Aspirational Design
Every member of the Hamilton community is invited to take part in this institutional planning initiative through sharing ideas, testing possibilities, and imagining what’s next for one of the oldest colleges in the country.
Our Process
This process may look and feel different from planning efforts you may have experienced before. Traditional strategic planning aligns resources with defined goals. Aspirational design goes even further.
- It helps us imagine the future we want, and design for it.
- It keeps us focused on opportunities, not just today’s challenges.
- It encourages us to ask, “What’s possible?”
Together, we will explore bold ideas, test them against Hamilton’s values and strengths, and shape the College’s next chapter.
Themes
Open Curriculum 2.0: Design a learning environment that maximizes creativity, exchange, communication, and connection.
DESIGN CHALLENGE:
Imagine a new integrated ecosystem of curricular programs, building from our open curriculum, that exponentially increases opportunities for students to pursue their interests while participating in the full richness of the Hamilton experiences, all as part of a coherent learning journey
Hamilton is known for preparing great writers and communicators who demonstrate mastery in practice across a variety of fields. This starts with preparing students to first listen actively, to be creative and critical thinkers with responsive, compelling, and well-defined ideas, and then teaching them to strategically and persuasively communicate those ideas. We have a robust writing requirement embedded across the curriculum, a top-level oral communication center, a vibrant language center, and a dynamic quantitative and symbolic reasoning center. We are building an Innovation Center that will accelerate the integration of technological mastery in instruction across (all) the disciplines, provide world-class spaces for students to learn while doing, and will expand LITS’ current programming around digital fluency.
Additionally, for the past 25 years, Hamilton has offered its students an open curriculum. Hamilton is one of the few U.S. colleges with an open curriculum, which means students have the freedom to choose courses that reflect their interests, while still fulfilling the faculty’s expectation that they study broadly across the liberal arts. While the Open Curriculum (OC) was partly the result of a lack of agreement among the faculty about the right balance between narrower “distribution requirements” and a broader embrace of exploration and interdisciplinarity, the OC has become a defining part of the Hamilton culture. The majority of students say the OC is one of the primary reasons they chose Hamilton over their second choice. OC also attracts students who are curious, open, and exploratory while giving faculty more flexibility to teach original courses that match students' passions and interests.
Many of Hamilton’s peers also emphasize writing and effective communication. But, what does it mean to have a facility for authentic and effective communication in our current environment; where social media impacts so much of our communication ecosystem, where images and visualizations threaten to overwhelm the senses, and where the competition for attention has grown exponentially? How is storytelling evolving to allow us to share stories using new media? How can we effectively advance ideas? If critical and creative thinking are fundamental to communication, do we start by analyzing how we teach these skills across the curriculum? How do we listen? How do we persuade? How do we prepare our students to use words, data, and visualizations as tools to advance ideas and to reach key audiences? If we aspire to lead the nation in graduating expert communicators, how might we extend and reimagine our current approaches? What evidence might we hold up to demonstrate that every graduate of Hamilton has mastered the art of communication in the current social and technological context?
As we move into the next 25 years of our Open Curriculum, what would it look like to design the open curriculum to purposefully meet learning and experiential needs of students at this moment in history? What does “open” mean, and how do we embrace this concept in our academic offerings and approach? How do we maximize the creative potential of an open curriculum? How do we create more cross-pollination across classes, coursework, and assignments? Can we embrace the importance of failure in our open curriculum? How is our approach to the OC different from Wesleyan or Brown? What is the distinctly Hamilton approach to the idea of an open curriculum? What evolution or refinement of the OC will signal to prospective students and their parents that we are the most important college in America for preparing graduates to “nourish a love of learning, a creative spirit, and an informed and responsible engagement with an ever-changing world?" Furthermore, what if, in crafting the OC 2.0, Hamilton re-instated the Jan term?1 How would it enhance our current curriculum? How would we use this to expand the horizons and opportunities for our students? Is this where we can create an opportunity for students to take risks? How would we use the Jan term (or a May/June term) to support Hamilton’s unique approach to learning? How would we differentiate our program from our peers and competitors? Is this an opportunity to respond to student demand for career-related training through carefully curated pre-professional mini-courses?
