Beginning in Oct. 2002, students, staff, and faculty were asked to give their opinions about where they saw the college: the problems, the pluses, and the places for improvement.
These opinions have morphed into a finished document, the Strategic Plan for Guilford College 2005-2010: Creative Leadership for the 21st Century. This 105-page Strategic Long Range Plan (SLRP) will guide the college to a specific place over the next five years.
“I first started working with the plan about the time of the May Board of Trustees meeting,” said senior A.Q. Abdul-Karim, Community Senate president and SLRP committee member. “It was 68 pages then. A lot has been added, primarily things for clarification and supporting evidence.”
The document lists the 27 SLRP committee members who put fort the ideas that eventually became the final document. Committee included the college president, administrators, faculty members, and past and present presidents of Community Senate and the Student Government Association, who were the primary student liaisons involved in the plan’s drafting processes.
A summary of the SLRP appeared in the “Guilford Beacon” Sept. 24. A draft of the plan was also released to the Guilford community via e-mail on Sept. 13. Previous drafts of the document were e-mailed Feb. 12, April 1, and Aug. 6 of this year.
One of the major changes to life as a Guilford student is described in the plan summary as “The Guilford Challenge,” which will become a requirement for students enrolling at Guilford beginning 2008.
“The Guilford Challenge” calls for students to participate in a wider range of extracurricular and co-curricular activities, including internships and volunteer experiences. These activities will be documented electronically and will likely be part of the information submitted to graduate schools when a Guilford alumnus applies.
According to the executive summary of the plan, “The Guilford Challenge” of principled problem solving will encourage faculty and staff to “[create] opportunities for students to pursue intentionally an education that transforms them through experiences, both inside and outside the classroom, and opens them to new visions and dreams for themselves and the world in which they live.”
The challenge goes along with the concept of principled problem solving: students working with each other and faculty members in an attempt to solve real community problems.
In preparation for this process, the college is establishing an on-campus center for principled problem solving (CPPS) by 2006 to serve as the focal point for the program. Community members would take problems to the CPPS, where they would be distributed among students to work on solving the problems. The CPPS would also serve as a resource for students as they worked to solve the problems.
The search for CPPS administrators – an Executive Director with grant writing experience and a Community Liaison with experience in community relations and interdisciplinary studies – would be headed by the college president and the academic dean. The search for CPPS administrators might begin as early as this spring. Faculty, staff, and student liaisons for the CPPS will also be solicited.
Another aspect of the SLRP is the projected growth of the college.
“More growth is not an end in itself,” reads the Sept. 24 executive summary. “Unless Guilford College receives many major gifts in the very near future, the foremost way to achieve our high academic and financial goals (e.g., improve our faculty salaries relative to our peers and competitors, reduce our short and long-term debt, and repair our aging facilities) is to use the revenue generated from a larger enrollment.”
The plan calls for an increase in the student population to 3,300 students by fall 2009, with 1,500 traditional students, 100 students enrolled in the Early College at Guilford, and 1,700 students in the CCE population.
Part of this growth is expected to come from an increase in student retention rates.
“Retention is always important because it shows the level satisfaction of the student base,” said Randy Doss, Vice President for Enrollment and Campus Life and one of the plan’s authors, in an e-mail. “Satisfied students will tell other students and that makes admissions job easier.”
Corresponding to the proposed increase in student population, the SLRP also calls for an increase in faculty size.
“Guilford’s identity is small classes and a low student-faculty ratio,” said Doss ’82, via e-mail. “Guilford is committed to keeping class sizes low and hiring more full-time faculty members.”
The SLRP also calls for a campaign to collect more funds to be distributed among campus grounds.
“By 2006, Guilford College will begin a capital campaign to raise $75 million in 2008-2014,” reads the SLRP document. “Guilford College will raise $25 million by 2014 to cover the projected costs of facilities upgrades … (and) designate the remainder of the new capital to new facilities.”
Faculty members approved the fifth draft of the plan on Sept. 22.
The plan is a major item on the agenda for the Board of Trustees meeting Oct 8-9. If approved by the Trustees, the plan will go into effect immediately. As the plan is a statement of long-term goals, certain aspects of the SLRP will be introduced into campus life at a later date.
The preliminary SLRP proposals, committee meetings, and suggestions began two months after Chabotar arrived on campus in fall 2002.
“We needed a sense of direction,” Chabotar said. “We needed to know where we were going.