Standard 1
Contents
- 1 Standard One-Institutional Mission and Goals, Planning and Effectiveness
- 1.1 1.A.1 The institution’s mission and goals derive from, or are widely understood by, the campus community, are adopted by the governing board, and are periodically reexamined.
- 1.2 1.A.2 The mission, as adopted by the governing board, appears in appropriate institutional publications, including the catalog.
- 1.3 1.A.3 Progress in accomplishing the institution’s mission and goals is documented and made public.
- 1.4 1.A.4 Goals are determined consistent with the institution’s mission and its resources - human, physical, and financial.
- 1.5 1.A.5 The institution’s mission and goals give direction to all its educational activities, to its admission policies, selection of faculty, allocation of resources, and to planning.
- 2 Supporting Documentation
Standard One-Institutional Mission and Goals, Planning and Effectiveness
The institution’s mission and goals define the institution, including its educational activities, its student body, and its role within the higher education community. The evaluation proceeds from the institution’s own definition of its mission and goals. Such evaluation is to determine the extent to which the mission and goals are achieved and are consistent with the Commission’s Eligibility Requirements and standards for accreditation.
The Evergreen State College, chartered in 1967, celebrates its fortieth birthday as it prepares the Self-Study for the 2007 decanal accreditation visit. The college has matured yet remains true to its founding principles and essential innovations as an experimental liberal arts college.
The college mission, as articulated in its Strategic Plan, honors the vision its first president, Charles McCann, who, forty years took seriously the legislative mandate that encouraged innovation. Dean Claybaugh's early history articulates this mandate,
Perhaps most important was the mandate to the college by executive and Legislature for an innovative approach. Governor Evans declared the need for a "flexible and sophisticated educational instrument" as opposed to the vast and immobile establishment"; and expressed the need to "unshackle our educational thinking from traditional patterns, Senator Gordon Sandison, Chairman of the Advisory Council, remarked: "It was not the intent of the Legislature that this would be just another four year college; the college would be) a unique opportunity to meet the needs of the students today and the future because the planning would not be bound by any rigid structure of tradition as at the existing colleges nor by any overall central authority as is the case in many states."
McCann and Evergreen’s founding faculty created a college devoted to teaching and learning infused by a culture of innovation and opposition. Their innovations were influenced by the ideas of Alexander Meiklejohn-that education should prepare students for a purposive public life within a democratic society. The founding faculty created coordinated studies programs and processes to foster collaborative, team-taught interdisciplinary learning communities. McCann established the Four Nos that set the foundation for Evergreen's distinctive competence: No academic departments, No faculty ranks, No academic requirements, No grades. Embedded in this set of negatives was his vision that the authority to determine what constitutes a liberal arts education should be centered on the individual relationships between faculty and students. Evergreen’s pedagogical practices evolved from this collective effort of the early faculty to create an innovative liberal arts education and foster the qualities associated with student engagement e.g., love of learning, a wide range of knowledge, and reflective thinking. This is reflected in the mission and the maintenance of a culture that supports engaged, active citizens, community participation, and the qualities associated with publicness/community i.e., autonomy, responsibility, problem solving, and team work.
Ernest Ettlich, in his interim accreditation report, captured the creative tension that has sustained Evergreen since its founding,
[T]he tensions between being able to assure uniformly the achievement by all students of general education goals particularly in writing, critical thinking and quantitative reasoning even as all students are being required to take responsibility for their own education is a healthy tension which should be a continuing hallmark at the institution and its evaluations. It is at the heart of the institution and contributes to its health and strength.
The Founding faculty came to Evergreen to "make a difference" and recruited students interested in doing the same. Today, Evergreen is one of two public colleges cited in Loren Pope's Colleges That Change Live: Forty Schools That Will Change the Way You Think About College which he wrote to "help youths of many levels of academic aptitude find catalytic colleges that will change their lives, help them find themselves, raise their aspirations, and empower them. In doing so it will free them from our system's obscene obsession with academic aptitude, which does not determine achievement, satisfaction with life, or the merit of a human being."
Forty years later, Evergreen is still an experimental college with an impressive track record of student engagement and success fostering and disseminating interdisciplinary teaching and learning, anchored by a vibrant community of scholars committed to providing an affordable education to Washington residents and nonresidents alike and to serving underrepresented and non-traditional students.
1.A.1 The institution’s mission and goals derive from, or are widely understood by, the campus community, are adopted by the governing board, and are periodically reexamined.
In May, 2004, the President directed the Provost to lead the update of Evergreen’s 2000 Strategic Plan. The Strategic Planning Coordinating Committee conducted a collaborative, multi-year strategic-planning process that reinforced Evergreen’s core values, articulated its mission, established strategic priorities for the allocation of resources, and set guideposts for the Campus Master Plan. During the three years leading up to the accreditation self-study, Evergreen’s Strategic Planning Coordinating Committee collected and coordinated the work completed by multiple Disappearing Task Forces (DTFs), work groups,[3] and faculty and linked several central themes: a dynamic and collaborative academic community, a focus on student learning, attention to the quality of faculty and staff work life, stewardship of our natural resources, community partnerships, and the reality that state accountability requirements would likely increase at the same time state operating support-as a percent of total operating revenue- would likely flatten or decrease. The mission statement reiterated Evergreen’s core values and its distinctive competence...
