Planning for the new academic year
I spent a couple of days at the annual conference of the Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges (CLAC) at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester. Whenever I have gone to this campus I just go to their campus center, attend meetings and come back. I had no idea that they had such a beautiful, sprawling and hilly campus. The conference provided an excellent way to reconnect with many colleagues from other small liberal arts colleges. These meetings provide a forum to share what each of us is doing and the fact that we are so similar in many ways helps. Despite those similarities, there are considerable differences either because of geography, budget constraints and other things. I was pretty excited to hear that Occidental College has launched a very ambitious academic commons project and I requested Marsha Schnirring, the Associate Vice-President for Scholarship Technology there, to share any planning documents with us. By the end of the day yesterday, she had mailed me a few! We are also witnessing significant turnover in leadership in IT organizations and it was great to observe all the shuffles and connect with many of the new leaders, who are also from other CLAC schools and have risen through the ranks. And the hosts were fantastic!
I can’t believe that June is already over. Time to start planning for the new year. At the LTS senior leadership retreat a few days ago, we developed a plan which we will discuss in detail a bit later. I discuss briefly some of the plans in this post.