January 25, 1999

We are happy to report that we held a very successful planning retreat with faculty, staff, administrators, and students participating on January 13 and 14. We discussed institutional vision, mission, and college-wide priorities in a highly interactive and productive format. As the December 4 memo to the community indicated, the planning retreat was the first step in a campus-wide planning process that will help prepare the College for the next decade.

The next step of the planning process is roundtable discussions. We encourage you to sign up for a roundtable discussion to hear the priorities that were developed at the retreat, to share your thoughts on these, and to tell us what you think the College's most important priorities should be. We want to know what you envision when you think of Ithaca College's future. The attached document outlines the priorities established at the retreat. As you review these, it is important to understand that the retreat participants developed these priorities after a day and a half of interactive exercises and after being charged to "wear the big hat" (i.e., to adopt a college-wide perspective) and to develop overarching institutional goals.

Specifically, at the roundtable discussions, we are interested in having a dialogue with you on whether you concur with what the retreat participants developed. Questions such as "have we missed anything" or "are there items on the list that should not be an overarching priority" will be posed. We are eager to have a large portion of the campus community participate in this activity and encourage you to sign up for one of the following sessions:

Please call or email Sharon Runge (srunge@ithaca.edu - 274-3121) to sign up for one of the sessions. It is important that you sign up in advance so that we can acknowledge your participation and make the necessary arrangements.

Once these groups have met, the planning committee will review the commentary from the roundtable discussions and develop a final priority list to be shared with the Board of Trustees at their February meeting. Task force groups will then be formed to work on implementing each of the various priorities, and we will once again look for volunteers to serve on these important groups.

Additional information on the planning process will be listed in the Ithaca College News. We will continue to provide periodic updates to the campus community on this important initiative, and thank you in advance for your participation.

As indicated in the attached memo, the planning retreat participants developed a number of institutional priorities along with discussing vision statements for the future. As you review the priority topics, it is important to understand that the retreat participants developed these priorities after a day and a half of interactive exercises and after being charged to "wear the big hat (i.e., to adopt a college-wide perspective)" and to develop overarching institutional goals. We are interested in having a dialogue with you on whether you concur with what the retreat participants developed and several questions to elicit your ideas. We hope that a synergy is created by the members of each roundtable and that brainstorming occurs within each group as they review the work of the retreat participants.

Before the group developed the priorities, we used as a framework, several overarching vision statements. The committee felt it would be helpful for you to see these statements as you review the overarching priorities.