Dear Colleagues,
As you know, we have been working together to develop strategic priorities to enhance academic excellence at the College. To date, we have administered surveys to Chairs and faculty; held design-thinking workshops for faculty and academic affairs staff; and engaged the Board of Trustees, leadership team and deans in feedback and review sessions.
Published below (and here in PDF format) is the penultimate draft of our shared and collaborative efforts toward the plan: Academic Powerhouse. I invite your feedback on this living document — once we gather your feedback (including through shared governance bodies), I will make revisions and submit the final draft of the plan to the Board in September.
Feedback may be submitted using this feedback form or sent by email to provost@holycross.edu. Thanks for your continued collaboration as we create the academic future of the College together.
I hope you are enjoying a wonderful summer.
With warmest regards,
Elliott
Academic Powerhouse: Aspire Pillar 1
A Strategic Framework for Sustainable Excellence in the division of Academic Affairs
College of the Holy Cross
Office of the Provost
Circulation Draft for Feedback
Table of Contents:
Mission and Values
The ASPIRE strategic plan calls us to create a hope-filled future and insists that Holy Cross must “offer a liberal arts education that is among the finest in the world and be recognized broadly for doing so.” President Rougeau’s bold vision for the future of the College builds on existing strong academic foundations and reminds us of our core commitments as an exclusively undergraduate residential liberal arts college in the Jesuit, Catholic tradition.
We recognize that academic excellence is at the very heart of our identity. We know that faculty, students, and staff are drawn to Holy Cross by our commitment to pursuing high academic standards and engaging the most challenging questions within a supportive and welcoming intellectual and moral community that seeks the common good and cultivates human flourishing. As we navigate into the next decade, facing headwinds in public discourse about the value and cost of higher education as well as an increasingly competitive environment for recruiting a diminishing number of highly-qualified domestic students, our investments in academic excellence will confirm and elevate our standing and significance in the national marketplace. Such efforts will be central to confirming our position among the finest liberal arts colleges in the world, enhancing our ability to recruit and support the very best students, faculty, and staff drawn to an institution of our kind. Excellence attracts excellence.
Our vision is anchored in enduring principles of liberal education as well as the distinctive characteristics of Jesuit higher education. At Holy Cross we support fundamental scholarly inquiry and basic research within our liberal arts model because original research is central to the discovery, creation, and sharing of new knowledge across the disciplines and in the service of the public good. At Holy Cross, we celebrate superb teaching, inspired by the power of the great instructors, courses, and learning communities to catalyze learning, cultivate lasting capacities and habits of mind, and prepare our students as people for and with others. At Holy Cross, we affirm that inclusive excellence is coextensive with and inseparable from academic excellence. We celebrate the rich diversity of identity and background and worldview that recognizes the dignity of all people and we pledge to remedy historical and structural inequities that persist in reinforcing privilege, exclusion, and inequality of opportunity. At Holy Cross, in keeping with one of the signature advantages of liberal arts education, we prize cross-disciplinary integration and invite our students through such encounters to develop as optimistic and imaginative thinkers confident in their abilities to identify urgent questions and seek effective answers. Finally, we hope to maximize the agency of our students, supporting their success according to their academic and personal goals by enabling them to enter the field of their choice with multiple favorable options.
This is an auspicious time for Holy Cross to embrace the opportunity to achieve even greater academic heights. Among our academic priorities are core physical needs such as learning spaces, studios, laboratories and academic infrastructure; these are essential. But as President Rougeau has communicated, part of the College’s broader strategic plan focuses on investing in people. Our faculty are at the heart of a Holy Cross education and as such, faculty-facing priorities are well represented in this framework. Our talented and committed staff partner with faculty to create and sustain academic excellence, and we recognize that their support and development as well is critical to the success of these priorities and of the College’s academic enterprise broadly.
Our strategic framework elevates the scholar-teacher as the working model for faculty excellence in the years ahead. Supporting faculty engagement in their field of study and enhancing support for scholarly production across the disciplines has a direct and immediate impact on the quality of our curriculum and of the high-impact learning we offer our students. Recruiting and retaining a diverse world-class faculty, moreover, reaffirms our reputation for academic excellence within higher education as well as with future students, parents, industry partners, benefactors and potential employers. Excellence attracts excellence.
Structure and Purpose of this Framework
This framework document outlines the strategic priorities for the Division of Academic Affairs in order to guide future decision-making; it is a living document meant to be flexible and adaptive to feedback rather than a final plan etched in stone. As we move through the iterative process, we expect a final draft to be published in September 2024. The priority at this stage is to seek detailed advice and direct insights from faculty (and from faculty governance bodies such as the Academic Governance Council). This process follows the model and methodology used to develop the Aspire plan. As with any strategy document, the focus can seem sweeping and the interaction of some priorities with other divisions can be significant. For that reason, this preliminary framework is an invitation to collaborative dialogue.
