Olivet College: Reinventing a Liberal Arts Institution (Z)

This case was written by Michael K. McLendon, Assistant Professor of Higher Education at Vanderbilt University, under the supervision of Professor Marvin W. Peterson at the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education at the University of Michigan. The project was funded as part of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s "Kellogg Forum on Institutional Transformation" initiative. This case is designed as the basis for class discussion on managing change in higher education institutions; it is not intended to illustrate either effective or ineffective handling of an administrative situation.


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Olivet College: Reinventing a Liberal Arts Institution (Z) - Back to Top

When the Olivet College community gathered at the home of President Michael Bassis on the evening of September 2, 1994 for the college’s "Labor Day Barbecue", the thoughts of most faculty centered on the frustrating sequence of events which had transpired earlier that Friday afternoon. The special day-long faculty forum that had just adjourned was to have ended with some consensus among faculty as to which of four alternative "delivery models" of innovative undergraduate education Olivet College would adopt. This consensus would have brought closure to a tumultuous year of "reinvention" at the institution?a year in which the faculty had taken historic steps to articulate a new academic vision for the college. Instead, the faculty forum had ended in confusion when participants reached an impasse in their deliberation regarding the different delivery models.

Understandably, the mood at the barbecue was bleak. According to one participant, even the children of Olivet faculty and staff seemed to sense that something was very wrong. Another attendee at the barbecue described the mood of the crowd in the following way:

People were milling around the yard [of the president’s house] and everyone was very sullen-faced. It was just a depressing atmosphere…very depressing.

President Bassis also sensed the dejection of forum participants. When his guests had finished eating, Bassis approached the leaders of the faculty working groups, several other faculty members, and his newly-hired vice president, Jim Halseth, asking them to remain at the house after the other guests had left. The president’s intention was to hammer-out an agreement among the working group leaders before the next morning’s session of the Faculty Forum began. He sought to accomplish this seemingly formidable task by sequestering his "guests" until they had agreed to a specific plan. One participant in the evening’s dramatic events described the unexpected development at the president’s house by saying:

[President Bassis] basically called us into his study, locked the doors, and said, ‘No one’s getting out. Nobody’s going home until this thing is done. We have come too far for this to fall apart. We’re going to stay here until we reach some agreement.’ At first, I think we were just surprised that we were being locked-up in the president’s house; it was a bit odd. Then, we settled into a huge argument for the next three hours.

Taped to a wall were the sheets of paper from the faculty forum describing the different models of undergraduate education Olivet’s faculty had presented earlier in the day. Each sheet of paper still contained the gold stars reflecting faculty support for various elements comprising the respective plans. For three hours, the conclave "vigorously debated" the merits of the alternative plans. The debate was partisan in nature, with each working group leader supporting most strongly the model that his respective group had studied.

After several hours of continued deadlock, President Bassis, who had said little throughout the heated discussion, approached the sheets of paper. He took a pen and began circling the half dozen or so items from across all four of the models that had received the most amount of support from faculty earlier in the day. According to one participant:

[President Bassis] then said, ‘Why can’t we do all of these things simultaneously? Why can’t we have a first-year experience and a senior experience and learning communities and service learning? It seems to me that this would give us a very powerful and a truly unique curriculum that could drive the whole thing forward.’…And, [we] looked at it, all the items that were circled, and [our] mouths dropped open.

The faculty leaders who were sequestered in the house described the moment as "magical" and "an emotional victory." Said one participant:

This was as much an emotional breakthrough as a conceptual one…There’s an emotional side to an institution, and that side of Olivet had been so badly damaged for so long. For those people who had put so much of their lives into the revisioning process over the course of that year, this was a special moment.

Amid the palpable sense of relief that this idea might be the solution they had been seeking, the group immediately agreed that a synthesis of the alternative plans should be presented the next morning at the Faculty Forum. At a little past midnight, and after outlining a proposal that included the multiple elements drawn from across the various delivery models, the impromptu meeting adjourned.

