The idea to first serve locally holds merit when it comes to building important connections. These connections foster relationships
that have significant impact on the institution as well as the region it serves.
Organizations serve all best when they first serve locally. This is true in any business enterprise, any educational institution and any religious organization—even in institutions that conduct business digitally. Quality is assessed through the lens of geography.
Toward this end, the architects of WT 125: From the Panhandle to the World have carefully and deliberatively used a process that collects the opinions of many individuals, along with their aspirations for an institution that they hold dear. A vast number of the people involved in this process are WT alumni. The impact and importance of that relationship is apparent in the care and concern that alumni demonstrate for the influence that the institution has had in changing the course of their lives. We hold such perspective in the highest regard. To do otherwise is to squander the very basis for an educational experience. The impact of an education is dramatic and life changing. When the skin is peeled off the rhetoric, the predispositions, the strategic plans and the portfolios of elected and appointed officials, the purpose of an education is wholly and simply this: to change the way an individual thinks.
The idea to first serve locally holds merit when it comes to building important connections. These connections foster important relationships that have significant impact on the institution as well as the region it serves. WT 125: From the Panhandle to the World is a long-range plan. For better or worse, government bureaucracies (and this includes universities) tend to derive direction from quarterly reports, annual reviews, and in the most thoughtful instances, five-year plans. This plan spans nearly two decades. It is a generational plan, one that encompasses roughly one generation. When organizations become large and complex, change and real progress occur at a glacial pace. Traditions, habits, customs, operating principles, shared governance and self-perception tends to develop over the life of an organization, not in a one- or two- or even five-year window.
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