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Institutional Mission and Goals, Planning, and Effectiveness
Mission' and Goals
Mission and Goals Define the Institution
In May, 2004, the President directed the Provost to take the lead to update Evergreen’s 2000 Strategic Plan. The Strategic Planning Coordinating Committee engaged in a collaborative, multi-year strategic-planning process that reinforced Evergreen’s core values, articulated its mission, and provided a framework for the allocation of resources, a capital campaign, and the campus master plan. During the three years leading up to the accreditation visit, 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 would likely flatten or decrease. The mission statement reiterated Evergreen’s core values and its distinctive niche….
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.
This mission and the Strategic Plan honored the vision of Charles McCann, the college’s first president who, forty years ago supported by the Board and a legislative mandate that encouraged innovation, articulated Evergreen’s basic principles:
- It would not be bound by any rigid structure of tradition
- It would unshackle our educational thinking from traditional patterns
- It would give the student confidence and ability to master difficult situations
- It would be free of the machinery of the traditional college including rigid administrative reporting lines or departments
- It would not impose academic coursework requirements upon students
- It would equip the student for life-long learning
- It would focus on interdisciplinary study around themes and problems, on contracted study and on internships
- It would employ the seminar method
- It would enable the student to set an individual course of study closely advised by a faculty member (cite John McCann p5)
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. Thirty-five 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.
"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.”[1] The oppositional aspect of Evergreen's founding culture was a response to both the dominant education paradigm and the political/economic culture operating in the late 1960s.[2] 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).
Since the founding, several core values evolved to guide the development of all college programs and services that continue to define Evergreen‘s distinctive competence. This includes a focus on teaching students to think critically and reflectively. Elizabeth Minnich’s recent work captures the essence of Evergreen’s pedagogy and purpose wherein she argues that the center of a liberal arts education especially one that is interdisciplinary is the act of reflexive thinking, not simply that the learner is reflecting on what it is that she has learned, but that she is reflecting on how they have learned and what they have become as they have learned. This pedagogy stands in stark contrast to mainstream efforts to emphasize standardized test scores.
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
The Evergreen State College was one of those twenty institutions wherein they cited several of our 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.
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 general education assessment methodologies as detailed in Standard Two wherein the data suggest that there is a remarkable degree of congruence between: What the college purports to do (above), why students select Evergreen, and what employers say about our graduates. To summarize briefly, the top three factors in students' decision to attend Evergreen are 1) opportunity to design their own education 2) Interdisciplinary learning 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 and a survey of alumni supervisors, 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.
As it celebrates it 40th year, Evergreen is now in the midst of a faculty generational turnover. During the ten-year period 1999-2009, about 75 faculty or 50% of Evergreen’s regular, continuing full-time faculty will retire or leave the college. One indication of the impact of this turnover is that, during the three year period 2005-07, nineteen faculty retired with a combined 598 years of service to Evergreen (an average of 31.5 years)! And, at the 2007 convocation, Evergreen recognized seven faculty members, each with 35 years of service to the college.
During this same three-year period (2005-07), Evergreen hired thirty new continuing faculty members (see appendix for a summary of the hires). Twelve continuing faculty positions are being recruited in the 2007-08 year. This has been an enormously time consuming, important, and fulfilling part of the work during this period as there were over 2,100 applicants for these thirty positions and in almost every case Evergreen hired its first choice. An important overarching question has been how to retain Evergreen culture and core values while adapting to a rapidly changing external environment, a new generation of faculty, staff, and students, and a new faculty union and collective bargaining process. The oppositional nature of Evergreen’s culture is again fore-grounded as the external environment continues to move away from the public interest and more towards the private interests of global capitalism and market forces e.g., legislative calls for more efficient degree production; for the public baccalaureates to become the workforce educator for the new global economy; the commodification of knowledge; the increasing disparity of wealth which manifests itself in the disparity of resources between the private liberal arts elites and the publics such as Evergreen.
Within this turbulent external environment, Evergreen discovered that its culture of innovation must continually be refreshed as its major innovations (learning communities, interdisciplinarity) were being marketed heavily by the other public baccalaureates in Washington state as well as nationally. Positive restlessness again emerged among the faculty in 2005 as many felt that the Planning Unit structure (implemented in 1995 as the result of a Long Range Curriculum DTF process) was moving Evergreen towards departments and threatening its core educational values as the curriculum seemed to be drifting away from full-time interdisciplinary coordinated studies programs. In response, the faculty Agenda Committee (Evergreen's version of a Faculty Senate) re-instituted Dean's Governance Groups to facilitate faculty conversations outside of the planning units and within interdisciplinary venues. As a result of these lively and well-attend conversations, the Agenda Committee and the provost co-charged a Curricular Visions DTF in fall 2006 to "summarize and disseminate the content of these discussions and produce coherent proposals that substantially reflect the governance groups discussions."
A Participatory Decision Making Culture
Evergreen has a long history and culture of inclusive, participatory processes and decision-making. During the past ten years, Evergreen has experienced a steady growth [chart STFE, faculty, and staff). This, combined with increased complexity and faculty/staff workloads pressures, contributed to a sense that Evergreen’s shared governance model was deteriorating. The Enrollment Growth DTF galvanized this sentiment and resulted in an institutional re-commitment to experiment with new structures and participatory processes e.g., the Governance Groups convened by the Agenda Committee, the Provost and Agenda Committee co-charging DTFs, FAPB, and the United Faculty of Evergreen. Sustaining a participatory culture within the re-founding era is another challenge facing Evergreen. The Strategic Plan, the Campus Master Plan, and this accreditation self-study have used a combination of high-tech/high touch methods to increase participation. For example, the self-study process began three years prior to the accreditation visit, first with the Strategic Plan, followed by the Curricular Visions work, and the Campus Master Plan.
