Can you hear it? It's the wind of change, finally blowing through AUBG doors. You've been waiting for it, even if you haven't realized it yet. Read on, as President Huwiler sits down with Verve for a fireside chat on the brand new AUBG 5-year plan. Learn about the origins of the plan and Huwiler's opinion on the major issues ahead.

How did you come up with the idea to create a five-year plan for the development of AUBG?

It is based pretty much on my previous experience. I used to be a member of association accrediting teams. When an institution seeks US accreditation, there are nine standards that the institutions have to meet. One of the increasingly important standards is planning.

A lot of institutions, particularly in the past, just went from year to year. When they had resources to allocate, they would do it ad hoc. Not enough universities do the kind of planning that has become routine in the corporate business world. Every once in a while, it is important for a university to step back and get its mission.

The published mission at AUBG has not really changed very much for a very long time, and maybe the environment has changed. Bulgaria is in the EU now, and the sources of our students are changing, the geo-political and economic situation is changing, so maybe the mission should be a little different than [what] it was in 1991 when Bulgaria was emerging.

Once we have decided  whether the mission should be exactly what it is now, or whether we should make some changes, we need to assess whether we have the people, processes, and resources to do what we say we want to do in the mission. We’ll say, by the end of five years, we would like to have these resources in place, so that we can accomplish this mission. Then, you take a realistic look at where you are now and where you want to be in five years and figure out what you need to do in order to bridge that gap.    

"In general, I find AUBG students more engaged than most students at most places"

Based on your experience of being on the other side as an assessor, do you think that the highly esteemed universities are the ones that have better planning?

The good ones do have good planning, and there will be debate, I suppose, about what comes first: whether they are good universities because they have good planning, or do they have good planning because they have lots of resources and have hired lots of good people?

When we look at models, […] we are looking at the very best. We repeatedly pull out the list with the top 20 liberal arts universities and colleges in the United States, and we compare ourselves.

Some of them have their planning processes, outlines, and schedules on their website […] and we were influenced by some of those.

Have there been any other 5-year plans developed before by the university?

Actually, this isn’t AUBG’s first plan. They got to the end of one of those plans, and then a new one was not done. They extended it and modified some things each year, so it has been a very long time since AUBG just started from scratch and got everybody to thinking, talking, and creating a plan.

Are you optimistic about the number of students who will get involved with creating the five-year plan?

Yes, I am. There has been very good response so far. I have got a surprising number of personal e-mails from students who are pleased that it is happening. I got one that ran on pages and pages. The electronic form would not accept as much stuff as he wanted to say, so he put it all on a Word file and sent it to me.

In general, I find AUBG students more engaged than most students at most places

Have many people applied for the study groups that will be formed?

I’ve gotten quite a few e-mails from people who are interested in participating in one or another of the study groups. In fact, since we want to accommodate everyone who really wants to participate, we may have some study groups that get a little larger than we would have planned for. But that is better than not having enough interest.

Do you expect each member of a study group to do very thorough research on his/her own?

When people agree to serve on a committee, they have to agree to do whatever it takes to get the information that committee needs. The committee chairs need to tell us what resources they need in order to get the information. If there is something they need that is really going to be more intensive and time-consuming than students, faculty, and staff can do, then we may need to go to an outside source.

Should such a planning process become regular at AUBG?

There should be a very clear, defined process. This team should come up with a plan of what happens, so that we don’t just get a big, thick document on a shelf somewhere. There should be an annual action plan and a list of specific, concrete, measurable things that the institution establishes as goals each year to move in the direction of where we’re going to be in five years. Then, each year the plan needs to be revisited […] to see what has really changed – maybe there is something that is outdated and needs to be thrown out or amended. Maybe there are new opportunities that weren’t available when the plan was written.

Why will the plan cover exactly five years?

The commonest period for long-range planning is five years, and we have gone with the crowd. It seems like a sensible period of time.

Some people come from ex-communist countries…