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Within the long range plan, the education area
is primarily focused on the undergraduate experience.
And that is asking questions of what
do we want a Stanford education to be in the next 10, 15 years?
How do we want to reach students where they are?
And knowing where they are, what sort
of environment for education do we need to create?
Our team is charged with envisioning
the future of our undergraduate residences on campus.
We spoke to more than 500 different individuals.
We accepted every request to meet with any group on campus.
And we received over 600 pieces of feedback
through our online web forum.
I was actually surprised by how intentional the committee was
on gaining student input.
What students said had a lot of weight
when it came to our meetings.
But even though students had complaints, perhaps about
systems like the draw, about the variance in housing
across campus, students also articulated a sense of identity
from housing.
You have students coming together
at the beginning of the year and deciding
this is the dorm we want to be.
This is the culture we want to have.
Creating moments of community, allowing a dorm
to have a culture through the year,
I think is very Stanfordian.
And we want to make sure that the system of housing
in the future includes those components of student agency
and student independence.
The key here is that the residences
have to be places of learning and community and exploration
and discovery.
That's what enables us at Stanford
to ensure that we're educating the whole person.
The final report of the task force
is now in the hands of university leadership
and will be presented to the board of trustees in April.
And we're excited for feedback on our recommendations
from all of those groups.
Our committee was charged to think about
whether our first year students should
have a common intellectual experience,
and if so, what that experience should look like.
What we see is an opportunity to capitalize on that desire
amongst the students to have some kind of shared experience
and combine it with an opportunity to expose them
to different ideas, different ways of thinking,
different disciplines.
We saw common themes emerge around the purpose
of a liberal education.
So a liberal education is ultimately
about education for free citizens.
The liberal doesn't have anything
to do with a political position.
It just comes from the Latin libertas, or freedom.
So the freedom to take a number of classes in different areas
but also the idea of freeing your mind
from social conformity, these are
deeply important values that I think
are central to this university.
We see it as our responsibility to give them
a forum in which they can discuss these big ideas
and figure out what those ideas mean to them
and how they will interact with the changing world when
they leave Stanford.
We're really trying to speak to as many faculty and students as
possible to get their feedback on these proposals.
Then come fall 2019, we will start
to engage with the various committees and other parts
of the university for implementing the proposals.
We were charged really to think about what a Stanford
major should become in the coming decades
and how it can remain nicely fitted
into a broad liberal education at Stanford,
even as the amount of disciplinary knowledge
in the different fields of various majors
continues to expand at an incredibly rapid pace.
A lot of members of the community were very excited
and charged up about the importance for students
of the future of active learning and project-based learning
in which the students are thinking
for themselves with the tools that they
have built up and cultivated in their education.
And we think there's a real chance
to reorient the major around that kind of learning
in particular by doing a better job of delivering
for every Stanford student a really robust capstone
experience in their major where the student has a chance
to think for herself with the tools
that she's cultivated in the course of her study
within the major.
So what we've been doing this quarter
is working very hard to develop a preliminary set of proposals
and a preliminary report that we can take out into the community
during spring quarter and discuss
with various stakeholders and get that important feedback.
Then over the summer, we'll refine our proposals
and come up with a detailed report
that we can put before the faculty senate next year.
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