By Richard Ekman

It's almost inevitable in any organization that the arrival of a new president will trigger the process of strategic planning, and CIC is no exception. What may be exceptional, however, is the way CIC's Board of Directors has decided to approach this opportunity. Presidents of all member colleges and universities recently received a document that describes how CIC intends to develop roughly a dozen "near-term" themes, topics, and projects into activities and services for the benefit of members and, at the same time, consult widely with leaders of member institutions—mainly presidents and chief academic officers—in a more speculative way, about these and other possibilities.
    Some 20 roundtable discussion meetings for small groups of presidents or chief academic officers will take place over the next few months. Our hope is to gain a much better understanding by the end of the process of the key issues that face independent higher education and what CIC is especially well equipped to do to address them. Responses to the invitations to the roundtables have been enthusiastic. (For up-to-date details about the planning activities, please visit CIC's website at www.cic.edu.)
    One dilemma in planning is establishing an appropriate balance between providing services to members "on demand," on the one hand, and offering services that the Board, staff, and/or knowledgeable outsiders believe deserve greater attention, even if members are not currently requesting them, on the other. Recently, for example, two highly successful conferences—for participants in CIC's Implementing Urban Missions and Engaging Campuses and Communities programs—illustrated how CIC's early embrace of community-based learning/service learning/experiential education at a time when these pedagogical approaches were not popular has given way to an era in which all types of colleges and universities are eager to utilize these approaches. CIC and CAPHE now field requests from a wide range of interested colleges and universities, and were able to include only a small fraction of them in the recent conferences.
    A certain amount of pure luck is needed by an organization when choosing a topic on which to base a program, but there is also skill and good judgment. CIC's CAO Task Force and the Programs Committee of the Board of Directors play substantial roles in choosing the program emphases of the CAO and Presidents Institutes, respectively, and other advisors help us as well.
    Nonetheless, some of what CIC chooses to do is based on strongly held beliefs about what is fundamental in our world. For example, despite the tendency of many students to choose courses that are not in arts and sciences, at CIC we are committed to the importance of study of the liberal arts by all students, no matter what their ultimate career aspirations. Our task therefore is to provide information about various approaches that appear to succeed in keeping the liberal arts viable among students who otherwise might be dubious. We at CIC would be unlikely to concede the basic premise that these fields of study are integral to undergraduate education, no matter what the trend data.
    In its approach to planning, CIC mirrors its members. Each college is always on the lookout for new niches, markets, and program possibilities. At the same time, the core business of education remains, for most colleges, providing a general education for citizenship and productive lives. At the two conferences mentioned above, a number of people noted that their institutions were, just a few years ago, the only educational institutions in their locales to initiate collaborative work with community institutions. Now, they said, they compete with other colleges and universities to establish working agreements with these same community agencies. The commitment to campus/community collaboration is now so well established at many of our colleges that it would be unthinkable to abandon it in a search for the next thing that is innovative and likely to draw students. A college has no easier task changing course instantly than a battleship—or even a membership association.
    CIC very much welcomes ideas for CIC's future and comments on the efficacy of existing CIC programs. I hope that all members will participate in the strategic planning efforts of the coming months.

Independent
The Council of Independent Colleges
One Dupont Circle NW, Suite 320 • Washington, DC 20036
tel: (202) 466-7230 • Fax: (202) 466-7238 • e-mail: cic@cic.nche.edu • www.cic.edu

Last updated: May 26, 2001
Copyright © 2001 The Council of Independent Colleges