More than 180 years later, the 2006 Fiske Guide to Colleges says “Lafayette College has done its homework and is earning higher and higher points among top students, as seen in the growing applicant pile. Gleaming new buildings, a crackdown on excessive student partying are just two of the visible reminders that the college is serious about continuing to rise higher and higher among the small elite liberal arts colleges. One of the few liberal arts schools of its size to offer engineering, Lafayette has also won respect for its technical and scientific programs.”

When Daniel H. Weiss took the reins as Lafayette’s 16th president, he told those gathered at his inauguration “these events allow us to pause and reflect on the state of our College: on our history and traditions, our accomplishments and challenges, and most important, on our aspirations and expectations for the future.

“In assessing the challenges and opportunities facing us at this particular moment in our history, I believe that we can best serve the interests of the College by dedicating ourselves to advancing three major objectives: 1. To reaffirm the central importance of liberal education as the best foundation for helping students build productive and rewarding lives; 2. To continue to enhance the quality of the academic core of the institution; and 3. To foster our identity at Lafayette as a vital and engaged community partner.”

Our enduring sense of purpose—it was the dream that provided the strategic vision for James Madison Porter in 1824; it endured and was built upon through the leadership of 15 presidents of Lafayette. Today, it is what Weiss calls “a legacy upon which to build” as he and Lafayette’s trustees engage the College community in the strategic planning process.

Over the next year, Weiss has put in place a system that will open channels of dialogue with all Lafayette constituencies—“the challenge is to make the process iterative enough and interactive so that everyone contributes and wants to contribute and becomes so involved that no one remembers his or her contribution. All who participate feel they have had a stake and say in the process. It’s a lot like making sausages—at the end, no one tastes or remembers his or her contribution, just the wonderful sausage.

“The more the better. The more conversation the better. What we’ll do, we’ll do together. We must recalibrate all the time. Not everyone is going to get what they want out of all of this. But everyone needs to feel the process was attentive to their input,” Weiss says.

To that end, Weiss has created a Strategic Planning Steering Committee, which he will chair, to “lead a college-wide process of discussion, review, and assessment, ultimately leading to the preparation of a strategic plan to be presented to the board of Trustees by early fall of 2007.”

The Strategic Planning Steering Committee will facilitate plugging all areas of the campus community into the discussion and crafting process of the draft comprehensive strategic plan to be completed by mid-July 2007. At the inception of the process, the Board and the Strategic Planning Steering Committee, guided by Weiss, have set a course focused “first and foremost” on strengthening the quality of the academic experience of Lafayette students. In so doing they are, “reaffirming the central importance of a broad-based and individualized education as the best foundation for helping students build productive a rewarding lives.”

Weiss points out that these key objectives of a liberal education, are what William G. Bowen (former president of both The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Princeton University) says “help us to develop those habits of thought which always ask why, which believe in evidence, which welcome new ideas, which seek to understand the perspective of others, which accept complexity and grapple with it, which admit error and pursue truth, wherever it may lead, however uncomfortable it may be.

“It should help us to be compassionate, and sensitive human beings, of service to others. It should help us to develop, and then demonstrate, a concern for ultimate values that are more than superficial signposts and that reflect more than the rote repetition of someone else’s formula for living a good life. Particularly important is the desire—and the ability—to keep on learning,” Bowen says.

Weiss envisions Lafayette emerging from the strategic planning process with a plan “to become a premier small college that is academically distinctive and international in reach and presence.”

What are the core values that inform this goal?

1. To educate highly promising students and promote the intellectual and personal maturation required for global citizenship
   
   Trained in critical inquiry, Lafayette graduates possess verbal, written, and quantitative literacy. They are morally knowledgeable and possess multicultural sophistication. Our alumni are conversant in technology and the arts. While they have disciplinary expertise, they are broadly educated, understand the multi-disciplinary nature of complex problems and are life-long learners.


2. To support highly qualified faculty as teachers and scholars who make meaningful contributions to the lives of their students and to the knowledge and conduct of their disciplines.


3. To support a highly qualified and professional administration and staff who are essential to the functioning and advancement of the College.


4. To be a caring and engaged community whose members are mutually interested in the well being and flourishing of all.

In addition the strategic planning effort will include evaluation and formulation of recommendations involving the size of the College, market position objectives and plans, the master plan for buildings, campus, and facilities, and the role of technology.

While the challenge may seem daunting, Weiss is optimistic and encouraged. “We are uniquely well positioned to face these challenges,” he says. “It is a difficult world that we send our young people into today. Lafayette needs to be at the center of that conversation. We can provide a value that is at the center of society”—our enduring sense of purpose.