
By Lindsey Harrison/WMBD-TV
NORMAL – President Larry Dietz addressed the crowd in Bloomington-Normal Thursday encouraging the community to stay confident during his fourth State of the University address.
Dietz acknowledged the fiscal hardships of the last 2 years due to Illinois’ budget impasse, but stressed the University is revising its strategic plan in order to prepare for the future.
“We’ve had a great plan for a long period of time, for 17 years. And so we’re not really altering that a lot. We will have new initiatives like the international initiative, you know the civic engagement initiative, but we’re not changing our mission. We’re not changing really a lot about what we’re doing,” said Dietz.
Construction began last week on the Bone Student Center renovations… in addition to the new center for community engagement and service learning which President Dietz had proposed in his first address are some of the major plans for the University.
Dietz later said the people of Illinois State University will persevere as long as they had two things.
“I’ve often said that during challenging times, the two things that we can control are planning processies, which we control quite well, and we have a lot of plans that are scaleable. But probably most importantly, we control our attitude. Together, the people of Illinois State University control both,” said Dietz.
Sean Copeland can be reached at [email protected]