Conclusion
At the time of this self-study, Calvin College
presents itself as a well-equipped, accomplished, confident institution
with a robust sense of mission. It has experienced a dynamic period of
growth: in enrollment, faculty, staff, programs, and facilities. As this
study has shown, the college has not been shy about sorting out and addressing
its outstanding concerns. It has vigorously pursued a variety of efforts
to improve the quality and character of its instructional programs and
campus life.
Calvin and the Criteria
Each of the new criteria for accreditation approved by the Higher Learning
Commission has proven useful in prodding Calvin College to evaluate its
recent record and current work and to shape an agenda of the unfinished
business for the years to come. What follows is a summary of the main
findings of each chapter and the criterion each addresses.
Criterion One (chapter two) asks whether the
college "operates with integrity to ensure the fulfillment of its
mission through structures and processes that involve the board, administration,
faculty, staff, and students." This study demonstrates that Calvin
College devotes enormous attention and intellectual energy to discerning
and articulating its mission. Calvin professors have produced a small
library of publications on the topic. The college engages faculty, staff,
and students in understanding and living out what is called the “Reformed
project.” Mission-mindedness is a great strength of Calvin College,
and, as is the case with muscularity more generally, it needs continual
exercise and challenge to maintain its might. Faculty and administrators
alike are cognizant of the historic patterns of secularization in North
American and European higher education. Institutions that were once confident of their religious and philosophical underpinnings have made dramatic
departures from these foundations—in some cases, over the course
of only one generation. The current struggle to define the Christian
identity of American Catholic universities is one of the most dramatic
examples. It is especially relevant because the older Catholic vision
for faith and learning was heavily theological and philosophical, as is
the neo-Calvinist worldview that animates Calvin College. The Catholic
story suggests that each academic generation must re-engage and renew
the traditions of thought and conviction that drive its community and
apply them afresh to the vital issues of its time. Rearticulating and
renewing its mission must remain on Calvin’s agenda.
The college’s mission is both focused and nuanced. The college
recognizes the need to address the diversity of its students, its constituencies,
and the social matrix in which it serves, and it is capacious enough to
engage in this task. Chapter two outlines briefly how the college, once
a monocultural ethnic institution, now addresses diversity from within
its mission, both with internal programs and external initiatives. Chapters
three through six each elaborate on this theme.
Calvin College is governed responsibly and has procedures and policies
in place to guide and channel its organizational work. Lines of accountability
are clear and well documented. The reconstituted Board of Trustees is
more responsive, engaged, and supportive of the college now than in recent
memory. The college continues to wrestle with changes in governance, however,
both in structure and in patterns and habits. The transition in 1995 from
a full faculty assembly to a faculty senate form of governance has limited the opportunities
for any given faculty member to participate directly in many policy decisions.
Faculty members still numerically dominate the policy-making committees
that feed these items to Faculty Senate, but some professors feel “out
of the loop” regarding important decisions. Contributing to this
feeling is the fact that Calvin has become busier and more complex than
ever. The college sustains this pace by depending increasingly on administrators
to take the initiative and guide faculty committee work in planning, proposing
priorities, and crafting programs and policies. The faculty’s structured-in
role in governance remains strong, but there are calls from within the
faculty for better consultation and communication. Of particular concern
is the process of forming annual budgets and developing the priorities
that feed budgetary decisions. Several changes have been made to improve
open and regular communication—between the faculty committees and
the senate, between the President’s Cabinet and the Planning and
Priorities Committee (PPC), and between PPC and the faculty more generally.
The college should continue its efforts to engage faculty and staff in
consultation about campus-wide priorities in order to honor and sustain
its principle of participatory governance.
Criterion Two (chapter three) seeks evidence
that the college’s “allocation of resources and its processes
for evaluation and planning demonstrate its capacity to fulfill its mission,
improve the quality of its education, and respond to future challenges
and opportunities.” This study shows that in response to the advice
given in the last accreditation review—that the college should strengthen
its institutional research and planning—Calvin has greatly increased
its institutional research and has instituted a systematic approach to
strategic planning. Research and planning have become part of the rhythms
and cultures of nearly every sector of the institution, and assessment
plans and programs have been built out across the Academic Affairs Division.
