Bringing Theory to Practice

Leadership Coalition: President's Symposium, November 10-11, 2008

Under the Bringing Theory to Practice Project, 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 formation of the Coalition was made possible with the support of the S. Engelhard Center, the Charles Engelhard Foundation, the Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation, and the Lumina Foundation.

Bringing Theory to Practice requested applications and plans from interested institutions of all types offering baccalaureate degrees. Over the next two years, the 45 colleges and universities selected will be offered grant support from BTtoP and its generous donors as they develop a Leadership Coalition.

As active participants in the Coalition, these colleges and universities will seek to enhance the academic, well-being and civic development of their students. The institutions will demonstrate how to achieve greater faculty and student interaction, broaden reward structures, and elevate expectations through the creation and maintenance of carefully sustained civic engagement programs.

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 support institutions committed to promoting campus cultures that are focused on actively engaging students in learning, and to evaluate their success. In doing so, these institutions will provide models for how institutions can fully address and advance the intellectual, emotional, and civic dimensions of their students.

According to Sally Engelhard Pingree, the founder and primary donor of BTtoP, "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 diverse group of 45 presidents who will attend 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 their plans into practice beginning in the calendar year of 2009, and a retrieval and dissemination conference will occur in 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 express profound respect for the institutional achievements already exhibited by those colleges and universities participating in the Leadership Coalition, and 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.

*Please note that President attendees have already been selected; this is not an open meeting.

Hotel Information

Georgetown University Hotel and Conference Center
3800 Reservoir Road, NW
Washington, DC 20057
(888) 324-2111
http://www.ahl-georgetown.com/

*Both sleeping rooms and meeting spaces are in the Conference Center Hotel. Meeting room names will be available in the updated agenda received upon arrival.*

Travel Information

Air
Reagan National Airport is the closest and best option for travel into downtown Washington, DC. Dulles International Airport is located in Chantilly, Virginia, about 45 minutes away from Washington. From here the city is accessible by metro and bus.
Train
Many trains come in and out of DC through Union Station, which is on the RED metro line. From here the Conference Center is most easily accessible by taxi.
Metro
A metro map is available through the WMATA website and can be used to find travel information to and from the airport, Union Station, or any other destination: http://www.wmata.com/
Taxi
There are plenty of taxis available in the Washington, DC area.

For more information please contact:
obrien@aacu.org or vacek@aacu.org