Future of Higher Education Research Team Report

Faculty Senate Responses to Big Questions

Mark Caprio

Wednesday, June 21st, 2017

¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 1. If Providence College were to be best known for one thing only within the next 10-20 years, what should it be?

• ¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0
• Excellence in teaching.
• An outstanding Liberal Arts academic program that prepares students for the future.
• An explicitly Catholic vision for diversity & inclusion and their embodiment on our campus.
• Liberal Arts and reaching out into the world living the Christian message
• Quality research.
• As one of the top liberal arts colleges in our region – a school that students aspire to attend, not one they apply to as a “back up” in case they don’t get into Holy Cross/Boston College/Swarthmore, etc.

¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 2. What should the College be doing in the next 10-20 years, that it isn’t doing today?

• ¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0
• Finding out who we are and making ourselves stand out in a crowd. Not doing things just because competitor schools are but because it is who we are and setting us apart from the crowd of liberal arts colleges. I feel like we are moving away from the focus on teaching that makes us special. And teaching in the sense of really building community and relationships with our students.
• Give students greater flexibility in their studies, more electives to craft a more individualized education and explore new interest.
• Bring in more students from more of the country (and internationally), giving the College a more national profile.
• Fund faculty research that explicitly advances the mission of the College, esp social justice & Catholic aspects.
• Emphasize more of a Global Understanding (i.e., bring more Asian/non Western ideas).
• Raising much more money for the endowment.
• Innovating and promoting a culture of innovation. Right now PC seems like we are among the last to try new ideas (e.g., first year experience courses). And, right now, change is painfully hard and sloe here, seems like more so than other institutions of higher education. We need to be nimbler, more flexible, more open to trying new ideas. This culture would trickle down to students, who would also learn how to be innovative.

¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0 3. If you had $100M+ new dollars to spend, how would you spend it?

• ¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 0
• Hiring to strengthen our commitment to our Providence community and diasporic populations. Attracting students who need mentoring and hands on teaching and providing them resources to succeed. Establish a Smith Hill scholarship that encourages the college to re-integrate the surrounding neighborhood into the campus community. Let’s take 2-3 students per year who grew up in Smith Hill and give them a scholarship.
• Set up languages houses—houses in which students who are all studying the same language could live, making the houses an intersection between learning and living.
• Helping more students have a study abroad experience; developing help programs in developing countries in the name of PC.
• An endowed chair in every department.
• Hire more and more diverse full-time/TT faculty in order to:
  • ¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 0
  • reduce reliance on adjuncts/part-time faculty (or at least, pay them better)
  • provide faculty with more time/opportunity for their scholarship (3/2 teaching load) and/or give them workload credit for advising
  • provide faculty/departments to innovate their curricula/pedagogy (more team-taught courses, more low enrollment experiential courses)
• Reduce tuition/increase aid to students

¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 0 4. What should be the most important measure or indicator of the College’s success? Why?

• ¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 0
• Student satisfaction: Not “were they happy” but 10 years out, do they value what they learned? Has it made them people who are critical thinkers and can they question dominant narratives in our society? I want the students who are out there in 10 years making people angry at them because they challenge the status quo!
• How well we prepare our students to thrive in the modern, international world. Our primary task is the education of students, so this should be the measure of our success.
• The flourishing of each and every student, faculty, staff, administrator.
• World view, world involvement (including more reaching out to helping those in need around the world rather than simply making money).
• Scholastic awards on all levels.
• Student growth and learning in a broad sense/in many domains (perhaps including: acquisition of knowledge and academic skills like critical thinking; development of adult/life skills like time management; discovery of vocation/identity/future goals)