When the Labor Day Faculty Forum reconvened the following morning, President Bassis recounted for attendees the events that had transpired at his home the previous evening. He reported that the working group leaders had hit upon a possible solution that combined the most popular elements from among the different plans presented on Friday. The proposed solution, which Bassis characterized as "powerful" and "comprehensive" vehicle, would consist of the following innovative elements:

· A "first-year experience", which would provide the students with a rigorous introduction to the college and its distinctive vision of individual and social responsibility;

· A "portfolio program", which would require students to take responsibility for their education by developing an individual portfolio of educational self-assessment;

· A "service learning" component whereby students would develop an ethic of social responsibility through service to the community;

· A "senior experience", which would help students integrate what they had learned throughout their education at Olivet;

· A "learning communities" component, which would allow students to take thematically linked courses;

· A "course-block" system whereby students would complete an intensive program of study that focused on only one topic at a time.

These innovations would complement a redesigned "general education" core aimed at infusing the concept of "individual and social responsibility."

The new, synthesized model was purposely presented to the Forum participants in skeletal form, for Bassis feared that faculty would "pick the idea to death" if it contained detailed information. The proposal that was presented, therefore, contained no specific information about how the college’s curriculum would be affected by the educational program. For example, no information was presented about how many hours of credit (if any) would be assigned to each of the various components of the proposed plan, nor was anything said about how these changes might affect faculty workload or teaching assignments. When these kinds of issues arose in the form of questions from the audience, Bassis deferred them to another occasion, maintaining that the only question on the table was whether Olivet College’s faculty were supportive of the larger ideas presented.

Although many issues arose, it was obvious to forum participants that there was widespread support for the new plan. In the afternoon, a vote was taken during which 90% of the faculty expressed their support for the proposal. The remainder of the day was spent discussing next steps to "flesh-out" the new proposal in preparation for its presentation at the next meeting of the Olivet College Board of Trustees.

In October, 1994, the Olivet College Board of Trustees unanimously endorsed what had come to be known as "The Olivet Plan", approving a new design for undergraduate education which would radically alter the fabric of the college and ultimately draw renewed national attention to the institution.

Implementing the Olivet Plan: Processes and Challenges - Back to Top

Beginning in the fall of 1994, Olivet College began an exhaustive, and exhausting, process of implementing the Olivet Plan so that students who entered the college in the fall of 1995 would become the first cohort of students to be enrolled under the new academic vision. The first stage of the process involved the program design of the various elements that comprised the Olivet Plan and the planning of how these elements, both individually and corporately, would be integrated into the curricular and co-curricular fabric of the institution. The second stage of the process involved the actual integration of the various elements of the Olivet Plan into the curricular and co-curricular structure of the college. The issues involved in the Olivet Plan’s implementation were complex and critical. They involved, among many others, identifying numerous academic majors and programs for elimination and/or consolidation; acquiring new financial resources and reallocating existing resources within the base budget of the institution to support the priorities of the new Plan; overcoming faculty resistance to change; and, attempting to change the culture of the institution to reflect an ethic of collaboration, shared responsibility and participation across campus.

The primary responsibility for implementation fell to James Halseth, who had just been hired in June, 1994 as the institution’s new Vice President and Dean of the College. Halseth was a highly experienced administrator who had served previously at a variety of liberal arts colleges. Halseth’s experiences had interested him in issues of reform, innovation and change in higher education. Indeed, he was initially attracted to Olivet College because of the new academic vision the college had crafted and because of the challenges which this new vision presented. From his earliest conversations with President Bassis, Halseth had understood that his primary role and responsibility at Olivet would be to implement the college’s new vision in a way that would cut across the entire educational program of the institution. Halseth had also understood that such a role would require him to "get down in the trenches" with faculty to manage the day-to-day details of implementing the Olivet Plan.

Although Dean Halseth exercised primary administrative responsibility for implementing the Olivet Plan, the Olivet Board of Trustees also played a significant role in the implementation process by lending its support, both publicly and privately, to the college’s ongoing change efforts. In fact, since President Bassis’ arrival in the summer of 1993, the Board had gradually been transformed from a "sleepy", disinterested group to an increasingly interested and involved one, a function largely of Board turn-over. In the year immediately preceding Bassis’ hiring, about one-third of the Board membership had resigned. An additional number resigned in the first year of Bassis’ presidency. All the resignations were voluntary and, in general, they were welcomed by top administration officials. The individuals who the remaining Board members recruited to fill the vacancies were naturally more receptive to Olivet’s new academic vision. By the fall of 1994, the Board had become quite supportive of Bassis’ efforts. While there was not a lot, substantively, that the Board could do to assist in the implementation process, Board members served as "great cheerleaders" for Bassis, Halseth, and the college’s ongoing change agenda. The Board sent strong, and sometimes public, signals that they believed Olivet College was on the right track and that the college should continue down that track. As one senior administrator commented:

Doing the things we did with the campus and the faculty and all, it was certainly comforting knowing that the Board was fully supportive. We had free reign to do what we had committed ourselves to do.

