Williams College
Self-Study for Accreditation
Planning and Evaluation
Our planning and evaluation systems are ultimately the responsibility of the President, guided by the College’s senior officers and supported by various groups representing constituencies of the College community, including students and faculty. The Senior Staff consists of the Dean of the Faculty, Provost and Treasurer, Dean of the College, Vice President for Operations, Vice President for Alumni Relations and Development, Vice President for Strategic Planning and Institutional Diversity, Chief Investment Officer, Assistant to the President for Public Affairs, and Assistant to the President and Secretary to the College. The Provost and deans are faculty members, a circumstance that, along with faculty representation on important committees and frequent reports by administrators to faculty meetings, ensures strong faculty engagement in planning and evaluation. Senior Staff meet weekly to discuss and evaluate short-term operations and at many of the meetings to review progress on long-term plans. They both begin and close the planning loop by determining which groups within the College should investigate issues and proposals and then by reviewing and deciding on those groups’ recommendations.
We describe in the appendices other groups involved in planning and evaluation, including various student-faculty committees and the faculty as a whole. The faculty has authority over the curriculum, and as part of its regular meetings it also hears frequent reports on planning and evaluation from the President and Senior Staff and offers valuable comments.
Planning and Evaluation as Ongoing Routines
Planning is embedded in the routines of the College, and we believe we have improved the regularity of our planning since 1997, when the NEASC Visiting Team voiced some criticism. We use our abundant data to inform decision making on a continuing basis, our planning is broadly based, and we use the results of evaluations to plan for the future. This is true of both long-term and short-term planning.
We have a long-run Financial Plan, which incorporates all of our assumptions about expected revenues, operating and capital expenditures, performance of our endowment investments, and gifts. Assumptions about revenue include expected growth in tuition and fees, grants, gifts for current operations, and miscellaneous income; those affecting expenditures include growth in compensation, financial aid, and managers’ budgets (all of which are influenced by factors beyond our control, such as inflation and health benefit rates), and costs associated with activities such as debt issue and repayment and community support. Our assumptions about endowment return are, compared with historical performance, conservative, as are those about levels of gift support for endowment and capital projects. The plan provides 12- to 15-year projections of these variables, a horizon far enough to allow for long-range planning but not so far as to be unreliable.
The Provost presents the Financial Plan to the Board each quarter and the President reports on it briefly as part of the Board conference calls that occur each month between regular meetings. During campaign periods, the plan also includes more detailed tracking and projections of campaign performance. The Provost’s Office maintains and regularly updates the plan to incorporate changes that affect any of the variables, such as new capital projects, changes to financial aid, compensation, tuition, other policies having significant financial impact, below-average performance of our investments, and so on.
We regularly use the Financial Plan to project the consequences of potential resource allocations. A typical set of projections might include exploring the implications of exceeding our current campaign goal by a significant amount, increasing our financial-aid program substantially, committing to a particular level of spending on new capital projects as well as issuing debt to fund them, increasing our operating expenses by a greater amount than normal (e.g., to support the community), and either over- or under-performance of our investments. Modeling exercises such as these allow us to understand well in advance the financial implications of our policy decisions.
The financial planning process focuses on long-term analysis of our financial condition. The process examines all financial activity — income and expenditure — that has or may occur. It, therefore, brings together the consequences of all activity in the operating and capital budgets. The intent is to project, using the best information available, the effect of current and expected College financial policies and program decisions on our financial stability.
The Financial Plan breaks activities into three areas: operating budget, capital budget, and overall financial results, including asset returns, debt principal payments, and liabilities. The operating budget reports and forecasts revenues from all sources that support current operations (student charges, auxiliaries, and gifts for current use), and expenditures to support current operations (compensation, financial aid, supplies, travel, etc.), including interest paid on debt and spending for renovations and repairs of physical structures. Department and office managers expend great effort to analyze and project each item in these categories — work that is then synthesized by the Budget Director and Associate Provost and reviewed by Senior Staff. The capital budget lists all new and major capital renovation projects with cost estimates and anticipated funding sources (gifts, debt, and unrestricted endowment). The overall financial activities section brings together information on operating and capital budgets, endowment support needed to balance the budget, and investment returns and debt principal payments to provide our bottom-line financial condition. To clarify future obligations and revenue sources, we put liabilities and life-income funds in a separate section.
