The Faculty Senate will meet Tuesday afternoon to vote on a new version of the proposed 2005-2010 ISU Strategic Plan.

This plan attempts to be more focused than previous versions. It is a lot shorter and does not contain as many explicit descriptions, said Jack Girton, at-large senator for the College of Agriculture.

The university needs a strategic plan in order to function and make any headway.

“It’s a way [for colleges and departments] to set goals and then plan ways to achieve them,” said Faculty Senate Secretary Tanya Zanish-Belcher, who served on the strategic plan committee.

The new plan has been called into question by the senate in the past because of its emphasis on research. Debate over the plan centered on what many faculty felt was an “off-balanced” emphasis on research and ignorance other areas like teaching, according to Daily staff reports.

Girton said the revised plan does a better job of putting Iowa State’s goals into context.

Because Iowa State is a land-grant university that was founded with the idea of taking higher knowledge and making it useful to the people, the plan then states this as a goal that can affect the school’s enrollment policy, extension and applied research, he said.

The committee tried to strike a balance between being too detailed and too broad so that all departments could take part in each goal listed in the plan.

One department may talk about a specific project while others may talk about a research program as a means of attracting new faculty, students and staff, Zanish-Belcher said.

After the plan is approved, the provost’s office can take this goal and set standards for accomplishing the goals, she said.

“It is an approach. Some like it better, some don’t,” Girton said. “I like it because it allows administrators to get creative; it gives them goals and then allows them to be creative about how we reach those goals.”

The draft that is before the Faculty Senate is a result of numerous rounds of input. Some suggested diversity needed to be stressed more.

The committee agreed and added it to the strategic plan. Other ideas were suggested, but the committee decided the issue was more a question of implementation than policy and was not included in the revised version, Girton said.

The senate will vote on the new strategic plan during the meeting at 3 p.m. Tuesday in the Sun Room of the Memorial Union.