August 2007

Dear Fellow Members of the Bates Community,

What is it that makes Bates great?  How should the Bates experience change in the next five years?  What should we be sure to keep and what might we alter?  This year we will engage in a planning process to help us address important questions like these and guide decisions about the future. 

This work is timely because it will help us think carefully not only about the status quo, but about future opportunities and challenges as well.  For example, many forces outside our control are shaping higher education around the country and affecting programs at top colleges like Bates.  These forces include intensified focus on career preparation and reduced emphasis on knowledge for its own sake, sweeping changes in demographic trends, and globalization as a growing educational influence that seems to be underscoring the importance of the liberal arts.  In light of global need for higher learning, national demands for accountability, and rising costs, what might these forces mean for us?  How might we use at least some of them to our advantage?

In addition to affirming our faith in Bates’ strength and articulating our collective ideas about moving forward, my aim is to support a highly interactive form of consultation with the community.  To begin, I will invite a number of faculty, staff, and students who are chosen at random to join me in groups for conversations about the future.  In addition, there will be other discussions anyone can join.  

Using what we learn, I will work with a steering group of faculty, staff, and students to articulate a few topics around which we will organize our planning this year.  Then we will form some working groups to develop specific plans.  The steering group will guide progress and help me draft a final document to present our collective ideas.  This work will take about a year.

Using this open, rather loosely defined planning process will be a new experience for us at Bates, and I hope it will be both beneficial and fun.  We are using it because it is designed to invite wide participation, stimulate new ideas, come to closure in a timely manner, and complement structured planning processes like some we have used recently. 

As we begin this work, I ask for your encouragement, participation, and enthusiasm—and welcome your ideas, questions, and feedback at any time.      

With warm regards,

Elaine