Skip to Main Content Skip to Footer Toggle Navigation Menu

Our New Strategic Plan: Draft for Your Review & Feedback

To All Members of the Macalester Community: 

We are reaching out to share an updated draft of our strategic plan. To help us further refine the document before we send it to the Board of Trustees, we invite any final feedback or questions. 

Throughout our planning process, your input has shaped the draft. If you’d like to review the process we used to get to this point, you can see details on our strategic planning website. We again thank our Strategic Planning Champions, all of whom actively engaged members of the Macalester community to ensure as many voices as possible were represented. We also thank each one of you who took the time to share your thoughts, suggestions, and love for this great institution. 

We see incredible opportunity ahead for Macalester, and for all in our community. We’re looking forward to working together to build on the college’s many strengths and to create the future we have imagined together. We believe this draft reflects the themes we’ve heard from all of you over the past nine months, and capitalizes on the opportunity to make the Macalester experience even more distinctive. 

You’ll notice that this is a fairly high-level plan. That’s intentional. This is an aspirational document, not an implementation roadmap. We want it to chart our destination and our priorities so that it can guide the next phase of our work to create a student-ready campus. However, this is not a “to-do” list. Consistent with the principle of shared governance, the development of tactical implementation tasks will require deep collaboration with key constituencies.   

As you review the draft, we’d like to know:

1) What’s most exciting to you about the plan? 
2) What’s missing? 
3) What isn’t clear?

Over the next few weeks, there will be opportunities for all members of the community to learn more about the draft plan and ask questions. Here’s an overview of those sessions:

  • For Staff: Wednesday, September 7 from 2-3 p.m. via Zoom (register here), hosted by the Staff Advisory Council
     
  • For Faculty: Wednesday, August 31 from 3-4:30 p.m. in the Weyerhaeuser Boardroom, hosted by the Faculty Advisory Council
     
  • For Students: Wednesday, August 31 from 6-7 p.m. in Kagin Ballroom, with pizza and beverages, hosted by Kathryn Kay Coquemont, Associate Vice President for Student Affairs and Dean of Students, and Lisa Anderson-Levy, Provost 
     
  • For Alumni and Current Parents:

Note: the formats for both sessions will be identical. We are holding two in order to provide flexibility for alumni and current parents who may want to attend from different time zones around the world.  

In addition, the strategic planning email box, [email protected], will be open until September 15. Please feel free to email us there with any additional feedback. 

We’re excited about the draft plan and hope you are, too. Once the plan is approved, we look forward to working with all of you to achieve our shared goals and build support for the college’s future.

With gratitude,

President Suzanne M. Rivera
Provost Lisa Anderson-Levy

August 23, 2022