Even so, there is room for improvement in making this process more routine.
The college now collects mountains of data in survey and operations research,
and has begun to apply its findings more deliberately to its evaluation
and planning.
Calvin has dramatically expanded its resource base in support of teaching
and learning, and now has the capacity to serve its learners well into
the future. The college continues to recruit an excellent faculty, and
it has whittled away at the student-faculty ratio. Faculty and staff salaries
and benefits have been sustained, and measures have been taken to improve
the competitive standing of faculty salaries. New policies have made employment
at the college more “family friendly” as well, while the number
and percentages have increased for women on the faculty and for persons
of color on the faculty and staff.
The college has experienced an enormous expansion of facilities and
services over the past decade. Not counting the work done for dormitory
and apartment renovations, the college has added or renovated nearly 500,000
square feet of space and has spent $65 million in the process, most of
it directly devoted to instructional and research needs. The Development
Division has more than kept pace with the demands for fresh funding, not
only for buildings and equipment but also for student scholarships and
grant-funded projects. The college has been raising more per year in recent
years than it did during the entire capital campaign that ended in 1996.
Calvin has also experienced some dramatic upgrades in information infrastructure
and services. In its library, its computing, and its telecommunications,
and throughout its newly created Information Services Division, these
points of service have been linked more closely, via teaching and consultation,
to the academic program.
These efforts have been guided by institutional research and evaluation—most
notably, a major study of information technology and services, an extensive
new campus master plan for facilities and grounds, and several consultative
studies of the college’s approach to advancement.
Budgeting for all of these initiatives remains an adventure, and as noted
in the discussion about governance, faculty concerns focus on what sometimes
appears to be an opaque budgeting process with some last-minute, ad hoc
budgeting decisions. A recently revised budgeting calendar, with structured
opportunities for communication and consultation, should prove helpful.
Even so, the college’s robust capacity-building success of the past
decade stands in contrast to the sense of limits and concerns about sustainability
that attend to annual planning for the general operating budget. One alternate
subtitle for chapter three, therefore, might have been “a tale of
two budgets.” While the college has achieved enormous success in
raising funding for facilities, information technology, and new programs,
it has experienced more of a struggle to build some reserve capacity for
its “general and educational” operations. A number of objectives
within the current strategic plan address this concern, and the college
needs to make sure that it is given some sustained attention.
Criterion Three (chapter four) requires the
college to provide “evidence of student learning and teaching effectiveness
that demonstrates it is fulfilling its educational mission.” It
is quite clear that Calvin College intends to keep teaching and learning
central to its mission. Moreover, the college communicates lofty goals
for learning that reach far beyond the immediate operational and instrumental
outcomes of an instructional program. It posits learning about nature
and culture to be an act of honor to the Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer
in whom “all things hold together” (Col. 1:17). To learn is
also to prepare for service as God’s agents in the world. One particular
challenge the college has been facing in meeting this criterion has been
to gauge how well it is serving these ultimate aims. The new core curriculum
has presented a fresh occasion for stating goals and seeing how well they
are being met. Every department continues to work at this task as well,
and the recent work performed to meet the NCATE and State of Michigan
standards for teacher education has sharpened their assessment plans and
operations. So has the work of each professional program to meet its accreditation
standards. There is much room for improvement, however, particularly in
completing the loop between evaluative research and program planning and
development.
Faculty members clearly expect to make teaching their highest job priority,
and they are given a variety of opportunities, such as workshops and funding
for projects, to improve their teaching craftsmanship. Faculty members
are evaluated regularly and comprehensively, with teaching effectiveness
being the foremost criterion for promotion and tenure, and the college
singles out exemplary teaching for presidential honors. Commitment to
learning is strong at Calvin, extending into the realms of student co-curricular
life as well as into the classrooms, laboratories, and library. In response
to the accreditation review of ten years ago, the academic and student
life professionals have greatly increased their collaboration in teaching
and learning. This collaboration is most evident in the first-year program
of the new core curriculum and in an area that is becoming a Calvin College
distinctive—academically based service-learning. Calvin vigorously
underwrites learning with facilities and with support services, and it
continues to expand and enhance both of them.
