LEADERSHIP

Inspiration and Vision Shaping

Fundamental to the work as president, as I see it, is the need to articulate the College mission internally and externally in order to inspire respect and understanding for the work of the College -- why we do what we do and why it matters. The first step in thus process is conceptual and creative: how to think about the College as a whole and to represent it as a whole for internal and eternal constituencies. There is the need to develop and evolve a resilient, flexible, enduring image of the College as well as to present its meaning and purpose over time. The image I have is one that fits the competing needs and complex realities of our community: a changing society which needs the continuously relevant education the College produces; students who need the practical education for lifelong goals; and the interests and needs of administrative staff and faculty, alumni, board members, media, foundations, government agencies, and so on.

Because a major role of the president is to communicate with all constituencies, I must transform this understanding into language, frames, paradigms, and communications strategies, as well as the programs, structures, policies, and practices that express this vision. Therefore, I seek to learn from alumni and other people associated with the College over time about the role of the College in their lives and our culture. I also continuously try to learn about the College from the people whose lives it has influenced and shaped, and to accrue a cultural history deeply engrained with the essential College mission which will successfully move us forward to the next century. The president must convey an internal and external sense of purpose so that Goddard again can be a national leader in higher education. The president also must provide a vision which places in context individual and group goals and work; how something connects to national and global mandates and realities; and how individual units of the College are part of a greater interconnected organization. In addition, I believe that the president should recognize and develop talent and expand opportunities for people to learn and contribute in new ways to the organization. The president should be a constant source of ideas, challenge, critique. and support.

External Promotion of Understanding

My role is to articulate and represent the meaning and significance of the College in such a way as to increase support -- both financial and reputation, understanding, appreciation, and value of its work. I am proactive in creating opportunities for an increased public role for the college, as well as events that can increase the visibility of the existence of the College and the meaning of its mission. I seek to enhance the visibility, prestige, and knowledge about the College in the state, nation, and world. I seek opportunities in my role as educational leader for the College to write, speak, organize, support, and participate in forums where higher education goals and mandates are addressed and advanced. I try to get Goddard "at the table" when decisions and thinking that shape national educational decisions are developed.

Internal Vision and Analyses

While externally I discuss the essential worth of the College (how great and essential we are), internally my role is as a conscience, to provide support, challenge and critique. How can we be better, walk the talk of our mission, constantly improve how we operate the College? How can we operate more productively, efficiently, holistically, and integrally? How can we better serve students; develop a more integrative, collaborative, rigorous, relevant curriculum and pedagogy in which arts and sciences are inextricably connected; strengthen our operational capacity; ensure that transcripts do justice to the educational outcomes; restore the campus grounds and buildings to their original architectural quality and technological infrastructure; communicate the credibility of Goddard's mission for more careful treatment of the natural and built and cultural envirormient; model a civic culture of "earnest care" for each other in which diversity is embedded in curriculum, personnel, and student body; innovate and experiment with new models for education and learning; raise our standards; and live up to the national reputation as a school of authentic excellence? Through learning about how w e do business, analyzing our structures, practices, policies, outcomes. I serve as a catalyst for reform, renovation, innovation, repair, growth, and stability.

In this context, I am responsible to the Board of Trustees for carrying out its objectives and mandates, which are shaped in part by my work in representing the college to the Board of Trustees; for providing the Board with the information and leadership to carry out its fiduciary responsibility for the college; for bringing the concerns of the College to the Board; and for fueling and inspiriting Board commitment and support. Relating to the needs of the Board and the College are try primary functions.

MANAGEMENT

Organizational

I oversee the administrative infrastructure of the College and maintain the integrity with which it carries out its functions. I analyze the processes and the efficacy of the policies and procedures for how we do business. I develop and assess the administrative capacity of the College for academic, legal, and financial integrity which includes overseeing and assessing College systems of assessment. After reviewing operational functions, I work to develop a senior staff, reporting structures, data-based cooperative decision making, governance bodies, budget, and the policies, structures, and systems that will make these most effective. I identify what data exists for decision-making and analysis, and what must be created, with structures to generate it.

