The College's strategic planning committee is in the preliminary stages of creating a blueprint vision for the future. The committee's main goal is to formulate the plan for the College's development over the next five years.
Members of the committee will evaluate issues such as the caliber of students the College recruits, retention rates, competitive faculty, athletics, and academic developments, among many other things. The committee is formed by faculty, along with some members of the College's administrative body.
The committee is charged with evaluating where the College is with the those issues, and forming goals for where we want to be in the future. Because the planning process is in its beginning stages, virtually anything and everything is on the table. The committee hopes for participation and involvement from the student body as plans and processes develop in the coming months
Mike Robertson, the College's director of media relations and a member of the strategic planning committee, is enthusiastic about the future of the committee, and stresses the need for involvement from the entire C of C community.
"Everything is on the table. the more we think, the more ideas we can produce for the entire community," said Robertson.
The Strategic Planning committee is comprised of 5 subcommittees. The categories are assessment, competitive analysis, environmental, focus groups, and strengths, weaknesses, opposition and threats, also known as SWOT.
The vision and planning being undertaken by this committee is truly all encompassing, so the student body should feel obligated to participate and give input to the forces that will shape the direction in which the institution is growing.
The committee meetings will be open to the college community. The dates and times of the open meetings will be shared with the community when they are established.
Roberston urges all members of the C of C community, especially students, to begin thinking about what issues are important to the College right now and in what direction we see our school developing. The committee is hoping to hear from everybody, not just leaders and members of certain clubs and organizations.
"We hope meetings will be full so that we can get as many diverse opinions from student and staff as possible." said Robertson.
For upperclassmen who remember former president Higdon's "fourth century initiative" plan, the Strategic Planning Committee can be seen as a natural extension of those visions.
That initiative laid the groundwork for substantial development under the leadership of our current president Benson. The fourth century initiative committed C of C to becoming a nationally preeminent Public Liberal Arts and Sciences University for the twenty-first century. The detailed plan and its goals can still be easily accessed on the College's website.
It is going to take a significant amount of time to see any materialization of the changes being made, but students can expect more communication from the committee with the campus within the next couple of weeks.
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