Whenever possible, alignment with other pillars and/or strategic priorities of other divisions is called out specifically, even while the scope of this document is narrowly tailored. For example, College priorities and policies related to admission and financial aid are directly related to the mission and future of academic affairs. New academic initiatives outlined below may support the College’s admission goals or may generate additional opportunities with implications for financial aid (e.g. increasing available financial support for summer co-ops or industry internships). Nonetheless, in this example, College policy on admission or financial aid strategy is out of scope as overseen and prioritized by the President and captured elsewhere under the Aspire framework.
This preliminary framework focuses on the core components of academic affairs—scholarship, teaching, faculty development, academic infrastructure—and proposes a vision for the future of academic enterprise at Holy Cross. We focus here on how to cultivate and sustain a world-class exclusively undergraduate liberal arts program shaped by our Jesuit, Catholic mission that calls us to create and share new knowledge in the service of justice and human flourishing along with our opportunity to cultivate students, faculty, and staff who are for and with others.
At the heart of this document is a commitment to sustainable academic excellence. While we will need to retain the nimbleness and flexibility to embrace new opportunities and correct course in the search for continuous improvement, we must also approach new and existing initiatives in a planful and deliberate way to ensure long-term financial sustainability. Experimentation and disciplined, fixed-term pilot programs with data-informed assessment plans will be a lever for innovation that allows us to explore and evaluate new academic offerings before locking the College into long-term commitments to programs, facilities, or people. Likewise, we must commit to making hard decisions about offerings that may not be meeting our academic standards or which may no longer align with faculty or student interest or with College priorities.
Below we articulate three domains that collect our academic priorities, with brief goal statements, rationales, and indicators of progress to help us measure performance. Those three domains are:
Enhancing the Academic Core
Embracing Grand Challenges
Powering High-Impact Learning.
Enhancing the Academic Core outlines the priorities for the fundamental or core elements of our educational missions: faculty size and characteristics; faculty support and workload; academic infrastructure; support for scholarship and teaching. Priorities in this domain are largely content-agnostic (e.g. they do not articulate a field of study or academic area in which we plan to grow, but speak to the common conditions of faculty and staff in academic affairs, and evolve those conditions in order to meet the imperative to accelerate our academic excellence). Priorities in this domain enhance the scholar-teacher model at the heart of faculty development, recruitment, and retention as suited to our liberal arts model.
Embracing Grand Challenges identifies five urgent cross-disciplinary topics for sustained encounter that speak to any academic department or program. Naming “grand challenges” enable us to allocate resources to the complex global questions that can only be addressed by cross-disciplinary exploration as scholars and teachers, inviting our students to participate in tackling the live, pressing matters of the present and the future. Such work is not necessarily too applied or ‘presentist’— the resources and enduring traditions of liberal arts across all disciplines will remain critical to any meaningful and serious encounter with grand challenges, as will the ideas, methods, and intellectual resources of emerging disciplines.
Powering High-Impact Learning reaffirms the commitments we cherish as an exclusively undergraduate residential liberal arts college. Our structure provides us with enormous power to invest with care in the academic growth and development of our students by providing them with access to individualized learning experiences that promote integration, application, and agency. Such experiences will vary by areas of interest, but include practices that invite depth of focus in which the student is the intellectual driver (independent thesis research, for example) or where an immersive experience provides the student the context for applying their knowledge, habits, and capacities (summer industry internships or co-ops, for example). Such high-impact learning experiences empower our students to be the authors of their own education and develop the agency and experiences necessary to connect their liberal arts experience with lived experience beyond campus. High-impact learning experiences, as a signature of our academic program and a hallmark of academic excellence, must be available to all students regardless of their financial need.
Processes of Consultation to Date
In July 2023, the Provost embarked on a nine-month, exploratory process aimed at engaging the Holy Cross community in collaboratively developing the Academic Excellence Strategic Plan for the College. The multi-phase process involved engagement from numerous College stakeholders included Faculty, Department Chairs, Deans, Academic Administrators, Trustees, and Staff.
The first phase included a six-question, open-ended survey to Faculty Chairs and Directors in August, 2023, as preparation for the pre-semester Chairs retreat. We asked Chairs questions related to: how is their discipline/field evolving; what topics excite them the most; what cross-disciplinary challenges will shape the future; what issues will shape the future of higher education; what does a transformational student learning experience look like that prepares all students to thrive post-Holy Cross; and what capacities/habits of mind should a Holy Cross graduate possess post-graduation. After analysis of the survey data, we prepared a design thinking workshop for the Chairs that took place during the August retreat. After gathering and analyzing feedback, the Provost presented the findings at the Board of Trustees September 2023 meeting. The Board, along with faculty and the senior leadership team, then engaged in a live workshop, targeting grand challenges and critical societal issues that Holy Cross is well positioned to address. The Board was live-polled on their top priorities for the College and action steps the College could take in the next five to ten years to prepare Holy Cross students to be leaders, spearheading these challenges in the decades ahead.