1 Hamilton once had a three-week January term that former graduates praise as an important part of their education. Winter terms are variously known for interdisciplinary classes, special-interest classes, classes taught by experts beyond the faculty, courses that are shorter and more intense, off-campus field trips, independent study, and multi-generational classes with non-degree-seeking alumni and community members.
Democracy & Imagination: Consider how Hamilton might serve as a blueprint for liberal arts colleges determined to preserve, revitalize, and renew our democracy.
DESIGN CHALLENGE:
How can Hamilton serve as a blueprint for how liberal arts colleges can fuel democratic renewal and civic innovation?
Hamilton College’s namesake, Alexander Hamilton, was our creative founding father — building and designing new institutions for a new democracy. His ability to imagine the possibilities for a new nation — secure, pluralistic, open to social mobility, economically diverse and independent, educated — formed the basis for the remarkable American experiment in democracy that is entering its 250th year of independence. Hamilton has always been a source for democratic imagination, and our mission includes preparing students for lives of active citizenry and diplomacy. We believe that imagination is critical for active citizenry and democratic leadership and lies at the heart of empathy, communicating across differences, designing and reforming institutions, building social movements, articulating new pathways for governance, and creating enterprises that advance our common good.
Hamilton supports many initiatives and efforts to prepare active citizens. Hamilton recently invested in Common Ground, which seeks to expand models of civil disagreement beyond the classroom and to celebrate artful argumentation. Our Crossroads Initiative, the Levitt Center, our Government Department, our Washington, D.C., Program, our American Indian and Indigenous Studies (AIIS) program, and additional programs and classes engage students in advancing ideas and practices that serve the common good. What other programs or initiatives might be developed?
While Hamilton joins hundreds of other colleges and universities who prioritize democracy and civic action and discourse on their campuses, how do we lean into our history and our commitment to imagination and democracy — how do we build the “Hamilton Way” for preparing students for lives of active citizenry? How do we scale Common Ground to appropriately build on what our community has always done to achieve a higher level of impact and recognition for our leadership in this area? How can we contribute innovative methods and models of conversation, debate, and pedagogy around democracy? Can Hamilton be a national center for auditioning the most innovative ideas for renewing our democracy — ideas at every level of government (local, state, national, and international), from any sector (public, private, mixed) and any industry or field?
Creative Campus & “What If”: Embed creativity in the DNA of Hamilton College to fuel extraordinary ideas.
DESIGN CHALLENGE
Embed creativity in the DNA of Hamilton College to fuel extraordinary ideas.
The Creative Campus is a framework for designing and evaluating the extent to which a campus is organized around maximizing creative exchange, the development of creative capacities among its faculty, staff, and students, and the use of creativity in its approach to building community, advancing belonging, engaging across cultures, and bridging divides (art/science, generational, class, race, etc.). A Creative Campus is defined by work at intersections; serendipity and improvisation; entrepreneurialism, in and outside the classroom; the embrace of creative expression in all areas of campus life; and a spirit of experimentation and prototyping. A creative campus embraces the non-routine; it encourages revision and continuous adaptation; it welcomes failure; and it rewards collaborations that allow new ideas and practices to emerge. President Tepper helped introduce the idea of the Creative Campus throughout higher education beginning in 2004. No campus, yet, has made creativity an organizing principle for its design. Hamilton has a history of embracing creativity – from the creativity of its founding trustee, Alexander Hamilton, to the creativity at the core of Kirkland College, which merged with Hamilton in 1978.
What if Hamilton designed itself to maximize the creativity of its faculty, staff, and students? The “What If” initiative is a way of auditioning some of those big, bold, aspirational ideas. We had close to 500 “What If” provocations from faculty, staff, students, and alumni, resulting in 51 submitted proposals. Many of those proposals will be funded; others we might ask for revision; others will be folded into the larger design process; and still others will be taken up by senior staff to be advanced as part of ongoing institutional renewal. What if the “What If” initiative, which supports ideas from the community for ways to drive positive change, innovation, and creativity across campus, became a regular and long-term part of the “Hamilton Way?”
