Expertise and Tactical Resources for Self-Support Programs

Each CSU campus has a self-support college or unit, generally led by a dean, director, or associate vice president. The unit’s staff represents a range of expertise in planning, managing, and delivering self-support programs. It can offer experience and tactical know-how to help the campus optimize its self-support capacity as it plans for the decade ahead.

Many campuses have already engaged their campus’s self-support leadership in campus-wide strategic planning. A healthy number of these leaders and senior staff belong to a network of professional colleagues outside of the campus. They are active in state, national, and even international professional groups working with innovative uses of self-support, extended education, online digital education, adult education, continuing professional education, international education, community and economic development, marketing, student support services, instructional design, and administrative technologies. A campus’s self-support leaders can thus contribute new models and ideas to their campus’s strategic vision.

As the campus refines its strategy, the self-support unit’s staff may require additional training. For this, self-support reserve dollars can be tapped. The unit can also acquire new capabilities by partnering with other CSU self-support units, which already have the necessary experience. When a strong strategic vision is in place, even a vacancy in the self-support unit offers an opportunity to add new expertise.

Finally, the CSU’s Commission on the Extended University brings together selected campus presidents, provosts, faculty senate leaders, campus self-support deans or directors, and Chancellor’s Office representatives to consider emerging issues in self-support capacities and strategies. Any campus can contact the Commission chair or the statewide dean of extended learning; both of these officers can help identify a team from other CSU campuses that has had appropriate experience or could suggest viable models and options.