In the next phase, we took the data from both the Chairs retreat and the Board of Trustees meeting and created an all-faculty survey aimed at the future of academic excellence at the college. The office of assessment and research administered the survey in October 2023, then coded and themed the responses into dominant, emergent areas. Based on those themes, we held two design thinking workshops in January and February, 2024 open to all faculty and academic administrators. The workshops were well attended and focused on the student experience and grand challenges of our time. Finally, the provost held a second session on academic excellence for the Board of Trustees at their January retreat.
All data and voices gathered over the past nine months are synthesized and presented in this draft strategic plan. The process was a rewarding, nine-month endeavor, aimed at ensuring all stakeholder voices were recognized and heard as we plan for and implement the next decade of academic excellence at the College.
Priority Domain: Enhancing the Academic Core
This domain details priorities for the fundamental or core elements of our educational mission– faculty size and characteristics; faculty support and workload; academic infrastructure; support for scholarship and teaching. Priorities in this domain are largely content-agnostic (e.g. they do not articulate a field of study or academic area in which we plan to grow, but speak to the common conditions of faculty and staff in academic affairs, and evolve those conditions in order to meet the imperative to accelerate our academic excellence). Priorities in this domain enhance the scholar-teacher model at the heart of faculty development, recruitment, and retention as suited to our liberal arts model– investments here may be understood as academic accelerators– or force multipliers for academic excellence. Each numbered priority expresses a concrete goal supported by a rationale and detail along with indicators of progress to help us measure performance year over year. Our commitment to academic excellence includes our candid use of data and feedback within the culture of assessment we are creating to support continuous improvement and transparent, intentional academic decision-making.
Priority 4A. Grow the size of the tenure-track and tenured (tenure-line) faculty by 30 new FTE lines across the disciplines, reducing the College’s dependence on visiting faculty.
Tenure–line faculty have long-term relationships with the College and with our students; we invest in their growth over the span of the career. Their scholarly achievements are fundamental to our reputation for academic excellence, opening doors for our students in professional and graduate schools and across the range of careers. Our population of tenure-line faculty is lower than our peers and aspirational peers, and our ratio of tenure-line faculty to students (14:1) puts us at the lower end of our comparison schools. Adding 30 new tenured faculty lines will reduce our reliance on visiting faculty, stabilize our academic programs, and create room for academic innovation. Adding 30 new tenured faculty lines will increase curricular options for our students (including access to mentored, high-impact learning, and enable us to build faculty depth in signature and strategic priority areas. Some of these hires may be lateral appointments and/or part of focused cluster hires in priority areas.
Indicators of Progress: year over year, we increase tenure-line faculty positions beyond replacement, recruiting 30 new tenure-line faculty by 2030. Achieving a target of 12:1 ratio of tenure-line faculty to students is a stretch goal.
Priority 4B. Adopt a more flexible approach to the standard faculty teaching load bringing us into closer alignment with aspirational peers.
To support the full development of the scholar-teacher model and to provide enhanced access to mentored learning, we should in the short-term adopt more flexible approaches to the standard 3:2 faculty teaching load, with the long-term goal of adopting a 2:2 standard in recognition of the heavy service, mentorship, and personal attention which our commitments require.Such a transition will be central to our commitment to academic excellence as it will support faculty scholarly impact, increase student access to individualized high-impact learning, support the adoption of inclusive pedagogies, and promote faculty wellness by reducing burnout. Moving to a future 2:2 standard teaching load will enable our faculty to devote more time to individual student mentoring and to the scholarly and pedagogical development central to academic excellence. As we embrace new evidence-based pedagogies and commit to high-impact learning experiences for all our students, we need to allocate appropriate time for this critical faculty effort. A 2:2 standard will also enable us to recruit and retain distinguished and diverse faculty more effectively by offering comparable conditions with aspirational college peers and many research universities.
To achieve this ambitious goal, we should proceed in two concrete phases, beginning with an initial phase of five years that combines data-rich planning with a more flexible approach to teaching assignments and more transparency around course releases. Options that increase flexibility might include: stacking courses across multiple years, course reductions at specific phases of the career, course releases for heavy service assignments, etc. Standards for course releases will be published and maintained; individually negotiated course releases will be dispreferred..