As the nation’s leading public interdisciplinary liberal arts college, Evergreen's mission is to sustain a vibrant academic community and to offer students an education that will help them excel in their intellectual, creative, professional and community service goals.
1.A.2 The mission, as adopted by the governing board, appears in appropriate institutional publications, including the catalog.
The mission is prominent in college publications but, more importantly, it has sustained an ongoing faculty conversation at the heart of the Self-Study i.e., what it means to be a "public" "interdisciplinary" "liberal arts" "college." This faculty conversation is occurring at the same time the Washington Higher Education Coordinating Board's (HECB)Master Plan calls for a significant increase in baccalaureate degree production to align with state workforce needs. Further, the Washington legislature enacted "performance contract" legislation to link higher education funding to these degree production outcomes (in contrast to the current practice of funding inputs i.e., student FTEs).
The conversation at the national level mirrors the Washington experience e.g., Department of Education is promoting standardized tests of college graduates and greater control over regional accreditation agencies to enforce accountability standards and student learning outcomes. The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) champions the relevance of liberal arts in an increasingly professional-oriented educational environment. Their Liberal Education and America's Promise (LEAP) initiative asserts that "college graduates need more cross-disciplinary knowledge, more skills in a range of areas-especially in the areas of communication, teamwork, and critical thinking and analytic reasoning- and more real world applications to succeed in a demanding global environment. Their recent publication, How Should Colleges Assess Student Learning: Employer's Views of the Accountability Challenge presents survey information suggesting that,
"Few employers believe that multiple choice tests of general content knowledge are very effective in ensuring student achievement. Instead, employers have the most confidence in assessments that demonstrate graduates ability to apply their college learning to complex real world challenges, as well as projects or tests that integrate problem-solving, writing, and analytical reasoning skills."
Evergreen's Master In Teaching (MIT) accreditation visit in October 2007 was a case study of this challenge. The Professional Educator Standards board (PESB) accreditation standards were geared for graduate professional schools of education, including strict standards for centralized assessment and clear expectations that programs demonstrate "positive impact on student learning." The Evergreen MIT program is purposely embedded within its liberal arts mission and pedagogy and not the traditional professional school of education model. There were clear cross-cultural communication issues at play between the accreditation team and Evergreen during the entire four-day visit as Evergreen simply did not fit the standard mold. Gradually, as they met with various stakeholder groups on campus and in the community, the team began to translate and ultimately to understand. At the exit interview, the accreditation team leader indicated that the MIT program met all of the accreditation standards and cited the program as exemplary in six areas: 1) Professional Education Advisory Board operating procedures, membership, meeting times, 2) Experience working with diverse faculty, 3) Recruitment, admissions and retention, 4) Collaboration (both across the campus and in the community), 5) Field experiences and clinical practices, and 6) Collaboration with P-12 schools.
They stated that Evergreen was one of the few programs in the state that met all of the strict Section 2 standards which include learner expectations, an assessment system, use of data for program improvement and positive impact on student learning. They complimented the staff and the faculty for the design and delivery of a teacher educator program that turns out well-trained educators as evidenced by the team’s interviews with local school superintendents, principals, teachers, and MIT graduates.
1.A.3 Progress in accomplishing the institution’s mission and goals is documented and made public.
The Strategic Plan was approved by the Board of Trustees in March, 2007 following several on-campus and local community fora with college stakeholders. The senior staff held a retreat in March to use the Plan as a framework to guide budget priorities for the 07-09 biennium, craft annual work plans, and finalize the development of forty institutional indicators to assess progress towards the strategic plan priorities on an annual basis. The Board of Trustees directed staff to distill these forty indicators into a set of Dashboard Indicators for their own use. The Strategic Plan set the stage for the Campus Master Plan (CMP) launched in March, 2007. The Vice-presidents, in their annual self-evaluations, assess progress meeting the annual goals, send these self-evaluations to the entire community and the president as the basis for their annual performance evaluations. Similarly, the Strategic Plan is being used to frame the 2009-11 budget planning process. (insert Trotter’s budget process memos)
1.A.4 Goals are determined consistent with the institution’s mission and its resources - human, physical, and financial.
The Strategic Plan established nine strategic priorities within three broad goal areas:
Educational Goal: Evergreen’s tradition as an experimental public liberal arts college devoted to scholarship, teaching, and learning, and strengthening its commitment to our original principles remains intact. At the same time we must adapt to growth, new students, and a new generation of faculty.
1a. Reinvigorate Evergreen’s interdisciplinary liberal arts mission
1b. Deepen the teaching and learning experience at Evergreen, focusing on student success
2. Improve student recruitment and retention
3. Recruit, retain, and revitalize faculty and staff
4. Provide institution-wide support for diversity and equity initiatives
Supporting Goal: We will continue to strive for an administrative culture that mirrors and supports Evergreen's pedagogy (interdisciplinary, collaborative learning environments) and uses human and physical resources to support teaching and learning. Two examples include cross-divisional collaborations around student success and campus sustainability.
