Every five years a committee gets together and writes out the overarching goals for how Albion College wants to approach the next five years. These strategies are meant to help Albion become a better college. They set the guidelines for what projects are prioritized and in what way the college intends to approach the projects they are planning.
President of Albion College Mauri Ditzler explained the strategies to be ones that are constantly being applied to the decisions the college is making.
“One should be continually implementing a strategic plan. So it’s not that every five years you have a new one and try to do everything in the first few years. Usually what the strategic plan does is it looks well out into the future and it might have [the goals] take 20 years to accomplish. But what you’re saying there is while you chase those really audacious goals, here are the strategies for the first five years.”
This leads to the question, should we expect to see big changes? The answer is no. Albion is already a great college and most of the plans will be to improve upon what it has already as opposed to altering what Albion College is.
Throughout the next few months the committee will be working to create a draft of the plan that will be publishing for viewing early in the spring semester. After the plan has been created, it will be presented to the Board of Trustees for their approval. Once changes have been made to the draft, it will be brought back to the board around May for their final approval. The current plan will apply until the end of this academic year. It had emphasized maintaining an academically challenging and diverse environment. It also created implementation teams, one of which focuses on the years of wellness and sustainability. The expected title for the upcoming strategic plan is Becoming an Exemplary Liberal Arts College.
“That suggests that we’re not going to change dramatically because we are a pretty good liberal arts college right now. So what it is saying is we want to figure out what it means to be a really really good liberal arts college and work on becoming better, but we’re not going to work on becoming something different,” said Ditzler.
While this is still a work in-progress, students can submit ideas by emailing them to stratplan@albion.edu. Be sure to look out for the draft this spring and voice your opinion about it.
Photo by Clare Kolenda
Leave a Reply