The first phase must include data-informed assessment of the impact on students, faculty, and the curriculum. Do students have increased access to mentored and individualized learning, more widespread adoption of new pedagogies, more scholarly productivity, and the like? Are students able to access the courses and experiences they need? Assuming the outcomes are affirmative, and as part of our broader investment in growing the tenure-line faculty overall, the College would then move to a permanent 2:2 load for tenure-track faculty while retaining flexible options for organizing teaching schedules. Some concomitant adjustment of faculty expectations, new course designs, and greater attention to service equity will be required to enable this transformational shift.
Indicators of Progress: after intensive modeling and implementation planning, assess the initiative by studying a) any negative impacts on available courses and seats, b.) increases in student access to high-impact learning experiences and the implementation of effective pedagogies, and c.) changes in faculty recruitment and retention. Proceed in phases as informed by impact data; only move ahead if the impact data confirm that the adjustment is achieving the goals outlined above.
Priority 4C. Launch and grow a nationally-recognized teaching Center to support inclusive, evidence-based pedagogies and provide faculty with expert partnership in adopting innovative and effective teaching practices to work for all of our students.
Building on the work of the faculty design committee, support the successful launch of a center for inclusive excellence in teaching beginning by recruiting a faculty director through a national search. The center will be a catalyst for effective teaching for all faculty and a resource to enable all of our students to succeed, realizing the full depth of our commitment to inclusive excellence. Support the center to establish Holy Cross as a national model for pedagogical excellence in the liberal arts, maintaining a team with trusted expertise to lead campus conversations and offering enhanced funding for pedagogical development, creative exploration, and curricular transformation.
Indicators of Progress: sample measures of success will include faculty engagement in programs, faculty satisfaction with pedagogical development services, and evidence of successful student outcomes attributable to center programming. Such metrics should grow year-over-year during launch and reach steady-state by 2030.
Priority 4D. Increase the diversity of our faculty and staff in academic affairs; increase the progress through faculty ranks, and the recruitment and retention of faculty with under-represented identities.
Our commitments to inclusive excellence touch all corners of the College and reflect our vision for a welcoming and broadly diverse community. Recent intentional efforts to recruit underrepresented faculty across identities have been successful, although retention remains an area in which we must be more proactive and responsive. Faculty of color may feel less of a sense of belonging to our community and are often highly sought-after for their academic achievement. Key strategies we must expand will include proactive recruitment programs that develop a pipeline of future faculty drawn to careers in an exclusively undergraduate liberal arts college, faculty development programs tailored to the specific needs of underrepresented faculty, addressing compensation in a market-aware manner and developing a retention reserve so we can react swiftly, and recognizing service equity and hidden labor. Building and sustaining critical mass will take deliberate efforts along with strong and consistent messaging from leadership.
Indicators of Progress: track demographics of new hires, retention of new hires, timeline to and progress toward each faculty rank.
Priority 4E. Deepen our investments in faculty scholarship by expanding our institutional support for and cultivation of external grants, collaborations, and sponsored research across the disciplines.
Compared to our peer and aspirational peer institutions, Holy Cross has underinvested in the offices and functions that assist faculty in identifying, competing for, and winning major external grants, academic fellowships, honors and awards. Likewise, opportunities for sponsored research projects with philanthropies, government organizations, and industry partners require dedicated and skilled focus. In order to support, recruit, and retain our excellent faculty (current and future), we must expand these functions. External grants, awards, and research collaborations are one of the most significant indicators of academic excellence and are widely understood across higher education as such. Ensuring that our faculty across the disciplines have access to and support for the entire lifecycle of activity related to grants, awards, and sponsored research (identifying, preparing, winning, administering, reporting)-- and doing so strategically– will be essential to continuing growth in academic excellence. Expand these functions with professional FTE with demonstrated experience, using indirect cost recovery to offset the growth in expense.
Indicators of Progress: measure growth in external research expenditures (awards as well as dollars received) and external academic recognitions (fellowships, awards).
Priority 4F. Increase the number of endowed professorships at Holy Cross and distribute these new professorships across the disciplines and within areas of strategic priority.
To support, recruit and retain academically distinguished faculty (which certainly includes our current faculty), we must double the number of named endowed professorships across the disciplines. These are very powerful tools to recognize faculty excellence, and levers of effective recruitment and retention at all ranks. Our pool of named and endowed professorships (26) is below average in relation to peer institutions, and dramatically below our aspirational peers; similarly, many of our current named professorships are underfunded. More endowed professorships distributed across the disciplines and in strategic priority areas will recognize academic excellence in our faculty and provide essential tools for retention and recruitment.
Indicators of Progress: measure the growth in named endowed professorships year over year from current, with a target of adding 20 new professorships by 2030.
Priority 4G. Develop and follow an academic capital plan as a subcomponent of the college capital plan in alignment with the Budget Planning Guiding Principles and principles and framework.