Our target for support from endowment for the operating budget is 4.5 per cent to 5.5 per cent of the start-of-year financial assets. We examine this target over a several-year period so that market fluctuations do not drive spending higher or lower in any particular year and to allow for steady growth in spending while protecting the future purchasing power of the endowment. Within the Financial Plan, we model spending proposals for their short-term and long-term effects. For example, when a new building is proposed, we add to the plan the related costs of compensation, future renovation, and maintenance and operations.
We also use the Financial Plan to model unexpected positive events and extremely negative ones, such as the impact of an average ten per cent, five per cent, or negative five per cent annual return on financial investments rather than the projected eight per cent. The scenarios also include both one-time and multi-year occurrences, such as high inflation or reduced giving. The results of this modeling lead to the development of contingency plans. For example, we staged the current project to create new faculty office buildings and a library complex so that if a negative financial circumstance occurred (e.g., unusually high construction costs or poor financial investment returns) we could delay parts of the project without harming educational activities.
Short-run planning takes place routinely through the activities of senior administrators, committees, the faculty as a whole, and faculty in departments and programs. We have a detailed annual budget, as well as annual plans for the maintenance and upgrading of physical facilities, acquisition of computer hardware and software, and the like. Each spring the Committee on Priorities and Resources (CPR), made up of faculty, staff, and students, reviews the Provost’s proposed budget for the coming year. Each fall it reviews the budgetary results for the previous academic year and also any current-year adjustments that the Provost plans to recommend to the Board in October. The CPR also reviews the annual capital renovation and repairs budget to ensure those projects address campus priorities and reviews any adjustments to previously approved capital project budgets before they are submitted to the Board. If the committee has serious concerns or significant comments about the levels of spending or allocations, the Provost presents them to Senior Staff for review.
The Committee on Appointments and Promotions (CAP), made up of faculty and senior administrators, performs a similar role in the allocation of faculty positions, which it undertakes on an annual basis but which is a significant element in long-run planning. Every spring the CAP meets with the Committee on Educational Policy (CEP), made up of faculty, staff, and students, to discuss academic priorities. The CAP then reviews departments’ and programs’ requests for new positions and for hires to replace faculty who will be on leave or who have left the College, and approves those that meet our highest priorities.
Department and Program Planning
The CEP each year monitors course offerings and major requirements, making recommendations to the full faculty, which must approve every new course, every significant revision in a course, and every change in major requirements. The process starts by departments and programs proposing changes, which are guided by department members’ own assessments of student learning as described at length in the section on Academic Programs. The CEP’s annual review is serious — by no means a “rubber stamp” — and often results in departments’ and programs’ revision of their proposals. Its responsibilities are especially great because changes in course offerings are very frequent (some of that is due to the generous leave policy that results in significant changes each year in the composition of the teaching faculty). For 2007-08 alone, there are 111 new courses and 68 courses significantly revised, while seven departments and programs are making important changes in the structure of their offerings (see “Course Package” for 2007-08 and the CEP’s instructions to departments and programs on how to submit proposals, both in Team Room).
We undertake external reviews of academic departments and some interdepartmental programs roughly every 10 to 12 years. Departments and programs engage in extensive self studies in anticipation of the reviews. The Dean of the Faculty coordinates these reviews and presents them for discussion to the CAP, and the results are considered in the CAP’s decisions on authorization of positions. There have been nine such reviews in the last five years. In the case of some departments, it has been more than 12 years since the last external review and we are committed to reducing or eliminating such cases in the near future. In addition, the CEP undertakes formal internal reviews of some interdepartmental programs.
We believe that our procedures for ongoing planning and evaluation serve us well. They include participation by faculty in many different ways: our practice of drawing major administrators from the ranks of the faculty, representation on committees (often by election), frequent reports to meetings of the full faculty, and discussions in those meetings. We plan no major changes in this basic organization in the near future.
Special Planning and Evaluation Efforts
While planning and evaluation are routine for us, we often engage in special efforts in those respects. Indeed, while each one of those efforts is decidedly not “routine,” we engage in so many of them that it has become routine to have one or more operating in any given year. In the remainder of this chapter we highlight a number of prominent examples, and we have chosen them to represent a variety of concerns at many liberal arts colleges: diversity, financial aid, student residential life, curriculum, student advising on careers, off-campus programs, athletics, and environmental responsibility. Our goal in this chapter is to illustrate our constant attention to planning and evaluation — to show that they are indeed essential features of our institutional culture. Therefore, our discussion here is summary in nature, with the details left to other chapters.
