On Saturday, the College’s Board of Trustees held their fall meeting, following a very full schedule of committee work on Thursday and Friday, as well as a celebration of the formal dedication of Gault Manor on Friday evening. In this report, I will share with you, as I did with the Board on Saturday, updates on our strategic priorities, but now more than ever these need to be situated in the context of the larger economy.

My view is that The College of Wooster is very favorably positioned, not simply to weather the storm, but to emerge from it in a stronger position. I have been talking with colleagues and experts across the country. One analyst put it this way: “The organizations that will come out ahead are those that have the following characteristics: (1) modest debt on their balance sheets; (2) relatively unimpeded by constraints on liquidity; (3) a diversified, conservative and protective investment posture; (4) a high quality, differentiated product in their markets; (5) a clear vision of their core mission; and (6) bold and confident leadership.”

Let’s take a look at where Wooster is by these criteria:

Debt: Relative to our peer institutions we have very, very modest debt on our balance sheets. We have begun a conversation about whether our conservative stance on leverage is the best strategy going forward, but at this particular moment, it is a good place to be.
Liquidity: We are unimpeded by liquidity issues. Many of our peers managed their short-term cash through the Commonfund Short-Term Fund. It froze up and participating institutions have been struggling to meet payroll and conduct normal business. We do not use the Commonfund and have not been affected by its problems.
Investment Posture: While our endowment has suffered losses there is good reason to think that our endowment performance will rank very well against our peers through this period. Our investment strategy was tuned to hold up well in just this kind of market context.
Differentiated Value: One of the things I most value about The College of Wooster, and am grateful to be able to boast about as President, is that we actually have a high-quality, differentiated product in our market. We need to get much better at demonstrating and marketing its value, but the culture of undergraduate research we offer our students is transformative and without peer.
Clarity of Mission: Unlike some of our peers who are confused about their core missions, some waffling between pre-professional programs and the liberal arts, and others struggling with a kind of schizophrenia, claiming an undergraduate liberal arts mission but with a faculty more committed to research than teaching, The College of Wooster enjoys a vigorous, shared commitment to our core mission as an academically rigorous liberal arts college that changes lives.
Leadership: With regard to leadership, I want to express my gratitude for the wise and careful stewardship Wooster’s Board of Trustees has provided the College over the years. Their guidance and thoughtful choices have positioned us with the relative strength we have in this period.

In short, we score consistently high marks on this scale of readiness to prosper. We have all of the qualities necessary, not just to weather this storm, but to emerge from it in a comparatively stronger position.

It should also be noted that thanks to careful stewardship and management, we ended the 2007-2008 fiscal year with a balanced budget, and we are projecting one for the current fiscal year as well.

Let me offer some qualification of my optimism. My belief in Wooster’s future is contingent on our ability to make thoughtful and courageous choices. We will, in all likelihood, see a reduction in the extent to which our endowment supports our annual operating budget. We may, perhaps, see some temporary reduction in gifts to the College. I am confident we can manage these challenges.

My biggest area of concern is loss of revenue from tuition and fees. The fact is that many families stretch to send their children to Wooster. As generous as our financial aid is, it is still the case that we do not meet the full, demonstrated need of some of our students, while others have been able to attend only by relying on home equity and student loans, which may be in jeopardy. Throughout the commentary on higher education, one finds the view that families in this period may choose lower cost educational alternatives. Frequently predicted here is a shift from comparatively expensive private education to less expensive public education.

There may be a silver lining here for us, if we deploy an effective strategy and market it well. That is, given our strong merit scholarship program and extensive commitment to financial aid, we can demonstrate in many cases that Wooster provides the quality and value of a private liberal arts college of the best kind but at a cost to many families that compares very favorably to public education. As I said, this is not true for all of our students, but it is certainly truer here than at some of our peer institutions that offer significantly less financial to their students. In short, we have an opportunity in this economic climate to market The College of Wooster for what it is: a high quality liberal arts education that can be had at a comparatively outstanding value. If we can seize this opportunity, we should be able to attract applicants with very desirable profiles.

In any case, I want to head into our near-term future with our eyes open and focused strategically. There is always the temptation to hunker down in challenging times, to become very conservative, or even to put a freeze on new projects, hiring, or the like. I believe that this is a response that is calculated to mire an organization and leave it buffeted by larger forces rather than controlling its own destiny. Now more than ever we should be making careful but bold investments in those strategic priorities calculated to improve our market position. The Board authorized two such investments on Saturday: the installation of a new, synthetic turf field and lights at John J. Papp Stadium, largely funded by gifts already in hand, and a detailed architectural plan and engineering study for the Campus Center project.

To address the challenges the economy may present thoughtfully and strategically, while continuing on our path to secure Wooster’s rightful place among America’s finest liberal arts colleges, we will have to make choices, some of them difficult, perhaps even painful. Therefore, I have engaged the Cabinet in a process of contingency planning. Rather than having to react to eventualities when they present themselves, now is the time to undertake the analytic and strategic work necessary to be prepared. John Sell and Ellen Falduto are developing a set of performance indicators that will help us track the key revenue and cost drivers.

