In the last five years, Olivet College has undergone a transformation that has led to the restructuring of college life and learning around a new commitment to community. This transformation reflects the way in which a college president, through his or her words, actions, and interactions with members of the campus community, can have a dramatic effect.
Upon his appointment as president of Olivet College in 1993, Dr. Michael Bassis perceived a lack of shared purpose among faculty, staff, and students. There was, he felt, no common identity that held the campus together, no common goals that drove the curriculum. President Bassis initiated a process that led to fundamental change. The process is best seen in four key steps: a question posed to faculty; the ensuing period of discussion and generation of ideas; action taken to turn those ideas into reality; and the extension of discussion to the campus as a whole.
The question that started it all, posed directly to faculty, was this: Given the range of opportunities open to them, why should students choose to enroll at Olivet? The president emphasized the history of Olivet, which was founded as the first college in the nation to accept students regardless of race or gender, and asked faculty to explore the institution s values and their own.
The very act of discussing and forming new ideas brought faculty together and energized the process of institutional change. The answer that faculty proposed centered on the idea of social responsibility. Faculty authored a vision statement and titled it, Education for Individual and Social Responsibility. The new vision statement defined five sets of learning outcomes related to communication skills, reasoning skills, individual responsibility, social responsibility, and skills specific to students field of study. Now it was time to turn that shared vision into reality. A year of intense deliberation among faculty resulted in the Olivet Plan, a new academic program for the college. The Olivet Plan describes how the college will deliver education that leads to the desired learning outcomes. The plan eliminates fifteen majors and minors, and adds two new ones. It revises general education requirements to emphasize diversity, and requires freshman and senior year experience courses, each with a service-learning component. It also requires all students to complete a portfolio of their work addressing each student learner outcome.
With a new sense of purpose among faculty, President Bassis extended the scope of campus discussion to the rest of campus. This time, a new question was posed to faculty, staff, students, administrators, and trustees: What does it mean to be a responsible member of this college community? The discussion that followed resulted in the Olivet College Compact, a statement defining the values that govern the social culture of Olivet. By 1999, when the first class to attend Olivet under the new curriculum graduates, they will not have seen the lack of purpose that Dr. Bassis perceived when he first came to Olivet. Instead, they will have experienced their undergraduate years at a college redefined by its own community and guided by a commitment to social responsibility.
From Service Matters 1998: Engaging Higher Education In the Renewal of America s Communities and American Democracy
The Olivet College Plan is online at http://www.olivetcollege.edu/about/plan.htm