This organizational structure and system must be supported, and it is the job of the president to ensure that the College has the appropriate resources to accomplish its goals. Thus, the financial health of the college is a major role of the president, both in managing fund-raising and in building a budget, which allows for institutional growth and stability.

Specific Goals Regarding Management

The specific goals of management are to:

• Build operational capacity through development of a plan for more efficient, productive use of resources, including building resources that go into fundraising/development, and marketing and admissions;

• Using appropriate data, establish critical size for College, and develop a specific plan to achieve thus size; Promote coherence and sense of common purpose;

• Integrate philosophy and organizational practice;

• Develop a coherent framework that helps the College community understand progress as an institutional whole, and the individual units within it;

• Apply criteria of Vision, Viability, and Visibility to each role (including president) and function to bring unity and sense of collaborative purpose to the work each does for the greater College goals;

• Develop an approach to budget, governance. and strategic thinking/planning that is based on "mission-critical" and "outcomes-based" assessment with all groups;

• Develop an integrative, collaborative organizational structure of greater accountability throughout the college for policies and practices for senior staff, for staff, for committees, for task forces, and for other governing bodies and all aspects of college;

• Ensure that College-as-a-whole maintains a mindset that is informed by the budget, governance, and strategic planning;

• Build outcomes-based strategic approach to meetings, evaluation, workplans, and the calendar; and

• Develop the structures and the approach for long-range planning.

• Hiring and developing senior staff; establishing data-generating and information-based governance bodies which represent constituencies on campus (faculty in high and low residency programs, staff, students in high and low residency programs);

• Continuing resound CEC, creating the Whole Student Task Force, the Morale and Equity Task Force, the Communications and Cultures Task Force, the Senior Staff Group, the President's Advisory council, and the Program Directors Council;

  
  

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• Beginning reporting and other management structures increasing the level of activity to promote stability and growth of the College in all areas; reviewing how the College assesses and plans for facilities, student services, community relations, fund-raising, alumni relations, marketing, budget, academics (program, curriculum, faculty);

• Ensuring that policy is created, implemented, and followed, in consistent and fair manner;

• Reviewing all personnel issues for fairness and equity;

• Working in institutional ways (with the media and organizations and individuals) to change people's minds who have written off the College as a non-productive member of the community, as irresponsible and unstable financially, as a place with problematic academic standards, as unstable for productive leadership; Accruing data to overturn these perceptions;

• Making the case for Goddard's institutional and student learning outcomes;

• Beginning conversations with community about the curricular and pedagogical implications of the mission (including writing strategic thinking paper for discussion);

• Moving the college forward with grant development;

• Meeting with people who may provide significant funding for the College;

• Developing plans to renovate the campus;

• Developing new and restored off-campus progams like Goddard has produced over its sixty years; and

• Initiating affiliations, partnerships, and other alliances for programs, and for increased support of new opportunities for college students, faculty, and staff.

