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BY MARA REVKIN

In print | Published February 7, 2008

Next Wednesday, Feb. 13, Student Council will host a public forum to bring students up to speed on the college’s long-term planning campaign, launched last year to define a trajectory for institutional development over the next ten to fifteen years.

In Jan. 2007, a steering committee comprised of faculty members, administrators, alumni and representatives of the student council and the Board of Managers was charged with the task of envisioning the Swarthmore of 2020.

In a statement to the Board of Managers last February, President Al Bloom emphasized that the planning campaign is not about amending or rearticulating the college’s central mission. “Rather it should be about how to best deliver on that educational and institutional mission in the decades ahead,” Bloom said.

The monumental project was delegated among several subcommittees, each of which has meet weekly over the past year to examine a different facet of the college’s future: “Academic Program,” “Broader Educational Experience,” “Broader Swarthmore Community and Philanthropy,” “Faculty and Instructional Staff,” “Leadership in Scholarship, Higher Education and Society,” “Recruitment, Composition of Class and Financial Aid,” “Resources” and “Staff.”

According to Sam Asarnow ’08, who served on the steering committee during his two semesters as Student Council vice president, some of the planning committees supervene on the missions of preexisting advisory groups while other “freestanding” committees were created exclusively for the 2020 planning campaign. “The difference between these existing committees and the more recently formed planning committees is that [the latter] include additional members, such as representatives from the Board of Managers,” Asarnow said.

According to Vice President of the college Maurice Eldridge, the planning committees are in the process of soliciting feedback from academic departments and students and will convey their recommendations to the steering committee by the end of the semester. “Next fall, we will start the process of prioritizing those recommendations,” Eldridge said.

Elisha Ann ‘08, a member of the Academic Program Committee, confirmed that departmental recommendations “are starting to come in.” "We haven’t really solidified our opinions as a committee yet, but we’re seeing some common trends across all the departments dealing with, but not limited to, enrollment, new technology, and faculty recruitment," she said.

Asarnow, who also sits on the Academic Program Committee, said that the group is “thinking about big picture ideas, such as areas we’d like to see the curriculum expand into, new interdisciplinary programs and maximizing research opportunities for students in all academic departments.”

While many of the committees address the college’s internal culture, some of the task forces – notably the Leadership in Scholarship, Higher Education and Society Committee – are dedicated to sustaining the college’s tradition of socially responsible engagement with the public sphere. Eldridge, who chairs the committee, said that the group is concerned primarily with “finding the linkage between the college’s intellectual enterprise and its commitment to helping to create a more just world.” This entails identifying a set of socially responsible initiatives that the college will nurture over time.

According to Eldridge, “Environmental sustainability initiatives and student-run programs like War News Radio and Swat Sudan fall under that category.” Developing new projects raises the inevitable question of resource availability, which the committee is addressing through its examination of existing and potential sources of funding. “We want to explore these existing [funding] mechanisms but also think about new ways to provide resources for student innovation,” Eldridge said.

In addition to their primary role as architects of the long-term planning project, the sub-committees are helping to produce a report that will enable the college to be reaccredited in the spring of 2009. Each committee is responsible for sections of a comprehensive self-study that will eventually be evaluated by the Middle States Association.

The timelines of the two processes coincide to such an extent that it seemed practical to incorporate the committees’ recommendations into the MSA report, according to Eldridge. “The separate planning groups are each responsible for developing certain chapters of that final report,” Eldridge said.

As the long-term planning process kicks into high gear, the college will inevitably have to explore fundraising strategies to finance the projects recommended by the steering committee. “No independent school can imagine existing without philanthropy. In the future, it could easily take half a billion dollars just to keep Swarthmore as good as it is today,” Eldridge said, estimating that the college is three to five years away from “announcing a new campaign of the comprehensive sort.”

While institutional changes may indeed be on the horizon, the planning process has not moved beyond an initial, conceptual phase. Student Council president Peter Gardner ’08 urged students to offer feedback on the campaign during this formative stage, “where nothing is really off the table.” “This is the time to be asking hypothetical, open-ended, even random, questions. If we had unlimited resources, what would we do?” Gardner said.

Ann emphasized that next Wednesday’s forum is intended to facilitate a discursive, rather than didactic, exchange of ideas and information. “The open forum is designed to inform students about the process, but more importantly, it’s going to serve as a brainstorming session. We’re hoping to collect raw student feedback … and incorporate those opinions into our committee discussions over the next few months.”

Asarnow said that students are respected participants in these discussions. “When we’re in these meetings, it feels like a collaborate endeavor that the students are really a part of. I hope students are excited about the forum because it’s important that they know how involved students have been in the whole process,” Asarnow said.

According to Ann, student council scheduled the forum after hearing anecdotal reports that “students feel uniformed about the planning process.” “The college will be dealing with a lot of money and prioritizing where it will go. We felt that students should be aware that important decisions will be made within the next year or so, and we wanted them to have input in that process,” she said.

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