In sum, Calvin is strenuously engaged in improving and sustaining its
teaching and learning, and the college increasingly turns to teaching
assessment and institutional research for insights on how to improve this
work. The next challenge is to develop a more natural and regular connection
between assessment and program improvement.
Criterion Four (chapter five) requires Calvin
College to show that it “promotes a life of learning for its faculty,
administration, staff, and students by fostering and supporting inquiry,
creativity, practice, and social responsibility in ways consistent with
its mission.” Calvin’s commitment to being a community of
learning, scholarly inquiry, and cultural creativity is both strong and
well articulated. It is rooted in a Protestant confessional tradition
that has strenuously supported education at all levels, has demanded learned
leaders, and has developed a significant body of religious and cultural
thought. Calvin College’s Reformed heritage shares little of the
anti-intellectualism that has plagued American revivalist movements. The
college views advanced learning not as a challenge to its faith but, rather,
as a calling that is encouraged and even demanded by its religious convictions.
Calvin College lives and breathes a regard for the life of learning.
It has attracted a talented faculty and has taken measures to ensure that
it will continue to do so: establishing endowed chairs and research institutes,
funding programs for scholarship, sustaining a robust tradition of academic
freedom, and upholding high scholarly expectations. Both internal funding
and external grants for faculty and student scholarship have increased
significantly over the past decade. Recent national surveys have shown
that Calvin faculty members are much more productive, as scholars, than
their peers at other private four-year colleges.
At a time when consumer demands for entry-level career training have
made a liberal arts education increasingly rare, Calvin has recommitted
itself to educating for a breadth of knowledge, skills, and outlook. Its
new core curriculum reinforces that commitment, and in response to the
new core, a variety of academic departments have decided to incorporate
many of the aims of the core into their majors and minors as well. Calvin
has developed an increasing number of means to engage its students in
learning that is integral to living. The college offers residentially
based living-learning programs, service projects and service-learning
components within courses, workplace internships, cultural and artistic
projects and events, and a wide array of student-run organizations. The
college also provides a variety of opportunities for cross-cultural engagement,
in the United States or elsewhere in the world. Assessment has driven
the development of many of these features; student and alumni survey results
have challenged the college to make Calvin’s learning more international,
intercultural, and responsive to the world of work. One of the largest
educational changes overall has been toward inquiry-based learning, with
several departments reforming their majors to feature active, hands-on
learning of the discipline. In response, the college has increased its
support, both through internal budgeting and with external grants, for
programs of student research.
The main challenge in each of these areas is sustainability. The college
has added value to its programs faster than it has increased tuition.
It has implemented a number of new programs, including its new core curriculum,
with major assistance from external granting agencies. Calvin’s
faculty members also have produced much scholarship, taking advantage
of both additional resources and an extraordinary work ethic. If Calvin
is going to sustain these strong efforts in inquiry, creativity, and service,
it has to find ways to make support for them more certain. Early returns
on the quiet phase of the new capital campaign are quite encouraging on
this front, but the challenge of sustainability will remain.
Criterion Five (chapter six) requires that
the college, “as called for by its mission,” identify its
constituencies and serve them “in ways both value.” As chapter
six makes abundantly clear, Calvin College has dramatically expanded its
community engagement and service during the past decade. This service
extends in many directions: across the higher education scene on local
state and national levels; among the networks of Protestant Christianity
in the region, nation, and overseas; with its alumni and fostering denomination;
and with myriad community-serving organizations in West Michigan: health
care agencies, schools, cultural organizations, commercial and professional
networks, and neighborhood development agencies. The college regularly
gathers opinions and evaluative comments from the communities with which
it partners, and it makes adjustments accordingly.
If Calvin can maintain these relationships, they will bear fruit for
many years to come. In order to sustain them, the college will have to
meet three major challenges. First, it must keep its educational mission
foremost in its external partnerships. Second, it must have better coordination
of its many programs and projects. Third, it must find reliable long-term
funding for those programs that need to continue. The challenge remains
to decide what needs to begin, what needs to remain, or what needs to
run out its course, without stifling creativity and initiative.