Identify and prioritize major academic infrastructure investments and major capital expenditures with the broader structure of the college capital plan and support the work of existing planning and approval structures such as the Finance Committee and senior leadership (major capital) and SPACE committee (smaller capital). Work with college space leaders to develop preliminary design studies and clearly articulated project goals in collaboration with faculty governance partners and academic stakeholders. Identify and prioritize existing academic facilities (labs, studios, libraries) for the maintenance and renewal necessary to meet academic expectations and thus to support excellence in learning and teaching. As the College plans for the growth of individual departments and of the faculty as a whole, work with department chairs to understand and consider space needs and long term planning so that college space leaders can take these considerations into account. Implement new capital projects as well as academic renewal projects as part of a long-term financial plan, with the flexibility to accelerate projects when available funds permit.
Indicators of Progress: measure progress towards major academic capital projects within the framework of the long-range financial plan and the broader capital priorities of the College.
Priority 4H. Ensure our classrooms and learning spaces are current, safe, appropriately equipped, and accessible.
Learning spaces should be updated, flexible and configured according to pedagogical best practices and professionally accepted standards. Develop and use professional design standards for classrooms and learning technologies that promote flexibility and enable evidence-based learning practices across the disciplines. Design standards that promote flexibility will also enable secondary non-instructional uses. Identify and renew outdated or substandard classrooms, prioritizing high-usage spaces and working to
renew a number of classrooms and learning spaces each year, prioritizing high-usage spaces. Allocate financial resources to bring as many classrooms as possible up to standard by 2030.
Indicators of Progress: establish a baseline as of Fall 2024, develop and publish design standards, and proceed with renewal year over year to ensure our classrooms and learning spaces support updated standards for academic excellence.
Priority 4I. Embrace experimental methods, celebrate academic innovation, and explore new forms of learning and new sources of expertise.
Ensure our faculty and staff have access to academic innovation methods and opportunities necessary to launch experimental projects and short-term, assessment-rich pilot initiatives. Commit to data-informed assessment of the efficacy of pilots and experimental initiatives; share outcomes transparently; celebrate creative exploration and reward faculty for innovative efforts. Develop a summer academic incubator or exploratory think-tank in which faculty and staff can explore heterodox, creative, and blue-sky ideas and develop pilot plans to test these ideas in live operations at the College and in the community. Incentivize and recognize champions of academic innovation through dedicated prizes and honors.
Indicators of Progress: measure faculty participation on academic innovation programs; measure the number of academic pilot projects that emerge from incubator and exploration initiatives; measure the success of pilots and adopt successful pilot projects on the basis of demonstrated achievement at Holy Cross.
Priority 4J. Deepen our scholarly, experiential-learning, and teaching collaborations within the regional academic, arts, and industry ecosystem.
Holy Cross is geographically fortunate to be within one of the most influential knowledge economies in the world, with hundreds of colleges and universities and major knowledge industries (academic medicine, pharma, biotech, software/computing, technology and robotics, finance, publishing) concentrated within 90 miles of campus. Our region is also an international hub of the creative and performing arts. Within such an ecosystem, and especially within Worcester/central Massachusetts, we have multiple opportunities for academic collaboration, industry partnerships, libraries and research consortio, and community-engaged scholarship and teaching in all of the disciplines we offer. Our emerging portfolio of accelerated masters collaborations with WPI, Clark, and the New England Conservatory of Music along with potential partnerships in development provide a powerful illustration of academic initiatives that add pathways to affordable graduate study, increase academic options for our students and deepen relationships with faculty and institutions nearby. Finally, building faculty depth in priority areas related to our regional industry ecosystem (for instance, computational life sciences) and weaving collaborative projects and experiences into our curriculum will position Holy Cross within these vibrant networks– and will increase career options for our students and external research opportunities for our faculty.
Indicators of Progress: measure consistent student demand for places in accelerated masters programs and feeder courses; increase year over year in research collaborations for students and faculty.
Priority Domain: Embracing Grand Challenges
This priority domain explores cross-disciplinary themes that describe systemic or global challenges of enduring significance, complexity, and power. Any academic discipline or department should be able to engage meaningfully in these challenges. Encountering such encompassing topics through our teaching, scholarship, and experiential learning creates pathways for discovery, illumination and integration across disciplines, prepares our students for lives of impact and aligns some of our academic offerings with timely and urgent matters. We will concentrate some academic investments (including faculty positions, internal funds for teaching and research and experiential learning, and infrastructure development) in these cross-disciplinary areas. We will likewise reflect on how internal practices may evolve to reflect these priorities and what we learn as we investigate them across the disciplines. For instance, our encounter with the grand challenge “Climate” may lead to community-originated insights that prompt institutional transformation. A course in environmental studies, for instance, might assess, design and propose an intervention that the College should adopt– applied learning in a hyper-local context with immediate impact! Potential illustrations of how we may explore a grand challenge include: visiting industry experts in residence; new faculty lines, cross-disciplinary teaching and research clusters, internals grants for teaching, curricular development, scholarship, and programming; experiential learning programs for students; industry internships and co-ops; updated academic infrastructure for scholarship and learning. We will also explore how to support most effectively the work of the faculty collaborating on these grand challenges in terms of physical space and their location within the College's larger academic structures.
