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Thomas R. Plough, Assumption College
August 26, 2002
Without civility, neither intellectual community nor intellectual
integrity are possible.
J. T. Bonnen
Welcome to the beginning of our last academic year in our first one hundred
years since the founding of Assumption College. During the last four years
I have been impressed with all your efforts, both in and out of the classroom,
to essentially generate a renaissance in the recognition of Assumption
College as a high quality teaching/learning environment. Faculty leadership
in instructional design and delivery reinforced with assertive mentorship
and an expansion of experiential components has led the way. Our student
friendly campus has been reinforced by innovative staff who implement
and deliver our various support services, in the academic and student
life and financial areas. This has been complemented by staff competence
in translating this personalized, customized, and student friendly academic
institution to our outside constituencies, including parents and prospective
students, alumni, donors and media. And certainly the increasing examples
of excellent work in the classroom and labs and outstanding evidence of
community outreach and caring on the part of our students, as well as
the career success of our alums, demonstrate the learning ethos in place
on this campus. An ethos facilitated and appreciated by our trustees.
Given all your intentional good work, Assumption College now has what
I call strategic traction. We are now on a lot of radar screens that couldn't
locate or identify us just a few years ago. You should be very proud of
your accomplishments. I am very proud of you. Your dedication to helping
Assumption College be a workplace and educational community which is serious
about engagement and civility, makes serving as your president a privilege.
I want to take a few minutes to reiterate the basic positioning of this
College which you have all facilitated and which I continue to believe
is both mission-centered and market-smart. I also will outline some manageable
challenges that we need to maneuver through over the next few years as
well as this coming academic year.
Assumption College is a co-ed, residential, comprehensive, liberal arts
and professional studies College, founded by the Assumptionists in the
Catholic intellectual tradition. This College was and is designed to graduate
individuals whose values and behaviors are true to our “Learn.Achieve.Contribute”
theme and whose educational outcomes of competence, character and compassion
are outward signs of our internalized motto of “Until Christ be
Formed in You.”
Stated a bit differently, our mission is to provide a spiritual, intellectual,
and social environment designed to attract, retain, and graduate students
who pursue ethical professional careers and personal lives based on values
undergirded by both faith and reason.
My vision, and I hope yours, is to have our great success in taking good
students and giving them a great education recognized and supported by
a much wider external audience. We are making very good progress in building
this reputation and support base of the College. I express this vision
by saying that we intend to move our institutional position from that
of a well regarded regional institution in New England to a highly regarded
regional institution in the Northeast. As many of you have heard me say,
we feature close encounters of the Assumption kind, that is, the relationships
between faculty and students and staff here often approach the quality
levels of those found in a stable extended family. Our faculty and staff
practice a lot of tough empathy with our students. We push them to study
and serve harder than they might like, but we do so with as much support
of their genuine efforts as we can. We intend to graduate every student
who enrolls here, through personal attention to each student’s religious,
social, personal and academic needs. We do this through creative teaching
and mentoring, through staff outreach and programming, especially campus
ministry and residential life, through inviting office and departmental
environments, and through high expectations of our students for their
campus behavior, classroom preparation, and quality of academic work products.
While we will not succeed with every student, we should take great pride
in the rather high number and quality of our students who do graduate.
Longitudinal research studies of student retention strongly and consistently
find that the first six weeks of the semester are critically important
to the successful bonding of students with a college’s traditions,
expectations, and culture. As a residential, Assumptionist, comprehensive
liberal arts and professional studies College, we are explicitly in the
business of building compassion, competence and character through our
active and aggressive outreach to our students. Our early attention, availability,
interaction and follow-up with individual new students is a top priority.
Each of our students, new and upperclass, needs to know that he/she is
known and appreciated. We can help our new students get off to a really
great start by paying a lot of attention to them during their first couple
of months here at Assumption College. As Richard Light writes in What
College Leaders Can Do, “{student} memories of critical moments
and events cluster heavily in the first few weeks of college. A lot of
small things ... really set a tone. It is clear that the first few days
and weeks on any campus are, for many, a big deal.” As he suggests,
rather than admit a bunch of talented students and get out of their way,
we should make a thoughtful, evidence-based, purposeful effort to get
in each (new) student’s way.
We will also need to continue various practices which help to sustain
our sense of community here. We all need to make a commitment to get to
know one another better and to spend some time with our colleagues as
well as our students. While we talk a fair amount about good teaching,
good advising, good scholarship, good research, good outreach and good
service, and this is quite appropriate, we need also talk a bit more about
good colleagueship. We need to display behaviors that clearly indicate
that we respect each other’s views and respect each other’s
roles. This is best accomplished by spending productive time with one
another. Teamwork, dialogue, collaborative planning and programming, both
social and academic, and our evaluation processes should demonstrate high
levels of civility and reaching out. Education is, after all, about relationships,
ideas, and colleagueship which lead to intellectual community and intellectual
integrity. I will be asking all support service and academic department
heads to plan regular meetings inside the department, and also with some
of the students they serve, and in collaboration with other departments
this academic year. I look forward to a brief annual report from all departments
that summarizes the suggestions for sustaining community that were advanced
at these meetings. Our community building process is also facilitated
by many of the very positive activities, programs and role modeling of
upperclassmen student leaders throughout our campus. Solid student leadership
is also a significant strength of our College.
