The five priorities, which were announced to faculty and other college employees in meetings last week, include, according to Tobin:
* concluding the faculty's process of curricular innovation, stressing the academic skills and rigorous habits of the mind needed for effective citizenship in an increasingly complex and interdependent world;
* increasing and taking full advantage of Hamilton's growing diversity, and continuing to foster community solidarity and inclusiveness;
* creating a campus master plan for academic, residential and administrative facilities in order to provide a blueprint for future growth;
* developing a comprehensive plan of action that promotes a healthy social and academic environment where learning and campus life are not compromised by dangerous drinking and other substance use; and
* initiating a comprehensive communications plan designed to strengthen Hamilton's recognition among the nation's strongest students, and raise awareness among key constituencies of the college's strengths.
Tobin said he established the five priorities to sustain the momentum being generated by increased selectivity in admissions, greater recognition of the college, and record years in fund-raising.
"This is a particularly auspicious time in Hamilton's history," Tobin said. "By moving forward aggressively, and by challenging ourselves to meet even loftier goals, we can make our position even more secure among the elite liberal arts colleges in American higher education."
When announcing the five priorities, Tobin commented on each. What follows are excerpts of those comments:
Curricular Innovation: The quality of our students' educational experience is the heart of everything we do. I believe that a successful curricular reform process represents our single most important strategic initiative. It is inseparable from our self-identification with academic rigor; it will attract serious students and help recruit and retain talented and dedicated teaching-scholars. Curricular reform will positively affect ongoing changes in residential life; it will enhance the fundamental goals of The New Century Campaign, and most importantly, it will provide a needed link between general education and the concentration.
The curriculum is, in Dean of the Faculty Bobby Fong's apt words, the autobiography of the faculty. By the faculty's overwhelmingly positive vote last May, Hamilton's professors reaffirmed their commitment to create a rigorous, integrative, goal-oriented curriculum characterized by small classes, early intellectual engagement, and intensive oral and written work in which students demonstrate that they are becoming liberally educated citizens. I believe it is time to test our belief in liberal education by codifying our commitment to the habits of the mind that frame a lifetime of learning.
What the faculty supported in May is, I believe, the foundation for a truly distinctive and appropriately rigorous curriculum that will help separate Hamilton from all the other national, selective liberal arts colleges — and we will be creating our own unique identity around that which matters most to us — good teaching and lifelong learning.
My goal, for which I seek the faculty's support, is the adoption by the end of this academic year of an uncommonly distinctive, defining experience, a rigorous sophomore year rite of passage by which students publicly demonstrate their progress in developing basic intellectual habits — basic in the sense of being fundamental to all advanced and specialized intellectual effort.
Diversity and Community: Our core educational enterprise is profoundly enriched by a diversity of viewpoints — ideas, methodologies, disciplines, ways of seeing and knowing, and the whole range of attitudes and interests that we assess in the admission process.
Intellectual diversity, which is created and enhanced by racial and ethnic diversity and a range of cultural perspectives, catalyzes academic exchange and reaffirms the deep values of tolerance and respect for difference within a vibrant and free marketplace of ideas.
If we're serious about taking advantage of the creative power of our diversity, then we must help our students come to understand conflict as a positive and creative force. Differences of opinion and experience are a crucial part of any learning process.
But diversity without unity is inimical to the goals of liberal education. The purpose of college is not simply to keep the community together. The goal is rather to achieve a sense of common purpose, especially while recognizing differences and encouraging dissent and debate. I want students who come to Hamilton for their own individual advancement to see their learning as part of a much broader, interdependent process of maturity and socially responsible citizenship.
Facilities Planning: We have become adept at managing our individual building projects as discrete, almost autonomous entities. Our primary task now is to organize and incorporate the disparate academic, residential and administrative proposals currently under consideration, as well as others that will follow, into an integrated b
