A Message from President Anne F. Harris

Dear students, faculty, and staff,

Welcome to the first update on Knowledge into Action: A Strategic Plan for Grinnell College. This update will come to your inbox twice a semester to share how our campus is putting this plan into action and how working groups across campus are taking on real challenges to positively impact Grinnell and Grinnellians.

We are making it happen! In this update, you'll learn more about the seven initiatives identified at the beginning of the semester and what the inter-campus working groups have accomplished to date. As we move forward, these periodic updates will showcase a kaleidoscope of stakeholders across the College coming together in different configurations to address the four themes and twelve goals of the strategic plan. Additionally, the first convocation of the academic year will be devoted to a campus-wide update.

I invite you to read about, learn from, and engage with the work so far. Your experiences of Grinnell shaped this plan, and you are invited to reach out to the working group leaders listed below or the strategic plan steering committee with comments, questions, and ideas.

Warmly,

Anne

Catalyst For Educational Excellence

ACTION: Research ways to integrate High-Impact Practices (HIPs) with College-wide learning outcomes to assist with student developmental planning, advising, and institutional accountability for equity.

HIPs are teaching and learning practices that have produced evidence of significant educational benefits for students who participate in them – including and especially those from demographic groups historically underserved by higher education.

Led by Graham Miller, the working group will map HIPs of global study, research, internships, and community engagement in terms of available resources and demographic participation for each of the four categories to provide a recommendation for increasing access to HIPs for students.

ACTION: Focus on the Higher Learning Commission Quality Initiative for advising as a first step in evaluating our institutional understanding of academic advising.

Led by Beronda Montgomery, Joyce Stern, and Andrea Tracy, the working group's initial focus is on a comprehensive evaluation of academic advising that examines the roles played by faculty and staff. In time, this will lead to specific recommendations to improve the quality of academic advising campus-wide (launched Nov. 2023).

Approach and Milestones

The Advising Mapping Group (Joyce Stern, Andrea Tracy, Timothy Arner, Catherine Ashton, Belinda Backous, Mark Peltz) has held interactive sessions with students, faculty, and staff to understand how and where students access advising and identify organizational gaps. To date, the Mapping Team has gathered information from 48 faculty advisers, 60 students, and many staff representing 27 offices.

The Registrar's Office, Analytics and Institutional Research, and DASIL are currently analyzing and visualizing data collected during these sessions.

Findings from this analysis will be shared with the campus community on Monday, April 29.

ACTION: Move forward with the College’s response to the Supreme Court decision on affirmative action with the goal of recruiting and retaining a diverse, well-qualified student body.

Led by Sarah Fischer, the working group seeks to develop a framework for mitigating losses in student diversity while observing the SCOTUS decision to limit the use of race in the college admission process.

Approach and Milestones

In response to SCOTUS’s decision to forbid the use of race as a consideration in admission decisions, Grinnell College convened the recruitment and retention group. This group’s charge is to develop a series of admission and enrollment strategies to maintain racial diversity in Grinnell’s student body.

The group submitted a report to the Enrollment Planning Group (EPG) in late 2023. The EPG has approved this proposal, and the working group is developing timelines for three primary initiatives.

Initiatives include strengthening the Laurel Scholars program, establishing admission pathways partnership programs across multiple communities, and introducing a new national scholarship (to begin for fall 2025 admission cycle).

Belonging and Connection

Students gather in residence hall foyer.

ACTION: Reinvent a residential experience and student programming that provide tools and opportunities to build community, develop self-understanding, and establish collaborative relationships across difference.

Led by JC Lopez and Mfon Nwabuoku, in collaboration with the SGA president, this working group is undertaking analysis of the residential curriculum proposal combined with inventory of actions already or soon to be in motion, as analyzed by the Student Experiences group of Senior Leadership.

Approach and Milestones

Implementation of the Residential Curriculum is currently underway, with progressively greater development and implementation from fall 2023 to spring 2024.

DSA has established learning goals for the residential curriculum. They have additionally created a range of RLC and CA activities that map onto learning outcomes and support student discovery and learning in their living communities.

Over the summer, DSA will develop internal staff manuals to guide further implementation and publicly available materials that articulate the residential curriculum’s goals for external audiences.

Collective Equity

ACTION: The Reduce Endowment Dependency (RED) initiative to identify long-term ways to reduce Grinnell's dependence on the endowment to fund the operating budget.

More than 60% of Grinnell's operating budget is funded by the endowment, making it one of the most endowment-dependent institutions in the U.S. Recognizing that over-dependence on any one source of revenue is not financially prudent, RED is seeking $5 million in annual operational budget space (through either cost-savings or new revenue) by FY29. Led by Germaine Gross, RED is an opportunity to re-engineer operations, explore ways to increase revenue, and identify where new investments are needed.

ACTION: Build a shared understanding among campus constituents and leadership regarding compatibility of data and cybersecurity and the academic mission of the College.

Led by Myrna Hernández and Jonathan Colby, the objective of this working group is represented by the name they selected: the Information Technology and Academic Mission Alignment Group. The group was charged with identifying and guiding the work of an external partner to assist in developing an understanding of our current landscape around the areas of service delivery, policy, governance, data sharing, and relationships. The group has selected and is working with MOR Associates, who bring expertise in IT and higher education to the conversation and have spent significant time in on-campus and virtual focus groups with a broad range of constituents to understand structures, processes, and culture at Grinnell. Simultaneously, working group members have conducted interviews with peer institutions (Williams, Macalester, Davidson, Colgate, St. Olaf, Vassar, and Rollins) that are experiencing a coordination of academic mission and information technology. Based on the collective data gathered from external and internal sources, and in consultation with Executive Council, Staff Council, and, when needed, SGA, the group will provide the president with a set of recommendations in the spring of 2024.

Shared Goals and Common Ground

Renfrow Hall Construction looking east from a drone

ACTION: Support community-building programs and community dialogue, with Renfrow Hall as a focus and inspiration, and the Civic Innovation Pavilion as a place to gather.

Led by Monica Chavez-Silva, JC Lopez, and Mark Peltz, the working group will analyze Renfrow Hall recommendations to establish residence guidelines for engagement and define the use of the Civic Innovation Space starting in fall of 2024.

Approach and Milestones

Three Renfrow advisory groups (operations, programming, and Civic Innovation Pavilion) have completed their work and have submitted recommendations for the residence hall’s operations and engagement.

The Implementation Group (Monica Chavez-Silva, JC Lopez, and Mark Peltz) have now convened to consider those recommendations and implement as appropriate.

As part of this effort, the Implementation Group held an informational session on February 7 (alongside other campus partners) for students interested in living in Renfrow Hall. Following this meeting, students were able to apply to live in Renfrow Hall. The deadline to apply has now closed, with 171 applications submitted. These applications are now being considered.

This group will next develop community guidelines with Residence Life.

Measuring Progress

Strategic Research has completed project initiation/update meetings with all seven groups to learn about/develop timelines and milestones that will help to track project progress.

Strategic Research is currently developing project management and updating reporting infrastructure. This will include dashboards on project progress and performance on both College-wide metrics as well as project-specific metrics, to be introduced in the fall.

Strategic Research and Communications are collaborating to establish routine communications on plan achievements and progress with multiple audiences across multiple platforms. The next update will be the week of May 11.

Share your thoughts online.

STAY CONNECTED: