This past weekend, members of the College’s board of trustees were on campus for their fall meeting, and while we took time Saturday night to celebrate the stunning success of the Independent Minds Campaign, most of our work was focused on the future.

Our conversations were framed by a memo that board chairman Jim Wilson and I wrote and distributed in advance of the meeting, in which we offered our view of the College’s highest priorities for the immediate future and the concrete actions we are prepared to take this year in pursuit of those priorities.

Because these priorities will shape our work together, I want to share with you some of the thinking behind them, as well as news of several other developments from the board meeting. I plan to make these post-meeting missives a regular part of my communication with the campus community.

The six priorities, which the board has endorsed, fall in six mutually interdependent areas: governance, campus community and communication; organizational structure and staffing; diversity and global engagement; enrollment; campus stewardship; and strategic planning. It’s important to note that the order in which I’ve listed them does not reflect my sense of their relative importance, nor Jim’s, nor that of the board as a whole.

Governance, Campus Community, and Communication

Wooster has a faculty distinguished by its commitment to transformative teaching and scholarship. Faculty members, however, have a number of concerns, including salary, diversity, the efficacy of faculty and college governance structures, teaching load, and the nature of faculty work. These issues and the challenges they entail are not intractable, but none of them can be addressed quickly, nor will they be resolved completely by any single action. Our goal and our commitment, then, is to engage the faculty in a collaborative effort to address them with openness and determination.

There is also important work to attend to in addressing concerns raised by our hourly and administrative staff. Every dimension of a student’s experience in college is in some way formative, and therefore everyone who works at Wooster contributes to the mission. One of the qualities that distinguishes the College is the pride that staff of every description take in their work, and in their roles in the overall institutional purpose. We need to do a better job of demonstrating our respect for the quality and complexity of the work of the staff and for their dedication to the College, and I will do all I can to work with them as partners in our common project.

Liberal arts colleges are like complex ecosystems; each part can only flourish if the whole system is healthy and functioning well, and the whole institution can only thrive in a climate of mutual respect, collaboration, and collegiality. Communication is essential to building that kind of community, which is why I have launched a number of initiatives this year, including regular, informal meetings with small groups of faculty and students, fireside chats, meetings with individual faculty members, and regular notes like this.

Organizational Structure and Staffing

One of the most critical elements in good management is getting the right people working within the right organizational structure. We believe that over the next few years we should seek to bring our organizational structure and staffing into alignment with the best practices among our peer institutions. The creation of the position of Vice President of Enrollment was one such step and we already have reason to be hopeful about that change. But there are others we need to consider, including possible revisions to the administrative organization of academic affairs, investing in strategic hires in development, strengthening our human resources functions, and developing a more effective organizational model to support our institutional commitment to diversity.

To that end, I have charged a task force which I will lead with studying the best organizational models to support diversity and inclusivity at other liberal arts colleges and developing a proposal for coordinated leadership of this work that is right for Wooster.

Diversity and Global Engagement

An excellent contemporary liberal education can only take place in a community of learners that is diverse ethnically, racially, culturally, socioeconomically, religiously and politically. It is through the engagement with different points of view, with perspectives formed by a rich diversity of experience and heritage, that liberal learning flourishes.

While Wooster’s history with racial and international diversity is one to be proud of, we have not made the same strides recently as many of the colleges in our comparison group. In fact, we have slid backwards while most of our comparison schools have made significant strides forward. To attract greater diversity, the College must be a place that is intentional and focused about welcoming people of diverse backgrounds.

With Board involvement, leadership, and guidance, we hope that we can use this year to make decisive strides forward with diversity and global engagement across the whole institution.

Enrollment

Admissions and financial aid will be a top priority for Wooster this year and for the foreseeable future, because the fact is that many of the other aspirations we all have for Wooster are feasible only if we make significant advances in our admissions and financial aid practices and outcomes. Wooster is an outstanding choice for many students who are not now considering us and that has to change. What is more, we need to recapture and surpass previous commitments to enrolling a diverse student body, become much more strategic about the way we award financial aid, and communicate the value of a Wooster education more effectively to prospective students and their families.

The hiring of Mary Karen Vellines and several new staff members has brought new energy, vision, and professional experience to the admissions office. But a project like this requires the effort of the entire Wooster community, including students, faculty, staff, trustees, and alumni. This was a point made over and over again by members of the board during the weekend. They are eager to do their part. And they are looking to all of us for the same kind of commitment.

Improving our enrollment picture will also require the crafting and implementation of a comprehensive strategy. I have convened an Enrollment Strategy Task Force, led by Mary Karen, which will pull together a wide array of expertise, analyze the details of our enrollment situation, evaluate our current branding and marketing initiatives, and draft a comprehensive strategy for the Board’s consideration.

