I am pleased to announce the membership of the President’s Advisory Council on Innovation, or PAC-I.
Approximately 75 faculty, staff and students were nominated or volunteered themselves for this committee – testimony to the readiness of our community to actively engage our quest for excellence and innovation. This high-quality pool of nominees made the selection process difficult, but has resulted in a council that I believe will help us shape a bright future. Please see at the end of this message a list of those selected.
In my request for nominations, I described the PAC-I as being responsible for “brainstorming together on a number of areas in which we seek to better fulfill our mission as being ‘the standard of excellence among residential, comprehensive colleges.’ The PAC-I will develop skill in imagining together the future of the College, using a student-centered perspective that focuses on identifying ways we can have the most powerful possible impact on integrative student learning, as identified in our mission. Questions of organization, policy, programs and priorities will all be on the table for the PAC-I to consider.”
I am excited at the possibilities for the work of this group. While "blue sky" thinking will be a part of what they do, much of the work will consist of brainstorming on ways we might address a number of focused questions or problems that stem directly from our mission. For example, the PAC-I may generate ideas on how we might better integrate student curricular and co-curricular experiences into a single tapestry of learning; how we might overcome barriers to increasing collaboration between departments and schools; how we might create a more international campus atmosphere and educational experience; how we can simultaneously improve the quality of the student educational experience, lighten the standard faculty teaching load, AND reduce the historical rate of tuition increases.
The examples above are just a few things that occur to me; I invite the entire college community to contribute questions, issues, and problems for the PAC-I to work on – questions that stem from a commitment to better living our mission and fulfilling our guiding principles.
Offering answers to questions like these will require an approach that is both creative and oriented to problem-solving. My hope is that the PAC-I will become a cohesive and effective team adept at generating lots of sentences that begin with "What if ...?"
What happens next? The PAC-I will have its first meeting later this month to get itself organized for the work ahead. Over the summer, the PAC-I will have a two day retreat off-site to do some in-depth grappling with questions that have been developed for the group to work on. The group will continue its work during 2010-2011, with the frequency and type of meetings to be determined as we learn what works best. I expect the PAC-I will also have one or more campus-wide forums next year that will give any interested parties an opportunity to engage in the kind of creative visioning at which I hope we will all become experienced.
We have an exciting future ahead of us – a future that we can shape according to the ideals of our mission and vision. I want to offer my special thanks to the following faculty and staff who will be part of the PAC-I, as well as to the two students who will be named to the group shortly:
Nicole Eversley Bradwell, Marian Brown,Lis Chabot, Nancy Cornwell, Bashar Hannah, Cynthia Henderson, Luke Keller, Shaianne Osterreich, Roger Richardson, Warren Schlesinger, Arno Selco, Bob Sullivan, Mary Tomaselli, Dave Weil, Dave Wilkins, Greg Woodward, and two students to be named.
https://www.ithaca.edu/intercom/article.php/20100401140325393