Implementation Planning Processes

The process that Halseth created to plan the implementation of Olivet’s new educational program relied heavily on temporary, voluntary groups of faculty to work on different programmatic issues. Specifically, Halseth created eight faculty "task forces" to design the different elements comprising the Olivet Plan and a college-wide Implementation Planning Committee to coordinate the integration of the various elements into a coherent whole. Halseth’s approach also made extensive use of Olivet’s Faculty Senate.

The eight task forces were comprised of self-selected teams of Olivet faculty. The task forces were each led by a "convener" who was appointed by Halseth. Because faculty could move between or among the task forces as their interests dictated, there was a fluid quality to the groups’ membership. Consequently, a core group of faculty on each task force tended to do most of the "gut-work" involved in developing the specific implementation plans.

Each task force was charged with designing a different element of the Olivet Plan and with planning how the respective element would be implemented. For example, the Senior Year Experience Task Force was given responsibility for developing recommendations relative to the design and implementation of Olivet’s new senior-year experience. Likewise, the Intensive Learning Term Task Force was made responsible for developing recommendations for the design and implementation of the college’s new intensive learning term experience. Some of the key substantive issues addressed by each task force were the following: the objective or purpose of the element with the context of the larger Plan; how the element was to be linked to the student learning outcomes; course requirements comprising the element (including number of courses required, number of credit hours required, and course distribution); new courses that would need to be designed; class sizes; and, academic and administrative areas that would be utilized to support the element.

When a task force had fleshed-out its proposal, the plan was referred to the Implementation Planning Group, a twelve-member committee-on-committees comprised of the eight task force convenors, the president of the faculty senate, a trustee of the college, and a student. The Implementation Planning Group discussed, and often argued over, the specific details of each task force’s proposal, sometimes sending a proposal back to its respective committee of origination for revision but usually making necessary changes on the spot. After a proposal received endorsement from the Implementation Planning Group, it was referred to the college’s Faculty Senate, where the proposal was placed on the senate agenda for discussion and for a formal college-wide vote.

By the late spring of 1995, the Olivet Plan’s program design and implementation features (See Appendix A for a summary of the Olivet Plan) had been approved by the various faculty task forces, the Implementation Planning Group, and college’s Faculty Senate.

Academic Program Review

Concurrent with the first stages of the implementation process was a restructuring of Olivet’s curriculum in order to bring the college’s academic programs into alignment with the provisions of the Olivet Plan. The first step in the restructuring was the elimination or consolidation of programs which were deemed too weak or irrelevant to be included in the new academic program. Beginning in the fall of 1994, Halseth initiated a college-wide program review process for the purpose of identifying such programs. Surprisingly, the process of program consolidation and elimination proved less difficult and contentious than many faculty and staff had expected. One chief reason for this was the abundance of courses and programs listed in the Olivet College catalog which had rarely, or never, been offered. One senior administrative officer recalled the superfluous nature of much of Olivet’s official curriculum.

Believe it or not, the program review process was not all that hard [to conduct]. It wasn’t as hard as we thought it might be because when we sat down to actually examine the programs we found so many unquestionably weak courses and majors. A lot of the courses and majors in the catalogue had never even been offered, or there were so few students enrolled in them that their existence was difficult to justify. So a lot of the arguments we had with departments and with individual faculty were pretty one-sided [in our favor].

Ultimately, this program review process eliminated 15 majors, 15 minors and 75 courses from the Olivet College catalog.

Although the program review process proved less daunting than many had originally expected, the college did not sidestep controversial decisions. One such decision that was made early in the program review process was the elimination of Olivet College’s music program. The music program historically had been one of Olivet’s strengths, enrolling up to 120 students and enjoying some regional notoriety. By 1994, however, there were only a handful of students enrolled as music majors and many of the program’s faculty had retired or had resigned, disillusioned with the state of their program. The music program therefore was targeted as one of the first casualties of the review process. One senior institutional official recalled that the program was "killed off" for symbolic, as well as substantive, reasons:

We did it because we wanted to get everybody’s attention. We just couldn’t get people to realize how far [the music program] had fallen and how desperately it needed change. So we killed it to send a message to other departments. The message was that we were serious about program quality and about making the college’s academic programming conform with the Olivet Plan.