I continue to believe that in a teaching college like Assumption we evaluate
annual professional performance, promotion and tenure appointments in
terms of positive impact on student learning and development. In the case
of staff we look for responsiveness to student needs, consistency in policy
implementation, innovation in programming and communication for students,
and student friendly scheduling of services. In the case of faculty, our
first priority is effective teaching and advising. Second, we value up-to-date
scholarship in the discipline and exploration of related best practices
in the classroom, especially as they are shared with others in the department
and across the College. Third, we respect and expect a commitment to institutional
governance, our Catholic mission, and active faculty participation in
College activities. Fourth, we value and appreciate funded research, successful
grantsmanship, and publication. Obviously, few individuals can excel in
all these areas, all the time. Faculty and administrative leadership is
required to allow for some flexibility in evaluating a balance of professional
activities over time with the exception that excellence in teaching is
not negotiable.
It is our intention to remain primarily residential because the residential
learning environment properly designed is the superior education model
for assisting students to ask the broadest questions at the deepest levels,
utilizing faith and reason and mentored experiences as their paths towards
the truth. Some of this residential dynamic could easily be witnessed
during the horrendous year of 2001, with horrific terrorist attacks, a
war in Afghanistan, the dot.com collapse, and as we entered 2002, large
corporate bankruptcies and corruption, and the scandal unfolding in the
Catholic Church. The teachable moments provided to educators on a campus
like this one, in times like these, are considerable. Given the needs
of our society, there is no better place to work or to study than a residential
campus like Assumption College.
As a College established in the Catholic tradition, we do have high expectations
for student behavior, both in and out of the classroom. Just as assignments
for a course are expected to be completed, campus requirements to act
civilly, obey the law and respect property and persons are also expected
to be met. Assumption College has performance standards for civility and
respect for others just as important as academic achievement. In order
to carry out our mission, all of us need to convey this dual expectancy
to excel in and out of the classroom to our students. I thank you all
for your involvement in the various aspects of student life - for your
affinity to be accessible to our students and for your extensive physical
presence on campus and at campus events. The active engagement of our
faculty and staff with our students in and out of the classroom is a strategic
strength of Assumption College. You should be very proud of the fact that
it is relatively easy for graduating seniors to find faculty and staff
who know them so well that highly personalized letters of reference to
potential employers and graduate schools can be obtained.
I think it is also very important and a strategic strength of this College
that faculty and staff provide plenty of structure for our students. Most
of our students respond best to what I would call assertive mentoring,
especially early on in their programs here. Requiring at least one office
visit a semester for advisees and for students in our classes is good
practice. Adhering to final exam policies, administering frequent quizzes
and exams, requiring class attendance and participation all assist our
students in succeeding here. Active encouragement of involvement beyond
the classroom in such things as volunteer work, athletics, and student
organizations assists us in the retention of our students, but more importantly,
it leads to higher satisfaction levels for our students in their collegiate
experience here.
As I confer with our student life specialists here on campus from counseling,
residential life, dean of studies and dean of students areas and read
our own incident reports and the national literature, it is clear that
some of our students get dysfunctionally caught up in a culture that tends
to define the weekend as extending from Thursday through Saturday nights.
This extended weekend lends itself to a fair amount of heavy (binge) drinking
here locally and on many other college campuses nationally. While we have
no problem with the legal and responsible use of alcohol, we want to be
certain that alternate activities are available to an increasing number
of our students who would like them and/or who are not of legal age, which
includes most of our freshman, sophomore and junior students. As educators
it is especially important for us to insist that abuse or use of alcohol
is no excuse for irresponsible behavior on this campus. Vice President
for Student Life Dr. Catherine WoodBrooks will be working on a number
of alternate programming ideas for weekends, including Thursday evenings.
In this regard I was happy to see the flyer announcing a Hispanic Film
Series on Thursday evenings this fall. Of course, Friday classes with
exams and/or required attendance and participation is very helpful. As
one activity designed to facilitate a more broadly defined student weekend,
I will also provide a fund of $100 to any faculty who invite four or more
freshmen or new transfer students to their home for dinner on Thursday
evenings in the months of September and October. Similarly, I will provide
$100 to any student group of six or more who invites and hosts at least
two faculty for dinner and/or a program at Charlie’s or Taylor Dining
Hall or their campus residence on Thursday evenings in September and October.
It is our intention to expand experiential learning opportunities for
our students, building upon the very successful Reach-Out Center, our
internships and field experiences, undergraduate involvement in faculty
research projects, juried shows, panels and audience-based performances
of student talent in the performing arts, study abroad, supervised peer
tutoring and service learning involvement. An experiential component in
a student program of studies is good educational policy and design and
it is becoming an expectation of graduate schools and employers. Research
also suggests that connections between classroom instruction and real
world experience are a particularly powerful motivator for continued learning.
