UTD President Prabhas Moghe formally announced his new strategic vision for the campus Dec. 9, inviting campus-wide input for his “Roadmap 2030” initiative four months after taking office.
Moghe’s announcement, sent out in a university-wide email, focuses on three strategic pillars: academic and research convergence, student success and external impacts. This university-wide approach with broad pillars marks a major departure from the highly detailed, benchmark-heavy strategic plan made by former president Richard Benson. “Roadmap 2030’s” focus on student success has caught the attention of student leaders across campus.
Neuroscience junior and Student Government vice president David Baker said he is eager to see administration taking a collaborative approach. However, he said it is imperative that the university is transparent throughout the process to truly address urgent student and faculty needs.
“I think there’s a great opportunity here to be a lot more direct with communications sent to the student body,” Baker said. “A lot of times with previous administrations, Student Government has observed how an initiative will be announced and then decisions will be made with next to no student input. Case in point, the removal of the track and field program over the summer.”
Baker said he hoped the new strategic plan is able to focus on issues like food and housing insecurity on campus. Baker said that the University-Wide Basic Needs Survey, which has not been conducted since 2023, helped identify these problems and he hoped the new roadmap considered supporting regular surveys like this. Baker said SG is currently in conversations with the Student Success Center to revive and update the survey for Fall 2026 and that those quantitative measures should be used to identify student needs.
Criminology junior and UTD Women’s Lacrosse president Jasmine Kouhestani said that the email was “super duper shocking” in its dramatic shift in support of students.
“It seems like President Moghe was kind of shifting administration to something that I never would have expected,” Kouhestani said. “When we had President Benson, it seemed like student input was not one of their top priorities. You had things like divestment, the [Spirit] Rocks, the protests, the encampment and the Mercury shutdown. I hope that this signals that in President Moghe’s administration, students will have more of a say in the university perspective.”
However, Kouhestani said that the current vagueness of the plans and the three pillars could be a drawback.
“It is ambiguous,” Kouhestani said. “We aren’t really being given any structure or expectation here.”
Benson’s strategic plan, finalized in 2018 after consultation with 50 students, faculty and staff, aspired to have UTD emulate benchmark universities like University of California Berkeley and Purdue University. It set specific measurable goals including enrollment growth, federal research expenditure increases and graduation rate improvements. “Roadmap 2030” does not have precise quantitative targets like this yet.
“The new vision will be a living document, enabling us to remain flexible in a rapidly changing world — yet it will remain anchored around three strategic pillars,” Moghe said in the email.
Moghe said that most universities already had pillars like those he announced, but that UTD’s goal would be to connect these pillars with the unique landscape of North Texas. This process will be overseen by the newly-minted Vice President for Strategic Initiatives Brian Ten Eyck. The announcement of “Roadmap 2030” comes four weeks after Ten Eyck began his role.
“There is so much potential at UT Dallas,” Ten Eyck said in a statement to UTD. “Working with President Moghe and his leadership team, I’m confident that this institution will quickly become recognized as one of the most important universities in the country.”
Student Government president and neuroscience senior Giana Abraham said her initial reaction was one of confusion, as she received the email shortly before a final exam today.
“It was like, we don’t have a plan yet, but we have the concepts of how to get to a plan,” Abraham said. “I wonder how such open and unstructured input will look like and who will actually be reading through all of it.”
Abraham said this feedback is critically important at UTD now because of ongoing concerns from students and faculty about whether the university can value and maintain shared governance. She pointed to the Academic Senate, UTD’s long-standing faculty body that was dissolved this August in response to state legislation, as an example. She said the senate’s intended replacement, the Interim Faculty Advisory Committee, has yet to begin operating because it still has not been formally finalized.
“The Student Government does not have power over policy,” Abraham said. “We send our proposals to bodies like the Academic Senate. But if faculty have no say in the actual curriculum, academics or policy anymore and the dozens of committees it formerly oversaw aren’t meeting, then I don’t know where it leaves all of us. We could all be left without a voice.”