Can Hamilton become known for its unique approach to creativity — an approach that maximizes learning, individual expression, and the skills necessary to advance ideas across every dimension of society, from business, to public health, education, and the environment?
Hamilton 360: Build a lifelong living and learning experience for Hamilton students that dramatically improves opportunities for lives of meaning, purpose, and active citizenship.
DESIGN CHALLENGE:
Build a lifelong living and learning experience for Hamilton students that dramatically improves outcomes for thriving in lives of meaning, purpose, and active citizenship.
Hamilton has one of the most loyal alumni bodies in the country in terms of giving time and money to the College and in their affection and pride as Continentals. That loyalty and pride begins as students and arises from a mix of extraordinary classroom experiences and the activities that animate their lives outside the classroom – residential life, social life, religious life, dining, clubs, the arts, and athletics. Using “experience design” as a framework, what is the Hamilton residential liberal arts experience, and what should it be going forward? Has it evolved as our student body has changed? Do we have the right spaces for a creative, connected, integrated, and dynamic social life? Is the social life experience meeting the needs of our students? What/where is the hub of diverse, student-driven nightlife and a model for a healthy, connected, and inclusive social life? Are Beinecke Village and Sadove the right places for this and, if so, how? Is our engagement with food – what we serve, how we share meals, how food is connected to sustainability, cultural exchange, belonging — what we want it to be? What should we prioritize in terms of spaces and future investments? How do we enable students to continue to creatively curate their collective experiences? Are there ways to strengthen the extraordinary array of student leadership and student mentorship opportunities? Can we rethink student employment, apprenticeships, and fellowships across campus and how they contribute to a Hamilton life?
Beyond the Hill, the economy continues to experience accelerating disruption and change. There are few straight pathways to a successful career and life. In reality, most graduates are not doing anything directly related to their major within 5 years. Economists predict that one-half of all current occupations will not exist in 25 years, replaced by new occupations that we cannot currently imagine. Most students have a limited “occupational imagination” with little idea of the immense variety of jobs that they might be qualified for or for which they might aspire. Most CEOs and HR managers say that today’s graduates lack the core competencies they are seeking – including creativity, the ability to collaborate, dealing with ambiguity, taking initiative, communicating clearly, the ability to adapt and quickly learn new skills, and the cultural and interpersonal competency needed to to deal with people across difference. In spite of these rapid changes in the world of work, most career offices at colleges and universities are still organized around older models – connecting students to alumni through traditional outreach; writing cover letters and preparing resumes; securing internships; and job fairs and career information sessions. Can Hamilton re-imagine how we prepare students for lives of work and purpose? Can we engage alumni differently? Can we build the strongest engagement platform ever to connect our students with alumni, parents and other potential mentors, coaches, connectors, and employers? Do we create a “multigenerational campus” with alumni participating as mentors, counselors, teachers and even students, both on and off campus? Can we guarantee every student a paid internship? Can we help students practice the liberal arts in the context of real-world challenges? How do we build from our great experiential learning opportunities; our fantastic alumni network and legions of alumni volunteers; our expert and experienced career advisors, in order to be a “best in class” liberal arts college building strong and durable bridges between life on the Hill and life off and after the Hill?
Practicing the Liberal Arts: Reimagine experiential and community-based learning at Hamilton to differentiate the student experience and demonstrate the value and impact of liberal arts colleges for the public.
DESIGN CHALLENGE:
Reimagine experiential and community-based learning to differentiate Hamilton’s student experience and demonstrate the value and impact of liberal arts institutions for the public.
The liberal arts were borne from the seeds of the Greek academies — the idea that small intimate exchanges between students and teachers would ignite the life of the mind and lead to robust intellectual growth, critical thinking, and the ability to express and defend ideas, which are all necessary to sustain a democracy. But, the pace of social change and the daunting challenges facing our planet, our economy, and our democracy require the application of ideas to practical matters in our communities, our organizations, and our political lives. Liberal arts colleges must demonstrate that the extraordinary learning that takes place in their academy-style classrooms and labs translates into the ability to engage in urgent opportunities and challenges outside the classroom. Moreover, students and their families, as the costs of higher education continue to outpace inflation, are expecting clearer pathways between college and post-college life. How might we remain true to our core commitment to the life of the mind while expanding opportunities for students to “practice the liberal arts” – deploying their aesthetic, scientific, philosophical, and humanistic reasoning, research, speaking, and writing skills to build, design, solve, improve, and otherwise create a positive impact?
