Invitation to Help us Shape CASL's Future

A group of CASL faculty, staff, and students have been busily engaged in planning for the launch of the college’s strategic planning process. Specifically, the group’s charge is to identify important questions that we need to bring to the CASL community, to identify important data/information that we need to share to inform our discussion of these questions, and to think about how best to engage all of CASL and its varied constituencies in the planning process. To assist us in framing the conversation, we now seek your input via this short survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/CASLCommSPSurveyB The survey will remain open through December 3 so please be sure to respond by then. Your responses will help us understand your perspectives and vision as well as how you would like to participate in the formal planning process. Many of my earlier posts suggest why strategic planning is an imperative at this moment in time. Two years of declining enrollments and a tightening financial picture for the college, growing media hostility toward the liberal arts and their relevance for today’s students, and an intensely competitive higher education market serve as important external reasons for engaging in strategic planning. But even more important are the opportunities that strategic planning offers us. Our college has been infused with new faculty and staff talent, we continue to draw talented and engaged students to our majors, and our alumni are making a name for themselves and for CASL is a wide array of professions. When coupled to the deep institutional knowledge and rich history of success embodied in our veteran faculty and staff we have the makings for a creative and empowering re-imagination of the college and of its priorities and future direction. Strategic planning will allow for those conversations, will prompt new ideas, and will enable us to tell CASL’s story in ways that are both meaningful to our community and understandable to those outside of CASL. As I look at the college and contemplate its future I am very excited about the opportunities that I see. The things I’ve come to value the most about my own time in CASL - the small classes, the engaged faculty, the opportunities for mentored research - are all still very much a part of what we do. It is my belief that the educational experience that we offer our students parallels, in these attributes, the education that students receive at smaller liberal arts colleges. I can readily imagine CASL embracing this model, aligning our structure and resources in pursuit of it, and becoming a public (and thus much more affordable) alternative version of this model. Doing so would enable us to tell a compelling story and would position us to grow in ways that are consistent with our values. A few words about our timeline CASL will begin our formal strategic planning process in the Winter term of 2015 with a goal of completing a plan by the end of the 2015 calendar year. Our planning process will look at the longer term (5-10 years) as well as the shorter term, and we expect our action plan to include both initiatives which require a longer timeline and improvements which can be undertaken immediately – even during the planning process. Your participation is critical to the success of this process: CASL is not defined by just one group or another, but by all of us together. Thank you for participating. I am very much looking forward to our collective work on behalf of CASL.