Standard 1

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 Strategic Planning Coordinating Committee fore-grounded the Northwest Commission of Colleges and Universities 2003 interim recommendations during its planning process.

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 State 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

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.” The founding faculty sought to eliminate traditional barriers to learning by inculcating a culture with a healthy distrust of administration. The academic administrative structures, established in the founding period, valued a flat non-hierarchical organization, a rotating deanery with close ties between academic administration and teaching, and semi-autonomous work groups (academic program teams) loosely-coupled to the academic administrative structure (deanery/provost). Evergreen has sustained itself an an innovative experimental college in large part because it has retained a high degree of congruence among its critical task/mission/distinctive competence, its organizational structure, and its culture (shared values, beliefs, practices).

1.A.6 Public Service is consistent with the educational mission and goals of the college.

Evergreen, as a public liberal arts interdisciplinary college, honors the traditions of a liberal education: thoughtful, well-educated, ethical, and active citizens. Evergreen’s culture of innovation is evident within its public service centers as they deepen Evergreen’s mission and extend the reach of the college outward from local to international communities.

Evergreen’s Public service centers have grown in number and scope since the last accreditation. These Centers enact, through their work, the central values of the college: community, diversity, cross-disciplinary approaches, social justice, and education with local, state, and national constituencies.

The centers position themselves in a reciprocal and collaborative relationship with the communities and organizations they work with. The assumption is that the centers will work in partnership with their constituents to identify needs and resources, establish goals and objectives, and collaboratively develop and implement programs and services that respond to the issues and resources that were mutually identified.

The result of this co-teaching and learning is that the experience and knowledge gained are reciprocal and of benefit to each party involved.

The centers enrich the campus environment in a variety of ways: by bringing guest lecturers, artists and scholars to campus; teaching throughout various areas of the curriculum; providing public forums for presentation and dialogue; serving as consultants (subject matter experts) to faculty and staff who are developing programs; providing resource rooms with books, films, newsletters, etc. that are open to students, faculty, staff, and community members; linking students with internship opportunities in the broader community; writing and publishing materials that are available to Evergreen and beyond; partnering with other educational institutions and with community organizations on research and educational programs that inform teaching and learning at Evergreen; and so on.

As the work of the centers proceeds, the skills and capacities of the centers expand and they come to take on more complex roles in the local, regional, national, and international work in their areas of focus.

The Center for Community-Based Learning and Action, founded in 2004, works with academic programs to integrate service-learning and community project work as an integral part of the Evergreen student’s experience. They provide connections for students to work with nonprofit and community-based projects such as trail maintenance, food banks, or low-income housing. One such project is the Gateway Program that helps incarcerated youth at Maple Lane and Green Hill obtain pathways to higher education while promoting the youths’ awareness of their own cultural identity.

The Evergreen Center for Educational Improvement works to improve teaching and learning in the K-12 system. Established in 1993, the Center partners with school districts and trains teachers on educational reform in math, science, and culturally appropriate curricula. The Labor Education and Research Center opened in 1987 to provide a safe forum for workers, community members and students to examine their work and lives in the context of labor history and political economy. The Labor Center develops credit and non-credit educational programs for Washington state residents, often contracting with Labor Unions to provide continued education for their membership.

The Northwest Indian Applied Research Institute, established in 1999, works with tribes to address issues important to the future of their communities such as cultural revitalization, tribal governance, resource management and economic sustainability. The Institute played a major role in the establishment of our MPA program in Tribal Governance, the first of its kind in the U.S.

The mission of The Washington State Institute for Public Policy, since1983, is to conduct practical, non-partisan research on issues important to Washington’ s citizens. Through the work of its own policy analysts, economists, and consultants, the institute works with legislators, government agencies and experts in the field to provide recommendations on relevant public policy questions in education, criminal justice, welfare, children and adult services, health, utilities, and government relations.