Hamilton and most of its peers provide many opportunities to practice the liberal arts – community-engaged projects, internships, fellowships, and class assignments organized around working with partners or clients. How might Hamilton elevate these opportunities to practice the liberal arts? Can we double the number of internships and fellowships? Can we scale more opportunities to practice the liberal arts within the curriculum? Can we better activate our alumni network to help students practice the liberal arts? Can we make the “practice of the liberal arts” part of a Winter term? Can “practicing the liberal arts” be a differentiator for Hamilton? How?
Innovation, Technology & Authentic Intelligence: Create a future where Hamilton students and faculty, through innovation, draw on the mix of technology and authentic intelligence to develop, test, and advance new ideas on campus and in the world beyond.
DESIGN CHALLENGE:
Create a future where Hamilton students and faculty, through innovation, draw on the mix of technology and authentic intelligence to develop, test, and advance new ideas both at Hamilton and in the world beyond.
Artificial intelligence, big data, predictive analytics, machine learning, and a host of other technologies are transforming virtually every field of study and enterprise. The speed at which large language models are becoming more sophisticated – completing tasks from taking the LSATs to ordering groceries, playing chess, creating short films – is dizzying. There are thousands of products now on the market that use AI as coaches and tutors for writing, math, science, screenwriting, and more. Soon you will be able to learn most languages by walking the streets of any city in an immersive headset interacting with an AI agent who appears as a waiter in a café, a child in a park, a merchant at a market, an Uber driver, or a shopkeeper. Students can have a debate with James Baldwin about race in America or interrogate Alexander Hamilton about his views on international trade. AI can provide powerful coaching around writing – helping students with basic issues of sentence construction, grammar, flow, and logic.
The Innovation Center puts Hamilton at the forefront of preparing students across all disciplines to innovate and lead in this technology-driven world,” said President David Wippman. “The center will provide students with technology-equipped classrooms, high-speed computing capabilities, makerspace, drone, robotics, and electronics labs, collaboration and display space, and a new home for Computer Science. Perhaps most important, by drawing students and faculty from across the College to work together on cutting-edge problems, it will foster the innovation that inspired the center’s name.”
What is the unique way a liberal arts college can engage with technology? How do we define and enable digital fluency? How can we build partnerships with other colleges and with industry, taking advantage of the Innovation Center, in order to show the distinctive ways a liberal arts college can not only keep up with technology but actually drive solutions to make technology more humane, more beautiful, more just, and more likely to expand, rather than diminish, human imagination and connection? What is the boldest version of the Innovation Center that could define a new liberal arts approach to technology and innovation?
How can we harness these advances and disruptions to free faculty for even more high-concept and high-touch teaching? How will colleges and universities incorporate AI in operations and learning? What new models of teaching might emerge? What skills do students need to engage with AI creatively, ethically, and artfully? And, what is the distinct role of a liberal arts college, both in the space of innovative pedagogy but also in terms of leadership? What can we do – the questions we ask, the way we interrogate and explore new technology, the way we center the human experience – that will help shape how society will engage with AI and emerging technology moving forward? Can Hamilton be a place that elevates authentic intelligence as a necessary mediator of artificial intelligence and, in so doing, better prepare students for a future that is not yet legible? Or can Hamilton become a useful enzyme that reshapes and redirects artificial intelligence toward critical human objectives and needs? What would it look like for Hamilton to not only navigate the new AI landscape responsibly, but to be a national leader in this space?
Technology is part of a larger innovation ecology centered on the art and science of advancing ideas. A hallmark of Hamilton is:
- a faculty on the frontiers of their disciplines and fields, surfacing new ideas, creating knowledge and ways of capturing and representing the full breadth of the human experience
- a gifted, self-directing, and curious student body that learns from and collaborates with faculty in their scholarship and creative endeavors
- a first-rate staff with deep technical knowledge and skills.
