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Alumni provided “very valuable” input to the Global Issues Working Group, one of the committees providing recommendations for the College’s strategic planning process, says committee chair Josh Sanborn, associate professor of history. Functioning from September 2006 through last month, the group had a mandate to report on how Lafayette should prepare students to become global citizens.
Sanborn led three group meetings with alumni: a dinner in Washington, D.C. hosted by Riley Temple ’71, a member of the Board of Trustees, and attended by about 10 alumni; a forum with 40 to 50 alumni and President Dan Weiss in New York City; and a meeting of about a dozen alumni hosted by Jim Benjamin ’84, president of the Alumni Association’s Atlanta chapter, with Paul Barclay, associate professor of history, in attendance as well. Sanborn also held one-on-one meetings with alumni and sent an email survey to members of the Alumni Online Community, which garnered more than 1,500 responses.
Benjamin believes his chapter was very fortunate to have the opportunity to provide input and feedback.
“Our group in Atlanta is not massive, but is quite spirited,” he says. “We talked about the need for a large breadth of offerings, but also realized that Lafayette is a smaller institution and that factor inherently places limits on the scope of materials that can be covered. We all felt strongly that the world will continue to evolve into a ‘flat community’ and require a solid intellectual foundation — one that requires interdisciplinary education and adaptability.”
“Paul and Josh did a fine job of ‘herding’ us through these issues and are clearly passionate and committed to the work. We ended with a discussion about the importance of keeping the alumni organized and involved with each other – recognizing that this network could provide an important means for achieving future success for the school, its students, and alumni.”
Alumni contributed to the Global Issues Working Group in three main ways, according to Sanborn.
“The first was that alums — particularly recent ones — provided us with a good ‘student’s-eye’ view of our offerings and of the experiences on and off campus that helped shape their lives,” he says. “That input definitely shaped the recommendations we made regarding improving support for international students and in finding ways to better integrate international students with the rest of the student body.”
The second way that alumni helped was by providing poignant personal evidence about the importance of understanding global issues, often expressed in terms of the workplace, notes Sanborn. Many were surprised at how often they needed to interact with people and companies from other countries.
“Many urged us to expand the offerings at Lafayette to better correspond to a world in which countries like China, India, Brazil, and Russia are now major workplace destinations, places of labor force recruitment, and the headquarters of important business partners,” says Sanborn. “They urged us to keep up with the changes in the world around us, and though many on the Global Issues Working Group thought from the start that broadening our curriculum and other offerings was necessary, it was very useful to get so many reports from alumni that supported this initiative.”
The third major area in which alumni contributed was in the theme of global citizenship.
“It was great to meet so many of our alumni over the past few months — and to hear from many more via email or survey,” says Sanborn. “Those meetings made clear that Lafayette graduates often go out and do very important things, not only in their jobs, but also through the way they live in the world. It certainly heightened my own sense of responsibility. It really matters what our students learn while they’re here, not only about foreign cultures, political processes, and economic change, but of their own place in society.
“Our alums are out there every day as schoolteachers, military leaders, government officials, corporate executives, civic leaders in their community, and as moral guides for their children. If that group of people going out into the world doesn’t know during kitchen table discussions how people are different across the globe and how they are similar, or if they don’t know at election time about issues like politics in the Middle East or climate change, then I think we’ve missed an important opportunity.”
Sanborn says he was struck by the eagerness of alumni to give their time to the College, not only by attending the forums, but also through returning to campus to advise students and helping them after graduation.
“We definitely felt as a group that this energy was something that everyone would benefit from receiving, and two of our recommendations were specifically to enhance the role of alumni in whatever programs we end up adopting through the strategic planning process.”