Essentially Kenyon

I thought that it might be useful to devote my blog this week to talking about Essentially Kenyon. In the email I sent out about the Essentially Kenyon Survey, I gave a quick summary of the Reaccreditation Task Force's plan to generate some goals for our reaccreditation self-study. Today I'd like to flesh those out a little bit. Probably the easiest way for me to do this is to give a little history of the event and then to quote from my report to the faculty about this event.

History

Once upon a time, many years ago in the murky past, the faculty would occasionally get together for a retreat to discuss large issues of importance to the college that were difficult to discuss in the hustle and bustle of day teaching classes, grading papers, and sitting on committees. One year the entire faculty went off to Mohican Lodge for a weekend to discuss the curriculum and various approaches to general education. Twice during Rob Odin's presidency (in the 1990s) the faculty met for a half a day on a Saturday to discuss such issues. One year we met to discuss scholarship and another to discuss the revisions to the curriculum then being proposed (which eventually led to the creation of the current QR and language requirements).

We have not done this in a very long time and it just happened that last summer three individuals made separate appeals to the administration to create just such an event. The first person felt that members of the community needed to have a stronger consultative voice in the management of the college. The second person felt that we needed to create a stronger sense of community and rearticulate our responsibilities to the larger community. The third person felt that the current situation made it a good time to think about a long term agenda for the college. What are the big issues that we will face in the next decade? How can we maintain excellence in the face of challenges that we will face?

The president thought this was a good idea and so Essentially Kenyon was born as a way of getting the entire community together for at least half a day to talk about the big picture. In the process , we would be reaffirming our responsibility to the community and learning how to listen to one another. We would encourage more informed consultation.

Process: A Campus Conversation

To get the ball rolling, a planning committee was created that consisted of Laurie Finke, reaccreditation coordinator, Pamela Jensen, Chair of the Faculty, Tammy Gocial, Dean of Students, and Howard Sacks, interim Provost. We discussed several options and contrived the plan below. We also enlisted the endorsement of the President, the Interim Provost, the Dean of Students, the Chair of the Faculty, the Reaccreditation Task Force, Student Government, and the PACT (the President's Advisory and Communications Team).

We decided to plan an event that would involve all 2000+ people on campus (faculty, students, administrators, staff) in a series of guided conversations about Kenyon that would allow us, as a community, to articulate our first principles, what is "essentially Kenyon." These conversations will take the form of a college retreat on November 1, 2008, at which all members of the college will discuss a collective vision of what the college should be in the year 2020. The goal is to open up a conversation that will continue over the next two years as work toward our goal of renewed accrediation.

The conversation will take place in three parts:

1. All members of the community would be asked to respond to a very brief survey. You can take the survey by clicking on this link (Essentially Kenyon Survey) or by clicking on the link on the Reaccreditation 2010 home page. The survey has two very brief open ended questions.

2. The planning committee will l sort the responses, and create from them a set of themes that will guide discussions at the Nov. 1 retreat. A series of moderated conversations for each theme would take place during a retreat on November 1.

3. After the event, a series of electronic threaded discussions for each topic will allow further response and dialogue to take place.

Outcome

The Self Study Task Force would examine these discussions and formulate a set of goals that will guide our work in the self-study. These would be publicly conveyed back to the community to summarize the event.