What if Hamilton organized its resources to better prepare students to advance ideas of public value? Whether it relates to business, education, or other social enterprises, how can we integrate entrepreneurship – that is, the process and skill of surfacing ideas, developing them into proposals, prototyping them, and exploring whether they are scalable and viable – into our liberal arts education? Can we develop an innovation environment that enables and empowers our community to extend our impact beyond Hamilton’s traditional boundaries?
How to Get Involved
Our success depends on broad participation. This process begins and ends with listening to and learning from all members of the Hamilton community. Between now and spring of 2026 you’ll have many opportunities to share ideas, offer expertise, and give feedback. Work will be shared with the Board of Trustees in March of 2026.
Engagement Opportunities
- Stop by during tabling events across campus
- Complete the survey at the beginning of the fall semester
- Discuss themes during community interviews
- Attend panel discussions, faculty meetings, or Staff Assembly
- Engage at a Community Charrette
- Email your ideas, experiences, or research to the Core Team
Save the Date: Community Charrettes
These sessions are open to everyone and will be where the work completed during the three preceding Focus Charrettes are shared back with the Hamilton community.
These sessions invite everyone to reflect, test prototypes, and help continue to shape each theme. Dessert and drinks will be provided.
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10/8/2025 7:00PM - 9:00PM
Tolles Pavilion
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11/12/2025 7:00PM - 9:00PM
Tolles Pavilion
Focus Charrettes
Focus Charrettes are smaller, theme-based workshops with co-leads and 18-22 selected participants – students, faculty, staff, alumni, trustees, and outside experts – who represent a cross-section of perspectives from across campus. The work done during each Focus Charrette is then shared back with the campus through Community Charrettes and the Design Hub.
- Sept. 10-11: Open Curriculum 2.0
- Sept. 17-18: Democracy & Imagination
- Sept. 19 & 22: Creative Campus & What If
- Oct. 21-22: Hamilton 360
- Oct. 23-24: Practicing the Liberal Arts
- Nov. 6-7: Innovation, Technology, and Authentic Intelligence
Key Milestones
Aspirational Design: Frequently Asked Questions
Aspirational Design is a way of collaborating and planning that starts with imagination, not problems. Instead of asking, “What do we need right now?” it asks, “What’s possible?”
At Hamilton: It’s our way of shaping the College’s future together. We’re exploring bold ideas, testing them against our values and strengths.
A charrette is an intensive, collaborative workshop where a diverse group of people come together to generate ideas, solve problems, or design solutions.
Charrettes are commonly used in fields like architecture, planning, and design to bring many perspectives into a fast-paced, creative process. The goal of a charrette is to move from brainstorming to tangible concepts in a short period of time.
At Hamilton: A charrette is a workshop-style session where Hamilton community members and outside experts work side by side to explore bold ideas, test possibilities, and imagine the College’s future.
Your voice is central. Ideas gathered through tabling, interviews and conversations feed into Focus Charrettes. The outcomes are shared back to the community through the Design Hub and at Community Charrettes, where everyone can add ideas and feedback.
Ideas move from brainstorming to testing to synthesis. We’ll share updates throughout, and the work will culminate in a report and presentation to the Board of Trustees in spring 2026.
During the second day of each Focus Charrette, participants will spend the day on campus having quick, informal conversations with Hamilton community members to gather input on the questions they explored the day before. No need to sign up, just be eager to talk with participants (or seek them out!). You can also fill out the fall survey or contact a member of the Design Team.
The Design Hub, located in Burke Library’s Stryker All-Night Reading Room, is a space to learn about ongoing conversations, review charrette outcomes, and add your own input on your own time.
The Aspirational Design Project Implementation Team will communicate regularly with the campus community via email and at regularly scheduled faculty and staff assemblies. You can also:
- Visit the Design Hub in Burke Library
- Check the Aspirational Design website for updates, communications, and other information
Aspirational Design Core Team
Contact
Contact Name
Aspirational Design Core Team