Abraham said that for the “student success” pillar to actually bring about student success, especially amid sweeping university budget cuts, concrete action needs to be taken. From talking to student leaders at other universities, she said she learned that measures like free textbooks, more open educational resources and lower fees have all been taken elsewhere to improve student quality of life.
“If we can make being a college student affordable, then that would be a really powerful tenet,” Abraham said. “Student success is a broad category, but there are specific things we can and should be doing that impact the daily life of a student for the better.”
Abraham’s concerns were echoed by political science sophomore Aysha Ahmed. Ahmed said her first reaction to the roadmap was to reflect on the most recent history of UTD. She said the university’s failure to engage with student demands for divestment from defense contractors tied to the genocide in Gaza was evidence to her that this new roadmap is merely performimg outreach instead of changing the university’s direction to genuinely involve students.
“UTD wants to show the public that they care about their students and their interests,” Ahmed said. “They can say they emailed all 30,000 of us, but that means nothing if we don’t see anything actually come of it. While I can hope that this is a break from how UTD previously operated, I fear that this is an attempt to tell people that they are heard while hiding away the suggestion forms in some basement level filing cabinet never to be seen or read again.”
Devarsh Pathak, Graduate Student Assembly president and computer science master’s student, said both this fall semester and these new proposals from Moghe are entirely unprecedented.
“After [Moghe] came, we quickly got this message from his office saying, ‘Hey, the president wants to set up monthly meetings with you,’’” Pathak said. “I think that this is the best way for us as students to access the highest level of authority on campus, actually speaking with them face to face so that we get our voices heard.”
Pathak said he wants the roadmap to remember graduate students at UTD — graduate students account for 23.3% of the total student body as of fall 2025 — by continuing to support international students, making internships and job opportunities more accessible for graduate students and increasing the amount of funding allocated to graduate research and travel.
The “Roadmap 2030” announcement ends with a call for students, staff and faculty to submit ideas via email or form, but it is unclear how administration will use this unstructured feedback, or how it will ensure the plan evolves from its current “hopeful” form into specific, measurable goals that the university is accountable for meeting.
Moghe’s email said that after the winter break, the university will work with the campus community more formally “through conversations, idea forums and focused working groups,” as well as a structured survey.
The Retrograde reached out to UTD for details regarding the plan’s implementation, timeline, benchmark schools and the state of the previous strategic plan. A spokesperson for UTD said they would be in touch “when we have more to share.”
“It’s obviously big and ambitious on purpose, but I wonder where it’s gonna go,” Abraham said. “I’d love to see like a focus on affordability and on student and faculty voices having a more meaningful role on campus. Considering the limitations that have been placed on our institution as of recent, only time will tell how this goes.”
Comet Comments
The Retrograde asked students across campus about the challenges they currently faced on campus and what they hope to see from “Roadmap 2030.”
“The parking is terrible and I hope they work on that,” history freshman John Ashton said.
“More on-campus housing. I remember I didn’t get housing my senior year which led to me moving to Northside, which is more expensive than on-campus housing, because it’s the most convenient. That being said, in my time at UTD everyone has been so sweet and everyone is just helpful. We should keep that,” software engineering master’s student Farrel Raja said.
“I think it is great that they are talking about taking bets on research. I always hear from other students in ATEC that they have so many ideas for research but they almost never get to go through with everything because funding is so scarce. Hopefully this new roadmap will provide support for students taking those creative bets,” animation and games senior Lex Laviolette said.
“I hope we can get some more events on campus. I have found that we have this super vibrant culture if you look for it, but that university should work on having more events, honestly weekly if possible, where students can get together and celebrate being a Comet. We won’t ever get commuter students to stay on campus for more than just class unless we give them great reasons to throughout the school year,” supply chain management and business analytics freshman Sebastian Perez said.
“I feel like there should be more plans for student’s academic help. Also, I feel like there should be more spaces for entertainment. Most of the UTD vibes are kinda boring, because we don’t have any school spirit, so I wish there were more activities for that,” computer science junior Zara Sadeq said.