This is the first in a series of updates from President Pamela Gann. She will address a number of topics of importance to CMC specifically, and higher education in general, in upcoming issues of CMC.
Over the past two years, the College has worked to develop a strategic plan to guide CMC’s development for the next decade. The strategic planning process has been collaborative, with more than 130 people working on various strategic planning committees, including trustees, faculty, students, alumni, and parents. The strategic planning process concluded in March, when the Board of Trustees voted unanimously to adopt the Strategic Plan. Below, I briefly highlight the Strategic Plan’s top priorities, and the College’s next steps in its planning efforts.
Basic Premises
As all members of the CMC family know, CMC was founded with a unique and distinctive mission: to educate future leaders in business, the professions, and public affairs. Since that time, CMC has advanced and grown across a number of dimensions, all while remaining faithful to its original mission. Thus, it should not be surprising that this Strategic Plan is based on the following premises:• That CMC’s mission is its most important strategic asset.
• That CMC has successfully developed into an excellent college, and is effectively accomplishing its mission.• That over the course of the next decade, the size of the College should remain at approximately 1,000 students in Claremont.
Based on these understandings, the Strategic Plan identifies the following overall goals for CMC:• To increase our effectiveness at educating students for thoughtful and productive lives and responsible leadership in business, the professions, and public affairs, and supporting faculty and student scholarship that contributes to intellectual vitality and the understanding of public policy issues.
• To increase our leadership and effectiveness within The Claremont Colleges.
The Plan then outlines a number of recommendations, each of which is intended to assist the College in achieving these goals. It is clear that our chief priorities must be the continued recruitment and retention of highly able students and an exceptional faculty of teacher-scholars. For these reasons, the College’s highest priorities over the next decade relate to student recruitment and retention and faculty recruitment and retention.
Our Students
CMC’s ability to recruit and retain an increasingly excellent student body, as measured by a student’s overall potential to become a future leader, is fundamental to the successful accomplishment of its mission. The Strategic Plan commits the College to ensuring that students who come to CMC possess both strong academic skills and leadership qualities.In order to succeed in this task, the College must maintain a highly competitive financial aid program, which would include:
• Reaffirming CMC’s commitment to need-blind admission. CMC is one of only about 30 institutions nationwide that can admit all students regardless of financial need. Financially securing our need-blind policy through increased endowment support will ensure that the College can continue to admit students solely on the basis of their individual merit.
• Improving merit-aid programs. CMC’s merit-aid programs, led by the McKenna Achievement Award program, have been instrumental to the College’s success in recruiting ,future leaders. The Plan commits to maintaining these programs, and increasing the McKenna Award, if finances are available.
While there are obviously other important factors that contribute to our success in recruiting and retaining excellent students, many of which are discussed in the Plan, maintaining a highly competitive financial program through the strategies identified above should ensure that the College will continue to attract future leaders.
Our Faculty
A distinguished and actively engaged faculty of teacher-scholars is the most important resource that CMC provides its students. Maintaining our excellent faculty is the most significant challenge that CMC will face over the next five to 15 years, as we will likely experience a significant number of retirements. Approximately 28 percent of CMC’s tenured and tenure-track faculty is over age 60, and approximately 12 percent is over 65. To meet this challenge, CMC must ensure that it provides a highly competitive package of compensation and teaching and research support to attract a new generation of faculty leaders.
While effectively managing potential faculty replacement searches is the top priority for securing the quality of education at CMC, a strategic expansion of CMC’s core faculty by approximately nine positions is the top priority for improving the quality of education. Although CMC was successful in maintaining its excellent student-faculty ratio through its recent growth to 1,000 students, it is also clear that the College has important staffing needs.
For example, as a liberal arts college, CMC distinguishes itself from other institutions by offering small classes, and opportunities for students to develop strong mentoring relationships with faculty. Thus, in the 2001-2002 academic year, approximately 65 percent of CMC courses had less than 20 students. While this figure is strong, it could be improved, and it masks class size pressures in certain departments. In particular, six departments had at least 40 percent of their courses with more than 20 students, including economics, in which 57 percent of the courses had 20 or more students.
In addition to reducing class size pressures, increasing the size of the tenured and tenure-track faculty will also ensure that a higher percentage of CMC’s courses are taught by its regular, full-time faculty. It will also enable CMC to continue to strengthen the curriculum and improve our academic reputation.
Next Steps
Although the Strategic Plan has been approved, it is important to remember that the planning process is a continuing part of what we do as a college. Indeed, the Plan itself calls on the College to engage in a number of important planning efforts, including a curriculum review. Thus, over the next two academic years, the faculty’s Curriculum Committee is expected to engage in a targeted curriculum review, in consultation with students, alumni, and other constituencies. The curriculum review does not contemplate any fundamental changes to CMC’s mission to provide a liberal arts education that emphasizes economics and government. Instead, the focus will be on addressing issues considered to be critical to the College’s ability to prepare its students for positions of leadership in the coming decade. Examples include the effectiveness of the senior thesis; the effectiveness of joint science; the effectiveness of curriculum in developing “core skills” in such areas as speaking, writing, and information technology; and opportunities to increase linkages outside the classroom, through internships, the research institutes, and so on.
Strategic plans also frequently identify potential building projects, and CMC’s Strategic Plan identifies four major building projects that the College will need to evaluate over the next decade: an athletic and recreation center (to replace Ducey Gym), a new student/campus center, a new academic building, and a new joint science building. Given our size and financial resources, it is unlikely that the College will complete each of these projects within the next 10 years. Nevertheless, we will need a plan and schedule to address these projects because each will be an important priority and need for the College over the next decade.
The College has a strong tradition of conservative financial management, and we will not depart from our established financial practices to implement any recommendation in the Plan that will require additional resources. Implementation of the major recommendations in the Plan will be contingent upon fundraising, and the College will not utilize tuition increases to fund the Plan. The College has not assumed that growth in the current endowment will be available to fund the Plan.
CMC’s Strategic Plan presents an ambitious set of recommendations based on our traditional strengths to guide the College’s development over the next decade. If we are successful in implementing the Plan, the result should be an even stronger CMC that is producing students who are as prepared as any student in the country to pursue thoughtful and productive lives and careers of responsible leadership in business, government, and the professions.
I send my thanks to the many alumni who have been actively involved in the Strategic Planning process, and I look forward to working with you as we enter the next phase.
Sincerely, Pamela Gann
President