Campus Community

“Campus life” has always had a special meaning at Goucher College. There has always been something unusual and wonderful about the way energy builds in the interactions among our community members-and then spills over into the communities and the world around us. Conversations that begin in our classrooms continue outside them long after classes have ended. Students, faculty, and staff turn ideas into action through service projects, informal campus conversations, and formal lectures, panel discussions, and other programs exploring the events of the day, using all of the personal and educational resources our community has to offer. Top-notch thinkers, writers, politicians, performers, activists, scientists, educators, and other experts routinely join us to share their knowledge, perspectives, and abundant experience.

The community we have built over the entire course of Goucher’s history is energetic, enthusiastic, expansive, and strong. We will act now to make it even more so. We will continue to cultivate an extraordinary body of students, recruiting young people who have the passion, energy, and academic strength not only to participate fully in the life of Goucher College while they are here, but also to use their knowledge to participate fully in the world outside Goucher when they leave. We will work to ensure that our student body includes and reflects the voices of people with a sufficiently wide variety of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives to enable us to approach our intellectual inquiries from all angles.

Attracting and recruiting these students is only the beginning. We must continue to provide a campus environment that engages, challenges, and energizes them, and also the support systems that an increasingly large and diverse student body demands. And if we are to realize this college’s vision of educating students to participate actively in the communities and world around them, we must do everything we can to model that kind of participation in our institutional behavior as well. We will undertake several initiatives to realize these goals.

1. Increase diversity and academic selectivity while expanding our undergraduate student population.

One issue before us in maintaining the energy and diversity of our community is our size. It is sometimes difficult to attain the critical mass we would like in the events and programs we offer, because there simply are not enough people here to participate in them all. The community of individuals we have cultivated here presents us with a paradox: How to satisfy the educational, cultural, and social needs of a population with an incredibly wide variety of interests and passions and still attract enough people to each of our events and programs to make them worthwhile?

Part of our solution will be to expand the college and its undergraduate population. The Goucher College Board of Trustees has voted to increase the size of the undergraduate student body to 1,400 by the fall of 2005. A further increase to 1,500 can be anticipated later. As we increase the size of our student body, we will take great care to maintain our high academic standards. Recent data on a variety of indicators is very encouraging: The number of applications we receive annually is now the largest in Goucher’s history, and we have become steadily more selective in recent years. We saw an increase of 35 points in the average SAT scores of students entering Goucher in the fall of 2003 over the year before. We have also achieved a major shift in the college’s gender balance; the freshman class entering in the fall of 2003 is 40 percent male.

One advantage of having a larger number of students on campus is that we can also have a wider variety of students. We will introduce new recruiting efforts to ensure that our community reflects and represents the widest range of voices, perspectives, cultures, and experiences we can attain.

Furthermore, we believe that taking an international perspective in the kind of education we provide means more than simply addressing global concerns in class and sending our students to study in other countries and cultures. We will expand the presence on campus of students from other countries as well, actively recruiting them abroad and within the immigrant communities of Baltimore and elsewhere in the United States.

With different groups of students come different concerns, and we will develop new systems to ensure that we are able to provide adequate support to anyone who chooses to join our community.

2. Promote a vibrant, engaging, and exciting living and learning environment on campus through abundant opportunities for community members to come together for social, cultural, and educational events both formal and informal.

One need look no further than the extraordinary list of visitors who joined us on campus just in the past year to see that this campus already buzzes with activity and energy. In the fall of 2002, U.S. Senator Paul Sarbanes of Maryland joined journalists from The Washington Post and The Baltimore Sun and the CEO of Brown Capital Management for a public discussion of corporate ethics, America’s ongoing economic crisis, and the landmark legislation Sarbanes sponsored to reform accounting practices. The Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney visited our ever-impressive Kratz Center for Creative Writing for a reading and discussion of his work. Maryland’s new governor, Robert Ehrlich, joined us on a snowy December morning for an open forum on the challenges facing the state as he began his term. The internationally renowned musicians Misha and Cipa Dichter visited to demonstrate their two-piano repertoire in the annual Rosenberg Lecture-Performance.

In March, we hosted a blockbuster celebration commemorating the 50th anniversary of the publication of James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain; that event brought together scholars, artists, performers, and literature lovers from across the nation for several days of activities that included film screenings, an academic symposium on Baldwin’s work, a theatrical performance of Baldwin’s The Amen Corner, and a keynote address by the renowned writer and cultural critic bell hooks. That same month, we welcomed Juan de Marcos González, member of the celebrated Buena Vista Social Club and leader of the Afro-Cuban All Stars, as this year’s Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Visiting Professor. He led his band in an exhilarating concert of Cuban music, and then joined Goucher President Sanford J. Ungar the next morning in a public discussion of music and politics in Cuba.