One element of that strategy, our Web site, is sufficiently critical to improving our admissions efforts that work on it has already begun. This semester, a Web Strategy Group, under the leadership of John Hopkins, will select a firm to help us reinvent and redesign our site to serve the whole Wooster community better, but especially to be more useful and compelling to prospective students and their families.

Campus Stewardship

The sine qua non of building momentum in the admissions market, and also in making progress in retention, is having very high levels of student satisfaction. This, in turn, is a function of providing a fundamentally excellent liberal education, which we do, and attending to prospective and current students’ legitimate expectations regarding the campus environment.

Surveys of our own students and national data make it clear that students and their families pay close attention to the quality of residential life, and are quick to extrapolate from the care and keeping of residence halls to the overall quality of the College. We need to be making regular, scheduled refurbishments to our residence halls so that every student can boast that they love where they live.

With regard to major capital projects, we have completed some truly outstanding facilities projects in recent years. Bornhuetter, Gault Admissions Center, Kauke, Longbrake Wellness Center, Morgan, and soon Gault Manor will serve the campus with distinction for years to come. At the same time, those capital needs that remain are brought into sharper focus by the projects that have been completed. Two, in particular, stand out.

Given the development of the biological sciences and their importance in the liberal education of our students and in their recruitment, we need to begin a careful planning process for a thoroughgoing renovation of our facilities in Mateer.

In my view and that of the board, however, there is no need more urgent than the building of a new campus center. The current Lowry Student Center and Armington Physical Education Center have served the campus well, but they are tired and out of date. The facility we need to build is a fully integrated campus center, where the full range of campus social life, athletics, and recreation are merged and intermingled.

This project holds the promise of bringing vibrancy to campus life and student experience that will add significantly to our overall mission while also fueling our admissions and retention efforts. The proximity of Lowry and Armington offers a unique opportunity to build an integrated campus center that will surpass, in its function and contribution to the quality of campus life, what competitors have done.

A Campus Center Steering Committee, chaired by Jackie Middleton, has begun the complex task of engaging all segments of the campus community in a process of envisioning what this facility can and should be. Meanwhile, I am working with members of the board and the administration to develop a timetable, financial plan, and fund-raising plan for what is likely to be the largest, most strategically important, and most complex facilities project the College has undertaken since the simultaneous construction of Kauke, Scovel, Severance, and Taylor halls following the destruction of Old Main.

In sum, while it will prove a challenge, we need to craft a two-pronged capital investment strategy that will enable us, over the next several years, to undertake the Campus Center project as well as the necessary annual investments in campus stewardship.

Strategic Planning

The College has a strategic plan that is in effect and the preceding priorities are either consistent with or pursue the details of that plan. But strategic planning is a dynamic process. Rather than treating the strategic plan ratified in 2004 as fixed, we would like to use this year to shift our strategic planning model from one that is periodic to one that is continuous but still long range. Good governance includes a planning process that is inclusive, nimble, and effective in the execution of strategic decisions.

We intend to engage the Cabinet and the Financial Advisory Committee in a discussion of this shift, orienting them both towards developing a mode of strategic planning as an ongoing dynamic process.

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Needless to say, we’ll be talking a great deal more about all of this in the coming months, but there were also, as I mentioned at the beginning of this letter, a number of other developments at the board meeting of which you should be aware.

The 2007-08 operating budget approved by the board in June projected 565 first-year students and 20 transfer students this fall, based on the number of deposits received at that point. Due to higher than usual “melt” over the summer, however, the actual numbers on the first day of class were 545 and 14, respectively. Combined with lower than expected retention of continuing students and higher salary and wage expenses, the result is a $1.3 million operating deficit for the current fiscal year that we will be working to reduce over the next few months.

On a more positive note, the endowment’s performance through September narrowly outpaced both the S&P 500 and our blended benchmark, returning 9.96 percent year to date. Overall, the market value of the endowment stood at just under $280 million as of September 30.

Finally, the executive committee reviewed the status of the L.C. Boles Golf Course. While affirming their decision to close the course in the future, in the absence of a specific plan or timeline for its alternative use, there is no good reason to take this action now. They have, however, directed us to work on increasing golf course revenue in order to reduce its operating deficit. Part of that plan will be a change in policy that will require everyone, except students, to pay some fee to play.

The Board of Trustees was mightily impressed with the spirit of the campus. Their perceptions are in accord with mine. We are at a place where there is tremendous openness to change and innovation, where good will and generosity of spirit abound, and where all eyes are focused on the future. I feel fortunate and grateful to have joined this community and will do all I can to be a catalyst of thoughtful progress.

Grant Cornwell