W&L's New Strategic Plan

To: The W&L Community
From: President Will Dudley
Date: May 14, 2018

I am pleased to announce that the Board of Trustees approved W&L's new strategic plan at its meeting on campus on Saturday.

The plan, which reflects input from all corners of our community, is the culmination of 15 months of work by more than 100 individuals. The plan reaffirms W&L's distinctive strengths, identifies opportunities to advance our mission, and provides the framework to support our aspiration to be a national model for liberal arts education.

The plan is organized around four themes: Community, Curriculum, Citizenship and Campus. Our community of trust and civility, our distinctive curriculum, our commitment to institutional citizenship for the benefit of society, and our beautiful and historic campus are a potent educational combination. The plan outlines how we will continue to build upon these strengths to provide the best possible liberal arts education to talented students who embody the qualities of personal integrity, leadership and academic excellence.

I encourage each of you to take the time to read the plan in full. Among the most ambitious initiatives it contains are our commitment to a need-blind undergraduate admissions policy and a signature law school scholarship program; renewed and expanded efforts to recruit and retain diverse pools of students, faculty and staff; steps to deepen student connections to W&L through the Office of Inclusion and Engagement; investments in our distinctive liberal arts curriculum and, especially, in our interdisciplinary programs; commitments to teach and present our institutional history comprehensively and accurately and to steward our resources responsibly; and improved facilities for Admissions and Financial Aid, the sciences, the arts, and the Williams School, among others.

Those of you who are familiar with our strategic planning process understand that this is a guiding document for the coming years, rather than a comprehensive list of projects. Good ideas that emerge in the future will be prioritized in light of the goals and principles established in the plan.

Our previous strategic plan was a blueprint for the university's transformative, $542-million Honor Our Past, Build Our Future campaign, and we see the results of that plan all around us. Even as we embark on the final initiative of that previous plan — the construction of The Richard L. Duchossois Center for Athletics and Recreation, which will begin in a few short weeks — it is time to look forward.

The plan is available at go.wlu.edu/strategic-plan. I am grateful to all of the people who contributed to the planning process, and particularly to Provost Marc Conner and Vice President Sidney Evans, who so ably chaired the strategic planning work. The result is a bold vision for the university that will build on our strengths and on the momentum of the past decade to ensure the bright future of W&L. I look forward to the work ahead.