Strategic Plan 2020–25
Our Values
As a Hispanic- and Minority-Serving institution of higher education in New York City, grounded by our commitment to advancing justice in its many dimensions, we recognize these interrelated core values as fundamental to the John Jay College of Criminal Justice community: (in alphabetical order)
DIVERSITY Explore, support, and respect the many voices within our community, fostering an inclusive environment that represents the many racial, religious, ethnic, gender, sexual, socioeconomic, political, cultural, age, and ability identities that make our community thrive.
EQUITY Confront and respectfully disrupt biases, stereotypes, and discrimination by creating and implementing opportunities for equal access and success for underserved communities.
INTEGRITY Promote honesty, transparency, and empathy in our actions and communications—at all levels within our community—by adhering to the highest moral and ethical standards in our personal and professional behavior.
JUSTICE Act fairly and ethically to build an environment that offers every individual equal opportunities to grow and flourish.
LEARNING AND SCHOLARSHIP Engage in transformative teaching and learning, both inside and outside of the classroom, support and pursue scholarship and creative activities, practice intellectual curiosity, strive for academic and professional excellence, and foster lifelong learning and civic engagement.
RESPECT Honor each other’s identities, ideas, values, and humanity partnered with a commitment to courtesy, civility, and kindness.
Our Vision
- Be an engine for social mobility and equity.
- Educate students to be fierce advocates for justice in a rapidly changing future.
- Support world-class research and a justice-minded faculty.
Our Mission
John Jay College of Criminal Justice is a community of motivated and intellectually committed individuals who explore justice in its many dimensions. The College’s liberal arts curriculum equips students to pursue advanced study and meaningful, rewarding careers in the public, private, and non-profit sectors. Our professional programs introduce students to foundational and newly emerging fields and prepare them for advancement within their chosen professions.
Our students are eager to engage in original research and experiential learning, excited to study in one of the world’s most dynamic cities, and passionate about shaping the future. Through their studies our students prepare for ethical leadership, global citizenship, and engaged service. Our faculty members are exceptional teachers who encourage students to join them in pursuing transformative scholarship and creative activities. Through their research our faculty advances knowledge and informs professional practices that build and sustain just societies.
We foster an inclusive and diverse community drawn from our city, our country, and the world. We are dedicated to educating traditionally underrepresented groups and committed to increasing diversity in the workforce. The breadth of our community motivates us to question our assumptions, to consider multiple perspectives, to think critically, and to develop the humility that comes with global understanding. We educate fierce advocates for justice.
From President Karol V. Mason
John Jay is one of the nation's premier criminal justice and liberal arts institutions, born at the time of the civil rights movement with the vision of building a more just criminal justice system led by John Jay graduates with a liberal arts education. The mission of the College has broadened since that time. As a proudly Hispanic and Minority-Serving Institution, we explore and advance justice in its many dimensions while staying focused on the specific success of the students we serve.
Every five years we recommit to our mission of educating for justice by working with the entire College community to assess how we are living up to our ideals, where we are falling short, and what strategies we can pursue to improve this great College for generations to come.
Over the course of the 2019-2020 year, hundreds of faculty, students, staff, and executives engaged in writing environmental scans, swot analyses and recommendations, meeting in small groups for community conversations about where we should focus, drafting goals, working through objectives in cross-divisional groups large and small, and eventually articulating a complete plan with goals, objectives, benchmarks, and key progress indicators.
I am proud of the work we have done in creating this plan, but know that the written plan is just a promise to ourselves and the community we serve to live our mission and ensure the strongest future for John Jay College. This plan is an ambitious road map for the next five years, but seeing how dedicated our community is, I have no doubt that we’ll reach our desired destination. I look forward to working with you on the journey to fulfilling our aspirations.
Karol V. Mason
President
Goals & Objectives
Goal 1
Educate and support undergraduate and graduate students at every step of their John Jay journey.
At John Jay we recognize that student success is everyone’s responsibility, and our fundamental purpose as a college. Guided by our 2019 Vision for Undergraduate Student Success we will build on and expand approaches we know are working to help enrich undergraduate educational experiences and propel students to degree completion, such as student cohort, engagement, and support programs; faculty support and development for enhanced learning and student research; and integrated academic and career planning. For undergraduate and graduate students alike, we will engage our alumni in the career success of John Jay graduates and inform students early about the benefits of experiential learning in multiple career sectors. With designated academic advising and enhanced co-curricular programming, we will decrease graduate student time to graduation and advance their careers. With a larger faculty, enhanced philanthropic support for targeted student programming, and curricular and extra-curricular opportunities to learn 21st century skills, we will support and prepare more graduate and undergraduate students than ever to complete their degrees and become fierce advocates for justice.