5A. Grand Challenge Theme: Ethical Computing, Humane Technology
Computing technologies are rapidly transforming science and medicine, government, business and industry, communication and public discourse and access to information. They are also reshaping the way people create new knowledge, form community, learn, and work. The extraordinary promise of computing technologies that advance the frontiers of new knowledge is nonetheless accompanied by significant hazards. Unreflective adoption of computing technologies can accelerate inequalities, corrode public discourse, and normalize ubiquitous surveillance and algorithmic bias as a mechanism of control. As we navigate a future in which computing technologies will become ubiquitous in all domains of human activity, we must attend to the ethical and sociocultural impacts of these systematic and profound transformations and prepare our students to embrace the moral dilemmas of emerging technologies with optimism, confidence, and an appetite to seek justice and human flourishing. A liberal arts education must include the literacies, skills and capacities necessary for our students to thrive and lead in the years ahead; these skills include computational knowledge and quantitative reasoning as well as well-honed ethical judgment that prioritizes and celebrates dignity and human flourishing. As we seek to cultivate ethical computing and human technologies to serve the common good at Holy Cross, we will look to the humanities, arts, sciences, and social sciences for integrative understanding to thrive within a rapidly changing landscape as scholars, students, teachers, and citizens.
5B. Grand Challenge Theme: Inequality
Economic, political, social, and cultural structures continue to drive and deepen inequality in the United States and globally. The list of problems is daunting: lack of economic opportunity; political disenfranchisement and violence; unavailability of basic needs such as housing, education, and healthcare; increased concentration of capital and influence in fewer hands; climate crises that destroy livelihoods and homes; manipulation of public discourse and access to information that silences and siloes, rather than promotes empathy and collaboration. All of these problems disproportionately harm those among us who have already been marginalized on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, ability, religion, educational attainment, age, or geographical location. As a Jesuit liberal arts college, Holy Cross asks all who join this community to determine “our special responsibility to the world's poor and powerless” (mission statement). What tools do faculty, students, and staff need to understand inequality and together imagine and enact the change needed to reduce it? A liberal arts education must provide multiple perspectives on the myriad, deep, and intertwined causes of inequality, from neoliberal market fundamentalism, to public policy that prioritizes capital accumulation and wealth hoarding over social equality, to cultural discourses that stigmatize poverty or food insecurity as a failure of individual character or work ethic, to systemic inequality and structural violence enshrined in law and politics, to centuries of imperialism that forcibly extracted resources from the Global South to enrich the Global North. We must understand these issues as interdisciplinary: economic, political, social, and cultural, but also moral and ethical. And this study must include high-impact learning experiences such as community-based learning, collaborative research, and study abroad that will cultivate the knowledge and empathy needed to become persons for and with others. Inequality is the result of concerted human effort, and it will change only with equally concerted human effort that begins with education.
5C. Grand Challenge Theme: Climate
Daily we observe evidence of the impact of anthropogenic (human-caused) global climate change, including lasting and intensifying harms visited upon our common home. Unsustainable and damaging practices (carbon emissions, deforestation, petrochemical pollution) are rapidly pushing fragile and essential ecosystems to the brink of collapse, imperiling global populations and provoking refugeeism, threatening biodiversity, and challenging sustainable food systems. Without urgent and sustained action, parts of the globe will become uninhabitable, provoking ever more intense economic, geopolitical, and social strain. The time for action is now. At Holy Cross, we must encounter this profound challenge with optimism, creativity, and urgency, working across disciplines to deploy the imaginative capacities and justice-seeking habits of mind we cultivate to not only understand the harms of climate change but also identify solutions and action steps that can begin to repair a broken world.