Much of their work begins with off-campus retreats, an integral part of Evergreen culture. Annual retreats include, but are not limited to: Management, Senior Staff, President-VPs, Faculty, Deans, Agenda Committee, Divisional retreats, and Unit retreats.
Broad based Steering Committees or DTFs are convened to oversee the work. Community fora on campus and in the community are held, a WIki web site with summaries of iterative drafts of the works in progress is utilized. And, in the case of the self-study-in addition to the Steering Committee-the faculty member coordinating the writing of the document has convened a group of faculty readers to review and critique the self-study. The Agenda Committee is also providing faculty meeting time to review the self-study.
Curricular Visions DTF
Central to the Strategic Planning process was the work of the faculty that began in 2006-07 and is still in progress. The Agenda Committee and the Provost co-charged a Governance Group Curricular Visions DTF to guide faculty discussion of “what adjustments are needed to bring current curricula, structures, responsibilities, and practices into alignment” with Evergreen’s mission as a public, interdisciplinary liberal arts college.
Faculty governance group discussions during 2006-07 as well as several summer institutes in 2007 highlighted the central questions about what is meant by "public, interdisciplinary, liberal arts education" and about what obligations faculty have to offer curricula which provide this education. The DTF produced an interim report in May 18, 2007 wherein they cited three proposals that were “ready-to-go:” Thematic Planning Groups, Fields of Study, and First-Year Cohort and recommended that the provost provide summer funds for faculty to develop proposals for the next year. This occurred and the recommendations of the summer work groups were sent to faculty for review during the fall of 2007. Briefly, these recommendations include:
1) Fields of Study: In order to make the curriculum more transparent and accessible to students, to craft: web-based content descriptions of the fields of study available at Evergreen; offerings in the field affiliated with the field; news and discussion sections; on-campus resources that support the field; and some links to professional resources; web pages designed so that all faculty affiliated with a field can edit the page at will, and offerings will be updated automatically to match the online catalog; brief profiles of alumni and students with examples of work done by those who’ve studied the field at Evergreen.
2) Thematic planning Groups: This speaks to the need to reinvigorate Evergreen’s curricular structures and invites faculty to form broadly interdisciplinary groups to explore topics and issues of high interest. Faculty would create and join groups on themes they genuinely want to teach students and study with colleagues over a sustained period of time keyed to matters of public significance, revisable on a regular basis, drawing together faculty from across the college who share common interests but might never realize it otherwise, these groups signal a fertile new direction in Evergreen’s life as an interdisciplinary institution.
3) First year cohort
This idea, originating in the First-Year Experience DTF report, calls for a more integrated academic experience that will give both faculty and first-year students a sense of themselves as a teaching and learning cohort—and for multi-year commitments by faculty to teaching first-years e.g., an initial cohort model with a 3-year cycle wherein faculty commit to teaching core 2 of the 3 years. Each core program would be 12 credits and share a common 4-credit module which has a common reading list, lecture series, films, etc. and a faculty seminar. A group of faculty has committed to meet during fall ‘07 to begin the planning for a fall ’09 implementation date.
The Strategic Plan
In May, 2004, the President directed the Provost to take the lead to update Evergreen’s 2000 Strategic Plan. The Strategic Planning Coordinating Committee engaged in a collaborative, multi-year strategic-planning process that reinforced Evergreen’s core values, articulated its mission, and provided a framework for the allocation of resources, a capital campaign, and the campus master plan.
During the three years leading up to the accreditation visit, Evergreen’s Strategic Planning Coordinating Committee collected and coordinated the work completed by multiple Disappearing Task Forces (DTF), 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 would likely flatten or decrease. The mission statement reiterated Evergreen’s core values and its distinctive niche….
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.
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. Multiple assessment efforts continued-following the Commission’s 2003 visit-to strengthen and reinforce the emphasis on interdisciplinary learning at Evergreen. In this era of public sector cutbacks, legislators at the national and state levels increased their demands on colleges to be more accountable and to improve-and provide evidence of-student learning. Evergreen has responded to this challenge in a manner consistent with its mission by actively working in statewide and national efforts to develop interdisciplinary assessment tools and rubrics. Nationally, researchers rely on indirect quality indicators measures that directly address the epistemic dimension of interdisciplinary work. Evergreen, a college with narrative evaluations in lieu of grades devoted to interdisciplinarity and integrative learning, has had to develop its own set of interdisciplinary assessment rubrics (see Standard Two).
The Strategic Plan was approved by the Board of Trustees in March, 2007. The senior staff held a retreat in March to use the Plan as a framework to guide budget priorities for the 07-09 biennium and finalize the development of “dashboard’ indicators or metrics to assess our progress towards the strategic plan priorities on an annual basis. The Strategic Plan set the stage for the Campus Master Plan (CMP) launched in March, 2007.
The Campus Master Plan
The Campus Master Plan consultants followed the Strategic Plan and used three core principles (learning, community, and sustainability) as its foundational values. They employed a broad, extensive community-wide process as they developed several iterations of the CMP. They succeeded in capturing the spirit of Evergreen and its future aspirations, especially in the manner in which they infused sustainability into all aspects of the plan. (The CMP is scheduled to be approved by the BOT in January, 2008).