We are also crafting possible interventions that we can implement in phases. Our plan is to be very transparent about our situation and intentions with the campus community, and to do this now, in a forward-looking manner. Our actions will be guided by principles, the most important of which is that we need to steward the integrity of our core mission through the turbulence. The second principle is that we will give careful attention to two kinds of strategies: (1) we will look for ways to reduce costs where possible even as we continue to invest in our forward progress, and (2) we will look for ways to preserve our revenue, and more importantly, to enable our students to persist in their educations which they will need now more than ever, by offering carefully devised mechanisms for supplemental financial support.

Let me now turn to offer a brief update on some of our strategic priorities.

Community and Communication

Whatever the strategic context, Wooster will fare better with a common sense of purpose, a clear sense of direction, and a climate of open communication. With the help and advice of my colleagues on the Cabinet and others, we continue to explore new ways to communicate with all Wooster’s constituencies and to encourage dialogue among them. Last week I mailed a campus update to all Wooster alumni and parents, and plan to do this twice a year. We introduced an on-line Campus Community Forum to serve as a virtual town meeting space to gather comment and encourage dialogue on important campus issues. We launched this by sharing the Commitment to Environmental Stewardship for comment and discussion and we will continue to post important issues or policy questions as they arise. Finally, of course, Peg and I continue to put the President’s Home to work as a community center, hosting groups of students, faculty, staff, and guests for conviviality and conversation.

Diversity and Global Engagement

Our work with the Diversity Task Force on how to organize ourselves to serve better our goals in the area of diversity and global engagement continues, and I am happy to say that when we reopen Babcock next fall it will be the home of the Wooster Center for Diversity and Global Engagement. This center will include a suite of offices on the ground floor and the residence hall will be a living/learning community of students from a broad diversity of backgrounds interested in the issues and values of the Center. The Center will bring together the International Programs Office, the Office of International Student Affairs, the Office of Multiethnic Student Affairs, the Ambassadors Program, and affiliated academic departments and programs in a nexus of Student Life and Academic Affairs cooperation.

I am very proud to be able to say that Dr. Yvonne Williams has returned to The College of Wooster in a part-time consulting capacity this year as Senior Advisor for Diversity Affairs. Try as she might to retire, her commitment to these issues and values and her love for The College of Wooster led her to agree to help us get organized.

Institutional Commitment to Environmental Sustainability

The Board reviewed and endorsed a statement of Commitment to Environmental Stewardship drafted by the students, faculty, and staff on the Environmental Task Force and subsequently discussed and endorsed by the Student Government Association, Campus Council, and the faculty. This statement expresses our collective commitment “to integrate environmental knowledge and values into daily life by conducting our affairs in ways that enhance personal, public, and environmental health.”

In addition, the faculty has established a new Committee for a Sustainable Campus, whose charge is “to review campus practices and make recommendations for changes in those practices that will reduce harmful effects on the natural environment; reduce energy consumption and employ sustainable energy sources where possible; enhance awareness and experience of the natural world on campus; and advance adherence to the College’s Commitment to Environmental Stewardship.” The idea is that this committee, whose members will include faculty, students and staff, will develop a list of recommendations, researched, prioritized, and analyzed for costs, which they will forward each year for consideration in our annual budget development process.

Improving Wooster’s Governance and Administration

Under the strategic priority of improving Wooster’s governance and administration, faculty on the Conference with Trustees Committee have been working diligently with the Trustees on the Faculty Relations Committee to revise the Statute of Instruction sections addressing policies and procedures for grievances and dismissals. These proposed revisions received a first reading at this meeting.

I am happy to report that we are making incremental progress towards the reorganization of the administration of Academic Affairs. We are currently conducting an internal search process for a new Associate Dean for Academic Engagement who will be responsible for leading student academic development, managing faculty advising, maintaining academic standards, and hearing student concerns related to teaching and program issues. Together with the Dean of Students’ staff and the Class Deans, the Associate Dean will monitor the academic progress of students at risk, provide support to these students, and serve as a point of appeal for student petitions. Many of these duties will serve our strategic goal of improving retention.

We are well into the search for our next Vice President for Finance and Business. We have over 60 applicants and the search committee has begun to review the credentials of the candidates.

Finally, I am happy to report on our progress in developing a new web site for the College with our design firm, BigBad. The web development steering committee has seen a range of possible design options and we have BigBad hard at work developing what will surely be one of the most engaging and functional web sites of any liberal arts college in the country.

Conclusion

I have not addressed all of our strategic priorities nor even all the good work that is being done under the ones I have mentioned. Their omission does not signal any relative lack of importance, only that we are working on getting better on so many fronts that I cannot report on them all within this framework. There is no shortage of commitment, optimism, or desire to improve at The College of Wooster. Some changes are happening quickly while others will take time and patience. But we are gaining momentum and I have every confidence that we will continue to make positive progress.

Sincerely,

Grant Cornwell