Trustees Approve Plan for Mount Holyoke 2003, OK Budget, Elect New Trustees
In a formal action last weekend, the board of trustees voted unanimously to adopt the comprehensive six-year Plan for Mount Holyoke 2003. The plan reflects fourteen months' work, and incorporates the ideas of hundreds of people in the College community. Trustee chair Barbara Rossotti noted, "The board believes that the plan will serve to enhance the unique character of Mount Holyoke. ... Moreover, the plan outlines steps to protect the resources of the College--financial, human, technological, and physical--to ensure that the mission is fulfilled for generations to come. The board of trustees would like to express its gratitude to the hundreds of members of the MHC community who contributed their ideas and words to the plan." The process of collaboration and comment on the plan continued right through last weekend, when trustees heard from two students concerning proposed changes in financial aid.
The plan reaffirms the College's commitment to remain an excellent liberal arts college for women, maintains the College's current strengths, and outlines a number of new initiatives. These include establishing a Center for Leadership and Public Advocacy and a new Program in Speaking, Arguing, and Writing; increasing the percentage of students of color from 17 percent to 25-30 percent; increasing productive ties among the Five Colleges; and improving access to new computer technologies.
The plan also calls for an increase in the number of highly qualified applicants from a diverse range of economic, racial, and ethnic backgrounds to 2,600 by the year 2003, and specifies efforts to moderate budgetary growth, including steps to slow the projected growth of financial aid over the next six years.
Now that it's approved, College administrators and faculty will begin implementing various aspects of the Plan for MHC 2003. Copies of the final plan--which differs only cosmetically from the April 24 draft--will be made available to the College community.
The board used much of its meeting Saturday to discuss the College's financial condition, according to board chair Barbara Rossotti, and trustees approved the College's $61 million operating budget for fiscal year 1997-98, which starts July 1.
Two new trustees were elected to five-year terms on the board. Harriet Levine Weissman '58, director of the Museum Gallery of the White Plains (NY) Public Library, and M. Eileen Shanley Kraus '60, chairman of Fleet National Bank (Connecticut), will begin their tenure as trustees in July. Trustees also approved a slate of board officers and committee chairs, formally voted to grant graduating seniors their degrees, and approved recommendations for department and program chairs, new faculty appointments, sabbaticals and leaves, and emeritus status for retiring faculty.
![[Index]](../index3.gif){kind=small}