Integrating and Prioritizing the Task Force Recommendations
Soon after Middlebury's Commencement, the Planning Steering Committee shifted gears to join forces with President Liebowitz and his senior staff as the Planning Task Force on Resources and Prioritization. Our first challenge was to digest the extensive reports submitted by 15 different planning groups. By early June we had read all of the reports and devoted four intense half days to wide-ranging discussions of the imaginative and sometimes provocative findings and recommendations in the 15 reports. (Elsewhere at this web site, you can read executive summaries of the task force reports.)
We devoted our next meeting, led by Becky Brodigan, Director of Institutional Research and Analysis, and by President Liebowitz, to an examination of results from the planning surveys. We probed the findings from surveys completed by 394 students, 126 faculty, 210 staff members, and 3,400 alumni (surveys from parents were yet to be tabulated). Our goal in reviewing both the planning reports and the survey results was to prepare ourselves for an all-day planning retreat.
On June 15, President Liebowitz, his staff, and the Planning Steering Committee assembled at Hadley Barn (just beyond Kirk Alumni Center) for a full day of intense presentations, analyses, and conversations. We focused on the global and strategically important issues; the titles and leaders of the four main sessions convey their essence:
Session I: Describing Middlebury Today and Defining our Future
Discussion leaders: Ron Liebowitz, President, and John Emerson, Dean of Planning
Session 2: Middlebury's Financial Realities and Strategic Choices
Discussion leaders: Bob Huth, Vice President for Administration and Treasurer, and Mike Schoenfeld, Vice President for College Advancement
Session 3: Middlebury in a Local, National, and Global Context
Discussion leaders: Alison Byerly, Vice President for Academic Affairs, and Becky Brodigan, Director of Institutional Research and Analysis
Session 4: Shaping and Organizing our Summer Planning Process
Discussion leaders: Amy Briggs, Associate Professor of Computer Science; John Elder, Professor of English and Environmental Studies; and Charlotte Tate, Assistant Director, Rohatyn Center for International Affairs
The day's meetings helped to clarify many of the choices the College will need to make in the coming months. We developed specific strategies for organizing our summer approach to what feels to all of us a somewhat daunting task—that of turning President Liebowitz's vision, our own aspirations for a College that we love, and the extensive list of suggestions and initiatives forwarded to us by 15 planning groups into a plan for Middlebury's next seven years.
As I prepare this update, our enlarged planning group is reviewing a massive spread sheet (on 17 legal-sized pages!) listing the most substantive recommendations that have emerged from the work to date by well over 100 dedicated members of the Middlebury family. We are focusing on organizing these recommendations into major themes and issues that will form the outline of our report at the end of the summer.
Thank you for your responses to the planning surveys and your many other forms of input.
John Emerson
Dean of Planning
June 24, 2005