Facilities Development Plan - The University of Nebraska Kearney

outfi tted with current instructional technology
and appropriate equipment. Academic
conferencing facilities will be improved.
Faculty offi ces will be improved where
required and located so as to enhance student/
faculty interaction. Planners will respect UNK’s
historical committment to small-class sizes
and comprehensive undergraduate research
capability throughout the curriculum. UNK’s
information technology infrastructure will
feature comprehensive wireless networking
capability in every building. The infrastructure
will support on- and off-campus teaching,
outreach, and student support services as well
as administrative computing.
Challenges for Growth
& Development
No plan can provide for all future eventualities.
Nor can it remove certain realities that are
beyond our control and can become signifi cant
constraints or limitations. Therefore, it must be
adjusted to accommodate changes—including
the progress it generates. Among such
variables and challenges that require constant
attention, we regard the following as especially
important.
ENROLLMENT
University and UNK leaders have established
ambitious goals for enrollment growth. We
strive to meet them. In recent years we have
launched a variety of initiatives to offer new
educational programs tailored to citizens’
needs. We are determined to market the
institution more aggressively and widely, to
increase recruitment of new students, to raise
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the college-going rate in Nebraska, and to
improve our performance in retaining students
to graduation. The physical campus improvements
envisioned in this plan certainly will
enhance our capability to enlarge our enrollment.
Indeed, it is unlikely that our traditional
residential enrollment can grow signifi cantly
unless we address long-standing defi ciencies in
our residential environment and academic infrastructure
(additional scholarship resources
are also required; this need is being addressed
in other planning processes). But to the extent
our residential enrollment grows, we must be
alert for ways in which the physical campus
should be refashioned to serve our students.
SCHOLARSHIP ENHANCEMENT
A major goal of our strategy is to enhance the
quality and quantity of faculty and student
research, notably externally funded research.
This builds upon signifi cant advances realized
during the last decade, in which the dollar
amount of grant awards to our faculty more
than doubled, and in which UNK has become
a national pacesetter in the undergraduate
research arena. To sustain and grow this
momentum, which is a key part of our vision
to achieve distinction among our peers, we will
need to devote special attention to emerging
needs for added laboratory facilities and equipment
as well as new library and information
services.
LAND USE POTENTIAL
The large tracts of land south and west of our
main campus will afford many opportunities
to expand and enhance UNK programs. We
outline concepts for such uses in this
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