerings and is usually much smaller and more personal in scale. So we consider that work to be so important, but also still just the beginning of some of the work that we're doing with the spiritual growth of our students.
We are also increasing the quality and the quantity of some of our academic co-curricular activities that we consider are high-impact practices. So whether those are increasing access and availability to study abroad, internship, other engaged learning opportunities, we know that those experiences can be so formative for our students. We want to make them available to more students while they're here at Baylor.
I'd say a third strategy that I'm very excited about under this commitment is our explicit commitment to the well-being of graduate students. Baylor graduate student enrollment has increased dramatically, which is so exciting for us. One in four Baylor students is now a graduate student, and we are committed to their flourishing both in and outside of the classroom.

Derek Smith:
Great. Rundown of commitment one, equipping students to flourish. Dr. Brickhouse, let's talk about the next one. Broadening interdisciplinary research and impact.

Nancy Brickhouse:
Well, first of all, I want to say a little bit about how we actually constructed this particular initiative. I would say that the white papers that we received from the community were particularly important in the construction of these, selection of these particular initiatives.
The white papers informed us of the kind of work that our faculty were doing and wanted to do, what were some of the big ideas that they had. So we looked for both those initiatives that had a lot of support from across the campus. Some of them were really just big ideas around faith and disability, for example, was one.
Others were a lot of smaller papers that seemed to kind of rhyme, if you get my drift. So we had a lot of papers that were kind of focused on environmental stuff, if you will. So we knew there was a lot of energy around environmental initiatives that people felt very strongly about. So that's how that initiative was constructed.
We also paid a lot of attention to some of our external interviewers. We talked to people outside the university who also informed a lot of these initiatives because when you're constructing a strategic plan, you don't want to just do things that you want to do. You want to do things that the world actually needs. Sometimes you can be fooling yourself a little bit. That's why it's important to talk to people also outside the institution.
So I think the faculty will recognize a number of key areas that we feel are areas where Baylor can really excel. Human flourishing for example, it appeared in Illuminate, I think it's even more prominent here. You might remember the Global Flourishing study that was led out of the Institute for the Study of Religion.
We're expecting a lot of that work to come to fruition this winter. That will bring a lot of attention to the kind of social science research that we can do here at Baylor that informs what are the attributes, or I should say, what are the conditions under which human beings flourish and what does it mean for humans to flourish?
We can build on that work and we can include initiatives, new initiatives within that broader umbrella. A lot of the work that we've done with the Faith in Character study, a lot of the work that we are planning around faith and disability, around bioethics, all of that fits in nicely under this larger umbrella of human flourishing. So those were the kinds of things that we were looking for.
I can't repeat all of the initiatives, so I encourage you to go to the website and look at the various initiatives within commitment two. I think it will energize the community in terms of working collaboratively across disciplines, across colleges to attack some of these big problems.

Derek Smith:
By the way, strategicplan.web.baylor.edu, if people are listening at their computer, they could go to that and cross reference. I know I'm asking you in 20 minutes to summarize something that many people put together, played a role in it over a year. Talking about the four commitments. Tiffany, next, building a vibrant, caring global community.

Tiffany Hogue:
Sure. This is such an exciting commitment. Provost Brickhouse and I heard throughout the unveiling meetings that we've had in the past week that people can really see themselves in this plan, which is so meaningful to hear. I hope that all of us can really see ourselves in this commitment because we all are part of our community.
So the first strategy in this commitment is to establish Baylor as a leader in preparing active, engaged citizens who interact with others with civility and respect. I think we can probably all agree that in this particularly polarizing season, Baylor needs to educate and graduate students who know how to work across difference and who I hope can be leaders in the area of civil discourse.
We're trying to model that in our classrooms. We're trying to model that as we work with colleagues across divisions. We want our students to feel like that's a distinctive part of their Baylor education.
We also are excited to grow the number, scope and scale of our international partnerships. We have many, and they are thriving. As part of our strategic plan, we have expanded our motto, as we've noted Pro Mundo. So you can really see the Pro Mundo influence throughout the plan, but particularly in commitment three.
Also, this is the commitment where we named that we want to increase the visibility and vitality of the cultural and performing arts throughout campus. We know the arts are such an integral part of our holistic experience as faculty, staff, and students, and we want to elevate and prioritize the arts in this new plan.

Derek Smith:
That's great. On the final commitment to discuss here, Dr. Brickhouse, we talked about that idea of stewardship a little bit earlier playing a role in the strategic plan. That's one of the commitments, this final one, demonstrating Christian stewardship.

Nancy Brickhouse:
In addition to the great research initiatives around caring for the natural world, this commitment also addresses our stewardship, the university's stewardship of our own resources. It addresses a capital plan. Where do we need to make investments in order to steward the growth of the university? It includes a new energy complex that is infrastructure that supports the entire campus and needs to be replaced.
So we want to be good stewards of the campus that we have, and that means taking care of these infrastructure projects that are going to not only be more energy efficient when they're replaced, but they'll also allow for the expansion of the campus. Right now, we actually cannot grow because our energy capacity is tapped out. Includes also stewarding athletics and Baylor's commitment to athletics in a very changing national environment.

Derek Smith:
Well, great rundown of the commitments. We also have key imperatives that are a part of this too. The first is affordability, value, and completion.