Dean Halseth and President Bassis received substantial criticism from alumni for the decision to eliminate the music program. The action made clear, however, the administration’s commitment to making change, even at the expense of "sacred cows". Ironically, the decision also generated support from other campus constituencies. For example, an Olivet trustee volunteered to pay the salary of a new choir director for 3 years while the college worked toward restructuring a new music major. Two years after the music program was eliminated, a new music major was reinstated at the college.

Funding the Olivet Plan: Communicating the Olivet Story Externally

Dean Halseth’s assumption of day-to-day responsibility for the Olivet Plan’s implementation freed President Bassis to concentrate on other critical issues, especially that of acquiring external financial resources sufficient to support the college’s implementation efforts. Bassis realized that the acquisition of external funding was absolutely essential, for the college simply did not have the internal resources to implement the plans being developed by the faculty task forces. A senior institutional officer recalled:

We had developed these quite detailed and ambitious plans for realizing the new academic vision, and here we were coming up on the end of the first year of the implementation process, and we hadn’t a dime to actually implement them for the [upcoming 1995 academic] year.

Faculty also had begun to wonder aloud whether the implementation plans which they were working so diligently to complete were financially feasible. How would Olivet College afford the First Year Experience courses or the course-based Service Learning projects that were being developed? How would the college pay the salaries of the new faculty who presumably would be hired to help deliver the varied elements comprising Olivet’s new academic plan. Would such funding come from internal reallocations or from new revenue streams? These questions, and others, became the subject of increasing attention at Faculty Senate meetings during the fall of 1994.

As the implementation planning stage continued in earnest throughout the fall of 1994, President Bassis worked intensively on building relationships with foundation program officers and on writing a series of grant proposals to submit to the respective foundations. When several of the foundations expressed initial confusion about what was actually occurring at Olivet, Bassis spent the December holiday break sequestered in a cabin in Northern Michigan rewriting the grant proposals and attempting to clarify for the foundation officers the nature and purpose of the Olivet Plan. Bassis continued to focus intensively on grant-writing during the spring of 1995, while awaiting word on the several proposals which the institution had already submitted to foundations.

The Olivet president’s grant writing activities were but one component of a larger, ongoing effort to communicate the institution’s story to important external publics. Because the college did not have the financial resources to hire public relations staff, President Bassis employed a variety of alternative, low-cost advancement strategies. One simple strategy was Bassis’ attempts to have himself included on panels at meetings of various professional and national higher education associations. He also employed the network of personal and professional colleagues and acquaintances which he had had developed over the years to communicate directly to people the nature of the change process that Olivet College had initiated. Additionally, Bassis wrote a variety of op-ed pieces about Olivet’s new educational program which appeared in several large circulation newspapers including the Detroit Free Press.

Another chief communication strategy was the creation of a college publication, Olivet Notes, which Bassis intended as a vehicle to make higher education leaders and certain philanthropic organizations throughout the country aware of Olivet’s efforts at reinvention. The idea for the slim publication was borrowed from Hillsdale College, a conservative liberal arts institution located just down the road in Hillsdale, Michigan. Hillsdale College’s very successful publication, Imprimis, had helped make the institution a cause celebre among conservative constituencies throughout the nation. Although clearly Olivet College was a very different kind of institution with a very different kind of message, the idea of a publication targeted toward higher education leaders and prospective donors seemed a like good idea.

The distribution list for Olivet Notes was small and select and only four issues of the publication were produced annually because there was little money for an aggressive mail campaign. Olivet Notes contained articles written by Bassis as well as reprinted speeches by various campus lecturers. Beginning in 1994, a campus lecture series entitled "Responsibility Matters" was started to focus attention around themes of individual and social responsibility. Initially, there were few "big names" brought to campus, but the series served to articulate and promote dialogue about what was happening at Olivet College and it also provided a source of publication material for Olivet Notes; the better speeches were abstracted and printed in the publication.