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From Self-Study to Strategic Planning
This study is fitting well into Calvin College’s ongoing cycle
of strategic planning. It has proven to be a fairly comprehensive scan
of the current conditions, issues, and opportunities confronting the college—in
effect, providing a helpful SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities,
threats) analysis. This report is thus setting the stage for the college’s
next planning phase, a mid-course review of the current strategic plan,
to be followed by a proposal for conducting the next major strategic planning
effort. Perhaps it would be helpful, then, to conclude this study by beginning
to apply its findings to the salient challenges identified in the current
strategic plan. As reported in chapter two, the current plan has five
main goals:
- Strengthen the college’s vision and practice as a Reformed
Christian community of teaching and learning
- Fortify the college’s role as a center for Christian scholarship
- Make the college a more effective agent of God’s shalom in
its educational partnerships, both at home and abroad
- Foster a communal environment in which the college’s students,
faculty, and staff are encouraged and supported in their efforts to
discern, declare, and pursue their callings
- Enhance the college’s performance and reputation by improving
the quality of its services, facilities, and financial base, while
sustaining its affordability
1. A Reformed Christian Community of Teaching and Learning
It may strike some observers as rather odd that Calvin College would
continue to wrestle with its religious identity and mission when these
features seem so robust. Yet these beliefs have been the wellspring of
the institution’s vigor as an educator of Christian students and
its leadership in the Christian movement within North American academic
and intellectual life. The college cannot afford to let the spring go
dry. An old Calvinist motto helps explain this concern: “Always
Reformed, Always Reforming.” Behind it is the idea that every generation
needs to take up, use, and advance the heritage of thought and conviction,
or else it will stagnate and die. As this report shows, the college continues
to pour resources and creative energy into faculty development efforts
that foster a fresh appropriation of this Christian tradition for the
college’s teaching, scholarship, and service. An ongoing challenge
for this theological and philosophical kind of faculty development will
be to give faculty members the space to engage this tradition with critical
solidarity. Faculty members need to be asking new questions, testing old
answers, and keeping these ideas and commitments supple enough to address
new concerns as they arise. Evaluations of faculty members’ theological
and philosophical commitments and of the college’s efforts in faculty
development show that faculty members are overwhelmingly supportive of
the historic Reformed mission of the college and appreciative of the programs
to acquaint new faculty with them. Yet they are still wary of the implications
for academic freedom and creative inquiry. Members of the college have
been leading national spokespersons for the creative use of “reason
within the bounds of
religion,” as the Calvinist philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff provocatively
put it years ago. So
the college has the intellectual and perspectival resources to temper,
nuance, and thus strengthen
its efforts to engage its current faculty in a Reformed Christian vision.
Likewise, the new core curriculum and recent efforts to renovate majors,
minors, and professional
programs have been occasions to reinforce the distinctive Reformed Christian
vision of
the college. The new core curriculum has become identified with Engaging
God’s World, a book
on Reformed Christian cultural theology that all Calvin first-year students
are assigned for the
January Interim. Likewise, the Nursing Department’s work on a new
curriculum is resulting in a
book of essays on the ways in which Reformed Christian perspectives can
be brought to bear on
the profession of nursing. But in curricular work as well as in faculty
development, the task going
forward is to keep these Reformed Christian ideas fresh and compelling,
and to subject them to
sharp-minded conversation. As a variety of evaluative projects have shown,
Calvin students have
very strong radar for anything that looks like an attempt to indoctrinate,
and very little patience
for repetitive conversations that lack in range and depth. So the challenge
going forward is to
make sure that all students engage the core ideas of the tradition for
faith, learning, and living,
but that they are challenged to test and try those ideas freely and to
plumb them beyond the
introductory level. Hence some of the goals in the strategic plan focus
on revising major and
minor concentrations to extend core learning objectives, and on implementing
a strong assessment
program for the core curriculum, including its senior-level capstone courses.
Especially because it follows the Higher Learning Commission’s new
criteria, this self-study
underscores the importance of the strategic plan’s focus on strengthening
teaching and learning.
It does so, however, with an important difference. The strategic plan
emphasizes inputs: new
programs, curricular innovations, faculty teaching development, and the
like. The self-study, while
full of evidence of the college’s programmatic energy and creativity,
also shows the college making
a stronger turn toward programmatic evaluation, research, and assessment.
