The Kenyon 2020 plan, adopted in 2015 to run through 2020, has guided the College’s major efforts since then, including fundraising with foundations and the alumni-and-parent community. While the Kenyon 2020 plan was formulated before the College rewrote its Mission and Values Statement in 2019-20, the latter document’s main themes were foreshadowed in the former. A summary of Kenyon 2020 plan success to date suggests that offices and faculty departments and committees across the institution made the plan’s priorities theirs.
The strategic priorities outlined in the Kenyon 2020 plan were:
I. Focus on an integrated, comprehensive experience that prepares students for post-graduate success.
Since 2015, the College made improvements in the first-year experience, particularly in new student orientation and efforts by the Career Development Office to reach first-year students with programming. Faculty and staff focused on increasing opportunities for high-impact experiences by: raising the profile of internships, mentored research, and community-engaged learning and research; creating a fund to subsidize internships for students with financial need; increasing the number of high-quality campus internship opportunities (such as the Kenyon Review Associates, Gund Gallery Associates and Center for the Study of American Democracy Associates); and adding opportunities for mentored undergraduate research outside of the sciences.
II. Strategically use Kenyon’s resources to attract, retain and graduate an academically excellent and diverse student body.
The percentage of students from outside the United States has more than doubled while the share of the student body that is domestic students of color has fluctuated over the period of the plan from a low of 17.5% of the first-year class that entered in Fall 2016 to a high of 22.4% of those that entered in Fall 2020, with the latter being the highest share of the student body that is students of color ever. Meanwhile, programs designed to promote the retention and graduation of students from first-generation, socioeconomically challenged and otherwise traditionally underrepresented at liberal arts college backgrounds — particularly the Kenyon Educational Enrichment Program (KEEP) and the summer STEM program inspired by it — have grown in size and profile.
III. Intentionally build community on campus, in our local region, and in the world-wide Kenyon family that enhances the learning environment and strengthens lifelong ties with the College.
Kenyon successfully expanded the number of faculty coming from underrepresented backgrounds. Although faculty salaries have slipped slightly compared to our benchmark, faculty retention is high. The Center for Innovative Pedagogy has become a home for faculty seeking to improve their teaching practices and the College has created an Office of Sponsored Faculty Projects to support faculty research. Faculty in the sciences sought and received a Howard Hughes Medical Institute grant to support and focus their efforts on inclusive pedagogy; one result of their efforts came with a revision to the criteria for faculty evaluation that incorporated inclusive pedagogy explicitly. Meanwhile, Kenyon developed the Employee Performance Program to improve staff development. To improve the College’s relationship with the broader community, we opened the Office of Community Partnerships (OCP), created an Office of Campus Events, and improved communications about Kenyon events in the region