5D. Grand Challenge Theme: Enhancing Democracy and Pluralism
What does it mean to live together as free and equal citizens? How do communities celebrate and welcome a rich array of identities, beliefs, cultures , worldviews, and ways of knowing within a framework of peaceful coexistence and mutual respect. Democratic pluralism celebrates difference as a desirable and productive source of collective enrichment, deliberative wisdom, collaboration, and encounter, although painful histories of dispossession and exclusion have often prevented groups from realizing their full belonging, standing, or agency. Groups need equal access to decision-making processes and equal space to hold and develop identities in community, within political, economic, and social frameworks that cultivate the common good, solidarity, and flourishing. Violent and exclusionary rhetoric that fuels identity-based conflict or promotes friend-enemy thinking imperils the supportive conditions in which groups can thrive. Systematic and widespread pressures brought to bear on political communities, institutions, and organizations threaten to supplant democratic pluralism with a winner-take-all antagonism that hardens difference into resentment and often violence or exclusion. Cherishing multiple forms of identity is constitutive of flourishing communities which respect the dignity of all and promote collective thriving. Knowledge-seeking institutions such as colleges thrive when identities and perspectives and disciplines collide, intermingle, overlap and enlarge each other within a non-negotiable framework of individual and group dignity. Authentic encounters with difference are central to liberal arts education; our recruitment efforts, curricular priorities, and co-curricular offerings must align with, reflect, and cultivate visions of community that are vibrantly inclusive and in which all have equal access to full membership and participation.
5E. Grand Challenge: Peacebuilding
Called explicitly by our Jesuit mission to seek peace and cultivate the common good, we inhabit a world and a nation in which extremism, polarization, and violence have become all too commonplace. Threats to peaceful and flourishing communities include state-sponsored warfare, terrorism and covert state action (including cyberwarfare), erosion of human rights regimes and the rule of law, ethnocentric nationalism, and the widespread adoption of language that promotes hate and celebrates violence. In the wake of systematic violence or just the antipathy towards peace and cooperation, acts of reconciliation, encounter, and atonement can begin collective healing. Peacebuilding happens in local and global settings, in individual acts of accompaniment and collective commitments to solidarity, anchored in a moral commitment to respect human dignity. A community of learning and teaching, devoted to growth through new knowledge, can itself exemplify the work of peacebuilding by modeling the pursuit of common solutions, seeking solidarity and cultivating amity even in the face of serious disagreement. This encounter– understanding the root causes of conflict, witnessing the profound harms of violence, and seeking reconciliation to begin building peace– requires all of the habits and capacities and moral-spiritual resources we hope to develop at Holy Cross.
Priority Domain: Powering High-Impact Learning
Powering High Impact Learning reaffirms the commitments we cherish as an exclusively undergraduate residential liberal arts college. Our exclusively undergraduate liberal arts identity provides us with enormous power to invest with care in the academic growth and development of our students by providing them with access to individualized learning experiences that promote integration, application, and agency. Such experiences will vary by areas of interest, but include practices that invite depth of focus in which the student is the intellectual driver (independent thesis research, for example) or where an immersive experience provides the student the context for applying their knowledge, habits, and capacities (summer industry internships or co-ops, for example). Many priorities in this domain build on existing successful programs, curricular and co-curricular initiatives within academic affairs as well as in other divisions such as Student Development. High-impact learning experiences empower our students to be the authors of their own education and develop the agency and experiences necessary to connect their liberal arts experience with lived experience beyond campus. Finally, high-impact learning experiences, as a signature of our academic program and a hallmark of academic excellence, must be available to all students regardless of their financial need.
Priority 6A. Develop and use an endowed fund to ensure that all Holy Cross students have access to experiential and high-impact learning opportunities regardless of financial need.
As articulated in Aspire pillar one, the College should “promise and deliver at least one experiential learning opportunity to all students.” We already offer many exceptional learning experiences for students (e.g. Maymester, summer internships, study away, summer research) but those opportunities are not always available to higher need students. Every Holy Cross student should have access to at least one fully funded high-impact opportunity during their four years with us. Financial support should recognize need fully by acknowledging not only direct costs but also lost earning opportunity. Likewise, ensure that all students have access to a laptop computer in order to enable equal access to learning materials and virtual computing environments; include a one-time grant to purchase a suitable laptop within our financial aid awards.
Indicators of Progress: measure funds raised to support access to high-impact learning year over year; measure increasing participation with attention to observable growth in higher need and under-represented student populations.
Priority 6B. Use summers intentionally to deepen and expand access to meaningful high-impact learning experiences away from campus, but with priority for opportunities in Worcester and the immediate region.
Develop a consistent array of summer opportunities that emerge from and extend our curriculum, using the opportunity for singularity of focus to immerse students in applied or experiential learning. For instance, paid summer internships with an industry partner that connect coursework to application and promote career readiness. Through a collaborative design process and the cultivation of relationships with industry partners, develop and grow the catalog of persistent offerings while also promoting student agency to identify their own summer opportunities. Enhance funding to to support under-resourced and unpaid opportunities, including by supporting living expenses and/or earnings replacement. Every student regardless of need should have access to a high-impact summer experience. Such summer opportunities should include co-curricular programming and a concluding student self- assessment with a faculty advisor (as part of a developmental reflective process mentioned below).