Much of the daily work entails creative and collaborative problem solving, and in that process, consciously developing protocols for decision-making and appeals, in order to build a supportive infrastructure for leadership and responsibility throughout College so and that people do not undermine elected and administrative leaders' roles. Some of the work is problem-creating -- identifying needs and areas of concern as well as opportunities and strategies to resolve the problems. The goal is to create work and reporting loops that make decisions much more holistic, institutionally oriented, and mission based. Other problem solving requires measures to ensure that the College is operating and making decisions in a legal way that protects individual members as well as the institution as a whole. I also have meetings with outside constituencies and community members. The majority of hours on campus are spent in meetings (senior staff, executive group -- directors, administrators, CEC, development, personnel, academics, program directors, personnel issues, safety and security issues, student issues, lawyers); each day I spend at least four hours a day on email, returning and making phone calls on behalf of the college, and communicating with trustees, including conference calls for the executive committee, development committee, academic affairs committee, and evaluation committee. An additional four hours before and after is spent reading and writing memos, papers, correspondence, etc. and analyzing the reports, memos, and assessments of the college. Weekends are spent meeting with local and regional constituents, programs for the College (graduations, Discover Goddard Day), and writing (op eds, lectures and addresses, communications to the community). Part of the schedule is traveling to do programs on behalf of Goddard (alumni events, What the World Needs Now Conversations, student recruitment, conferences, lectures, donor cultivation. etc.). Part of the travel is to develop Goddard's potential for involvement in state, national and international programs for increased opportunities for the school and for visibility. I am working to bring Goddard back to the table in regional educational associations and consortia for grants. etc, Current work includes representing higher education for a United Nations sponsored symposium bringing together organizations for global development to develop new thinking for society in understanding how cultural institutions affect poverty. In other representational work, includes waving the Goddard banner in a lecture series I am giving on the mandate for arts and sciences at Sierra Club Le Conte Memorial: presenting to Modern Language Association on the role of graduate education in higher education reform; presenting to Association of Integrative Studies on curriculum and pedagogy: and presenting to Lilly Conference on College and University Teaching, on new holistic approaches to assessment of student learning outcomes.

Institutional Goals

My goals as president are to make progress in the above areas, with three primary areas of focus:

Visibility -- to increase the understanding and support of the world for what Goddard is (measured by more student applications, increased eternal finding and support, increased invited opportunities for the College. etc.);

Viability -- to develop the infrastructure, systems, practices. and policies to make Goddard more operationally stable quid accountable (which includes establishing a viable size in all programs and the structural policies to achieve thus size), and to significantly increase our resources through fund-raising;

Visibility -- to get closer to realizing the mandates in Goddard's mission for continuously evolving academic programs, curriculum, and pedagogy which reflect the advances in knowledge and learning that have happened in the past twenty years (measured by new programs, innovations, experiments, which give our students and faculty more global, integrated learning experiences and development).

My personal goal is to have the expression "this is Goddard" or "that's Goddard" mean a way of operating that is characterized by a value of ambitious, pro-active responsibility for self, society, planet; by doing things differently in order to do them better; by thinking "out of the box"; and by being a source of creative and productive thinking for society on its most critical problems. A major subordinate goal is to increase the quality and amount of presentations of Goddard's image, including an emphasis on our web/home page that does justice to Goddard's creative, student-intensive approach to learning, with interactive possibilities for alumni, parents, Board members, and students to present College programs and philosophy. Other changes I would like to see accomplished include: renovated dorms and physical plant with coherent and strategic campus organization; academic programs which integrate arts, sciences, humanities, social sciences, technology, service leaning, cross-cultural experience and that are transdisciplinary, collaborative, problembased, and community-oriented; more learning opportunities for students (intellectual, social, physical, cultural) including experiences for internships; a decrease in the percentage of tuition for College operating expenses; increased staff and development opportunities for staff; and programs that create greater retention and applications. As Goddard restores its once exemplary campus and moves again to become a nation-wide presence (as the majority of our students and faculty are national), I feel an ethical sense of responsibility to connect our rebuilding with the rebuilding of our neighboring communities such as Plainfield, once again leasing and buying properties for students, staff and faculty. renovating and restoring community structures through our work and service learning program, and becoming an institution our neighbors feel makes our community stronger and more beautiful because of our relationship and presence. That to me would be the proof of the pudding of realizing Goddard's mission.

Finally, a goal is to have people, especially our students, think that being president of Goddard is something they could and should and would do someday and that is because the leadership and management of such a school is worth every ounce of energy and commitment that one has, and that it essentially is no different from trying to make a productive difference in any community, organization. or group whose survivial one feels is essential to the world.

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