Since 1985, The Washington Center for Improving the Quality of Undergraduate Education has successfully fostered collaborative approaches to educational reform by conducting campus-based, statewide and national professional development workshops based in principles of access and equity and significant student learning using a variety of curricular approaches including integrative learning and ongoing assessment. For the past ten years, the Washington Center has held the National Summer Institute on Learning Communities at Evergreen, which draws between twenty to thirty campus teams from all over the U.S. each year.

The Longhouse Education and Cultural Center celebrated its 10th anniversary in September 2005. The “House of Welcome” was built in collaboration with Northwest Indian tribes. Its mission is to promote indigenous arts and cultures. As a gathering place for people of all cultural backgrounds to teach and learn with each other, the Longhouse also provides a venue for hosting cultural ceremonies, classes, conferences, performances, art exhibits and community events. More recently, the Longhouse has evolved into one of the premier Native Arts management and cultural preservation centers, fostering cross-cultural exchange and expanding an indigenous Pacific Rim network.

1.A.7 The institution reviews with the Commission, contemplated changes that would alter its mission, autonomy, ownership or locus of control, or its intention to offer a degree at a higher level than is included in its present accreditation, or other changes in accordance with Policy A-2 Substantive Change.

Evergreen has experienced few changes of this nature during the past ten years. In each case, it has notified the Commission in advance of the contemplated changes e.g., the dual Master of Public Administration/Master of Environmental Studies degree and the proposed Master of Education degree.

Standard Two-Planning and Effectiveness, Accountability and Assessment

Positive Restlessness: A Culture of Evaluation

The most extensive external assessment of Evergreen during the past five years occurred with a visit from George Kuh and his team of educational researchers from the Documenting Effective Educational Practices (DEEP) program at Indiana University. Their report, dated December 31 2003, was a remarkable affirmation of Evergreen’s pedagogy and a clear, accurate depiction of Evergreen’s culture and practice, “the operating philosophy: innovation leavened with autonomy, personal responsibility, and egalitarianism.”[5] The DEEP team reported on Evergreen’s success in each of their five benchmarks of effective educational practice (academic challenge, active and collaborative learning, student-faculty interaction, enriching educational experiences, and a supportive campus environment) and were effusive in their praise for Evergreen in all five areas, “Evergreen has created a structure for putting higher order mental skills into practice.”[6]

The DEEP team’s work is anchored by the concept “student engagement,” of which there are two elements: (1) the amount of time and effort students put into their studies and other educationally purposeful activities and (2) how an institution allocates its resources and organizes the curriculum and other learning opportunities and support services to encourage students to participate in activities that lead to student success (learning, persistence, satisfaction, graduation).

Subsequently, in their book, Student Success in College: Creating Conditions That Matter[7], the DEEP researchers identified twenty “gemstone” colleges who share six features that foster student engagement and persistence.

• A “living” mission and “lived” educational philosophy • An unshakable focus on student learning • Environments adapted for educational enrichment • Clearly marked pathways to student success • An improvement oriented ethos • Shared responsibility for educational quality and student success

Evergreen was one of the twenty gemstone colleges. The study cited several of Evergreen's practices and characterized our culture as one of “positive restlessness” meaning:

• Restless in a positive way, never satisfied with their performance, continually revisit policies and practices to get better • They simply want to be the best they can be • Focused on the quality of their work and its impact on students and institutional performance

Simply put, Evergreen has a rich culture of evaluation. At the conclusion of each academic program, faculty members write narrative evaluations of each student. Students write self-evaluations of their own work and a narrative evaluation of the faculty. Faculty teaching colleagues prepare and exchange written evaluations of each other. Each faculty writes a self-evaluation. At the end of the year, the academic deans write annual evaluations of faculty on term contracts. All of these evaluations are kept within each faculty’s portfolio and reviewed annually by the deans until conversion to continuing status and then every five years hence by teaching colleagues and an academic dean. Feedback loops abound within the academic culture of Evergreen, a hallmark of reflexive thinking.

Supporting Documentation

See Supporting Documentation for Standard One