Tiffany Hogue:
Sure. I'd love to talk about that. It might help to note that the imperatives differ from the commitments in that the imperatives are woven throughout the plan. Affordability, value, and completion were topics that came up regularly throughout our listening sessions. We know the value of a Baylor education has never been higher. We also want to commit to helping our students with high financial need. As part of that, commit to helping our undergraduates graduate within four years.
So we are really focused on that work right now as a leadership team. We are excited about the progress that we've made with retention, and we know that it takes years to improve four year and six year graduation rates, but that work is very important. We've even had some internal studies done recently on the cost to students if they take extra time to graduate. So we are really focused as a university right now to help our students graduate in a timely way as one way of helping them while they're here.

Derek Smith:
Second imperative, Dr. Brickhouse, health and engineering.

Nancy Brickhouse:
So health and engineering are again woven in throughout the plan as important for the overall growth of the university health because Baylor is kind of branded health. In Texas, that's what people think of when they hear the name Baylor. We have so many health institutions that also carry the Baylor name. These are our fastest growing colleges at Baylor, fastest growing in terms of enrollments or those that are doing health related professions. We want to support that work.
We want to also enable those colleges to buttress their research capacity in those areas so that as we're creating more professionals for the health space, that they also have access to cutting edge research and advanced technologies in terms of their education.
Engineering, because we feel like that is the place where we have the greatest opportunity for growth. If you look at our location in the middle of the Texas Triangle, that's the area between Dallas, Houston, Austin. It is a central part of Texas. There's huge investments being made right now in science and engineering. We want to take advantage of that. We want to figure out a strong position for Baylor in that space so that we can be a part of the growth of central Texas in science and engineering.
Our engineering college is particularly, it's young and it's small, and so we want to scale it so that we can compete a bit more, again, in the central Texas region. I would also say that so many of our, when you're talking about deeds, Baylor In Deeds, there are so many good deeds that can be done through health and engineering. So many of our students feel callings to serve in these areas. We want to make sure that we're being responsive to their vocational calling.

Derek Smith:
Well, another imperative that relates to some of that and has its own threads as well. I would ask you about human technology interface.

Nancy Brickhouse:
Oh, everybody's talking about this. Emerging technologies. AI, of course, is the one that is in the common lingo right now. This imperative really is about making smart use, ethical use of emerging technologies, both in our research as well as in our educational programs.
In order for our students to be prepared for the world that they're entering into, they need to understand these technologies. They need to know how to use them, how to use them ethically, and we want to make sure that they are prepared for that. So we want to also be leaders in terms of the ethical uses of AI and other emerging technologies. Baylor's very well suited to play a lead role there.

Derek Smith:
Tiffany, we discussed the idea of civil discourse earlier, and it's one of our four imperatives.

Tiffany Hogue:
It is. We feel that our Christian mission makes this one especially appropriate for Baylor at this time. We are called as a faith-based institution to treat one another as made in the image of God. In a time where the political rancor seems so divisive, we feel like we can offer something else and that we must do that.
So we have a great gift in our president who's a national leader on this issue. We have a presidential series on civil discourse. So we are committed to bringing in national speakers and creating other opportunities for all of us to get better at these skills.
Then we have a really wonderful opportunity to think deeply about how to help our students get better at this while they are with us. So I think Kevin Viegas has been on the program talking about the bridge building work that he's doing with our students. We're so excited about other similar initiatives that will come into fruition in the next five years under this plan.

Derek Smith:
Well, thank you. A great rundown of the imperatives and the commitments. As that brings us into the final few minutes of the program, closing questions here. We've seen the rollout this past week. What are some other... Are there going to be other milestones along the way that people can expect to see some of the impacts or implementations going forward?

Nancy Brickhouse:
Absolutely. I think that the earliest signs of progress will be largely those initiatives that are fairly continuous with Illuminate. So for example, in the human flourishing space that I talked about, I think that there will be a lot of positive, new initiatives related to that early on.
I think that things like advanced materials and manufacturing, we've really built a strong group there. That is an initiative that has taken off that people are going to see become much more visible under Baylor In Deeds than it was under Illuminate.
I think that perhaps on the more literally visible front, there's a commitment to working to upgrade a lot of our classroom spaces. Some are really quite old-fashioned, and we really want them upgraded in terms of the most recent technologies and spaces that are conducive to great learning. I think that that will also be something that we can see in the early years, if you will, of Baylor In Deeds.

Derek Smith:
Well, when you think about Illuminate back in 2018 and all that's happened since then, certainly so much excitement and it's kind of fun to anticipate what's ahead here with Baylor In Deeds. Thanks so much for taking the time, each of you, for joining us, for all the work you've done and for what's ahead here with Baylor In Deeds.

Nancy Brickhouse:
Thank you.

Tiffany Hogue:
Thank you so much for having us.

Derek Smith:
Great to have you both here. Chief of Staff Tiffany Hogue and Provost Nancy Brickhouse, co-chairs of there's strategic planning group that led to Baylor In Deeds. Our guests today on Baylor Connections. I'm Derek Smith. Reminder, you can hear this and other programs online, baylor.edu/connections, and you can subscribe on iTunes. Thanks for joining us here on Baylor Connections.