Dear Providence College Parents,

It is my great pleasure to write this letter to you -- the first in a series that I will use to regularly communicate with you about important initiatives and activities underway at Providence College. The content of these letters will be based on input we received from a series of focus groups we held with parents in which we asked what other information you want to know, in addition to the periodicals you already receive from the College.

For this first letter, I would like to share with you some of its key goals of Providence College's new Strategic Plan. We began the process of updating and renewing our existing plan in 2005. For now, I will concentrate on three of the goals: the religious development of our students, the content and form of our curriculum, and our commitment to diversity.

If you ask me what is most important in this plan, the priest in me is going to tell you that it is the religious development of our students. One of our greatest obligations is to create evangelization and outreach programs that excite students to appropriate better their Catholic faith. The Chaplain's Office, which is now overseen by the newly established Division of Mission and Ministry, sponsors a number of initiatives--retreats, small faith sharing groups, and service programs--to help accomplish this goal. I am confident that this most vital of transformations for our students is being effectively led and that many new and exciting opportunities for students' spiritual growth lay ahead.

The second most important goal of the plan is to strengthen our curriculum. As part of the process, the College is undergoing a Core Curriculum review, which began in January of last year. The Core Curriculum is critical to Providence because, in a sense, it defines who we are and what makes us distinctive among Catholic colleges. It is also a unifying aspect of a PC education because all students share the experience of certain core courses.

In my original discussions with faculty and administrators about changes to the core, a consensus emerged on three points. First, any revised Core Curriculum would be faithful to the Catholic and Dominican traditions of the College. Second, a modified Development of Western Civilization (DWC) Program would remain the centerpiece of the core. And third, our revised core would be responsive to the 21st century world of globalization and diversity. Making the core relevant to the modern world while maintaining the kind of integrated thinking that lies at the heart of a Catholic and Dominican liberal arts education, especially within the DWC Program, is the most significant challenge of this review.

In the midst of the discussion regarding what we should be teaching our students there emerged questions about how we should teach. All the best contemporary literature on how students learn points to the importance of active learning-the idea that students learn more effectively when they are actively engaged in the learning process. For example, writing-intensive courses have been shown to help students synthesize and clearly articulate what they are learning. We expect numerous other active learning methods to emerge from this review process.

The third important goal of the plan is to develop a campus characterized by greater racial, ethnic, geographic and socio-economic diversity. Diversity in all its forms is an essential educational value for our students. We need to educate students to live in a world where diversity of languages, political ideas, races, religions, and cultures surrounds them. As a Catholic institution, we have the same obligation to embody diversity as does the Church--an institution whose membership spans racial, ethnic, geo-political, and socioeconomic barriers the world over.

To create such diversity, we need to take action on several fronts. We must step up efforts to recruit students from outside our region and from underrepresented and disadvantaged backgrounds. Some of these students may have the financial resources to attend PC, more will not. To help these students enroll, we must expand our scholarship programs.

Providence College derives 81% of its operating budget from tuition. With such a high percentage of our income covering day-to-day expenses, there is very little left for scholarship programs. Yet, our tuition is still lower than that of comparable liberal arts colleges, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, in the region. Given our tuition-driven status and our below-market-pricing, we struggle to remain competitive on the one hand and to continue to ensure excellence on the other. Increasing our endowment, which ranks among the smallest when compared to our competitors, is essential to increasing our diversity and maintaining our educational excellence. It is one of the most serious challenges the College faces--one that has become a major focus of my work.

I trust from this brief outline of our primary strategic goals you can see how interrelated and interdependent each goal is to the others. The plan's holistic, integrated nature parallels the way in which we approach the education of the whole student in mind, body, heart, and soul. In its fullness and integration the plan will help guide us in our pursuit of excellence and truth.

Rev. Brian J. Shanley, O.P.