Humanities Strategic Plan

Humanities Division
April 23, 2008

Mission Statement

The Humanities Division seeks wisdom, cultivates imagination, and pursues truth through skillful writing, creative exploration, and critical reading and thinking.

Goal #1: Increase the quality of students’ engagement with ideas, languages, texts, and contexts.

Objectives:
1. Raise the visibility and prestige of the humanities in the self image and public image of the college.
2. Expect, support, and reward good teaching.
3. Strive to achieve greater ethnic and cultural diversity among faculty and students in the immediate future.
4. Create an environment in which academic inquiry and religious inquiry are mutually enhancing experiences for faculty and students.
5. Balance the perennial and the cutting edge in teaching and research (e.g. save the Classics, explore the border lands, preserve the culture of books, experiment with new technologies in teaching and learning)
6. In public statements and in practice, promote and protect academic freedom in intellectual and artistic expression for all members of the division.
7. Expand student-faculty collaboration in the humanities, including research programs and opportunities beyond the classroom.

Goal #2: Create opportunities for students and faculty to synthesize diverse ways of knowing and to act on the wisdom they gain from seeing knowledge whole.

Objectives:
1. Create more opportunities for team teaching in the Humanities Division.
2. Create more opportunities for ambitious and high-achieving students.
3. Develop a co-curricular community among the students within the Humanities Division.
4. Encourage and support faculty members in bringing humanities programs to the rest of the college, the community, and the world.

Goal #3: Acquire the human and financial resources to support Goals One and Two.

Objectives:
1. Work to make the recruitment of top humanities students an institutional priority.
2. Increase funding for student-faculty collaboration in teaching and research during the semester as well as during the summer.
3. Enhance support for faculty scholarship and for creative and scholarly publications.
4. Demonstrate the need for an increase in the number of faculty in the humanities departments.
5. Establish and maintain a limit of 20 in all general education writing instruction courses, maintain the limit of 18 in English 113, and maintain the limit of 24 in language instruction classes.
6. Increase faculty development in the teaching of writing across the curriculum, in part by developing a full-service Writing Center.
7. Hire an internship coordinator for the humanities division.

Four objectives will be developed in 2008

Goal #1: Objectives #1, #2, #3
Goal # 3: Objective #1