To the Williams community,
It’s my pleasure to release the draft reports from the Strategic Planning working groups and strategic academic initiatives. You’ll find them all on the Strategic Planning website.
These drafts are the fruit of last fall’s extraordinary outreach efforts: Hundreds of faculty, staff, students and community members attended related meetings and events, while hundreds more, including alumni, parents and families, submitted online comments and participated in phonecasts.
As I draft the strategic plan this spring I’ll use the reports, which incorporate so much outreach, research and analysis, as a guiding source. Not every specific recommendation will find its way into the plan, which is meant to be a high-level statement of our aspirations for the next ten to fifteen years. But the reports will guide my thinking about our strengths and ambitions. Later on, they’ll also serve as a bank of ideas for “operationalization”: the phase when we translate the plan’s big ideas into concrete, practical steps that will get us where we’ve said we want to go.
Your comments on the reports are welcome via the online portal anytime between now and Friday, February 28. My colleagues from the planning process and I will review the feedback as we finalize the drafts and I begin deriving major themes for the strategic plan.
As you read, I hope you’ll join with me in thanking all those whose extraordinary efforts got us to this point: the members of the working groups, initiatives and Coordinating Committee, as well as the many people in our community who shared ideas and advice. Each of you is helping us chart a course for Williams’ excellence in the years and decades to come.
Maud
Final reports: Working Groups and Strategic Academic Initiatives
Diversity Equity and Inclusion report
Faculty and Staff Development report
International Initiatives report
Learning Beyond the Classroom report
Technology and the Liberal Arts: Data Science and Digital Humanities report
Technology and the Liberal Arts: Science and Technology Studies report
General timeline
September–December 2018: Introduce process and convene committee.
January–June 2019: Establish working groups; write charges; gather feedback and data.
April 2019: Campus and online fora to discuss working group charges
June–September 2019: Assemble data for working groups
September–December 2019: Working groups gather community input, write draft reports
February 2020: Community feedback on drafts of working group reports and strategic plan
April–June 2020: Write strategic plan and present to Board
June 2020 and beyond: Communicate plan to the Williams community and invite participation
Megamenu Social