~
DAVIDSON
COLLEGE
August 2024
Davidson’s Enduring Purpose for a Dynamic World:
Strategic Priorities and Proposals
Davidson College embraces our educational mission as articulated in our Statement of
Purpose. In a turbulent moment in higher education and in wider society, institutions like
Davidson with a clear identity, robust academic reputation, talented workforce, vibrant
campus and local community, solid financial resources, and deep alumni engagement are
poised to thrive even in the face of challenges[1]. Davidson can and must strategically employ
our strengths to continue to serve our mission.
A year-long process engaging senior campus leadership, the board of trustees, faculty, staff,
and students has sparked probing analysis and creative visions for the future. Four working
groups and a steering committee explored key themes that play a vital part in the strategic
priorities and proposals that have emerged. The Strategic Planning Working Groups were
charged with developing big ideas; they were instructed to leave planning for implementation
for the next stage of the process.
We discovered a consensus across the college on two complementary points: 1) We embrace
Davidson’s enduring purpose, and 2) To continue to fulfill that purpose, we must seize the
opportunities that we see at this moment.
The priorities and proposals described below each support our purpose and enable us to
adapt to future demands. We will strategically redouble efforts to deliver the distinctive
Davidson experience on campus and across a lifetime. A well-designed Davidson experience
that supports and guides students as they move from pre-enrollment to graduation and
alumni status is integrally connected to wellness and well-being in mind, body, and spirit.
This strategic plan will position Davidson to achieve our purpose more fully—to assist
students in developing humane instincts and disciplined and creative minds for lives of
leadership and service.
Priorities
1. Enhance our academic resources and curriculum, recruit and support faculty in
academic areas of need, and build a library for the future.
2. Reinforce Davidson's strengths in identifying, enrolling, and supporting students who can
thrive at Davidson, regardless of their circumstances.
3. Build a four-year advising and “learning for life” program that guides students through
Davidson in a spirit of exploration and self-reflection, assisting them to develop intellectually,
personally, and professionally.
4. Deepen and expand our work in institutional history; education and reconciliation;
and justice, equality, & community.
~
DAVIDSON
COLLEGE
August 2024
Davidson’s Enduring Purpose for a Dynamic World:
Strategic Priorities and Proposals
Davidson College embraces our educational mission as articulated in our Statement of
Purpose. In a turbulent moment in higher education and in wider society, institutions like
Davidson with a clear identity, robust academic reputation, talented workforce, vibrant
campus and local community, solid financial resources, and deep alumni engagement are
poised to thrive even in the face of challenges[1]. Davidson can and must strategically employ
our strengths to continue to serve our mission.
A year-long process engaging senior campus leadership, the board of trustees, faculty, staff,
and students has sparked probing analysis and creative visions for the future. Four working
groups and a steering committee explored key themes that play a vital part in the strategic
priorities and proposals that have emerged. The Strategic Planning Working Groups were
charged with developing big ideas; they were instructed to leave planning for implementation
for the next stage of the process.
We discovered a consensus across the college on two complementary points: 1) We embrace
Davidson’s enduring purpose, and 2) To continue to fulfill that purpose, we must seize the
opportunities that we see at this moment.
The priorities and proposals described below each support our purpose and enable us to
adapt to future demands. We will strategically redouble efforts to deliver the distinctive
Davidson experience on campus and across a lifetime. A well-designed Davidson experience
that supports and guides students as they move from pre-enrollment to graduation and
alumni status is integrally connected to wellness and well-being in mind, body, and spirit.
This strategic plan will position Davidson to achieve our purpose more fully—to assist
students in developing humane instincts and disciplined and creative minds for lives of
leadership and service.
Priorities
1. Enhance our academic resources and curriculum, recruit and support faculty in
academic areas of need, and build a library for the future.
2. Reinforce Davidson's strengths in identifying, enrolling, and supporting students who can
thrive at Davidson, regardless of their circumstances.
3. Build a four-year advising and “learning for life” program that guides students through
Davidson in a spirit of exploration and self-reflection, assisting them to develop intellectually,
personally, and professionally.
4. Deepen and expand our work in institutional history; education and reconciliation;
and justice, equality, & community.
August 2024
DAVIDSON
COLLEGE
Davidson's Enduring Purpose for
a
Dynamic World:
Strategic Priorities and Proposals
Priorities
2
5. Coordinate and build out curricular and cocurricular work in the areas of ethical
leadership and public good.
