Inform
Give us your feedback
Would you like to give us your feedback? Fill out this form and share your ideas.
Back to News Articles
Tomorrow Together
These are extraordinary times in higher education. The tools that enable learning and the sharing of knowledge are becoming increasingly more powerful and widespread, and they are changing at a pace that is as astounding as their reach. For colleges, it is a development that holds both tremendous challenge and opportunity.
Indeed, many scholars now say we are experiencing the third great societal revolution associated with the democratization of knowledge, a development as significant as the industrial revolution. Of course, knowledge will always be about the exchange of ideas. What’s changing is the speed of that exchange, and the number of people who are able to participate and contribute.
In light of this, and in anticipation of the College’s 250th anniversary in 2019, President Jim Yong Kim has asked the Dartmouth community to undertake a multidisciplinary strategic planning process to chart a bold course into the future. His challenge to Dartmouth faculty, students, and alumni is to look both forward and outward—to build on Dartmouth’s strengths while embracing innovation from around the world. “None of us really knows what the future is going to look like, but we know that if universities and colleges like Dartmouth are not actively trying to understand what it could be, we’re going to fall behind,” Kim says. “We want to scour the world to try to find those things that strike us as truly forward-looking.”
Provost Carol L. Folt is leading the process, which is the first such endeavor to include every department of the undergraduate school and the professional schools. The strategic planning initiative will provide opportunities for the entire Dartmouth community to contribute, including trustees, senior leaders, faculty, staff, students, and alumni.
“Dartmouth is entering, for the first time in its history, a period when everybody at the institution is coming together to talk about the future,” Folt says. At its core, strategic planning is a process that imagines what Dartmouth can be. It envisions new tools that faculty will use to create knowledge, and to share it with their students and with the world. “We’re going to come together and we’re going to think about those things in a way that allows people to dream and think in a community,” Folt says.
THE SWEET SPOT
In a world in which technology makes academic exchange simultaneously broader and more intimate, Dartmouth is uniquely situated to lead. Throughout its history, a hallmark of Dartmouth has been unfettered student-faculty interaction. This is a function of the College’s small size relative to comparable institutions and an academic culture that places a premium on both research and teaching.
The democratization of knowledge is fostering a more collaborative type of scholarship, which Dartmouth is well suited to incubate. The sheer volume of knowledge now available to everyone makes the ability to synthesize information and to think critically and across boundaries of paramount importance. Dartmouth’s low barriers between academic departments, together with its world-class graduate schools in engineering, medicine, and business, make that kind of cooperation easier. Technology also has made the bedrock quality of a liberal arts education—the ability to think critically—more important than ever.
“Part of the strategic planning process is to look at opportunities to enhance interdisciplinary collaboration into the future. We think it’s more likely that the great institutions will move in our direction, toward a model that emphasizes great teaching and great research,” Kim says.
Dartmouth faculty members have earned a reputation as prolific researchers with a steadfast commitment to teaching. While the College has one of the nation’s highest rates of journal citations per faculty member, even the most distinguished researchers teach courses. U.S. News & World Report cited this combination of excellence and access when it ranked Dartmouth first in the category of “Best Undergraduate Teaching” two years in a row, in 2009 and 2010.
Dartmouth’s scale is an advantage in an increasingly interdisciplinary world. Hanover is a small, informal place: It’s easier for faculty to collaborate across disciplines and schools, and easier to react quickly to change. Paradoxically, a smaller institution can more easily interact with the outside world. In Dartmouth’s “high-touch” culture of student-faculty interaction, knowledge flows in both directions.
Dartmouth College has long been a leader in both technology and globalization. John Sloan Dickey, the president of Dartmouth from 1945 to 1970, brought an international perspective to the College that didn’t exist on other American campuses in that era. His successor as president, John Kemeny, pioneered the use of computers in education.
Dartmouth remains closely engaged with the outside world. It consistently ranks first in the Ivy League in the proportion of students who study abroad, at more than 60 percent, and is unique in that all 48 of its foreign study programs in 23 countries are led by Dartmouth faculty rather than third parties. The College also has a relatively large proportion of undergraduates from outside the United States, at seven percent.
As Dartmouth students become increasingly international in their outlook, as they go into the world and become leaders in thought and commerce, Dartmouth will become more of a nexus for knowledge generated all over the world. Technology already enables relationships developed in classrooms and on the Dartmouth Green to thrive over great distances. This trend will accelerate over time, allowing Dartmouth alumni, students, and faculty to carry the College’s high-touch synergy into the broader world. The result is a general lowering of barriers—between students and faculty; between academic disciplines; of time, distance and culture. Greater connectivity will give rise to more powerful ideas.
“We have to fight the idea that everything is already here,” Folt says. “Great work occurs around the world. The challenge is not to become insular, but rather more porous.”