It is our intention to continue a balance of major programs of studies
in both the traditional liberal arts and sciences disciplines and complementary
professional fields of study, wherever student demand, retention, and
post graduate success make them fiscally viable and intellectually credible.
At the same time, in a society that is narrowly career oriented and focused
on vocationally relevant programs and skills, it is important to maintain
a liberal arts foundation in all that we do and to demand the same emphasis
on achieving broad perspectives as on developing specific competencies.
It is our intention to pay special attention to our web pages as they
become more and more important as a communication vehicle to the wider
world. Prospective students, candidates for positions here at the College,
foundation personnel, and even college ranking organizations are prone
to take a look at us electronically before they ever contact us in a traditional
manner. Up-to-date pages, consistency and accuracy in messages, and quality
of images are just as critical on the web as in the College View Book
or catalogue. Material for our web page is subject to the same review
and approval process as printed material for the catalogue. Our web pages
are fast becoming one of our primary windows to the outside world.
As we look forward to the 2002-2003 academic year, we will need to address
several areas in considerable depth. We will, of course, be fully into
a campaign mode in the next couple of years. One of the very important
components of our campaign will be the percentage of faculty and staff
who make a fiscal pledge to the campaign. Participation of our faculty
and staff will send a strong message to alumni, non-alumni, foundations
and corporations about the value of the various components of our campaign
to the continuing educational quality of Assumption College. This “internal’
campaign will get started right away as the official announcement of our
Centennial Campaign will occur in October at the annual President’s
Council Dinner to be held at Mechanics Hall. Chairs and division leaders
of our internal faculty/staff campaign will be announced in September.
I encourage your thoughtful consideration of a financial commitment to
our future. As I constantly tell our alumni, their annual support checks
allow me, at least symbolically, to take them with me on calls to foundations
and other major donors. Concrete fiscal support by faculty and staff to
the various components of our Centennial Campaign will send a powerful
message to many other constituencies which will help to assure campaign
success and ongoing academic quality here at Assumption College. As George
Kirstein has written “Apart from the ballot box, (and education),
philanthropy presents the one opportunity the individual has to express
his meaningful choice over the direction in which our society will progress.”
Another important matter will be budget planning where we cannot anticipate
significant growth in the student body since we will be near our cap of
2150 undergraduates. The current economic environment in the Commonwealth
and its implications for financial aid programs, and the underperformance
of endowment funds are just two examples of why we will need to carefully
and conservatively review all our costs as we plan for 2003-2004. These
two factors alone, state financial aid and endowment losses, could result
in a $1,000,000 revenue loss. We cannot rely on large increases in levels
of tuition as an offset because that would put us out of line with the
market niche for students which we occupy. The Budget Planning and Priority
Committee will develop guidelines for preparing the 2003-2004 budget requests
with this background in mind, and we can anticipate in-depth trustee scrutiny
of budget recommendations, in the context of our five year budget projection
model. At this time, I do not expect budget cuts per se, but increases
in budget areas and new positions will be modest at best.
Two areas were noted by our NEASC visiting team and came as no surprise
to our own self-study team. We do need to update our strategic plan, or
statement of strategic directions, since the blueprint prepared before
I arrived four years ago has now gone out of date. We have waited to launch
such a planning process until our Provost could be hired. Dr. Joe Gower
will begin to consult with you and others on the campus to design such
a process, select a strategic direction team, and move us towards an updated
expression of our educational strategies and programs. Additionally, Provost
Gower will help us all to move program assessment forward. This formidable
twin task will require the best thinking we can all muster and will be
a focus of activity during the 2002-2003 academic year. The two activities
of strategic direction setting and program assessment procedures will
require some kind of methodology for academic portfolio analysis including
a review of economic and demographic trends, curriculum offerings of competitor
colleges, a review of marketing, pricing and financial aid strategies,
a survey of prospective students’ academic interest and goals, a
review of current enrollment by program, program revenues and expenses,
retention rate and graduation rates by program, new and revised program
recommendations, and analysis of faculty and facility strength related
to approved programs. Most importantly, the planning process and the dialogue
it generates, helps us reaffirm our shared beliefs, core values, perceptions,
and feelings about our College.
As we announce our Centennial Campaign this October and approach our
Centennial Celebration in 2004 you have succeeded in positioning this
College in a strategic niche that has real staying power, and more importantly,
in a niche that significantly makes a difference in the lives of the students
we serve by developing their perspectives on how to live a life in order
to make sense out of making a living.
As John Gardner has written: “The deepest threat to the integrity
of any community is the incapacity on the part of its citizens to lend
themselves to any worthy common purpose.”
Our worthy common purpose and task is to provide a spiritual, intellectual,
and social environment designed to graduate students who pursue ethical
professional careers and personal lives. You carry out that task very
well!
I always share my summer reading list with the academic community so
you can all see what kind of reading materials are likely to influence
my judgment during the ensuing year.
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