Updated July 2020
In May 2019, the Colgate University Board of Trustees, faculty, and Alumni Council approved and endorsed The Third-Century Plan, a comprehensive plan that seeks to pursue Colgate’s mission at its highest level and establish Colgate as one of the very finest undergraduate institutions in the nation.
The Third-Century Plan is continually monitored by the Board, administration, and faculty to measure progress against its goals and to show effort applied in service of its initiatives. The Status Update Report provides periodic updates against the plan for the University community.
A University is, at its core, the product of the people it attracts and a union of individuals in service of learning. Truly talented students, a leading faculty, and professional staff are all required for Colgate to be among the finest colleges and universities in the nation. Colgate, therefore, must take those new steps necessary to ensure that it attracts students, faculty, and staff of remarkable promise and achievement
Expansion of the financial support available to students to lessen the burden of student debt.
Beginning with the faculty cohort hired in the 2019–2020 academic year, pre-tenure faculty members will receive a calendar-year / four-course leave following a successful third-year review.
Colgate seeks to diversify its faculty — to bring to its classrooms, studios, laboratories, and team settings a greater range of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives.
Faculty: Conversion of visiting assistant professor lines to permanent positions
Colgate’s future rests on the extent to which it continuously strengthens academic life and nurtures a culture of intellectual rigor across all of its endeavors. As a leading American institution with a broad liberal arts mission, Colgate must support and encourage students and faculty as they explore both timeless questions and new areas of inquiry, ensuring that this University remains a place deeply engaged with the most pressing academic debates that challenge humankind.
Colgate reaffirms its belief that artistic expression, creative thinking, and innovation must be hallmarks of a Colgate education. The Middle Campus Plan for Arts, Creativity, and Innovation is not only a rethinking of the role of the arts and creativity at Colgate, but also a rethinking of the campus itself.
The University will enable new interdisciplinary research, teaching, and programming, while enhancing existing strengths in exploring linkages between mind, brain, and behavior, including an updated and expanded Olin Hall.
Plan renovation of Gatehouse to become swing space for Olin, summer of 2021
Colgate must overtly and explicitly create a deep, clear, and compelling campus culture — nurtured and expressed through its residential programs, athletics and other student activities, ceremonies, and traditions, and the overall campus experience. Colgate’s campus culture must foster bonds between students, faculty, and staff while connecting them, in a meaningful and sustained way, to the institution itself.
A Colgate education means all students live the liberal arts, connecting their Colgate education to where they live. The way students live at Colgate shapes their education and their experiences. It begins with first- and second-year students living within one of four Residential Commons where the integration of living and learning expands. The Colgate Residential Commons system is grounded in providing every student with a strong foundational community, where they experience tradition and build class unity and where University affinity is cultivated.
Upper-level housing options along Broad Street, the College Street apartments, and within the townhouses allow juniors and seniors to move into increasingly independent living options. The intergenerational connection between the first and second two years of a student’s experience is forged with the Broad Street social houses affiliated with each of the four Residential Commons as well as with the Broad Street interest houses. Both the social houses of the Residential Commons and the Broad Street interest houses invite students from all four class years to take part in a variety of social, intellectual, artistic, academic, and extracurricular activities.
Colgate should increase students’ access to opportunities to build core skills and gain necessary experience by developing ways to offer applicable training to a wide proportion of Colgate students who seek it. Aligned with Colgate’s commitment to financial aid, career services provides all students with access to opportunities to build critical skills, competencies, and experiences known to differentiate job candidates.
The health and wellness of Colgate students require an integrated model that ties together Student Health Services (SHS); Counseling and Psychological Services; Shaw Wellness Institute; Chaplain’s Office; Division of Physical Education, Recreation, and Athletics; and numerous other campus and community partners.
A facilities plan, developed from a review of PERA facilities and programming needs, projects future facilities and programming needs, defines a set of facility renovation and development priorities, and proposes a phased approach to facilities projects.
Current institutional policies and guidelines are examined and clarified as they relate to need-based financial aid, athletics financial aid (scholarships), admission slots, medical non-counter student-athletes, international studentathlete admission, and the Patriot League Academic Index. Recommendations are proposed for adjustments that are aligned with institutional expectations for academic and competitive success.
Colgate must steward one of its most precious assets: its campus. Enhancing the beauty of the campus, improving its infrastructure, and preserving its natural and built environment for future generations must remain high University priorities.
With the guidance of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates and building on prior long-term planning efforts, Colgate has developed the beginning of a long-term campus development plan. This plan will guide efforts to restore the campus landscape and treescape, improve parking and circulation, utilize the upper campus now expanded with new residence halls, and rationalize and improve the Middle Campus to create a new, engaging precinct for arts, creativity, and innovation.
Colgate needs to develop a variety of housing stock options that are affordable for faculty and staff from across the salary range.
Colgate must continue to invest in and develop the Village of Hamilton in collaboration with community partners.