NIU President John G. Peters announced his hopes for NIU’s future during his 2007 State of the University Address on Thursday.

Peters recalled the forming of a strategic planning process and explained how the task force is going to proceed on both the university and individual college and departmental level.

“For those issues that cross college and department lines, I am establishing university-level task forces to evaluate suggestions and create action plans,” Peters said. “When these groups have completed their work, they will be discharged and their recommendations integrated into a specific, university-level plan.”

Peters said he was intrigued about the task force suggesting the university establish a “themed” year.

The theme will be influenced by a single big issue and when chosen, brought into classes, performances, broadcasts, alumni presentations and other different projects.

Last spring, several departments hosted presentations on global climate change.

“The initiative generated a lot of excitement on campus, and I hold it up as an example of what I think our Strategic Planning Task Force was trying to get at with the suggestion of a ‘themed’ year,” Peters said.

Another concern of the Strategic Planning Task Force, Peters said, was to assemble an investment strategy to support multi-disciplinary scholarships to complement individual scholarly and artistic achievement.

“A dozen or so of our top researchers,” according to Peters, developed a rubric to help decide on future research priorities which would be used by the proposed Dean’s Council Task Force on Multidisciplinary Programs to solicit and evaluate proposals for support, as well as to make funding recommendations.

Peters also commented on the imperative to strengthen and extend NIU’s regional and global impact via partnerships with national and international laboratories like Fermilab in Batavia and CERN in Switzerland.

The final imperative Peters remarked on was to make NIU “an institution of first choice for students, faculty and staff.”

To achieve this, Peters outlined proposed measures, as well as measures recently enacted, to offer more competitive salaries, enhance the physical university campus, and raise NIU’s profile.

“Salary improvement has been my number one priority since coming to NIU,” Peters said. “We must pay competitive salaries to attract the best faculty and staff, and we must provide incentives for outstanding achievement that keep our best and brightest here.”

To accomplish this, Peters will present in December a faculty reward program to the Board of Trustees.

A new program to track the progress of NIU’s future is also in Peters’ outlook. “Great Journeys” will chart recommendations into a five-year calendar and will list the investments made.

“In the end, we will have made investments that matter, and that have a measurable impact on the life of our institution and the people it serves,” Peters said. “The work we have done over the past 12 months, and the work we will continue in the coming year will define Northern Illinois University for decades to come.”