6. Strengthen our relationships in the Town of Davidson and across the Charlotte region.
1. Enhance our academic resources and curriculum, recruit and support faculty in
academic areas of need, and build a library for the future.
Rationale: Academic excellence fuels Davidson’s identity and mission. The past five years
have brought a significant wave of retirements of stalwart faculty members who shaped the
college over more than three decades. We have hired a new cadre of three dozen tenure-
track and other continuing faculty members, who are more diverse in terms of fields and
demographic backgrounds than their predecessors. As the fields of liberal arts knowledge
have expanded, so too the faculty have increased the number of majors and minors available
to students. Fields such as Computer Science, Public Health, Africana Studies, and various
modes of data and digital studies are now integral parts of our curriculum, alongside long-
standing areas of strength across the Humanities, Arts, Social Sciences, and Natural
Sciences. Our strategic work must continue to recruit innovative scholars committed to
teaching and developing our curriculum, which educates students for the world in which they
will lead and serve. At the same time, our academic facilities, including the library, must meet
the needs of our students, faculty, and staff into the future.
Proposals:
•
Explore opportunities to make the curriculum and daily schedule more flexible,
including prioritizing activities that best enhance the Davidson experience and use
student, faculty, and staff time efficiently.
•
Continue to support ongoing, proactive curricular reflection and reform undertaken
via faculty-led, student-centered initiatives implemented through existing
governance structures.
•
Expand support for scholarship and creative work by faculty and students via internal
resources and infrastructure for externally-funded research—including fields across
STEM with particular attention to emerging and disruptive technologies such as
generative artificial intelligence.
•
Promote teaching excellence, including deploying inclusive pedagogy to reach
all students, through the John Crosland Jr. Center for Teaching and Learning.
•
Build out the human and technological infrastructure for digital and visual studies in
the 21st century.
•
Complete a major renovation to transform the library into the multi-disciplinary center
of intellectual life at Davidson College, a dynamic environment for students, faculty,
staff, and the broader community to collaborate, explore, experiment, and grow as
researchers, creators, and scholars.
2. Reinforce Davidson's strengths in identifying, enrolling, and supporting students who
can thrive at Davidson, regardless of their circumstances.
Rationale: The opportunity to learn and grow at Davidson College is extraordinary, and a
fundamental component of a Davidson education is learning from the breadth of experience of
3
one’s classmates. We must actively promote this opportunity and extend it to the young people
who are most able to benefit from it, regardless of their economic circumstances, social
background, or origin, whether domestic or international.
Proposals and existing initiatives:
•
Increase financial support to maintain need-blind admission and meet
demonstrated financial need without packaging loans—ensuring Davidson is
accessible for talented students regardless of their families’ ability to pay.
•
Build endowments and new scholarships to decrease the share of financial aid
allocated from the college’s operating budget.
•
Intensify the pathbreaking experimental work in Admissions to partner with
community-based organizations and add networks to reach low-income and first-
generation students, including recruiting Pell-eligible students.
•
Build on collaborations between Admission & Financial Aid, Athletics and Arts
departments to recruit scholar-athletes and scholar-artists from all
backgrounds.
•
Expand efforts by College Communications and Marketing to increase visibility and
knowledge about Davidson and encourage and support our alums to assist in that
work.
3. Build a four-year advising and “learning for life” program that guides students through
Davidson in a spirit of exploration and self-reflection, assisting them to develop intellectually,
personally, and professionally.
3.A. Advising and Learning for Life
Rationale: The Davidson student experience includes access to world-class faculty,
experiential learning opportunities and funds to support exploration in the classroom, the
community and across the world. The college has all the elements needed for a student to
explore their passions and develop their purpose. This reflective work connects academics,
student life, and career exploration. We can improve by making it easier for each student to
discover and select, thoughtfully and intentionally, from the many options available to them.
We can enhance the ways we teach our students to reflect on experiences and seek
intellectual and career pathways that appeal to their strengths and goals. We want every
Davidson student to graduate with a sense of their own story—including moments that might
look like failures or detours—so they can articulate a dynamic narrative about their
intellectual, personal, and professional growth.
Proposals:
•
Redesign the advising system to ensure that all students can receive high-
quality advising, develop a mentor network, and come to recognize their
unique abilities and capacities. As we enroll domestic and international
students who can thrive at Davidson regardless of their economic
circumstances and social backgrounds, we redouble our commitment to
supporting each student on their journey to graduation, through career
development, and as alums of the college.
