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| The
Proposal |
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Background
For
many years the College concentrated single-mindedly
and almost exclusively upon "liberal
education" in the arts and sciences
for eighteen-to-twenty-two year old full-time
residential students. That part of the
mission is at the core of what transpires
today on the Fredericksburg campus, and
it dominates the academic culture on that
campus. But beginning in the early nineteen
eighties, the College began slowly to
expand its part-time adult student enrollment
and evolved an office of "graduate
and continuing education" to look
after that clientele and also to develop
non-credit programming in response to
the demands of a growing local population
and business community.
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| By
the early nineties, formal plans were in
place to develop a second campus which would
focus exclusively upon serving the continuing
education needs of the greater Fredericksburg
commuting region, and at the same time return
the existing old campus essentially to its
historic agenda of traditional undergraduate
liberal education. The two campuses would
have very different agenda, and they would
need to operate with a considerable degree
of autonomy, one from the other. |
| In
the fall of 1997 a very broadly representative
(faculty, students, staff, alumni, governing
board, foundation board, local community)
task force was created by President Anderson
to look at the implications of opening the
new campus, especially with respect to institutional
image, and to recommend a name for the new
campus. The task force recommended, among
other things, that the institution "move
toward university status," and call
the new campus the James Monroe Center for
Graduate and Professional Studies. |
| In
September 1998, bearing in mind the task
force recommendations and anticipating a
new level of institutional complexity that
would come with the opening of the new campus
the following fall, the College’s Board
of Visitors adopted a resolution officially
committing the College to seeking university
status. It also proposed using the Commision
On Colleges of the Southern Association
of Colleges and Schools' (COC-SACS) "alternate"
Self-Study mechanism as the vehicle for
accomplishing the strategic planning and
decision making that "becoming a university"
would require. The links on this page present
the College's Board of Visitors (BOV) Charge
to the Self-Study Steering Committee, the
Proposal for the Alternative Self-Study
as approved by the BOV and COC-SACS, the
Timeline for the study, a list of Assumptions
that drove the original Self-Study Design,
a list of Issues that the Self-Study needs
to address, and the proposal for the compliance
side of the Self-Study. The Proposals were
approved by COC-SACS on October, 31, 2000. |
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