Objectives
a. Prepare all undergraduate and graduate students for lifelong success beyond John Jay.
b. Institutionalize academic support programs for freshmen & transfers.
c. Increase our undergraduate and graduate graduation rates
d. Align and scaffold high impact instructional practices in general education and major courses to enhance students’ critical thinking, research-based academic writing, and quantitative reasoning skills.
e. Expand curricular and extra-curricular opportunities for experiential learning; creative research, production, and problem solving; and technological and information literacy.
f. Increase size of full-time faculty
Goal 2
Create and advance knowledge in support of justice education, public awareness, and civic engagement.
Our mission describes the college as “a community of motivated and intellectually committed individuals who explore justice in its many dimensions.” As student-facing staff and professors, we advance justice education not just by “educating traditionally underrepresented groups and … increasing diversity in the workforce” but also by developing innovative curriculum that affirms the identities of our students and works toward our ideal of equitable outcomes for all demographics within our student body. John Jay’s curriculum is like no other in the country, with robust offerings in social justice, criminal justice and justice education that span STEM, social science and humanities disciplines. With contemporary challenges such as climate change, rapid technological change, and economic and structural inequality, John Jay’s curriculum must keep pace with the rapidly evolving future. We will continue to hire new faculty, we will increase the money we invest in faculty support for cutting-edge research that “builds and sustains just societies,” and we will increase the college’s connections with the local, state, federal, and international agencies and NGOs that benefit from our research and hire our alumni.
Objectives
a. Increase number of courses supporting environmental justice, data literacy, and digital literacy in General Education and incorporate AASHE sustainability/U.N. Sustainable Development concepts throughout the curriculum.
b. Expand John Jay’s reputation as a national and international convener of justice issues.
c. Support faculty to build on John Jay’s reputation for excellence in research.
d. Increase intentionally designed civic engagement activities to positively impact student learning and professional outcomes, foster personal and community empowerment and deepen collaborative interactions among faculty, staff, students and community partners.
e. Support faculty efforts to innovate justice curricula and pedagogies.
Goal 3
Embody and promote our values of equity, diversity, and inclusion.
We are a college committed to justice, we are committed to educating historically underrepresented and low-income students in the name of equity, and as a proud Hispanic- and Minority-Serving Institution we know that our diversity is our strength. But as with any high ideals, we know that there are gaps between our commitments and the lived experience of some in our community. So, as a college, we are making it a top priority to continue to build a culture in which we embody and promote equity, diversity and inclusion. We have begun this work by formulating the core values that frame our educational mission and that we want to animate our campus climate: diversity, equity, integrity, justice, learning & scholarship, respect. We will orient all newcomers to our community—whether students, staff or faculty—to these values. We will make it our mission to close the equity gaps in educational outcomes for different demographic groups of students. We will work toward building a faculty that looks more like our student body. Faculty will not be expected to thrive on their own; we will provide new and continuing faculty with professional development and mentoring opportunities to facilitate their success, which in turn will help shape the successful outcomes of our students. Finally, we will mobilize the power of knowledge to engage faculty in the creation of a shared framework for a culturally affirming, inclusive pedagogy and curriculum design that helps our students see themselves, their strengths, and the experiences of people like them from a strengths-based, and not a deficit-minded, framework.
Objectives
a. Create and sustain a culture of equity, diversity and inclusion.
b. Close graduation equity gaps for all student populations we serve.
c. Achieve equitable student success across all learning modalities.
d. Continue to hire, retain and advance a diverse faculty through collaborative support and mentoring services for all faculty at all stages of their careers.
e. Develop a shared framework across the faculty that informs a culturally affirming, inclusive pedagogy and curriculum design.
Goal 4
Improve and expand financial resiliency, operational efficiency, and the college’s sustainability.
No one questions John Jay’s commitment to justice, but a person looking at our funding model might rightly question how we can afford to educate fierce advocates for justice and support world-class research. After several years of projected budget deficits that have forced us to winnow our hiring and make difficult decisions on an annual basis, it is time for John Jay to take stock of its sources of income, its costs, its operational efficiencies, and its priorities, and to align those four things in order to make a more sustainable future for the college. While over the past five years the college has increased funding from indirect grant revenue and philanthropy, neither one of these sources of funding alone will be sufficient to sustain us. To become a sustainable college we need to diversify our revenue streams and improve operations through technology and staff development. Because we are fierce advocates for justice we commit to reducing our carbon footprint and saving energy, but this is a strategic alignment of costs and priorities, because doing so will also save us money.
Objectives
a. Create an effective, transparent budget process aligned with college priorities.
b. Expand and diversify revenue streams.
c. Improve operations through staff development and technology.
d. Implement a comprehensive sustainability program using AASHE Stars.
e. Use space creatively to sustain priorities.
f. Build plans for adding space to the college.