Strategic Changes

• Develop a plan for the construction of new housing and renovation of existing housing that generates sufficient beds to accommodate expected growth, completed by the fall of 2021.

• Create a plan for adjustment to the dining program so that the College can feed the additional students envisioned.

• Plan for additions to faculty and staff necessary to support a larger student body.

• A larger population could provide more students for smaller programs or to major in new programs (such as computational studies) as well as more robust social and co-curricular options.

• A larger student body will generate more extracurricular options — something that has always come from student creativity — e.g., publications, radio and podcasts, filmmaking, and more organizations based on changing student interests and affinity groups.

• More students would also further enliven the environment of the village center, using the new facilities as they evolve into Kenyon activity spaces or cafes and retail.

• With more students per class, the prospects of admitting more academically strong and diverse students increases.

• A well-planned evolution of the student body size, over the course of the coming decade, will enable Kenyon to intentionally evolve its faculty, staff, programs and support systems in ways that will maintain its strengths and ensure the high-quality education for which Kenyon is currently recognized.

• With a larger student body, fixed costs of operation can be spread across more students, allowing Kenyon to lower per student costs and contribute to cost containment efforts.

• A larger enrollment will generate more net revenue to contribute to Kenyon’s financial stability and its adaptability.

• Seek faculty endorsement of a new calendar.

• Determine the impact of calendar adjustments for athletics and co-curricular programming.

• Establish responsibilities in the academic administration for coordinating a winter term and its attentive activities.

• To give emphasis to high-impact experiences and to be able to devote time for them, we should consider adopting a 4-1-4 calendar, with a winter term in January in which courses and other learning opportunities would be offered. A one-month winter term would allow short-term intensive internships, course-embedded travel, experimental courses that emphasize experiential learning, mentored research, intense laboratory courses, immersive language courses, and individual work on honors projects or similar independent study that is harder to accomplish during normal semesters. This will also enhance faculty goals — sometimes using the January term for faculty-student initiatives and in other years for advancing their own projects and research. Dedicate resources to faculty development related to redesign of semester courses and creation of winter-term courses. Ensure that financial constraints do not create inequities in the capacity of students to access winter term opportunities.

• Review existing external partnerships.

• Consider Kenyon centers and affiliated organizations for programmatic and recruitment purposes beyond what they are already offering.

• Identify programmatic areas in which collaboration with new partners could be beneficial to Kenyon, and then identification of new partners for further vetting.

• Recruitment of students to achieve the College’s ambitious goals for enrolling an academically promising and diverse student body will require establishing stronger pipelines to channel prospective students to Kenyon and reinforcing or renovating existing connections, such as the Kenyon Academic Partnership, Camp IV and Kenyon Review Young Writers.

• Achieving programmatic goals such as creating more international experiences or better experiential learning opportunities could be achieved more effectively and efficiently by working with institutional partners both abroad and in the United States.