Strategic Planning

Strategic Planning Committee
Minutes/Notes - Wednesday, October 3
Teague Library

Present: Margaret Hampton, Wes Miller, Bob Southard, Doug Bennett, Newell Pledger-Shinn, Monteze Snyder, Rick Foreman, Tamara Clark, and Sara Penhale

Not present: Paul Ogren, Nancy Sinex

Agenda

1. Introductions
2. Approval of 10/03 minutes
3. Letter seeking Alumni input (final approval)
4. The work of the SPC in the weeks and months ahead (key dates, major topics we need to address )
5. Essential foundations of Earlham College (redux) & Strengths and Weaknesses of Earlham

Discussion

1. We welcomed Tamara Clark to the committee, now a regular member.

2. We approved minutes of the 10/03 meeting, prepared by Newell Pledger-Shinn

3. We discussed a new draft of a letter to alumni seeking their input. Doug had shown an earlier draft of the letter to the Alumni Council over Homecoming weekend and incorporated their suggestions.

We also discussed whether to send the letter also to parents of current students, and decided to do this. We will ask respondents to tell us their relationship(s) to Earlham, and if a response doesn't make that clear we'll look up the respondents relationships.

Sara will put the letter on our website. Next week we will consider versions of the letter for faculty, students and staff. We also decided to give an interview to the Word after next Wednesday's meeting about how students can engage with the committee.

4. We discussed the committee's next meetings, which, after the discussion, include the following:

Oct 11 (Thurs) noon Fine Arts Div consultation (Wes and Doug)
Oct 17 (Wed.) 4:00 p.m. regular meeting
Oct 18 (Thurs) 9:00 to 12:00 working session for those available
Oct 23 (Tues) noon Science Div consultation (Bob, Sara and Margaret)

5. We discussed a new outline of the committee's report, considering with various sections where we might look for input both from within and without Earlham, and beginning to consider who on the committee might take the lead in organizing our thinking and drafting that section of the report. We concluded we should be sure to focus in some section of the report on 'morale' issues among faculty and staff, and we might usefully discuss some issues under "community life" and others under "student life."

6. We gave further consideration to how we work in a dialogic manner with various constituencies. Particularly when we begin to identify some priorities for the future. The discussion focused on the following:

• We want people not only to tell us what they want, but also to be prepared to shoulder a measure of the responsibility for carrying through with these commitments.
• We will circulate drafts of sections to various people and invite faculty to respond to drafts before we ever take a full draft to the faculty for approval
• This year's strategic planning report will set some broad commitments and themes that will establish a framework for departments and divisions to prepare their sections of the accreditation self study next year.

7. We discussed how we would handle our first round of discussions with Divisions - realizing that we probably will have more than one round with the Divisions. We settled on the following:

• use index cards to have each person indicate strengths and weaknesses relating to the Division
• use index cards to have each participant indicate strengths and weaknesses beyond the Division (color code the two sets of index cards)
• hand out graphs showing recruitment data and also retention data, and invite participants to tell us what they make of our lack of progress to date.
• hand out our 'essential features of Earlham' list and ask participants to tell us whether these are the most important features and if so why they are important.

8. At the end of our meeting, we discussed the results of the strengths/weaknesses exercises we had conducted with faculty and trustees on the previous Thursday evening. Darlena Rankin had compiled all the responses, and Monteze had done a simple content analysis sorting the responses into categories.

The major strengths emerging from this process are:

• Faculty/staff-student relationships
• Values and community
• International and off-campus programs

The major weaknesses emerging from this process are:

• Enrollment
• Appeal and promotion of Earlham
• Facilities
• Compensation (pay and benefits)