In April, 1995, President Bassis learned that his grant writing efforts had paid off when the college received its first grant award, from the Teagle Foundation. By all accounts, this first grant was enormously important because it provided desperately needed revenue to support the college’s evolving implementation plans and because it provided external, symbolic affirmation of Olivet’s efforts. One senior officer recalled:

Symbolically, the grant had a tremendous effect on campus. It showed people that we weren’t completely on our own with this thing, that others cared about us and would support us.

Incredibly, within the next month, Olivet College learned that it had been awarded two additional grants, signaling the start of an extraordinary windfall of financial support from a wide array of external sources. Indeed, over the next three years, Olivet College received in excess of $2 million in grants from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Frederick S. Upton Foundation, the William Randolph Hearst Foundation, the Alden Trust, the Teagle Foundation, the State of Michigan, and the U.S. Department of Education. During this period, the college also received its first substantial private gift. An anonymous New York donor, who had first become interested in the Olivet story through a mutual acquaintance of Michael Bassis, asked that Bassis travel to New York to discuss recent changes at the college. The anonymous individual subsequently made a large donation of an undisclosed nature to the college in 1996.

Although Michael Bassis wrote the initial grant proposals, Jim Halseth became increasingly involved in grant writing, eventually spending as much as one-half of his time at this task. The nature of the grant awards varied, as well. While some awards, such as the large, 1996 Kellogg Foundation grant, provided general institutional support in the form of subsidies for salary, professional development, travel, and office expenses, other grant awards covered very narrow and specific purposes. Indeed, one of Olivet’s grant strategies was that of "shopping" major elements of the Olivet Plan to different funding sources. Typically, these grant requests were characterized as "seed money" to help further develop and enhance the various elements of the Olivet Plan. However, all of Olivet’s grant proposals were premised on the idea that, as a consequence of its reinvention efforts, the college would grow and eventually replace external funding sources with increased tuition revenue and other forms of "internally" generated funding.

Through a series of evolving partnerships with national foundations and higher education associations, including the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s "Kellogg Forum for Higher Education Transformation" and the American Council on Education’s "Project on Leadership and Institutional Transformation", the college was placed in the national spotlight as a model of institutional transformation of undergraduate education. Olivet College also received national attention through its long-term relationship with Stephen Covey, author of the best-selling 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Covey had heard of Olivet’s "turn-around" efforts and had written the institution a letter of congratulation and support. Covey subsequently agreed to be the college’s May, 1996 commencement speaker and partnership was begun between Olivet College and the Covey Leadership Center to provide faculty, staff, and students with extensive professional development support.

The implications of this external financial support for the implementation of the Olivet Plan were extraordinary. Indeed, most senior institution officials later attested that, without this externally-derived support, the Olivet Plan could not have been implemented. The windfall of external funding also allowed the college to make fundamental reallocations within its base budget. Between 1994 and 1998, base budgets for instruction, academic support and student services increased from 54% to 58% of the operating budget while base budgets for administration and plant decreased from 46% to 42%. Additionally, base budget allocations for faculty and staff development, a critical element of the Olivet Plan, increased by 276%. Finally, the infusion of external financial support into Olivet’s operating budget allowed the college to reverse its recent trend of deficit spending. Whereas the institution had a budget deficit of $929,760 for the 1992-93 fiscal year, the college enjoyed a modest budget surplus for the 1998 fiscal year.

Overcoming Faculty Resistance

President Bassis’ insistence that faculty claim "ownership" and primary responsibility for the development of the Olivet Plan placed a tremendous burden on faculty time and energies. The burdens which the implementation of the Olivet Plan placed on faculty were just as substantial, for a variety of ongoing permanent faculty working groups, such as "First Year Experience Group", "Olivet Plan Group", "Service Learning Group", Portfolio Group", and "Senior Year Experience Group", continued to work on implementation issues and problems related to each of the Plan’s major elements. In addition to these committee activities, other demands were placed on faculty time including that of teaching new courses, expending considerable time advising students and assisting them in the development of their portfolios, redesigning curricular offerings, and reconceptualizing the role of faculty as educators, not simply as instructors.