In its current level of
development the college has become more active and adept in taking soundings
and gathering
evidence regarding current performance. It has yet to develop robust patterns
of digesting what
it is collecting and turning it into useful insights for the improvement
of programs and practice.
The challenge going forward, then, is to develop regular patterns of analysis
and reflection. The
college must build in regular expectations that proposals for developing
new programs or changing
old ones must argue from evidence gained in solid programmatic research.
These patterns
must apply not only to the Academic Affairs Division but to the other
divisions as well.
At the core of these evaluative efforts will be the new core curriculum.
The new core is still
fresh, and the college has yet to graduate its first class that has worked
fully under its requirements.
The implementation of the new core has been the college’s primary
focus, but the structures
are in place for ongoing assessment. Already the college is finding that
parts of the system
need adjusting. Fortunately, the plan has included a standing committee
so that the evaluation
process and the adjustments can take place regularly. The next five years
will be critical, however,
in finding out, by means of the core assessment plan, what might become
a sustainable core
system for a long time to come.
2. A Center for Christian Scholarship
The strategic plan for 1997-2002 bristled with proposed measures to
strengthen Calvin’s support for scholarly work: chairs, study centers
and institutes, a research and scholarship office, increased course release
and sabbatical budgets, more summer research fellowships for students,
more seminars and conferences, and the like. The current strategic plan
is more focused in that regard; its aim is for the college to make many
of these ventures, already begun, more sustainable.
The self-study underscores that pattern. As chapter five shows, the
college has been energetic in
advancing the “discovery” agenda in recent years, and it has
a great deal to show for it: increased
support for faculty and student research and scholarship, and increased
opportunities to pursue
learning in a variety of venues—in community-based work, in overseas
programs and exchanges,
and in partnership with state and regional agencies. Underlying all of
this activity, however, is the
question of sustainability. Can faculty sustain their extraordinary levels
of scholarly productivity
from this small-college setting, given the other trends that the HERI
survey shows: increasing
time pressures, multiplication of tasks, and higher levels of stress?
One tempting response is to
say no, and to back off on expectations for scholarly engagement. But
Calvin College could not
pursue that option with integrity. The college has a leadership role to
play in the contemporary
Christian intellectual movement; it has a historic mandate to be a center
for Christian thought and
scholarship. The college has a responsibility to educate its students
according to the best canons
of higher education pedagogy, which emphasize engaged learning, inquiry-based
education, and
apprenticeship. Students learn to be scientists by doing science. They
learn to be humanists by
practicing the careful study of text and context. Students need senior
scholars who can model
such learning and serve as mentors. So the college needs to find ways
to sustain and underwrite
its gains in faculty scholarship.
One answer to the sustainability question implicit in the strategic
plan, and also addressed in this self-study, is to fortify the resource
base. As the college’s current capital campaign planning documents
show, the campaign’s success will be judged not only on whether
some significant building projects are funded, but also on whether the
college can raise significant endowment funding for institutes, chairs,
and faculty and student research. As the college’s development officers
prepare to take the new campaign public, the signs are very positive.
3. An Effective Agent of God’s Shalom
One of the most dramatic changes at Calvin during the past decade has
been its vigorous
efforts, in many venues and directions, to engage in service and outreach.
Chapter six overflows
with evidence of such activity—with churches, schools, teaching
hospitals, research institutes,
and community-serving agencies in the greater Grand Rapids region; with
off-campus programs
and sister universities in Asia, Europe, Africa, and Latin America; and
in a variety of educational
consortia in North America. Programmatic partnerships with its sponsoring
denomination, the
Christian Reformed Church, have become more frequent and more creative
as well. One of the
major developments of recent years has been the college’s vigorous
examination of matters of
race and ethnicity and its recommitment to justice, reconciliation, and
partnership across these
cultural lines.
The main lesson for Calvin going forward in its many partnerships is,
once again, sustainability.
Many of the current programs are funded with grants and gifts. Several
are the result of the
active engagement of one or two members of the faculty and staff. All
take active maintenance,
and all require careful prioritization within a busy institution. After
periods of expansion and
dispersion of effort must come periods for concerting and conserving effort.
To address some of
these concerns, the college has created a new position of director of
community engagement.