Diversity
Since our last Interim Report to NEASC, we have perhaps focused attention on no issue more than that of diversity. Williams has long worked at diversifying itself and that work will long continue, but we organized over the academic years 2004-05 and 2005-06 a special effort of planning and evaluation called the Diversity Initiatives. These initiatives were designed to improve the experiences of all parts of the College community — students, faculty, and staff. A major summary of these activities is the Diversity Initiatives Self Study of April 2005 (in Team Room), which notes “[the] process was to be the work of the whole College, not just a section of it; action-oriented; presented first in the form of a self study; and critiqued by people outside the College with experience of these issues.” Virtually every part of the College’s governance structure played a role in framing issues, analyzing current operations, brainstorming ideas, and implementing plans. We focused on the experiences of members of the Williams community from historically underrepresented groups, with the goal of making it one in which all members can thrive. As the Diversity Initiatives Self Study says, “For all the progress Williams has made in becoming more open and supportive, the case remains that some people, because of factors intrinsic to them, are excluded from the College or have less full and satisfying experiences here.”
Two groups of outside consultants informed this work and provided an external perspective. Their reports are also in the Team Room.
Steps we took during the Initiatives are listed in the appendices. They fall into categories of structure, access, curriculum, support, awareness, programming, and residential life. Of particular relevance to this accreditation self study is the compilation of “a battery of measurements of the degree to which students from historically underrepresented groups thrive at the College, with a plan to update and report those measurements to the College community every two years.” To our knowledge this is the first such battery of measures of progress in diversity devised by a college or university. They are the measures we will use to assess progress over time and they will inform the process of continual planning and evaluation that is the main subject of this chapter. As explained in the section on Public Disclosure, what we have made public are measures of community members’ experiences; for reasons of confidentiality, we share measures of performance only with College policymakers. Two years is too short a time from which to draw meaningful conclusions but among the things these data do seem to indicate is the degree to which faculty who leave the College, though the number is small, are disproportionately women and/or people of color.
Overall, the Diversity Initiatives have refocused our energies, in the words of our new Vice President for Strategic Planning and Institutional Diversity, “from being a diverse community to being an inclusive one.” By the high standards to which we hold ourselves, the progress towards this important end seems frustratingly slow. As a result of the Initiatives, however, we now have significantly more structures in place and have developed tangible measurements by which to gauge progress.
Financial Aid
Another example of a special project is one led by the Advisory Group on Admission and Financial Aid (AGAFA). Each fall, AGAFA, whose members are faculty and staff, reviews reports based on data on admission, student financial-aid profiles, and surveys of admitted and enrolled students, along with measures of academic performance and non-academic activities of students in various categories that traditionally have been relevant for admission (legacies, athletes, international students, etc.). This review enables the group to determine how effective such things as recruiting targets and loan burdens are in helping us attract and enroll the desired student body. An AGAFA review in 2004 of family income distribution led to a recommendation that we not require loans as part of financial aid to families with parental contributions below $1,000 and to enhance the enrollment of qualified students from the lowest-income families. Staff in the Provost’s Office estimated the budget implications and used the Financial Plan to simulate the short- and long-run effects on overall finances. After the proposal was deemed financially feasible, the CPR and Senior Staff endorsed it and presented it to the Board for final approval.
During 2006, the Director of Institutional Research supervised a student project targeted at identifying the “hidden costs” of attending Williams, such as unofficial residence hall social fees, which can be disproportionately burdensome to students with limited financial means. This resulted in publication of the “Savvy Spenders Guide to Williams: A Handbook for Students on a Budget” (in Team Room), which was reviewed and approved by AGAFA and distributed in the Fall of 2006 to all first-year students. It was so well received that in 2007 we sent a revised version over the summer to the homes of all entering students.
