Academic Consulting
Grounded in the Liberal Arts
Driven by Ongoing Conversations
Solutions Tailored to the Realities of Your Organization
Our Services
Strategic Planning
Our distinctive method puts the strategic back in planning. Rather than just creating a consensus wishlist of what your team wants --or, more often, thinks it ought-- to do, we conduct a series of individual relational meetings across your organization and its constituencies to identify comparative advantages, key market segments and constituencies, and to define your value proposition. We then help you position your offerings in light of what we find, and draw out the implications for each program and functional area of your organization.
General Education/Liberal Arts Core Curriculum
Do your students see your General Education program as simply a hoop they have to jump through or something they need to “get out of the way?” We can help you redesign your general education requirements so that they engage students around questions that matter to them while intiatiting them into disciplines they did not previously undertand and giving them the tools they need to live as free human beings and engaged citizens.
Deep Engagement/Enrollment Management
Wondering why your students keep stopping out and perhaps never returning? Has your historic key demographic suddenly disappeared or contracted so that you need to find new market segments and new constituencies? This process teaches you a method which integrates quantitative analysis of the populations from which you draw students and the economies and broader social realities in which they are embeded with in-depth interviews which help us understand what the students you reach and those that you don't are trying to accomplish and what they need in order to meet those aims. You will also learn how to find out what is happening with those who come and then leave, and what you need to do to get them back --or if you should even try.
Diversity/Equity/Inclusion
Are you investing heavily in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs only to find that your efforts both meet with ongoing resistance and that they have little impact on student success? Our process will help your faculty, staff, and administration understand what it means to say that class, race, and gender are structural problems and begin to identify ways of transforming those structures or at least offering students a way around them, while reducing personalization and passive resistance to efforts in this area.
Civic Engagement
We can help you develop a civic engagement process which provides your students with a basis in experience for understanding why liberal education is important and which also empowers your organization to act effectively in the public arena.
Organizational Culture
Does your college or university feel like a burnt over district? Does every disucssion become a battle or a power struggle? Our training can help you create a culture of consultation and collaboration while recognizing the value of disagreement, even around fundamental mission and strategy, for your organization.
Liberal Arts Transfer and Professional Pathways
Tired of your liberal arts divisions being simply service units for your professional and career and technical programs? We will help you think through how to structure your liberal arts offerings and your advising processes in a way which helps students understand the advantages of an undergraduate liberal arts degree and to think about what comes next if they take that path, including professions which they can enter directly out of college and those which require professional school or graduate education. For community colleges we can help you promotes transfers to liberal art programs at colleges and universities, both public and private.
Deep Engagement/Student Success
How do you help students succeed unless you know what they are trying to accomplish? Indeed, you can't even challenge them to think about their aims in life differently without understanding their starting point. This process teaches you a method centered on in-depth interviews and ongoing mentoring which is in turn linked to both liberal arts and professional or technical courses which will allow you to understand your students as whole persons, reflect with them about what they want to do with their lives, and show how all aspects of your program, both liberal arts and professional or technical can contribute to their growth and development. We will also look pedagogies which emphasize deep engagement around fundamental quesitons and/or teaching critical skills, and which eliminate requirements with no value added, such as excessively rigid attendance and deadline policies.
Spiritual and Religious Diveristy and Engagement
An authentic liberal education engages students at the very core of their being, and this means that it will challenge their most fundamental convictions. But doing this in a productive way requires pastoral as well as pedagogical skill. Do you find that students resist engaging questions around class, race, or respecially gender —or even settled scientific theory such as evolution— on what they claim are religious grounds? Or are there some students who are so secular as to seem tone deaf regarding questions of meaning and value? Our process can help you figure out how to engage students across the spiritual spectrum and provide an experience which is at once challenging and respectful. We explore a broad range of questions such as what spirituality and religion are; freedom of religion, disestablishment, and separation; ethnoreligious identity and diversity; and religion and gender questions, and help you map out a way of engaging religious diversity which catalyzes conversation and engagement and which is respectful of individual beliefs and values.