Trinity College Dublin launches Strategic Plan 2020-2025

Posted on: 10 March 2020

Trinity College Dublin today [Tuesday 10^th March 2020] launched its Strategic Plan 2020 – 2025. The five-year plan, entitled Community and Connection, will shape the future of the university to benefit Irish society and the wider world. The plan’s vision is of Trinity nurturing a globally connected community of learning, research, and scholarship, and inspiring generations to meet the challenges of the future.

Over the next five years, Trinity’s core mission will involve: civic action, through teaching, research and public engagement; research pursued at the frontiers and intersections of disciplines; and education that challenges students to think independently, communicate effectively, act responsibly, and develop continuously. This will be achieved by fostering an effective, flexible organisation that values all members of Trinity’s community.

The launch was done by live stream to avoid bringing a large number of people together during the current outbreak of Covid-19. A physical launch for the college community, external visitors and the media was cancelled.

Key ambitious initiatives in Trinity’s plans include:

• Hiring new academic staff in key areas
• Reducing the student-to-staff ratio from 18:1 to 16:1
• Expanding the Trinity Access Programme for students from socially and economically disadvantaged backgrounds
• Boosting diversity by targeting 36% of students from outside Ireland by 2024
• Raising postgraduate student numbers on campus above 30%, closer to comparable research universities across the world
• Developing a comprehensive digital learning strategy
• Building at least 600 more student accommodation units

 

Trinity will also undertake the following major projects:

• A strategically vital €1bn project to create an Innovation District east of the main campus, designed to make Dublin one of the top innovation cities in the world
• A major conservation project for the historic Old Library that will include a new Research Collections Study Centre to enhance access to its considerable treasures
• A Cancer Centre for excellence in oncology, in partnership with St James’s Hospital
• The completion of the E3 Learning Foundry (Engineering, Energy and Environment)
• The most ambitious philanthropic campaign in Irish history, mobilising alumni and supporters to raise €400m to take the university to its next stage of development

 

Speaking at the launch of the Strategic Plan, Trinity College Dublin Vice Provost and Chief Academic Officer, Professor Juergen Barkhoff said:

“We are very pleased to present this ambitious and bold Strategic Plan Community and Connection. The title is programmatic. Our vision is of a community that will inspire new generations to meet future challenges. In a world in which connectivity is the new growth, Trinity will grow – not primarily by getting bigger, but by becoming ever more connected in an interdependent world. Over the next five years our campus will become more diverse and more inclusive with increases in the number of international students, postgraduates and students from underrepresented groups.

We will significantly invest in staffing to make sure that our students are best prepared for the future world of work and for successful and fulfilled lives as engaged citizens. We will develop and practice next generation teaching and learning with major initiatives in digital learning and the development of more modular offerings and more flexible short-term courses. And as a research university that puts research at the heart of what we do, we will, on many interdisciplinary fronts and in many innovative ways, take up sustainability as the big challenge of our time.”

To view a copy of the Provost’s speech, click here