I am pleased that so many of us are planning to attend next week's "Coming to a Common Vision" retreat with colleagues from across the university.  We have never before had an opportunity on this campus to bring so many student services professionals together to talk about developing a shared understanding regarding our goals and our role in higher education, and I look forward to the presentations and conversation.  Next Tuesday's event will both frame and launch a broader set of discussions around the topic of transforming support of undergraduate education in the college and across campus.  I am writing today to provide a quick update on the college meeting portion of next Tuesday's proceedings and on some of our plans for following up with the conversations begun at the retreat and elsewhere throughout the college.

The CLA college portion of the retreat is scheduled to begin as part of the afternoon session at 2:30 in the Captain’s Room at the Earle Brown Heritage Center in Brooklyn Center.  At that meeting, we will begin a collective process of discussing what we have heard and thought throughout the day, and we will set the stage for the next set of conversations within the college.  Although we will follow wherever it leads, our discussion will be built around four questions:

1. What information from today stands out for you?  What were the “ah ha” moments?
2. What are you initial thoughts of the common themes that could be used to create the common vision?  What is good about the themes?  What is missing?
3. What should be the next steps that central administration, colleges/units, and others (e.g., CDN, AAN, etc.) should take to create and make the common vision a reality?
4. What can we do to assure the conversation continues?

We will take notes of the conversation at the college meeting, and the themes generated from the results of all meetings will be made available online and used to continue the process of coming to a common vision.  For your convenience, we have attached a pdf form containing these questions to today's e-newsletter.  Please feel free to print it out and take it with you to Tuesday's events and to take notes for use in our college meeting that afternoon.

Of course the retreat will not produce the kinds of results we want if it is not followed by additional discussions within the unit and across the college.  We will therefore soon be announcing several town hall meetings in which we will continue the work begun next Tuesday.  Our goal in these town hall meetings is to involve as many advisors, counselors, and student support professionals as possible in developing a set of shared principles to guide our work and a list (or lists) of recommendations to be sent forward to the Provost, our own Dean, and other stakeholders regarding steps they might take in order to support and further our efforts to serve our students and to achieve the aims of the college and the campus. 

As part of the broader set of conversations we want to pursue, we will also be inviting our staff members to help us develop budget priorities for the 2008-09 budget proposal we will be submitting to the college.  As many of you know, we are now in the process of planning for the 08-09 CLA Student Services budget.  We have developed a general understanding of budget needs through our conversations over the past several months while working through strategic positioning implementation teams, new initiatives like Access to Success and a revitalized mentoring program, changing leadership in the MAP office, expanded Regional Advising, the effort to raise salary levels across the unit, and much more.  Next Tuesday’s retreat and the town halls that will follow will further develop our thinking about fiscal priorities.  I would thus like to use the budget planning process to continue the work already underway and to build on the efforts articulated over the course of the last budget cycle to develop a single student services enterprise designed to optimize our support of

• Retention

• Graduation

• Educational success (curricular and co-curricular)

• Student engagement

• Inclusiveness and diversity

• Student satisfaction

These goals, I believe, are the touchstones of an extraordinary education and the keys to a signature undergraduate experience.  They should be associated with measurable outcomes, pragmatic programs, and realistic investment strategies.  We will be asking for your help in developing our budget priorities to support these and related goals through meetings and conversations in the student communities and services units, through our town hall meetings, through email, and through a wiki site we will be announcing in the near future.

I look forward to next week’s conversations and those that will follow.  If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions as we open this exciting new chapter in the development of a common vision of student support, please feel free to email me or to stop by my office to chat.