•
Implement a four-year cocurricular, developmental learning for life program
that provides information about available resources and regular exposure to
the skills students need, when they need them. Among these skills is the
4
ability to articulate the meaning of their experiences in a dynamic narrative.[3]
The learning for life program will incorporate career exploration as well as
strategies for using evolving technologies, including artificial intelligence, and
ways to harness those technologies for ethical uses and productive personal
and professional exploration.
•
Centralize resources for advising, the four-year learning for life program,
high-impact experiences, networking, and career development in order to
support curricular, co-curricular, and extracurricular high-impact experiential
learning opportunities alongside a student’s academic course of study. The
central structure will focus on reflection and mapping to assist students in
connecting their passions to their purpose through storytelling – that is, to
learn to articulate the meaning of their experiences.
•
Combine existing alumni/ae volunteer roles with newly created roles,
including mentoring opportunities, to connect students and alums with the
network of Davidson alums, parents, and friends—one of the most engaged
networks among all colleges and universities.
•
Explore a new academic requirement: a First-Year Seminar that reflects on
the world’s most pressing problems from multiple perspectives and ways of
knowing, with a focus on learning with and from their peers as they read
about and discuss these problems, articulate their own positions, and plant
the seeds of their own narrative of learning and growth.
3.B. High-Impact Experience Guarantee
Rationale: Research shows that high-impact experiences have significant educational benefits
for all students, and especially for those from underserved and underrepresented backgrounds.
Such experiences include research, study abroad and away, fieldwork, artistic productions,
exploratory and experiential travel, internships, and community-engaged learning. Davidson
currently offers a wide range of high-impact experiences; we can improve how well we ensure
that every student can take advantage of at least one such experience and how well we weave
critical reflection into each one. While competing on an NCAA Division I team can itself be an
intense and formative experience, we intend for scholar-athletes, who comprise one-fourth of
Davidson students, to have access to at least one additional high-impact experience.
Proposals:
•
Guarantee and make accessible a high-impact experience for every student.
•
Use all available resources and channels to encourage every student to take
advantage of this guarantee.
•
Streamline and centralize the resources and advising for high-impact experiences
to reduce the burden on students and employees and to ensure that these
experiences are structured with a reflective component that helps students
integrate them into their intellectual, personal, and professional narratives.
•
Strengthen existing high-impact experiences as needed to ensure their quality
and accessibility—including expansion of research opportunities in STEM and
across the curriculum as well as funding, networks, and critical reflection to
support internships.
•
Build new opportunities for curricular and/or extracurricular experiential
learning, including through interdisciplinary problem-solving.
High-Impact Expeence Guarantee
5
4. Deepen and expand our work in institutional history; education and reconciliation;
and justice, equality, & community.
Rationale: Our initiatives in these areas reflect our mission in a fundamental way. Davidson
College is rooted in the soil of the American South, a region marked – and marred – by slavery
and racial injustice. Since 1837, the college’s ideals grounded in the Reformed Tradition have
centrally included freedom and equality. However, many of its founders and early leaders and
benefactors profited from the enslavement of human beings; the college itself profited from the
work of enslaved people. For more than a century after the end of slavery in the US, the college
was complicit with structures and practices that maintained racial segregation, exploitation, and
injustice.
We have an obligation to the past, present, and future to uncover and educate all members of
our community about this history. Inspired by and following from the work of the Commission
on Race and Slavery, we will continue to expand and deepen this work.
Proposals and existing initiatives:
•
Develop Beaver Dam plantation, homestead of the Davidson family, as a site for
the study of institutional and local history and descendant outreach.
•
Expand our engagement with descendants of people enslaved by college founders,
leaders, faculty, and benefactors, alongside ongoing exploration of the college’s
history with slavery, segregation, and efforts to promote racial justice.
•
Continue outreach and collaboration efforts aimed at using the college’s assets to
understand and partner with communities harmed by the legacies of slavery and
racism, and expand additional education and racial reconciliation work, building upon
prior efforts of the college’s Commemoration and Acknowledgement and Naming
Committees.
•
Support Dútα Bαhiisere Kus Ráˀhere: We Know Corn Together, our multi-faceted
educational collaboration with the Catawba Nation.
•
Deepen our curricular commitment to justice, equality, and community across
the curriculum.
5. Coordinate and build out curricular and cocurricular work in the areas of ethical
leadership and public good.
