Strategic Vision

Authentically Augustana

Augustana's first formal strategic plan, entitled Authentically Augustana: A Strategic Plan for a Premier Liberal Arts College, was unveiled in 2005. It grew from an eighteen month conversation which engaged the Board of Trustees, administrators, faculty, students, and alumni. They considered Augustana’s current strengths and weaknesses, as well as the opportunities and threats likely to present themselves in the years just ahead. They reviewed early drafts of the plan and their input led to substantial refinement of it.

The plan articulates six broad goals:

Enrich our academic programs to help a new generation of students develop the qualities of mind, spirit and body necessary for lives of service and leadership in our changing world.
Increase the diversity and academic qualifications of the student body.
Strengthen our student life, extra-curricular, co-curricular and campus ministry programs, and strengthen their ties to the academic program, to better educate the whole person.
Develop and implement a new campus master plan.
Strengthen the college’s endowment, financial structure, human resources, physical facilities and information systems.
Strengthen ties with alumni and external constituencies and promote opportunities for students by conducting ourselves in a manner befitting a good institutional citizen.

We have already enacted a number of initiatives in pursuit of those goals. By way of examples, we’ve expanded the size of the faculty, and decreased class size and the student-faculty ratio. We have enriched support for both student and faculty research and will anticipate increasing the number of students studying abroad.

The centerpiece of the strategic plan is Senior Inquiry, a reflective research program intended to be the culminating experience of an inquiry-based curriculum that will ask students to bring synthesis, analysis and reflection to their college years.

Like all good capstone programs, Senior Inquiry projects will be rigorous, original and extensive. Augustana’s mission is to prepare students for lives of leadership and service in a rapidly changing world. In keeping with that mission, Senior Inquiry will be distinctive from the typical senior research project in at least three ways:

It will have a greater focus on integration of knowledge across disciplines and across the students’ years of study.
It will have an intentionally reflective component, in which students assess not only what they’ve found but what their findings mean.
It will encourage students to undertake inquiry which might serve the common good.

As with all our programs, Senior Inquiry is a work-in-progress as the faculty debate the ways in which Senior Inquiry’s goals can be adapted to their disciplines and departments work to balance ambition with resources.

The strategic plan lays out a host of other initiatives. It can be read in its entirety here.

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