As impressive as this list is, it only scratches the surface of what goes on here. Many times throughout every year, our concert halls resound with performances by the Goucher Chamber Symphony, Opera Workshop, Jazz Ensemble, African Drum and Dance Ensemble, Chorus, Chamber Singers, and computer music students. Our biannual main-stage dance performances premiere new work by renowned ballet and modern choreographers alongside pieces by Goucher faculty members and students-and several other performances highlight cutting-edge experimental work and the reconstructed dances of Chorégraphie Antique, Goucher’s dance history ensemble. Goucher’s student-athletes take the field in cross country, track and field, field hockey, volleyball, soccer, tennis, basketball, lacrosse, and equestrian events almost daily (while a conference-leading 51.9 percent of them made the 2002-03 Capital Athletic Conference All-Academic Team). Our Open Circle theatre company presents several staged readings and full-productions each year, often featuring the work of Goucher students. Our two art galleries on campus host major exhibitions by Goucher student and faculty painters, sculptors, and photographers alongside work by prominent-and promising-local and national artists. Readings, research presentations, and other formal and informal events and programs abound.

These lists are meant not to detail every activity that takes place here, but rather to illustrate just how electrifying life on a college campus can be. And we believe it can and should be even more so. We will continue to pack our calendar with high-profile events and programs like those mentioned above, drawing regional, national, and even international attention to our campus community and all that takes place here. And we will continue to balance the blockbuster concerts, lectures, performances, and discussions with less formal opportunities to come together, talk, and learn as a community-informal workshops on writing, music, and dance, for example; visiting scholars offering late-night seminars; and impromptu town-hall discussions like the ones we’ve held over the past couple of years on terrorism, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and other topical events from around the world. We will continue to build Goucher’s reputation as a center for timely, incisive, nuanced, and balanced exploration of the issues that we all face as citizens of this world-and for first-rate cultural and artistic events and programs, too.

3. Increase the variety and quality of educational experiences in which students may participate outside the classroom.

One of the challenges we face in this age of all-pervasive information, communication, and entertainment technology lies, somewhat ironically, in teaching students how to connect. Our students come to us as independent operators, wired into the Internet, their e-mail accounts, their personal stereos and DVD players and text-messaging cell phones, but not always able-or sure of how to-make real connections with other people. If we are going to help these students realize their potential as active participants in the communities and the world around them, we must teach them how to collaborate.

Building on some of Goucher’s longest traditions and greatest strengths, we will enhance the opportunities we offer our students in faculty-student research, service learning, and internships to foster the conditions under which classroom learning spills over into students’ lives outside class-and into the community. We will explore the ways in which we might broaden faculty-student collaboration, which currently takes place largely in the sciences, to include other disciplines. We will also expand the opportunities we provide for students and faculty members to get together out of class at both formal and informal events and gatherings. Finally, we will encourage greater interaction between our Career Development Office and students’ advisers with an eye toward making more and better connections between students’ academic careers and the work they do in internships, in work-study positions, and at jobs outside school.

4. Expand interaction with Goucher’s alumnae and alumni.

Our large, strong, and very dedicated alumnae/i body represents a tremendously rich resource. Our current students can reap great rewards from our alumnae/i’s life experiences and expertise in their chosen fields. Our community in general can and does profit greatly from their energy and dedication to the college. We already have two organizations in place to encourage interaction between current students and alumnae/i, and we will expand their efforts to reach out to current students. At the same time, we will broaden the avenues through which alumnae/i can remain connected to their alma mater through events, programs, and other opportunities to contribute.

5. Expand the scope of Goucher’s collaboration with other colleges and universities in the Baltimore metropolitan area.

There are more than 20 colleges and universities-and more than 100,000 college students-in the Baltimore area. Many of these are connected through the Baltimore Collegetown Network (BCN, of which Goucher is a member), which runs a shuttle service among member institutions and coordinates academic and social events and programs designed to bring students from different schools together. It seems only natural, in trying to increase the liveliness of our campus, that we should draw on the resources that all of this represents. In addition to encouraging students to take advantage of the opportunities the BCN offers, we will explore the ways in which we can support the network’s efforts through our own interinstitutional programming.

Our connections with other schools can also help us in our efforts to diversify our campus population. Goucher currently has programs in place that bring students from underrepresented communities to our campus, including the Bridges program with Baltimore City Community College, the Choice Middle School Tutoring Program, and the Lemmel Middle School Program. Using their success as our guide, we will expand these programs and also direct our efforts toward increasing diversity at the graduate school level through targeted recruitment efforts involving our graduate programs and post-baccalaureate premedical program. We will explore the possibility of developing more substantial collaborative relationships with historically black colleges and universities in the region, as well as more interaction between Goucher and other colleges through joint activities, speakers, and other programs.

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