MCC 2020: Sharing the Vision
MCC 2020: Sharing the Vision is a campus-wide initiative focusing on “student success.” Over the past two years colleagues from all areas of the college have gathered together on a regular basis and talked about issues of substance to the college and, most importantly, to and for students.
The initiative’s vision statement emphasizes, implicitly and explicitly, a number of key concepts:
- Shared learning goals
- Shared understanding
- Shared responsibility
- Shared leadership
The vision requires that the College community arrive at a set of learning goals for students – what they should learn in order to be successful - and that everyone, not just faculty and student support staff, take responsibility for student success.
As stated in the Campus Action Plan, the goals of MCC 2020 are to:
- Create a coherent, intentional, and renewable climate for fostering student success.
- Promote an environment and climate for student engagement and inclusive excellence.
- Develop campus-wide consensus on educational goals, on what it means to be a “prepared” student, and on definitions of student success, inclusion, and excellence.
- Use the results of regular assessment to align programs, policies, procedures and organizational structure with educational goals.
Key to achieving these goals is the commitment to work toward consensus from the beginning of the process in order to achieve:
- Inclusive Excellence – the firm belief that if everyone took responsibility for participating in the process, in the conversations, in developing learning goals, then better and stronger goals would result. This includes a commitment to leveraging the full range of diversity on MCC’s campus.
- Buy In– the belief that if everyone has responsibility for contributing to the development of learning goals for students, then everyone will buy in to those goals, perhaps more easily and readily than they might if the goals were developed by others.
- Suspended Titles – the belief in open and shared conversation - that when faculty, staff and managers enter the room to talk about learning goals, they do so as colleagues and educators first and try as much as possible to speak with and listen to each other as such.
In a letter dated December 29, 2006, MCC President Emeritus Jonathan M. Daube stated, in part:
Our MCC 2020: Sharing the Vision initiative represents an effort to make a very fine and a very successful institution even better. After almost twenty years as MCC's president, I am more convinced than ever that institutions -- and individuals also -- remain relevant and lively to the extent that they are willing and able to modify and adapt. Change for change's sake is foolish, but resting on one's laurels leads to atrophy. Besides, I believe that Manchester Community College is now strong and undefensive enough to contemplate its future yet again, without fear or favor. Administrators and maintainers, students and faculty, community and support staff: all can join in the discussion to the extent that they wish to, without threat to anyone. The goal is to have a college where decisions are understood, where any decision can be measured against mutually agreed-upon overall objectives, and where the overall direction is continually enriched by maximal participation and leadership that is shared. The collegiality that has been building is a means rather than an end, but it is something that we do need to build some more if we are to make the paradigm shift that 2020 calls for.
The ultimate goal remains to come up with a plan that reflects our collective best thinking for the next 15-20 years. And it is assumed that the more widespread the involvement in the creation of such a plan, the greater the buy-in; the greater the buy-in, the greater the chances of success.
The mantra is student success.
