Engaged Liberal Learning:
The Plan for Skidmore College, 2005-2015

Overture

Colleges and universities tend to focus either on their past or their future. While Skidmore honors, takes pride in, and builds upon the legacy of its past, we are accustomed to thinking in the future tense: about our hopes for our students, changes to be made in our curriculum, or a greater role to be played by our College throughout higher education and in the world at large. Even our declaration that creative thought matters orients us toward a distant horizon: The concept of creativity itself points to a moment that does not yet exist — when something hidden will be revealed, a plan realized, a quandary resolved through an imaginative approach. Creativity threatens the status quo and so entails risk. Yet Skidmore has always invited change and embraced risk. Because of the dedication, foresight, and audacity of so many who have come before us, the College has made enormous progress across its first century. Throughout our history, we have challenged ourselves to make no small plans — to make no ordinary choices — and we do so still today.

In this spirit, beginning in Fall 2000, the members of the extended Skidmore community gathered to reaffirm our fundamental principles and the continuity of our history but above all to look forward. We resolved to envision our future confidently and creatively, to be forthright in naming our challenges, to set goals incorporating our highest aspirations, and to identify the actions required to achieve them. Preliminary results of this process appeared in "The Distillation Report," issued January 2001, and later in the precursor to the present document, "The Plan for Skidmore," which was endorsed by the Board of Trustees in May 2002. Further development and implementation of the 2002 Plan were temporarily deferred by a presidential transition and the need to address certain financial issues that required immediate attention. Now, having completed that transition, reestablished our fiscal stability, renewed the planning conversation,¹ and begun planning for an upcoming Middle States reaccreditation review,² we bring forward this revised Strategic Plan and look toward the ambitious comprehensive fundraising campaign that it will inspire, a campaign whose scope reflects our bold aspirations for our students and our College.³

1.  Multiple conversations have occurred within the faculty, in student government, in the Committee on Educational Policy and Planning in developing the "Academic Vision Statement," in an ad hoc Retention Committee, within the administration and the Board of Trustees, and in other areas across the Skidmore community as well.

2. Planning for the Middle States review and the revision of this document have been well coordinated, and the themes developed in each process are mutually supporting.

3. In May 2004, anticipating the completion of this revised Plan, the Board of Trustees authorized the most ambitious comprehensive fundraising campaign in Skidmore's history. This campaign will support the highest priority Initiatives identified below (some of which will appear as objectives in the campaign case statement) and, in so doing, will produce significant changes in our institutional landscape.