An Update from the Core Review Planning Team (CRPT)

Dear Community,

This note follows the one sent to you at the end of June to provide an update on the activities of the Core Review Planning Team (CRPT). As a reminder, this team is composed of faculty, ASHMC student representatives, a staff member, and the president of AABOG, and is charged to lead the upcoming review of the college’s core curriculum.

Our efforts are directed toward informing a summer-through-fall process that will, we hope, culminate in a collective understanding of the goals of our core curriculum by the end of the fall term.

Since our last update:

• We have created a survey that has gone out to alumni (we already have over 1,000 responses!) and will go out to faculty, students, and staff over the two-week period straddling the start of classes this fall. The survey has been designed so that we will better understand what each constituency believes the core curriculum is, or has been, and what that curriculum should prioritize going forward.
• We have worked with the Dean of Faculty, Lisa Sullivan, to form the team that will conduct the external review of the core, November 13-15. The team will be led by Art Heinricher, Dean of Undergraduate Studies and Professor of Mathematics at Worchester Polytechnic Institute (https://www.wpi.edu/people/faculty/heinrich).
• We have established a CRPT webpage (https://www.hmc.edu/crpt/) on which you can see, for example, a calendar of CRPT-led meetings and recent communications, and a link to communicate directly with CRPT. This webpage will be updated regularly going forward.
• We have coordinated with the Faculty Executive Committee, and the Diversity, Inclusion and Excellence committee to schedule meetings this fall that will address the core curriculum. Thursday meetings over lunch will be discussions among the faculty, and Friday afternoon meetings will include all college constituencies. Please see the CRPT website (address directly above) for the meetings’ dates, times, and locations. ASHMC and AABOG may schedule other meetings separately to facilitate discussions among their constituencies.
• We have invited a team of external facilitators from Caltech to help us design, organize, and run a strategic planning session that will take place early in the spring of 2018. This event will also include all college constituencies.
• We continue to work with the office of institutional research, the registrar, academic departments, the office of admission, and to look outward to other institutions to collect information and data that will inform community discussions of the core curriculum this fall.
• We continue to work closely with ASHMC and staff representatives, as well as the AABOG leadership.

Best regards,

The Core Review Planning Team

Tom Donnelly, Core Curriculum Director
Erika Dyson, Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts
Nancy Lape, Department of Engineering
Ran Libeskind-Hadas, Department of Computer Science
Marissa Lee, ASHMC
Julia Wang, ASHMC
Laura Palucki Blake, Director of Institutional Research and Effectiveness
David Sonner, President of AABOG