Aspazia's strategic planning rant

Aspazia, the Mad Melancholic Feminista, is also exercised about the strategic planning document, but for reasons that differ from mine. She objects to the passage on diversity:

"Enhance on-campus diversity of all kinds (racial, intellectual, geographic, etc) . . ."

The call for intellectual diversity, with its evocation of David Horowitz's agenda, rankles her. But I think it cuts both ways. True, a call for more intellectual diversity among the faculty would be scary - do we really want affirmative action for conservatives? But intellectual diversity among the students, that's another matter entirely. Why not seek to attract students with different intellectual outlooks rather than the bland apathetic conformists that seem to account for a majority of our current student body? (Ouch). One of her commenters (she has commenters!) takes umbrage at the "etc.": if you can't bother to spell out what you mean by diversity, you oughta just shut the hell up (my paraphrase).

Meanwhile, I've been trolling the websites of the 47 liberal arts colleges that are better than us for some insights into their strategic planning process. At Washington & Lee, for example, the planning process is quite a bit different from here. There, apparently, the strategic planning process starts at the level of the college faculty (!) whose vision is then combined with those of the other college divisions to form the final report. We're not talking about faculty (minority) representation on the college-wide strategic planning committee as is done here, but a process conducted by various task forces and committees of the faculty, coordinated by the college dean. The plan, from what I can see, covers everything from curriculum to resource needs. The faculty draft includes this nugget, under "New Initiatives Specific to the College":

Improve communication and trust between faculty and administration

Trust has disappeared from some quarters, and we must restore it. To tell faculty they must understand limited resources when that instruction comes from a layer of bureaucracy that did not exist three years ago strains both credulity and trust.

Ouch again!