5. Evergreen: A Place for Sustainability
6. The college’s physical resources will imaginatively enhance the learning and working environment
7. Use technology to enhance teaching and learning and administrative support at Evergreen
8. Evergreen’s local, regional, and national partnerships are a rich resource conduit to its unique mission. The college both contributes to these partnerships and learns from them
Financial Goal: Evergreen faces decreasing state support, prompting tuition increases yet remains committed to serving underrepresented students. Evergreen must, in order to sustain its mission and principles (small classes, an interdisciplinary team-taught curriculum, high degree of student-faculty interaction), augment and diversify revenue streams, improve net tuition revenue, control operating expenditures to sustainable levels, and make prudent use of existing resources.
9a. Diversify revenue streams
9b. Keep the growth of operating expenditures to sustainable levels
The Strategic Planning Coordinating Committee fore-grounded the Northwest Commission of Colleges and Universities 2003 interim recommendations during its planning process.
1.A.5 The institution’s mission and goals give direction to all its educational activities, to its admission policies, selection of faculty, allocation of resources, and to planning.
"Every organization has a culture that is a persistent, patterned way of thinking about the central task of and human relationships within an organization. Personality is to the individual as culture is to the organization. It includes the predisposition of members, the technology of the organization, and the situational imperatives with which the agency must cope.Cite error: Closing </ref> missing for <ref> tag deterred more students from attending college; Washington ranks 49 of 50 states in college participation rates for 4-year colleges among 18-25 year olds). The state funded two new four-year branch campuses to the north (Tacoma) and south (Vancouver) of Olympia. An important part of Evergreen’s strategic planning work over the past two years has been the development and implementation of a strategic enrollment plan (See link and Standard 3). Evergreen has enhanced its web team staff in order to more effectively communicate its "sophisticated educational instrument" and its institutional effectiveness to the public in general and to prospective student specifically.
Student engagement, success (learning, satisfaction, graduation), and student autonomy to devise their own academic pathways are core educational values at Evergreen as articulated within its Five Foci and Six Expectations.
Evergreen’s Five Foci: 1) Interdisciplinary education 2) Personal engagement in learning 3) Linking theory and practice 4) Collaborative learning and 5) Teaching and learning across significant differences
The Six Expectations for all Evergreen graduates: 1) Articulate and assume responsibility for your own work 2) Participate collaboratively and responsibly in our diverse society 3) Communicate creatively and effectively 4) Demonstrate integrative, independent and critical thinking 5) Apply qualitative, quantitative, and creative modes of inquiry appropriately to practical and theoretical problems across disciplines and 6) As a culmination of your education, demonstrate depth, breadth, and synthesis of learning and the ability to reflect on the personal and social significance of that learning.
These form the basis of Evergreen's educational assessment methodologies as detailed in Standard Two wherein the data suggest that there is a remarkable degree of congruence among: What the college purports to do (above), why students select Evergreen, and what employers say about its graduates. To summarize briefly, the top three factors in students' decisions to attend Evergreen are 1) opportunity to design their own education 2) interdisciplinary learning and 3) integrated learning. The top four fields of interest for entering students are-for 1st year students-Visual/performing arts, Natural Resources, Psychology, and Social science and, for transfer students, Visual/performing arts, Education, Natural Resources, and Public Administration/Social science. The top three goals, cited by entering Evergreen students for earning their degree are 1) personal success or satisfaction, 2) personal growth and development, 3) creative and effective communication skills (1st yr students)and job or career change (for transfer students) (cite) Greeners at Work 2003, a survey research project studying how Evergreen prepares its graduates for the workplace, consisting of a survey of alumni who graduated in 1999-2000. The survey also includes supervisors of alumni and indicates that supervisors rated Evergreen alumni highest on their willingness and aptitude to learn new skills, ability to work in a culturally diverse environment, and ability to cooperate on team efforts.
The lack of comparison groups for peer benchmarking represents a challenge for Evergreen. The new Carnegie classification of colleges and universities, was unveiled in 2006. Evergreen’s peer college rankings are based upon these Carnegie classifications e.g., the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) benchmarks, US News rankings, and HECB accountability measures, to name a few. Evergreen is no longer in the baccalaureate liberal arts college classification due to the fact that it awards greater than fifty graduate degrees per year. This bumps Evergreen into a different peer group entitled Masters, Smaller Programs (MSP). Given the MSP criteria (size, selectivity, residential, four-year, public/private, etc) various sub-groups can be delineated within the MSP universe. Interestingly, Evergreen is literally in a class by itself or “peerless” because no other college shares all of our characteristics. This forces Evergreen to merge sub-groups using one or two Carnegie characteristics in order to create an adequate peer comparison group. Whereas in the past Carnegie classification Evergreen had several legitimate peers, in the new MSP classification, there are only five legitimate peer institutions. Without a consistent set of peers Evergreen’s challenge is to find realistic benchmarks for the variety of data sets and indicators that are monitored and reported both internally and externally.
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