Although the majority of Olivet’s faculty accepted these new demands, some faculty resisted. The nature and extent of such faculty resistance varied widely. Some faculty simply chose not to participate in the process. The majority of these non-participants lacked strong professional credentials and, therefore, were unsure whether and how they might fit into the new order being created. As the Olivet Plan materialized over time, many of these faculty gradually became involved in the change process, having finally found some component of the Olivet Plan that was of especial interest to them. Occasionally, their integration followed personal conversations with President Bassis or Dean Halseth, who appealed to them for their support.

Other resistors, however, either continued their vocal criticism of the Olivet Plan well into the implementation process or sought through subtle means to subvert the change process. Some of these faculty told students not to take seriously certain elements of the Olivet Plan, asserting that the college would not dare prevent a student’s graduation for failure to comply with the new curricular requirements. Some faculty simply tried to create a difficult work environment for colleagues who became well integrated into the new order. Most of these resistors eventually left Olivet College, either voluntarily or at the request of President Bassis and Dean Halseth. From the administration’s perspective, such departures were not necessarily failures. Jim Halseth, for example, characterized the departure of resistant faculty as likely the best course of action for both the college and the individual faculty member, saying:

The point I always tried to make with people was that not everybody is going to want to work at a transformational college. That doesn’t mean they’re bad people or they’re not capable people. In fact, in a more a traditional setting, many of them do just fine. But Olivet was no longer that kind of place?it wasn’t the right environment for them anymore.

As the implementation process unfolded, it became apparent that there was occasional resistance from department or program heads, as well as from individual faculty. Such resistance typically manifested itself in the form of "foot-dragging" in the redesign of existing courses or the implementation of new ones, or of failure to communicate with faculty and students the expectations and requirements of the Olivet Plan. Early in the implementation process, such resistance was either overlooked by Halseth and Bassis or department heads were gently prodded to conform with the Olivet Plan. Beginning in 1996, however, a few department heads who continued to resist were removed from their positions and replaced with faculty who were more enthusiastic about the new academic vision.

Of course, the most effective strategy for overcoming faculty resistance was changing the normative structure of faculty life by hiring new faculty whose values more closely matched those of Olivet’s new academic vision. As faculty positions opened as a result of natural attrition, forced departure, or the addition of new faculty lines made possible by foundation grants, the college paid particular attention to hiring individuals whose interests, abilities, and disposition seemed to "fit" well the demands of working at Olivet College. These new hires also afforded the college an opportunity to address issues of faculty diversity. Accordingly, between 1994 and 1999, over fifty percent of the faculty that were hired at Olivet College were women. Moreover, while there was only a single faculty member of color in 1994, by 1999, 33% of Olivet faculty were of color.

New faculty, especially those of color and women, were an especially important acquisition for Olivet College, not only because they helped diversify the college but because they played a major role in the actual change process. Dean Halseth commented on the important contribution of these new faculty, saying:

Because of their extraordinary energy, the faculty of color and the women who came in in large numbers had a major influence on [the] implementation [process]. These were people with things to prove…

Even with the important addition of new faculty, challenges involving faculty participation and involvement in the implementation of the Olivet Plan persisted. One problem that had, by 1996-1997, begun to create significant tension was the disparity of effort between those faculty who were considered "on board" with the new vision and those who were not. A minority of faculty had bore the preponderance of responsibility for implementing the Olivet Plan, and tension had emerged between those who were highly committed to the new order and those who were less committed.

Aligning Student Learning and Culture with the Values of the Olivet Plan

Two key assumptions underlying the Olivet Plan were that meaningful and enduring institutional change would require a change in student normative systems and that character development must take place outside the classroom, as well within it. In essence, these commitments dictated that student life at Olivet College be "brought into alignment" with the values espoused by the new vision of Education for Individual and Social Responsibility and that both the curricular and the co-curricular be employed to advance student learning. In early recognition of these commitments, the offices of both the Associate Vice-President for Academic Affairs and the Associate Vice-President and Dean of Community Life were placed administratively directly under Dean Halseth’s purview.

Both of the tasks mentioned above seemed daunting. They also shared a common obstacle: the existence of student cohorts with divergent sets of values and expectations. In 1995, only one class of students had come to Olivet under the provisions of the Olivet Plan, whereas at least three cohorts of students had come to the institution under the provisions of the old system. As a result, some students embraced the values and goals of the college’s new vision, but many did not and would not.

