University of Minnesota’s 5-year plan includes ‘exciting’ health care efforts for Duluth

DULUTH — The University of Minnesota Duluth received a visit from University President Rebecca Cunningham last week, just days before the start of the spring semester.

Cunningham’s Northland visit included meetings with several local legislators, as well as stops at some of the system’s regional facilities.

The trip was capped off with a forum hosted at UMD on Friday. Cunningham and UMD Chancellor Charles T. Nies met with college community members and discussed the university’s new strategic roadmap, outlining upcoming initiatives and opportunities at UMD and across the university system.

“We have these five wonderful campuses that serve different students with different interests in different study and learning environments,” said Cunningham in a sit down with the News Tribune, “and we’re working together in really just new and exciting ways.”

Back in October, the university unveiled its new strategic plan, Elevating Extraordinary 2030, which outlines its goals and mission over the next five years. Building on the last strategic plan, which concluded in 2025, the university’s next phase will be guided by five main areas of focus: preparing and engaging students, innovative learning, serving communities, advancing research and investing in the local workforce.

“The strategic roadmap … really gives us the framework and the structure to say we’re doing this, not only because we know it’s good for our students,” said Nies, who co-chaired the development committee for the new plan, “but it’s also helping to advance the mission and the programming for the University of Minnesota, across all campuses.”

How each of the five main university campuses puts the elements of the strategic plan into action will likely look a little different at each school, Nies said, but having a set of system-wide goals will also create more opportunities for campus partnerships and shared resources.

One of the overall facets of the strategic plan focuses on serving the community through the development of health care and health research, which has led to “exciting” investments in the university’s medical programs, Cunningham said.

Earlier this year, the UMN’s Medical School Duluth Campus expanded to a four-year program, opening new opportunities for students looking to focus their education in areas such as rural health, family medicine and Native American health.

The UMN School of Dentistry, which trains more than 70% of Minnesota’s practicing dentists, is also planned to undergo changes, Cunningham, said as the university looks to restructure and renovate the school.

However, the university’s top priority right now is reaching an agreement on continued funding and support for the state’s largest medical school.

In November, the University of Minnesota rejected a proposed deal between Fairview Health Services and University of Minnesota Physicians, the clinical practice for the school’s faculty. While the $1 billion deal would have provided funding and support to the medical school for the next 10 years, the university objected to the proposal, claiming a lack of involvement in negotiations and that the university’s control over the medical school would be greatly reduced under the new plan.

Contributed / University of Minnesota Duluth

All parties have since returned to the negotiating table, with the help of a Minnesota Attorney General-appointed mediator.

“We’re in mediation right now, and I expect that we’ll come to a solution that works for all three parties here,” Cunningham said. “The university remains very committed to rural health care, and once that gets sorted, we can continue to look to other plans and phases. … There’s lots of opportunities for next conversations and next partnerships, but my first job of business is to sort out our partnership with Fairview.”

Among those “next conversations” are discussions about the proposed medical center in downtown Duluth, a project that has been under discussion since 2022.

The idea to expand current health care services and training options in Duluth through a new academic health center has received

continued support

from the city since it was first proposed. While Essentia Health and Aspirus St. Luke’s have

offered locations

for the potential medical school campus, Cunningham says the plan still requires some more thought.

“The university is still interested in exploring that opportunity, and it remains in our five-year plan that we worked with the regents on last June,” Cunningham added. “We plan to continue to explore the opportunities … for what the right opportunity is for medical education here, and how we could expand that.”

Expanding medical education efforts go hand in hand with local initiatives, like

the Duluth Promise,

Nies said. Focused on creating career pathways in fields with high workforce demands, Duluth Promise is a coalition of local schools and industry groups, including UMD, Duluth Public Schools and the Duluth Area Chamber of Commerce.

The initiative launched last year and has since narrowed its focus to health care careers.

“It fits in rather nicely with some of the overall focuses of our strategic plan,” Nies said. “We’re creating a pathway from kindergarten to med school right here in Duluth. … We’ve got a lot of strong partnerships here, and we’re going to really lean into that strength as we move forward. There’s a lot of great things ahead.”