Middle States
Focus Statement

Skidmore goes into this periodic review for Middle States accreditation in a rather different place than we occupied ten years ago, at the time of our last review. We were then in the midst of a presidency that had successfully consolidated the remarkable achievements of the previous presidency: we were settled into our new campus and into our relatively new identity as a more academically balanced and stronger co-educational liberal arts college. This year, in contrast, we have a new president and are embarking on a new campaign that emerges out of five years of strategic planning, still ongoing. We are considering significant changes in our core curriculum for the first time in some twenty years. And we have heightened ambitions for the college: to continue to strengthen our faculty and student body, to expand our facilities, to improve the education our students undertake, and to maintain our position as a top-tier liberal arts college.

The college’s leadership has decided to conduct a focused review. Our focus, in brief, is on the ways we are planning for and working to increase the degree of students’ engagement in their Skidmore education. Within that focus we have three areas on which we will concentrate: designing a new model for our students’ first-year experience; strengthening the sciences and recruiting students earlier and in greater numbers into the sciences; and engaging our students more fully in a more culturally diverse environment and course of study. Each of these areas has been the subject of review in recent years, and in each we have recently made gains and are engaged in significant planning. All of them relate to what we see as a major challenge for the college: to increase the degree to which our students, from the moment they arrive, eagerly and energetically undertake the transformation essential to the liberal arts education. The key to that transformation is, of course, the faculty, and we understand in this review that the faculty, in their passion for their own professional work, exemplify engaged learning for our students. In this review now and in our planning, faculty are working with other areas of the college to meet our common goals.

The new model for the first-year experience has emerged out of ongoing discussions of our academic vision. It also responds to information we have been gathering about our students and their experience here. We aim to increase faculty involvement in both advising and mentoring our students; to develop a first-year curriculum that focuses more clearly on the students’ interests and learning and draws more directly on the faculty’s own intellectual lives, even as we retain the integral vision that informs our current interdisciplinary Liberal Studies core; and to connect the students’ course-related learning more fully with their co-curricular and residential experiences. Central to all of this is the goal of developing structures and pedagogies that will engage our students, and of assessing in an ongoing way how well we are meeting that goal. As part of the self-study, then, we will pull together the information that has motivated this initiative, review the progress that we have made on it, and gather whatever new information we feel we need in order to move forward effectively. It should go without saying that whatever we learn about engaging our first-year students will also affect students throughout the college.

One of the areas to which we are particularly eager to draw students is the natural sciences. For several years now, we have been gathering information about the state of the sciences at Skidmore and reflecting on ways we can make significant improvements. We plan now to assess the operations and needs of our science majors and programs, and to use our findings to guide investment in faculty, support staff, equipment, and space so that these enterprises can deliver breadth and depth of subject matter and collaborative research comparable to that offered at other strong liberal arts colleges. Our current science majors excel in many ways and demonstrate a high level of engagement in and commitment to their studies. We believe that strengthening the sciences at Skidmore will result in a more balanced and compelling intellectual climate throughout the college. Our self-study will collect the information gathered over the past several years by our Science Planning Group and develop a plan for increasing the population of students who major in the natural sciences and deepening their engagement with their studies. Our study will also look closely at the interrelationship among curricula, pedagogies and research programs in the sciences; and at connections--existing or planned--between the science programs and the students’ co-curricular lives. Since the sciences have been leaders in curricular reform, assessment work, grants, and demonstrably strong outcomes for students, we also expect to consider paradigms they may provide for other disciplines.

Our third area of particular concern, the transformation of our campus to a more truly diverse and international community, also relates integrally to our focus on student engagement. We welcome the opportunity to reflect on our achievements and challenges in attracting more racially and culturally diverse students and faculty; in teaching our students about different constructions and aspects of diverse cultures, ethnicity, and race; and in internationalizing the curriculum and supporting study abroad for our students. We see our students encountering a variety of cultural perspectives in their course work and in their co-curricular lives, we see them studying abroad, and we want to learn how to increase, intensify and integrate these experiences. We are asking ourselves how we must change in order to invite our students more fully to embrace change themselves. And we hope to devise ways of assessing the extent to which our students are truly engaged in this aspect of their education, so that they not only encounter diversity but are transformed by it.

Each of these three sub-topics within our general focus on student engagement is connected with the others. Further, we see each of them as embodying the fundamental aspects of a Skidmore education, which informs and energizes our students' lives regardless of the career path they choose. It is an education that instills flexibility and intellectual agility, and teaches our students to attend to the intricate workings of our complex world. The student-centered journey as transformation is the cornerstone of our academic mission. Our self-study will capture these essential elements of a Skidmore education with the idea in mind that our college is historically grounded in the creative arts, and that creativity remains our mantra, not only in the arts but in every aspect of our curricular and co-curricular culture. Our hope is that the self-study will help us to clarify who we are and what we are doing, to bring our goals into focus, and to advance us further towards meeting them.

August 2, 2004