Despite this formidable challenge, the college set about to create new student life programs and to modify existing ones in order bring them more closely into alignment with the values of the Olivet Plan. For example, the college revised the campus disciplinary system to stress remedial efforts aimed at infusing a heightened a sense of student responsibility, rather than focusing on punitive sanctions. Olivet employed various tactics to integrate Greek organizations into the weave and fabric of the larger student culture. The college also created several new organizations and centers, including the African American Cultures Center and the Global Cultures Center, as a means of increasing student awareness of cultural diversity issues. Perhaps most importantly, Olivet College overhauled its campus alcohol policy following an embarrassing episode in late 1995, in which acutely intoxicated students from a campus party filled emergency rooms at local hospitals. The new, stricter policy, which later became a national model and was publicly lauded by U.S. Senators Edward Kennedy and Joseph Biden during their congressional efforts to combat campus drinking, emphasized the responsibility both of students and faculty to the larger community.

Olivet College created a variety of specific initiatives and programs aimed explicitly at integrating more closely curricular and co-curricular learning on campus. Theme houses were created to promote living-learning opportunities. The college began awarding fellowships, grants, and special recognitions to students who demonstrated superlative acts of service in the community. The Olivet Lecture Series brought to campus nationally acclaimed speakers and activists. Faculty were encouraged to link course work and course requirements more closely with real-world issues and problems and the course-based Service Learning Project requirement placed students in service opportunities in the immediate community and beyond.

These varied efforts led Olivet College in 1996 to adopt a graphical representation of the Olivet Plan, illustrating the curricular and the co-curricular as equally important "trunks" of student learning which both build upon and contribute toward a culture of responsibility on campus (See Appendix B). This illustration led to further discussion among faculty and staff as to whether the metaphorical "trunks" of the tree should be two branches or one?the latter representing an educational program in which the curriculum and the co-curriculum are conceived as inseparable.

Recognizing that much of Olivet College’s culture, especially its student culture, remained largely unaffected by the institutional vision of Education for Individual and Social Responsibility, President Bassis convened an all-day meeting of the Olivet community on April 2, 1997 to formulate a set of principles about the meaning of responsible membership in the college community. Although originally intended primarily as a guide for students, the conversation became enlarged to include the responsibilities of all members of the Olivet college community. Seven such guiding principles intended to operationalize responsible membership were formulated. Together, the seven principles were entitled, The Olivet College Compact (See Appendix C). The Compact was subsequently referred to Olivet College’s Faculty Senate, Staff Senate and Student Senate, where open and wide-ranging dialogue was held about the nature and implications of the seven principles. In May, 1997, all three senates ratified the document. The Board of Trustees endorsed the The Olivet College Compact in June, 1997.

Despite much effort, innovation, continued campus dialogue and improvement, the task of aligning student learning and culture with the values of the Olivet Plan proved one of the most persistent challenges of implementation. For example, one college consultant’s 1998 report concluded:

Students report?and faculty seem to concur?that many students see the value in the Olivet Plan, some students are against it, and a large group is in the middle. Some students stated, ‘Lots of students are in it but are not living it.’
The Departure of President Bassis and the Challenges of Institutionalization - Back to Top

In August, 1998, Michael Bassis left the presidency of Olivet College to become Dean of the New College campus of the University of South Florida, an institution renowned for its non-traditional approach to undergraduate education. Olivet’s Vice President and Dean, James Halseth, was appointed Acting President for the 1998-1999 academic year while a search committee began the process of identifying the college’s next president.

By virtually every measure, Olivet College had experienced dramatic change and marked improvement during the five-year presidency of Michael Bassis. The college had accomplished what would have seemed highly improbable, even impossible, to virtually anyone in the spring of 1992?it had reinvented itself as a national model for the successful transformation of undergraduate education. In the process of this transformation, Olivet had articulated a new and distinct academic vision; it had specified what students would know and be able to do upon graduation; it had developed a unique educational delivery system, the Olivet Plan, to give programmatic expression to the college’s new vision; it had fundamentally altered the nature of decision-making on campus; it had attracted extraordinary external financial resources to support its transformational efforts; and, it had begun to change the culture of the campus to reflect the college’s new commitment to individual and social responsibility.