THE POWER OF THOUGHT
As information becomes increasingly plentiful and easy to share, scholarship will become more about the synthesis of information. Students and faculty will have to be adept at accessing knowledge, but the more daunting challenge is to make sense of it. Learning how to master complexity becomes a very important skill. Students will have to learn how to communicate with people who speak different languages, who come from different cultures, and have learned things in a different way.
“Moving forward, our job is to teach students how to think logically and critically about important questions,” says Denise Anthony, a professor of sociology who chairs the Faculty Strategic Planning Advisory Committee, one of three core committees in the Strategic Planning process. “The future is connected to the past and present of Dartmouth. It’s focused on students learning to think critically.”
Part of the challenge of Strategic Planning is anticipating what the students of the future will be like. The students of today give a good indication of the trend. They are more technologically savvy and more connected to the world than the students of even a decade ago. They want, and expect, to make a difference in the world.
“I see the students of the future being impatient about problems that they think they’ve inherited,” Kim says. “We’re already seeing that. They don’t want a planet and a future—an economic future, an educational future, an environmental future—that seems limited.”
The student of the future will have a great deal in common with students today. Most will be still be 18 when they come to Hanover. They’re leaving their homes for the first time, and they’re finding their place in the world. They’re discovering who they want to be, and how they will make their mark. Students have always come to Dartmouth to be challenged. That isn’t changing, but future students will be much more savvy about technology and broader in experience. “They will bring incredible diversity and technical skills that are different from those that faculty bring,” Anthony says. “They will push us.”
That interaction—a close and vibrant give-and-take with students—is one of the most important factors that will continue to attract top faculty to Hanover. Dartmouth appeals to scholars because it is the kind of place where faces mean something, where faculty members enjoy chance meetings with students and colleagues. That intimacy has always been part of the Dartmouth experience, but it hasn’t limited the College’s reach into the world. Anthony sees the small residential campus in the New England woods as a touchstone, a launching pad into the wider world.
Technology will allow Dartmouth to bring more of that world into the classroom. It will also allow the classroom to reach beyond campus. “There’s no question that information technology is revolutionizing both the classroom and distance learning,” Anthony says. “We have to be sure that we use those technologies in the spirit of what Dartmouth has always been: the high-touch, small classroom, intensive experience of being at Dartmouth College is something that we’ll never lose.”
A COLLABORATIVE PROCESS
Planning for the future is naturally fraught with uncertainty. The Strategic Planning process is therefore less an exercise in prognostication than a chance for the Dartmouth community to agree on what the Dartmouth of the future should look like. That effort is collaborative by nature. Says Folt: “We are the community of Dartmouth. We have ideas, core values, and traditions and we have incredible people who are figuring out where the future is going.” It’s a process of discovery, and that makes it particularly appealing to a group of people who have dedicated their lives to the pursuit of knowledge. “The most exciting thing is that we have no idea what’s going to come out of this,” Folt says. “Our faculty are going to have time and a protected space to interact with each other and really think big about where we’re going as an institution,” she says.
The process began in the spring of 2010 with many preparatory conversations and consultations involving the Board of Trustees, faculty, senior leaders, and alumni advisors. It has now entered an 18-month action phase expected to conclude in December 2012. The process employs three principle committees and a number of working groups.
The Strategic Planning Steering Committee (SPSC) oversees the process and will coordinate approval of the final strategic plan. Provost Folt chairs the SPSC, which includes the deans of arts and sciences, the college, professional schools, and graduate studies; the executive vice president and chief financial officer; the senior vice president for advancement; and the president’s chief of staff. This committee reports to the Board of Trustees and President Kim.
The Faculty Strategic Planning Advisory Committee (F-SPAC), comprising 17 junior and senior faculty nominated by deans of each of the schools will identify academic topics to be addressed. It will form working groups to study those topics and to provide reports and recommendations. The F-SPAC is chaired by Anthony. The committee reports to Folt.
The Senior Executive Strategic Planning Advisory Committee (SE-SPAC) will identify academic support and campus operations topics to be addressed and will form working groups to study the topics and to provide reports and recommendations. The SE-SPAC consists of 26 senior administrators and is co-chaired by Maria Laskaris ‘84, dean of admissions and financial aid, and Martin N. Wybourne, Vice Provost and Professor of Physics. The SE-SPAC reports to Folt.
The process will develop specific goals and benchmarks to guide Dartmouth in significantly enhancing the excellence of its teaching and research over the next 10 years. It’s impact however, should be much more enduring.
Kim is encouraging Dartmouth faculty and staff, students, and alumni to take an active role in the process, and he is encouraging them to think big. Noting that Dartmouth has recently emerged fiscally sound after a very difficult financial downturn, he says that the College is now in a position to forge its own path, leading the way into an extraordinary future. “Now the question is: What can we do to be the Number One institution of higher education in the world?”
