Jennifer O'Brien
Project Coordinator, BTtoP
202-387-3760
OBrien@aacu.org

45 Institutions Selected to Form Leadership Coalition and Receive Grants to Support Their Work in Creating and Sustaining Transformative Campus Change and Cultures for Learning

Washington, DC—September 17, 2008—45 university and college presidents have formed a national Leadership Coalition, committing their campuses to becoming models for what liberal education can offer—and most effectively deliver.

The institutions in the Coalition will be supported in their plans and work over the next two years as they demonstrate how making a priority of creating and sustaining a campus culture for learning elevates expectations, involves greater faculty and student interaction, broadens reward structures, and results in greater attainment of the academic, well-being, and civic development of students.

With the generous support of the S. Engelhard Center, the Charles Engelhard Foundation, the Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation, and the Lumina Foundation, the Bringing Theory to Practice Project, an independent project in partnership with the Association of American Colleges and Universities, sought applications and plans from interested institutions of all types offering baccalaureate degrees.  From those applications, it has selected and will offer grant support to forty-five colleges and universities as they form a Leadership Coalition.

The initial activity of the Coalition will be a President’s Symposium, to be held in Washington, DC, November 10-11, 2008.  The objective in forming the Coalition is to encourage and support those institutions which are committed to providing successful models of how a campus culture focused on actively engaging students in learning, and evaluating their success in doing so, can address the full dimensions of the intellectual, emotional, and civic flourishing of students.

According to Sally Engelhard Pingree, Project founder and primary funder, “creating campus cultures that help students achieve all of the core outcomes of liberal education can become the defining condition for institutional excellence and appeal, and the best means of re-centering higher education’s focus on the whole student”.  For Donald W. Harward, President Emeritus of Bates College and Director of the BTtoP Project, “The Symposium and the Coalition will call upon presidents as educators to be active in leading the institutional efforts necessary to create and sustain their own campus cultures for learning—and to be supported as their institutions gain recognition as national models.”

The 45 presidents (leading diverse types and locations of institutions) attending the two-day Symposium will form the nucleus of the Leadership Coalition. In addition to receiving grant support, the participating institutions agree to:

• Hold relevant internal conversations regarding the institution’s commitment to a call for a “campus culture for learning”, what that will mean for their campus, and what strategies they may employ.
• Establish a leadership/planning team that would initiate plans to fit their own institutional culture.  The plans they develop will be presented at a national workshop session in 2009.
• Put into practice their plans beginning in calendar year ’09.  A retrieval and dissemination conference will occur 2010. The campus projects will constitute the examples that will become the central features of a nationally distributed publication, promulgating the institutions as models of successful, effective and affordable “Strategies for Change in Creating and Sustaining Campus Cultures for Learning”.

The BTtoP Project and its funders extend their congratulations and profound respect for the institutional achievements already gained by those colleges and universities participating in the Leadership Coalition and to recognize the presidents of those institutions as national educational leaders.

The institutions listed below have been selected to participate in the Leadership Coalition and to receive support for their work in creating campus cultures that support learning and a commitment to the full development, intellectual, emotional, and civic, of their students.  

For additional information regarding the Project and grant support, please see www.bringingtheorytopractice.org

The Bringing Theory to Practice Project is sponsored by the Charles Engelhard Foundation of New York City and developed in partnership with the Association of American Colleges and Universities. It explores and advocates the academic community's support of engaged learning and the relationship of such learning to student health and civic development.

The project is guided by an interdisciplinary planning group of scholars, researchers, practitioners, and institutional leaders. Currently, there are 300 colleges and universities across the nation connected to the project, many supported by grants, and many in discussion of these topics on their campuses.

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AAC&U is the leading national association concerned with the quality, vitality, and public standing of undergraduate liberal education. Its members are committed to extending the advantages of a liberal education to all students, regardless of academic specialization or intended career. Founded in 1915, AAC&U now comprises more than 1,150 accredited public and private colleges and universities of every type and size.

AAC&U functions as a catalyst and facilitator, forging links among presidents, administrators, and faculty members who are engaged in institutional and curricular planning. Its mission is to reinforce the collective commitment to liberal education at both the national and local levels and to help individual institutions keep the quality of student learning at the core of their work as they evolve to meet new economic and social challenges.