Of course, Olivet College could point to more concrete indicators of improvement, as well. The college’s fall 1998 enrollment of 918 students was the largest in school history, and student retention had risen to 60% from year-one to year-two, up from less than 50% five years earlier. No less impressive than the increasing ethnic diversity of the Olivet faculty was the increasing diverse nature of Olivet’s student population. In the fall of 1998, 16.2% of Olivet students were Black and over 6% were drawn internationally, compared with a student population in 1993 that was only 6% Black and over 91% white. Olivet College’s fiscal picture had also improved between 1992 and 1998, owing largely to the extraordinary external support the institution had received from both foundations and key individuals. Whereas in 1993, Olivet College was faced with nearly a one-million dollar budget shortfall, by 1998 the institution was enjoying modest annual budget surpluses.

Bassis’ departure, however, marked a transition between two distinct eras in the process of transformation at Olivet College. The first era, the era over which Michael Bassis had presided, involved the articulation, formulation, and implementation of a new institutional vision. The second era, the one with which the college was now wrestling, involved the "institutionalization" of changes that had been made. The challenge of institutionalization was the challenge of sustaining change and finding ways to affect the deeper normative systems of the college. Of course, other questions also confronted Olivet College in 1998. As the first cohort of students that entered the college under the Olivet Plan prepared to enter their senior year in the fall of 1998, these questions appeared increasingly important to Olivet College’s long-term prospects:

· To what extent, if any, would Olivet College’s commitment to its reinvention change following the departure of Michael Bassis, whose contribution toward the initial transformation process was obviously crucial?

· How would the college’s reinvention "saga", a powerful corporate memory which had helped propel the institution through several difficult years of implementation, be retained in the midst of staff turnover and the hiring of new faculty with no personal experience in the shared events of the past?

· How could Olivet College’s climate and culture be changed so as to infuse an ethic of "individual and social responsibility" into the institution’s normative fabric?

· How would Olivet College demonstrate to current and prospective students and to external sponsors that its unique program of undergraduate education was, in fact, having a discernable effect upon the institution’s students?

· How could the enormous demands which Olivet College’s new educational program had placed on individuals’ time and energy be redistributed to lessen the impact of "burnout" being experienced by many Olivet faculty and staff?

· What were the long-term implications of treating all employees, not just faculty, as "educators"?

· Would the Olivet Plan prove sufficiently compelling to attract students to the college, even at a cost of about $18,000 a year?

· Would the institution’s enrollment-generated income ever be sufficient to cover the inevitable decline of externally derived grants and subsidies?

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Dean Halseth’s decision to remain as Acting President of Olivet College for the 1998-1999 academic year provided a crucial source of continuity as the Board of Trustees initiated its search for the college’s next president. Almost immediately, the Board announced that it would seek candidates who were committed to sustaining Olivet College’s distinctive vision and educational program, allaying fears that the departure of Michael Bassis would spell the end of the Olivet Plan.

A presidential search committee comprised of trustees, faculty, and students, and staffed by private search consultants, was formed in September, 1998. Reports suggested that the search committee was pleasantly surprised by the number, quality, and diversity of candidates in its pool. Many observers attributed the large and well-qualified candidate pool to the positive national attention which Olivet had received in recent years. In December, 1998, the search committee announced that it had narrowed its field of candidates to 50, and that it intended to begin interviewing candidates in mid-January. In February, 1999, three finalists were brought to campus for interviews. On March 10, 1999, the Olivet College Board of Trustees announced that it had hired one of those finalists, Frederico J. Talley, an associate provost and associate professor at Rowan University in Glassboro, N.J. as the college’s twenty-fourth president.

Talley’s academic and professional background was steeped in student affairs administration. Talley held an undergraduate degree in English from Dickinson College (1978), an MA in College Student Personnel from Bowling Green State University and a doctorate in Student Personnel and Higher Education Administration from Ohio University (1986). At Rowan University, Talley served as associate provost for academic and student services and associate professor in the Department of Special Educational Services. As such, he supervised the areas of the institution most responsible for both curricular and co-curricular affairs. By all accounts, it was this combination of experience leading student academic and personnel services that made Talley an especially attractive candidate to Olivet’s search committee.

In June, 1999, Iowa Wesleyan College, an institution known for its own innovative undergraduate program, announced the hiring of James Halseth as its next president.

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Reference Links:

Managing Change and Transformation in Higher Education...Institutions...M. W. Peterson...CSHPE...School of Education

Higher Education Transformation Work Group
Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education
2117 School of Education
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-1259