Announcing Penn’s Strategic Framework: In Principle and Practice

November 30, 2023

To the Penn Community,

I write you today to share In Principle and Practice: Penn’s Focus on Tomorrow, providing a strategic framework to guide our path forward.  This document is the result of a year-long strategic planning process, shaped further by the initiatives we launched this fall. You can learn more at: https://in-principle-and-practice.upenn.edu/

Articulating our ambitions for the future is especially crucial now, when urgent global challenges are provoking anguish, fear, and testing our community.  We are responding exactly as we have so many times before, by working together to improve Penn for the future. That is the core and essential purpose of In Principle and Practice.

This framework is built around our values and our unique DNA. Our founding ethos is a Franklin-inspired striving to discover, disseminate, and employ knowledge for its own sake and for the benefit of humankind.  In Principle and Practice will help us as we work, together, to strengthen our community and to achieve even greater excellence in all Penn does.

Penn’s principles are the essence of who we are, our enduring values and distinctive strengths. We are Anchored, Interwoven, Inventive, and Engaged.  Our practices are how we will act on our principles with passion and urgency. We will accelerate interdisciplinary pursuits, lead on great challenges of our time, grow opportunity and strengthen community, deepen connection with neighbors and the world, and foster leadership and service.

This moment of challenge is exactly the time to recommit to our ambitions for the future and to further our connections as a community. Just as we are launching urgent University-wide efforts to combat antisemitism and interconnected forms of hate, including Islamophobia, and identifying ways to strengthen our bonds with one another, this strategic framework emphasizes strengthening community, deepening connections, cultivating service-minded leadership, and collaborating across divisions and divides.

In the months ahead, we will engage faculty, students, staff, and alumni in the implementation of this framework. I encourage you to offer any implementation ideas by emailing Strategic-Framework@upenn.edu. Some steps we take to implement In Principle and Practice will come soon. Some actions, more ambitious still, will take time to plan fully and enact to lasting, maximum effect.

Finally, a note of thanks. I want to express my deep appreciation once again to the members of the Red and Blue Advisory Committee, chaired by Provost John L. Jackson, Jr., who led this strategic planning process. I am equally grateful to the many members of the Penn family who engaged with the planning process and whose excellent ideas are reflected in this framework.

I will continue to keep you updated on our progress as we move Penn forward into a future of even greater excellence.

Sincerely,

Liz Magill

M. Elizabeth Magill
President
Trustees University Professor and Professor of Law
University of Pennsylvania