Residential Life
We engaged in a large-scale, and lengthy, planning and evaluation effort in connection with student residential life. Since our new residential life system is one of the special emphases of our self study, we give only a brief summary here and leave to the section on Students the details and a preliminary evaluation after just one year of the new system. The Committee on Undergraduate Life (CUL) necessarily considers some issues related to student residential life every year. However, as part of the strategic planning process we initiated in 2000, the committee took on the task of a full review of our housing system with the intent of seriously considering major changes. A series of committee reports describing this system and other aspects of student life (in Team Room) led to dramatic changes. These include: creation of a new Office of Campus Life, with significant additions to professional staff; gender balance within each residence; creation of new positions staffed by students to serve as resources within residence halls; a new housing system aimed at providing more ways for students to build relationships with those in other class years; increased funding for student activities, including ones that enhance student-faculty interaction; and major renovations to key residence halls.
We believe the result of the changes is that social life on campus is more varied and vibrant due to increased funding, addition of professional staff, and creative programming.
Curriculum
The Committee on Educational Policy (CEP) and the faculty as a whole have major responsibility for curricular planning and evaluation. In addition to the CEP’s annual review, the committee and the faculty undertake special projects from time to time. An unusually comprehensive review took place in 2000-01 and resulted in major changes (we mentioned the results in our last Interim Report, but noted they had just been implemented). As part of our strategic planning process, we consulted a wide variety of data, including the results of surveys of seniors and alumni, that helped lead our discussion to three areas of focus: 1) students needed more training in expository writing, quantitative reasoning, and oral expression; 2) students wanted smaller classes; and 3) some groups of students were distinctly less satisfied with their academic experience than others. This information represented a form of assessment — self-assessment, to be sure, but highly meaningful. In retrospect, we should have moved even earlier than we did on the writing issue. The goal of the review became in large part the development of curricular innovations to address these three areas.
The CEP dedicated a full year to a broad consultative review of the curriculum. A call to the College community for ideas elicited more than 150 specific suggestions. The CEP summarized them in working papers and presented them for focused discussion at faculty meetings, interdepartmental cluster meetings, open forums, College Council meetings, a Board retreat, and on Websites. By late Spring of 2001, it winnowed the proposals to 13 for faculty discussion and vote. The faculty approved (by at least 60 per cent majority) the following: 1) expansion of the tutorial program, especially at the level of courses for first-years and sophomores; 2) a requirement that all students complete at least two writing-intensive courses and at least one course in quantitative or formal reasoning; 3) initiatives to encourage interdisciplinary team teaching and experiential education; and 4) a fieldwork-based program in New York City. Some of these implied substantial financial commitments, which Senior Staff had determined were acceptable. We have implemented all these changes, though we delayed the Williams in New York program for some time and we still regard it as an experiment. The implementation illustrates our ability to plan effectively. The tutorial program has tripled in size over the past five years, and now is a major feature of our curriculum as we describe in the Academic Program section. We have reviewed the tutorial program recently, and report that evaluation in the Academic Program section rather than here because it is best understood alongside a description of the program.
We also have monitored and evaluated other curricular innovations stemming from the strategic planning process in 2000-01. The CEP has twice reviewed the effectiveness of the intensive-writing requirement and related issues in student writing. In both 2002-03 and 2003-04, it considered whether the College should hire a professional coordinator of writing pedagogy, and in 2006-07 it worked with an ad hoc faculty advisory group to improve the peer writing tutor program, which had been largely unsupervised by faculty or professional staff. In each case the CEP made sure we benefited from an external perspective by bringing in consultants — established writing instructors from Brown, Bryn Mawr, Harvard, and Princeton — to assess how we teach writing, host faculty workshops, and make recommendations. The major results are that the Dean of the Faculty has begun to hire writing pedagogy consultants to work with departments and programs that request them (two so far) and that a pilot program for training peer writing tutors will start in 2007-08 (proposal submitted to the CEP by Joyce Foster, Director of the Academic Resource Center, et al., in Team Room).
We definitely have seen payoffs to our attention to student writing. Current students, in contrast to those in the late 1990s, seem satisfied with the writing skills they have acquired at Williams. In the exit survey of 2007, seniors ranked effective writing as the ability they most improved at Williams. Some 91.5 per cent of seniors stated that their writing was stronger or much stronger now. Likewise, seniors also rank writing as one of the most important abilities to their lives in general. This is indirect evidence that Williams is contributing substantially to the improvement of a skill that both the students and the College believe is central to a liberal arts education.
