Clark’s Academic Strategy Focus Areas 

Our entire community has been engaged in the Strategic Framework planning process. Our academic strategy is to promote Clark as a destination university that provides a transformative liberal arts education and pursues research to address real-world problems. Here, we build on Clark’s distinctive model of a liberal arts-based research university.  

Through this process we have identified 4 areas of focus:  

1. Climate and global change: arguably the most critical threat we face today.  
2. Creative arts, media, design, and technology:  several of the world’s most rapidly evolving and growing fields. 
3. Science and health: from basic science to drug discovery and biomedicine.  
4. Social and urban issues: partnering with local communities to better understand and solve enduring challenges impacting urban life.  

What connects these 4 areas as a coherent whole is that we care about social and ecological justice across all things we do. Our traditional academic departments will still be central to our educational mission, but we want to  promote interdisciplinary work that partners with diverse stakeholders as an authentic social-technical enterprise. Leveraging and strengthening these capacities can help us become a reference institution for interdisciplinary engaged and translational work with real impacts on people’s lives – in all 4 areas and the spaces in between them. We want students to come to Clark to expand their thinking and to do so beyond silos or limited frames. We want them to inhabit integrative, collaborative frames. 

Submit Your Ideas and Contacts 

The Alumni Council’s Programming Committee will sponsor a series of programs and events in 2022-2023 and beyond that reflect Clark’s academic strategy focus areas. In a variety of ways, the Council wants to highlight alumni who are doing excellent work in these areas:  

1. Social/Urban Issues: Partner with local communities more broadly to deepen understanding and find solutions to enduring issues of the complex social phenomena impacting urban life.  
2. Science and Health: Develop new knowledge and approaches in behavioral and mental health, health policy, and public health, from basic science to drug discovery and biomedicine, which drive large sectors of the economy.  
3. Creative Arts/Media/Design/Technology: Promote new scholarship, tools, pedagogy, and innovation in evolving forms of creative expression. Equip and empower students for rapidly evolving creative and technological marketplaces.  
4. Climate/Global Change: Promote research and develop expertise in the most critical issue facing world leaders, scientists, policymakers, and citizens, for at least the next century.  

If you would like to suggest a program idea or bring our attention to alumni who are doing great work in these areas, please email us at alumni@clarku.edu.