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Goals and Priorities: Virginia Tech’s Academic Enterprise

Updated July 2025


The Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost is committed to supporting and advancing Virginia Tech’s Beyond Boundaries vision, and to achieving the strategic priorities outlined in The Virginia Tech Difference: Advancing Beyond Boundaries. Primary amongst those strategic priorities is Virginia Tech Global Distinction and Virginia Tech Advantage.

  • Virginia Tech Global Distinction reflects the university’s commitment to institutional excellence across our tripartite missions of education, research and outreach, and positions the university as a destination for world-class faculty, staff, students, and partners serving the Commonwealth of Virginia, the nation, and the world. It builds on faculty strengths and considers future needs to invest in and grow high impact research and collaborative innovation.
  • Virginia Tech Advantage seeks to offer the full educational experience to all students, regardless of income or underserved or underrepresented status. The initiative will generate substantial new funding for scholarships, basic needs, study abroad, undergraduate research opportunities, paid internships, and more educational opportunities, all of which will help to make Virginia Tech a destination for top talent. 

In an effort to advance these commitments and in partnership with faculty, staff and the academic community, Provost Cyril Clarke has developed and framed the following themes, goals, and initiatives to support and contribute to the progress of the visionary concepts of Beyond Boundaries.

Core strategic themes

(extracted from and aligned with Beyond Boundaries)

  • Virginia Tech is a university with global reach and is increasingly recognized as an institution with a worldwide perspective, a commitment to empowering graduates to solve global challenges, and a convening force and top destination for international talent.
  • As a comprehensive university, Virginia Tech has developed and will continue to advance selected programs that are among the best in the world with adequate representation across the arts, humanities, design, sciences and engineering that synthesize talent and knowledge to achieve international reputational excellence.
  • Virginia Tech highly values inter- and transdisciplinary learning and discovery, and leverages these opportunities and experiences to address the complexities of the world’s most intractable societal problems.
  • Virginia Tech is committed to evidence-based, student-centered learning utilizing innovative instructional methodologies that are developed and employed across undergraduate, graduate, and professional curricula.
  • Virginia Tech recognizes the need for and value of engaging in partnerships with other educational institutions, public and private industries, governments, and local communities to achieve its tripartite mission.

Crosscutting goals

To enhance its international standing, quality of programs, and commitment to service, Virginia Tech must:

  • continue to increase representational diversity of students, faculty and staff, and foster an environment in which all individuals can thrive;
  • elevate the productivity and impact of faculty scholarship;
  • secure more extramural funding in support of research;
  • implement plans for developing faculty to achieve national distinction;
  • expand enrollment of graduate students and appointments of postdoctoral associates, and promote their career success; and
  • embed experiential learning within the transcriptible curriculum.

These crosscutting goals map to AAU membership indicators and THE World University Rankings, which serve as relevant proxies for tracking progress accomplished in achieving our strategic priorities and Beyond Boundaries vision.

Moving forward

We continue to solicit proposals for Destination Areas 2.0 project grants in an effort to identify thrust areas in which Virginia Tech is well positioned to solve a particular problem or answer an important question. These thrust areas are aligned with existing strategic interests represented by Research Frontiers, research institutes, Interdisciplinary Graduate Education Programs, and the existing DA 2.0 thematic areas. Current projects in Phase I and Phase II of development are as follows:

Phase II projects:

Phase I projects:

  • Ecological and Biocultural Restoration 
  • Human-Systems Integration in Healthcare 
  • Learning Landscape Laboratory 
  • Materials in Medicine 
  • Rural Environments 
  • Virginia Tech Public Interest Technology Collaborative 
  • Whole Health Research at Virginia Tech

As DA 2.0 development and partnerships move forward, Virginia Tech will also continue to invest in specific thrust areas that are strategically important to the university and will support our broader efforts to advance other project-based thrust areas.