The CEP has conducted other notable studies in recent years. In 2001-02, it reviewed the status of concentrations, which are groupings of courses on an interdisciplinary theme — similar to what many colleges call minors. Examples are biochemistry and molecular biology, neuroscience, environmental studies, and Africana studies — for the list of all 12 and more description, see the section on Academic Program. The CEP led the faculty in establishing uniformity in the minimum requirements for students to earn a concentration, and it adopted a schedule for the formal review of interdisciplinary groups of faculty that offer concentrations. In 2003-04, the CEP followed up with a study on the “state of the major at Williams.” It gathered and discussed data on all our major fields and concluded that despite a great variety and diversity of requirements, the major at Williams is currently in good health. Its final report states: “The structures of the College’s major fields...are the product of thoughtful and continuing attention by the faculty. The diversity of majors reflects well-considered efforts to teach disparate fields of knowledge in a coherent and meaningful way within a Liberal Arts framework” (CEP report, May 11, 2004, in Team Room).
In 2005-06, the CEP led a major effort to assess and redesign one of our graduation requirements, namely the “peoples and cultures requirement.” We have required students to complete at least one from a long list of courses on dimensions of American cultural diversity or of the non-Western world. There had come to be widespread dissatisfaction with the requirement. The CEP’s review sparked lively debate among students and faculty. The committee designed and administered faculty-opinion surveys, studied diversity requirements at peer institutions, made presentations at faculty meetings, sponsored open forums, and met with leaders of the Multicultural Center, the Committee on Diversity and Community, and student groups, including College Council, Minority Coalition, Gargoyle Society, and others. The result was a nearly unanimous rejection of the existing requirement and strong support for finding a new and better way to accomplish the same objective. The CEP’s proposal, called the Exploring Diversity Initiative (EDI), presented a new rationale for requiring the study of groups, cultures, and societies as they interact and challenge each other. It is described in the section on Academic Program. The faculty approved the proposal, and the new requirement will take effect in 2008-09. To ensure effective implementation we established a competitive grant program for faculty members to create new courses and/or revise current ones, and have appointed a faculty member to oversee the initiative. We project a full review of the new system in 2013 by the faculty director and an ad hoc advisory committee. Their report to the Dean of the Faculty and CEP will address, among other things, the degree to which such courses have been infused throughout the curriculum, faculty and student reaction, and whether it should remain a requirement.
Off-Campus Programs: Williams in New York, Williams-Exeter Programme
Williams in New York provides another example of careful planning and evaluation over an extended period. The faculty approved this experiential education program in the Spring of 2001, but financial considerations led the CPR to recommend a delay in implementation. In 2003-04, however, the CEP proposed a small-scale pilot program that would be more affordable and would allow experimentation with various curricular and logistical structures (“logistical” in the sense of matters like housing students in New York). The faculty and trustees quickly approved that plan and the pilot program was launched in the Fall of 2005. We received a three-year grant from the Spencer Foundation to support the program’s ongoing assessment (the foundation’s grant is part of its Innovations for Excellence in Higher Education program).
We have been evaluating Williams in New York over the two years it has existed. Evidence has included student course survey results, special surveys of students, interviews of students, and annual reports by the program’s directors. The evaluation has been enriched to an unusual degree by external perspectives: students in the program do 15 hours a week of intensive fieldwork in a public, non-profit, or business organization, and representatives of those organizations have been a source of advice and evaluation. However, it is in connection with the program that we also project an important evaluation exercise in the near future. We expect a comprehensive review by the CEP and an ad hoc faculty committee in 2007-08, during the program’s third year. The CEP and the ad hoc committee will make recommendations about the program’s permanency, academic scope, size (number of students), administrative structure, location, and other matters. The ultimate goal of the most interested groups on campus is a permanent program with 12-18 students each semester, but we will maintain it as a small-scale pilot until we know that student interest is sustainable and that the academic experience of a semester in New York is of the quality we require of all of our programs of study.