Indicators of Progress: measure overall student participation in summer opportunities and higher-need student participation in particular, seeking growth year over year; measure the growth in persistent opportunities (e.g. college-led summer offerings) as well as student-originated offerings; measure alignment of summer opportunities with career outcomes.
Priority 6C. Activate the campus during the summer with a focused suite of academic programs and opportunities.
Grow the for-credit summer session to continue supporting student curricular needs; identify carefully tailored academic non-credit and co-curricular offerings to meet the needs of our students and other learners. We should design, launch, and sustain a distinctive, tightly focused summer program that is well differentiated from both local and peer school offerings and that enhances our reputation for academic excellence, experiential learning, and long-term relationships by engaging new populations with a small number of focused, intentionally designed academic programs, such as short-term non-credit academic programs for alumni and families, and focused faculty-led career development programs for mid- career professionals). A pilot offering could bring learners to campus to explore a grand challenge through an interdisciplinary lens.
Indicators of Progress: track number of offerings, participation in offerings, seeking growth in participation and surplus revenues year over year; measure engagement and activation by audience (e.g. do programs generate increased admission activity from target populations).
Priority 6D. Increase accelerated masters partnerships in strategic priority areas and fields in which we are unable to offer our own programs (e.g. software engineering).
Launch a small number of high-quality offerings with trusted institutional partners in the area to increase available pathways to professional graduate study and emerging career options. Collaborations in which students begin progress towards their graduate degree while at Holy Cross provide significant financial savings and a streamlined admissions pathway– these extend our offerings intentionally to meet student need (especially in areas we do not support) while allowing us to maintain our liberal arts curriculum. Local universities (WPI, Clark, UMass Chan) and regional collaborators (New England Conservatory, Tufts) will be core partners.
Indicators of Progress: measure growth in student participation year over year until steady state; measure growth in 4+1 programs to offer at least eight 4+1 (or similar) collaborations by 2030.
Priority 6E. Expand cross-disciplinary integration and reflection at later phases of the undergraduate education.
As students move through their four years, we should weave in reflective moments of inquiry-driven learning and cross-disciplinary reflection, accompanied by a faculty advisor. Montserrat is a signature program to be celebrated, but integrative cross-disciplinary thinking should be sustained over the four years through intentional reflective activities in dialogue with advisors and more consistent access to cross-disciplinary learning in the junior and senior years. Faculty may wish to develop advanced interdisciplinary courses to complement advanced work in the major (e.g. offer a second encounter with a Montserrat-style inquiry-driven course in the junior or senior year). Such advanced-level integrative courses may be aligned with grand challenge topics, may be team-taught by faculty in multiple fields, or may revisit first-year Montserrat topics, questions, and methods. Faculty and students may consider formalzing and expanding the annual process of intentional academic reflection (potentially to augment existing advising and career development processes). Such augmentations to our existing curriculum and advising processes will require enhanced College support in time and planning effort.
Indicators of Progress: measure growth in cross-disciplinary courses and learning opportunities after the first year; survey recent graduates on sentiment and insights into their highest-impact learning experiences.
Priority 6F. Expand undergraduate opportunities for capstone projects, senior theses, mentored independent research, and other forms of independent study that promote student agency, autonomy, and the creation of original scholarship.
Expanding opportunities for our students to pursue original questions that emerge from their academic training and align with their future goals positions students as the authors of their own learning, with appropriate mentorship and high academic expectations. Culminating projects such as capstones (which may involve applied research emerging from a summer internship) and traditional senior theses are available within the curriculum; faculty may wish to consider removing barriers to entry and promoting flexibility in order to make an integrative, self-motivated academic project more consistently available to all interested students.
Indicators of Progress: measure the growth in students writing theses and capstone projects year over year; measure evidence of impact of such autonomous academic study on student career and academic outcomes.
Priority 6G. Enhance existing opportunities for community-engaged and project-based learning, with priority for opportunities based in Worcester and the region.
Students cherish courses and co-curricular programs that enable them to put their scholarship into action, connecting their academic training and development across the disciplines with community partners. Building on multiple successful programs in this domain, enhance opportunities for students and faculty to accompany community partners to support their goals, prioritizing initiatives that align with grand challenges, deepen our commitments to Worcester, and extend our mission to develop people for and with others.
Indicators of Progress: measure growth in opportunities for students and faculty year over year; measure impact of community-engaged scholarship and learning with and for community partners (seeking and using their feedback to improve).
We look forward to continued conversation around each of these priorities as we seek iterative improvement in the months ahead, confident in the bright future of the College and eager to continue our momentum swiftly forward.
Respectfully submitted,
Elliott Visconsi
Provost & Dean of the College
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