Rationale: According to our Statement of Purpose, our mission is to assist students in
developing humane instincts and disciplined and creative minds for lives of leadership and
service. The Honor Code and the community of trust that it requires and reinforces are central
to Davidson’s identity. The strategic planning process imagines measures we could take to
elevate our purpose by more actively embracing and promoting work aimed at building a
more just, equitable, and community-minded campus, society, nation, and world. We believe
Davidson has an opportunity to fill a void in public life for ethical leadership that forges mutual
listening and learning, public understanding of social problems, and positive outcomes.
Proposal:
•
Establish an Institute for Public Good. The Institute will coordinate activities to help
our students and employees become effective, ethical leaders and citizens in local,
national, and international arenas. It will (1) support moral-philosophical discussion
6
about questions of individual and public good; (2) prepare students to collect and
analyze data to answer questions about issues of public concern; (3) develop
leadership capacity, including fostering discourse across political and moral divides
and building common understandings to solve problems for the public good; (4)
identify and analyze opportunities to promote the public good through policy
innovation; (5) practice civic service through reciprocal collaboration with and
assistance to underserved communities. The activities of the Institute will include
leadership initiatives such as educational programs; student fellows and
programming; visiting domestic and international scholars, practitioners, and leaders;
leaders in residence; leadership programming connected to our distinctive approach
to Division I “athletics done right”; student internships and research; and skills- and
capabilities-building projects. The themes it considers will include ethics and integrity
(including academic integrity and Davidson’s Honor Code), sustainability, social
capital, and racial education and reconciliation—among others.
Additional Proposals:
•
Establish an incubator for work in Arts and Public Good.
•
Explore curricular options in Ethics and Social Change and Policy Studies.
•
Expand research commitments to specific social problems such as economic
mobility and emerging & disruptive technology.
Departments such as Philosophy and Religious Studies and the Philosophy, Politics, and
Economics major offer resources that reflect on the nature of the good and public good. The
Departments of Political Science, Economics, Educational Studies, and Public Health offer
courses on policy studies, public administration, and specific policy areas. The Departments
of Art, English, Theatre, Music, Dance, and Digital, Film and Media Studies have all
demonstrated an interest in civically engaged artistic production. Through FIRST, our STEM
departments have spearheaded learning on inclusive pedagogies, ethical practices, and
community-based research. Indeed, nearly every academic field could make meaningful
connections to public-good work.
In addition to academic departments and programs, other existing resources include:
•
College Crisis Initiative (C2I)
•
Deliberative Citizenship Initiative (DCI)
•
Chidsey Leadership Program
•
Smith-Davidson Leadership Initiative
•
Center for Civic Engagement
•
Dean Rusk International Studies Program
•
Summer Promise Program (currently in planning to launch June 2024)
6. Strengthen our relationships in the Town of Davidson and across the Charlotte region.
Rationale: Our location in greater Charlotte is a remarkable asset for Davidson, just as we
are an asset for our town and region. We can leverage our myriad relationships for mutual
benefit. The Working Group on Engaging Davidson and Greater Charlotte learned that while
Davidson has made significant impact through partnerships between various parts of the
College and organizations in Lake Norman and Charlotte, overall, we have potential for even
stronger engagement in a leadership capacity. We aim for Davidson to be viewed as a
natural partner for academic initiatives in Charlotte and to attract many applicants from
7
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. As an institution focused on helping students lead lives of
leadership and service, Davidson has both an opportunity and a responsibility to develop an
institution-wide strategy to bring more visibility to the work we are already doing— and to
expand our relationships in Davidson and greater Charlotte.
Proposals:
•
Enhance structures that help students access opportunities in the greater Charlotte
region, build our relationships with key businesses and organizations that hire our
graduates, and provide students with related career services.
•
Pursue strategic collaborations with other educational institutions that are either
located in Charlotte (Johnson C. Smith University, University of North Carolina at
Charlotte, Queens University, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools) or have satellite
campuses (Wake Forest Medical School) to work toward an Academic Neighborhood
in Charlotte through which we could share resources and work together to solve
entrenched problems facing our communities.
•
Access a physical space in Charlotte to use as a launching pad for Davidsonians to
engage with Charlotte and secure reliable and accessible transportation to that
location. This space will allow Davidson to benefit from opportunities arising from area
growth and strengthen and improve our community. We envision a multi-faceted
space promoting a living[4]-and-learning community aligned with our commitment to
more systematically apply our humanistic, artistic, social, spiritual, and scientific
creativity to pursue innovative solutions to community issues.
