President White and the Board of Trustees have been finalizing the Strategic Plan in the past weeks and are nearing the completion date in the beginning of May. The Strategic Plan is basically a layout of what the College will do to renovate and expand the campus.
Director of Public Affairs Jim Amidon ’87 said the four Strategic Planning committees wrapped up the semester-long work in early December by forming draft thesis statements that represented the central elements of their discussions. The four separate thesis statements, each created by each respective committee, are available on the faculty/staff home page (http://www.wabash.edu/facstaff/plan.cfm).
“Those thesis statements were shared with all of the faculty and staff, and on December 18 approximately 160 members of the community and a few Trustees attended a half-day series of rich and productive conversations about the draft thesis statements,” Mr. Amidon said.
With a few minor changes to the drafts, President White assembled the drafts and source materials that the committees used to support their work, and mailed all of the information to the full Board of Trustees. Mr. Amidon also said the Board will have “intense planning conversations” January 24-25 in advance of its regular Saturday Board meeting. All Trustees will attend 60-75 minute sessions presented by each of the planning committees. In addition, Trustees will meet with faculty and students while on campus, then devote much of the Saturday meeting time to planning talks.
The dinner that Mr. Amidon mentioned is the LEAD dinner taking place next Saturday evening. President White said he hopes more students will sign up for the dinner because there will be Board members who will talk with students and they can give him feedback from the students. Mr. White stressed that this is a very important part of the Strategic Planning process and students need to RSVP by 8am Monday morning.
“The reason we picked sophomores and juniors is because freshman are too new and the seniors are less engaged in what will happen in the next few years, but they will be more engaged with what will be happening over the next 25 years,” Mr. White said. “There are some seniors who are invited, particularly student leaders, as well as seniors from the Presidential Advisory Group, such as Gary Simkus and Lincoln Smith.”
“With the Strategic Plan, it has to be an appropriate degree of generality because not all of our issues will be articulated very clearly in the Strategic Plan in May, but it will tell us the general direction we will move.”
The planning session on December 18 was a very valuable time when faculty and staff from all over campus had a chance to discuss the future direction of the College with the planning committees. Students on the President’s Strategic Plan Student Advisory Committee have met every week with President White and their input into the essential questions of Strategic Planning has been described as “very important.”
This kind of involvement in the Strategic Plan has pleased President White immensely. He said he hopes that more students will sign up for the dinner with the trustees in the spring semester, too, because then the entire Wabash community will be able to discuss a draft of the Plan as President White modifies it for submission to the Board in May.
President White understands that the Strategic Planning process was never considered an easy task to accomplish, but he has found that it entails much more than just planning and organizing. He also said that Wabash does not have any obvious problems or issues at hand that need a tweaking, which simplifies and complicates the planning process simultaneously.
“We don’t have a crisis that needs fixing or a problem that needs an incredible solution at this moment and that makes Strategic Planning more interesting, but also more difficult because there is not a problem in front of our eyes,” Mr. White said. “I am proud of what is coming out of the Strategic Planning process because it is more adventurous than I might have expected, it’s more interesting, and there are some really important things that will come out of this, regarding faculty and students.”