In 2002-03 we reviewed our study-abroad program at the University of Oxford. Because of the off-campus location and the necessary involvement of a foreign university, the program’s director (a faculty member) conducted the review along with the President, Dean of the Faculty, Provost, and senior officials at Oxford’s Exeter College. The evaluation focused on the costs and benefits of granting “visiting student” status to our students at Oxford, as opposed to the “associate student” status in place since the program began in 1985. The program’s directors had posed the same question in the mid-1990s and deemed the change to visiting student status unnecessary. However, after several more years in which we felt our students’ access to academic resources was inadequate, and with the university hinting that it might phase out associate student programs, Williams and Exeter decided to forge a new agreement (see Williams-Exeter Programme at Oxford agreement, Fall 2003, in Team Room). Our students now register officially as visiting students at Exeter, with all the rights and privileges of regular students (e.g., longer library hours, access to the full array of university lectures, and membership in the Student Union), rather than as free agents with an ill-defined connection to the university. As recorded in the directors’ annual reports (in Team Room), the results of the new arrangement have been overwhelmingly positive.
Every year the President, Provost, Dean of the Faculty, and other Williams officials travel to Oxford to visit the programme, discuss fiscal and curricular policy, and talk with students and their tutors about their experiences.
Reviews of Administrative Offices
In non-academic areas of the College, one way we incorporate long-range planning into our routine is through internal reviews of administrative offices. Two very important recent examples are reviews of the Library and the Office of Information Technology, which are discussed in Chapter 7. These reviews were wide-ranging and detailed and have proven very useful tools in subsequent planning. Absent from either of them, however, is an external component. Unlike our reviews of academic departments, which have as an essential component the involvement of a visiting committee of external colleagues, our reviews of administrative offices over the past several years have not had this feature. Including such a component, at least in the cases of those offices that are either particularly complex or essential to our mission, would be well worth exploring. The Office of Career Counseling (OCC) review was done by the Director of Human Resources and the Budget Director. They worked with the then Director of OCC to review the office’s operations, staffing, budget, goals, and accomplishments. They gathered feedback, including surveys of current and prior users and interviews with offices across campus to provide a “360-degree” analysis. The Director of Human Resources and the Budget Director also visited career counseling offices at other colleges and gathered benchmark information on their programming and staffing levels. The report led to several changes, including a centralization of internship and fellowship administration within the office (rather than split between the Dean of the College’s Office and OCC), new staff, and the pursuit of higher visibility for the office on campus, which will be helped by relocating the office as part of the new library construction.
College-wide planning for administrative staffing levels takes place both centrally and at the office level. We participate in the Non-Faculty Staffing Survey administered every three years by the Consortium on Financing Higher Education, a group of 31 highly selective colleges and universities. For our purposes, the survey compares staffing by functional area at 19 colleges. We use this data when evaluating staffing levels and requests for new or replacement positions. We ask any office requesting to fill a vacant position or create a new one to evaluate its current staffing level and tasks and to project staff changes three years forward. After discussion with the manager, the Director of Human Resources and the Budget Director review and recommend to Senior Staff whether to fill the request.
Athletics and Recreational Facilities
As we identify a potential programmatic or facility need, we create an ad hoc planning groups to investigate the need and evaluate possible responses. In the last few years, we became increasingly aware, through normal channels, including the CPR, that students, faculty, and staff were concerned about the quantity and quality of athletic resources for recreational use. Further discussion made it apparent that the Athletics Department also had concerns about space resources for athletic teams. We formed an Athletics Master Planning Group to investigate and recommend a course of action, whose work is ongoing. It engaged an architectural planning consultant to document our current resources and compare them to competition standards (set by national organizations in each sport) and to resources at peer colleges, considering both intercollegiate competition and recreational uses. Based on the consultant’s report, we created three subcommittees. One addressed the immediate need for more and better fitness space and equipment. The second is concerned with renovations to the football/track/turf field complex, where the consultant identified immediate needs. The third is surveying students and employees, and also athletic directors and facilities administrators at colleges with which we compete in intercollegiate athletics and in admission. That subcommittee has also visited peer institutions. With the consultant’s report and information from other colleges, we are benefiting from external perspectives.