In each of the other realms in which the college is partnering, Calvin
continues to develop its
capacity to provide oversight, sustain interest, and steward people and
resources.
4. A Communal Environment
Calvin continues to grow busier, and its institutional patterns of activity
are becoming more complex as well. Questions about the character of campus
common life and the integrity of its relationships and processes are arising
from within and becoming more insistent. The college has devoted special
attention in recent years to students, faculty, and staff of color and
to the issues of justice, reconciliation, and partnership that arise from
their experiences on campus. With the passage of From Every Nation,
the college has a plan for making continued progress on these issues and,
one hopes, the will to pursue it. The college has made progress in addressing
gender concerns as well. In the last decade it has more than doubled the
number of women on its faculty and has increased the number tenured by
50 percent. It has instituted employment policies that allow more flexibility
for faculty and staff members with young families. Female representation
is substantial on the most influential policy-making committees and has
increased among dean-level administrators. Gender climate concerns remain,
but the current pattern of action suggests that Calvin is addressing them
effectively. The campus has worked hard to accommodate the growing number
of students with special needs because of physical or other disabilities.
It has a prioritized list of projects to pursue as it proceeds with renovations
and new facilities in order to make them accessible for the physically
disabled. For those with other learning challenges, the relevant service
centers on campus need to review their current operations and consider
fresh approaches in order to meet the rapidly growing demand for support.
This self-study deeply underscores the areas of need outlined in the current
strategic plan
regarding faculty and staff professional development. The college needs
to find ways to devote
more time and energy to the professional development of its administrative
staff, and thus to
demonstrate its desire to enhance and conserve the great value and loyalty
it enjoys from their
service. It needs to take a careful look at the changing patterns of faculty
activity and responsibility,
roles and rewards, and to consider some restructuring of these positions.
The Lilly-funded
vocation project has been a boon to students in becoming more vocationally
reflective and aware;
this effort needs to be extended more intentionally to staff and faculty,
even as the project grows
and matures in its work with students.
Many of the concerns about the quality of community life point to how
the community
makes decisions, allocates scarce time and funds, and communicates these
processes across the
campus. How vested and invested do the various members of the community
feel about the process?
As the self-study has shown, many of these concerns have focused on faculty
governance
and on decision-making processes regarding budgets, new programs, and
strategic directions. Is
governance transparent? Is it inclusive? Are the processes being properly
communicated? The
campus has devoted a fair amount of time and energy to these questions
over the past decade,
and it must continue to devote problem-solving attention to them in the
years to come.
5. A Sustainable Future
The self-study has revealed a dramatic, decade-long expansion of programs,
services, and
facilities. And more is planned. How will it all be attained? The strategic
plan calls for a capital
campaign, and in recent months, its quiet phase has begun, after a wait
of at least two years while
the economy has been on the mend. Yet while the capital campaign and strategic
plan stress new
building, the self-study adds the need, identified by Physical Plant
staff, to step up the pace of
renovating existing buildings. Program growth and change need to be matched
by the renovation
and reconfiguring of existing facilities to serve new programs or the
changing needs of older
ones. Likewise, the college continues to struggle to find a sustainable
formula for maintaining its
programmatic quality and dynamism while dealing with the constraints imposed
by patterns of
enrollment, tuition pricing, and rising costs. Capital campaign infusions
for student scholarships
and for research and programs should help, but they do not provide the
total solution.
Across the college and the many dimensions of its work, the largest
outstanding issue is, in a word, sustainability. Calvin College has been
on a fast track for curricular and programmatic innovation and growth,
building construction and renovation, expanded outreach, inter-institutional
partnerships, and international connections and relationships. Faculty
research is up. Student course loads are up. College program offerings
are up. And spending is way up—spending of tuition funds, gifts,
grants, and the energies of faculty, staff, and students alike. How sustainable
is all of this? It is tempting to answer with a Thoreau-like response,
such as “simplify.” Yet the college probably would be injured
more by a major dampening of the creativity and imaginative energy of
its students, staff, and faculty than by its current busyness and intensity.
To stand still is to stagnate, to grow complacent and insular. So the
answer is not stasis or retrenchment but planning and priority setting—in
a word, stewardship.
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