•
Bring more of our neighbors – from our extraordinary community of more than 1,700
local alums to underserved students in our region – to campus through intentional
outreach in programming, research, and events.
Next Steps, Implementation, and Evaluation of Outcomes
Year one of the strategic planning process has yielded a rich set of ideas and initiatives, as
described above. As we refine and build consensus around this statement of priorities and
proposals into the summer of 2024, we will also frame implementation plans for each
proposal, with the goal of moving forward to the next appropriate step for each one.
Some of the ideas generated by the working groups have already been implemented or will be
realized in the 2024-25 academic year. This spring we named an inaugural Vice President for
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, who will become a key partner in the work of education and
reconciliation and related initiatives. With presidential discretionary funds, an Artificial
Intelligence pilot initiative launched in May 2024, offering all faculty and select staff and
students access to pro-level AI tools and professional support from Davidson’s Technology &
Innovation Office and Academic Affairs to explore applications. The library project design—
now envisioned as the George Lawrence Abernethy Library at Davidson College—and
fundraising proceed apace, based on prior and ongoing consultation with faculty. Possibilities
to create an Institute for Public Good have already arisen. We will move forward with
proposals as we are able to advance them with the necessary planning and resources.
For many proposals (or clusters of proposals), President Hicks and his senior leaders will form
a team of stakeholders to plan next steps. In some cases, this will require a focus on
feasibility, and for most, it will involve developing an implementation plan. These planning
teams will include colleagues from the faculty and relevant administrative offices and units.
Next Steps, Implementation, and Evaluation of Outcomes
8
Students, alumni, trustees, and friends of the college will also be asked to serve as fitting to
the topic and work. This planning and implementation process will begin immediately, with
many teams beginning in fall 2024 with the start of the new academic year.
For each initiative, the planning teams or other relevant leaders will establish metrics for
assessing that initiative’s success in achieving the outcomes named in this strategic plan.
During the 2024-25 year, senior leaders will consider the possibilities and progress on each
proposal, including the resources needed to initiate and to maintain it, and the source(s) of
those resources. Ideas that are determined to be feasible with existing resources will be
pursued through normal governance processes on whatever timeline is workable; ideas that
are feasible with additional resources will become opportunities for fundraising. As each
initiative is implemented, senior leadership will work with the Office of Institutional
Effectiveness, and other offices to develop quantitative and qualitative methods to evaluate
progress and outcomes. The evaluation planning and results will be reported to the Board of
Trustees at least once per year, beginning with an update at the April 2025 meetings, and
continuing as initiatives reach their scheduled evaluation date(s) until 2030 or the Board
determines the objectives have been met. Note: we have not (yet) named a firm end date for
the plan.
At its April 18-19 2024 meeting, the Board of Trustees passed a motion affirming the direction
of this strategic planning vision and process. The faculty, who also received this document at
the same time as trustees in April, are invited to provide input to the Strategic Planning chairs,
Dean Byron McCrae and Dean Shelley Rigger, and to President Hicks. This revised document
is being shared in May with the trustees, faculty, and staff. In response to the feedback we
receive, we will continue to refine the document over the summer and request from the Board,
in August, approval of our strategic plan in the form of a revised version of this document. We
are grateful for the significant, constructive and creative input of many people across the
college community in moving this planning process forward and helping Davidson to realize its
purpose into the future.
[1]
Davidson’s “fundamentals” are among the strongest of any college in the country. Our
financial resources create a firm foundation thanks to the generosity of alumni, family and
friends of Davidson and the extraordinary stewardship of our in-house investment team
and the trustee investment advisory committee. Our alumni are among the most engaged
of any U.S. institution. We have little deferred maintenance beyond the library, and our
endowment performance has been excellent. With those fundamentals in mind, Standard &
Poor’s recently reaffirmed our global rating at AA+ with a stable outlook. Our identity and
demand are rising, with a 25% increase in applications over the past two years and one of
the higher yield rates in the country: nearly 50%. Our discount rate is stable, even with an
admissions policy that is need blind and a financial aid model that meets calculated need
without packaging loans.
[2]
See, for example, the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE)
Competencies: https://www.naceweb.org/career-readiness/competencies/career-readiness-
defined.
[3]
By “living” we mean coordinating housing for Davidson students pursuing summer
internships or service work in Charlotte, as we have already piloted in recent summers.