Environmental Responsibility
We have a special interest in environmental responsibility for a variety of reasons. We have one of the oldest — perhaps the oldest — interdisciplinary curricular program in environmental studies in the U.S. Many of our students have been strongly influenced by the surrounding natural environment in choosing to attend Williams, and responsible use of the Earth’s resources is an important part of the civic engagement of the College and its members. In the Spring of 2006, President Schapiro responded to a growing concern about global climate change, and to a student-led petition that received more than 1,000 signatures of faculty, students, and staff calling for reduction in greenhouse gases, by appointing a Climate Action Committee (CAC) to investigate how Williams should respond. The CAC, made up of students, faculty, and staff, presented data, its own concerns, and recommendations to the Committee on Priorities and Resources, which endorsed the recommendations (The CAC report is in the Team Room). Senior Staff recommended the CAC’s proposals to the Board, which approved them unanimously. As a result, we have adopted the goal of reducing, by 2020, our greenhouse gas emissions to 10 per cent below 1990-91 levels. We also have adopted the principle of sustainability as an institutional priority. We will report publicly on our progress from time to time and work with local communities and other colleges and universities to enhance sustainability efforts broadly. As a result of the Board’s endorsement, our long-term Financial Plan now includes additional funds each year to support these objectives, and administrators will evaluate possible spending from them. Since adopting the goal in January 2007 we have:
- Budgeted $500,000 for this work in 2007-08;
- Established an interim committee (Manager of Special Projects, Associate Vice President for Facilities and Auxiliary Services, Budget Director, and a representative of the faculty) to advise the Vice President for Operations on sustainability matters until we put a broader, more representative group in place this fall;
- Decided to pursue Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Certification for two academic buildings under construction and an athletics building being designed;
- Hired students to work on a variety of sustainability projects over the summer;
- Engaged consultants to help develop a five-year plan to reduce energy consumption;
- Bought greener fuels to reduce emissions associated with electricity consumption and heating.
Projections: We will continue to review and improve our financial planning methods and assumptions in order to provide the best information possible to inform our decisions on the allocation of resources. Examples of such work underway or planned for 2007-08 include the incorporation of more realistic market fluctuations into our financial planning models, the implementation of a new system to project and prioritize better the maintenance and modernization needs of our physical plant, and an external review of our budgeting processes. Over the next three academic years, the Dean of the Faculty will coordinate external reviews of eight or nine academic departments. In 2007-08 the CEP will conduct formal reviews of four programs. Over the next few years, the CEP will also review such curricular initiatives as the on-campus experiential education initiative, the First-Year Residential Seminar, the Critical Reasoning and Analytical Skills program, the Interdepartmental Program for Experimental and Cross-Disciplinary Studies, and the Summer Humanities and Summer Science programs. The CEP will also continue discussion of ways to assess the intensive writing requirement, and the Dean of the Faculty’s Office will oversee a pilot program to train student peer writing tutors.
As discussed in the section on Organization and Governance, the Vice President for Strategic Planning and Institutional Diversity will launch in 2007-08 the new LINKS Committee to function as a think tank and assist his office in coordinating our many and varied diversity efforts. With the help of a full-time research analyst appointed for the year, he also will identify and examine the factors that disproportionately affect students at the College who fall into three groups (high-financial-need and first-generation college students, high-financial-need and members of historically underrepresented groups, immigrants), and will develop a set of recommendations for ways to reduce or eliminate those factors. Preliminary information suggests that due to financial circumstances, students in these groups may experience the College in ways significantly different from the historically dominant group of U.S. students with low or no financial need.
The Athletics Master Planning Committee will issue in Spring of 2008 a report that will include recommendations on how, within budget, we can best renew and enhance our recreational and athletic facilities. That report will be discussed in meetings of the Senior Staff, the Board, the faculty, the student-faculty Committee on Priorities and Resources, the faculty Committee on Athletics, College Council, and many other groups. Achieving our goal for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and making sustainability an institutional priority will, of course, require action by many parts of the College community. In Fall of 2007 the Vice President for Operations will form a broadly representative group to advise him on the most effective next steps.
From this section and others, it is clear that planning and evaluation are an enduring part of our College culture. We are in the fortunate position also to be able to devote time to thinking about the future of the College beyond the window of our usual long-range planning. In addition to the planning initiatives described here and elsewhere in the Self Study we are in the very early stages of the next round of strategic planning exercises. The President and trustees have formed a group of trustees, faculty, and senior administrators to begin investigating the broad question “What should Williams look like in the year 2020?” Sub-groups are producing analyses of the following issues as they relate to the College’s future: How might our finances be affected by endowment returns, financial-aid scenarios, and fundraising? What challenges might we face in our efforts to retain the highest quality faculty, staff, and students? How sociologically different might our students and their families be from those of today? How might increasing globalization affect our operations? What expectations will faculty and students have for the use of technology in teaching and learning? These analyses will inform discussion at the next Board retreat, attended also by faculty and staff, in January 2008.
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