INTRODUCTION

Even a cursory reading of the material written for the eight study commissions of PLU 2000, or recording and summarizing the conversations about it, will discover a broad consensus concerning the heritage, present circumstance, and best hope of Pacific Lutheran University. This consensus amounts to an orientation for the University. An accurate and engaging articulation of it should illuminate our policy deliberations, focus our marketing effort, define our recruiting criteria (for faculty, staff, and regents as well as students), and guide the reform of our curriculum and pedagogical methods.

The consensus seems to aggregate into five axioms, each of which:

• claims consistency with and derivation from the traditions of the University;
• stipulates a diagnosis of a particular aspect of the University's present situation; and
• provides the conceptual outline (and sometimes the detail) of a prescription that is sensitive both to the institution per se and to the cultural and demographic milieu in which the University finds itself.

1. That we continue to reform the University community by extending the reach of collaboration in learning, policy deliberation, and work, and that we adjust our curriculum, pedagogy, and faculty development to accommodate a new University-wide educational strategy that fuses liberal and professional education;
2. That we reaffirm our participation in, and consistency with, the vitalizing tradition of Lutheran higher education;
3. That we adopt "educating for lives of service" as our motto and statement of educational purpose;
4. That we develop a more diverse community of students and employees; and
5. That the educational enterprise of the University supply the purpose, method, and style of our recruiting effort, our financial, equipment and plant-management strategies, and the articulation and publication of our institutional self-portrait.

This new self-definition seems everywhere in the documents and discussions sponsored by PLU 2000 to be struggling for emergence and acknowledgment. The imminence of this self-definition is evident most often in statements of what we are not, or in heavily qualified statements of what we are.

We are neither a liberal arts college nor a research university-nor even a "comprehensive university" (if that means a group of professional schools randomly branching from an arts and sciences trunk). We are a residential campus, but many of our students live elsewhere. We offer 4-year baccalaureate degrees in a wide range of majors, but a rising proportion of our students are "non-traditional" -- mid-life/mid-career people seeking additional education, entering or advancing in the service professions, or transferring from public institutions. We are a church-related institution, but neither are we nor do we seek the establishment of an exclusively Christian campus.

Scattered through these perceptions are fascinating glimpses of what we are and what we might become. Sometimes they are hinted at and sometimes stipulated. The following, condensed from the PLU 2000 documents, constitutes the broad outline of what appears to us as a clearer understanding of PLU, and perhaps even a new self-definition:

1. At PLU, the traditional tension between liberal and professional education has been minimized by the acknowledgment that our students seek a useful education, and such an education (whether granted in the liberal arts or elsewhere in the curriculum) must include serious and dialectical study of ethics, literature, and the forms of civil discourse.
   
   
2. We depend upon and are committed to the welfare of the neighborhoods of Parkland, Tacoma, Pierce County, and Puget Sound, and we welcome the part time student (both graduate and undergraduate), the transfer student, and the adult learner.
   
   
3. While we remain a Lutheran institution of higher learning and acknowledge our Scandinavian roots, we are committed to a new infusion of diversity, to capitalizing upon our location on the Pacific Rim, and to the preparation of men and women for lives of thoughtful service in an increasingly globalized society.
   
   
4. Because of the broad mix of our students and the fields of study we offer, we possess and must further extend a community which is both profoundly inclusive -- it must make colleagues of staff workers and full partners of part-time students -- and a living testimony to the principal values we teach.

Indeed, the campus community is widely reported as the University's most distinguishing asset. Nevertheless, it is in need of reform, and for two reasons: 1) its traditional stability has been shaken by financial difficulties which have not yet been fully overcome by the complex of restructuring policies know as Project Focus, and 2) it has not yet been fully adapted to the changing mix of our transfer, adult, minority, international and 4-year enrollment, or to our current obligation to prepare our students for effective lives of thoughtful service in an increasingly diverse, international, and technological world.

The primary focus of the reforming attention is the learning process. We quote from one of the planning documents:

"Joining `community' and `learners' to describe PLU highlights a traditional strength of the university, its attention to the involvement of whole persons, students, faculty and staff, in the educational process. To build on this self-understanding for the twenty-first century entails a commitment and a claim. The commitment is that PLU will shape its institutional culture deliberately to foster communities of learning. The claim is that learning, even of the most solitary sort, is significantly shaped, motivated, and supported by learners' past, present, and future communities."

Henceforth, we must shape our pedagogy by consulting the needs and gifts of our students, the requirements of academic disciplines, and the competence-based requirements of professional certification. A vital pedagogy to support life-long learning for the twenty-first century can emerge from a sustained and mutually critical and creative consideration of these three factors. In this consideration we must find ways to help students draw upon their gifts as resources in the process of being intellectually challenged by the educational process. Further, as we reflect on our pedagogy, faculty, students, and administration, we must recognize that not all conflicts over ideas or actions will be resolved. We must continue to practice civil and constructive ways of living with the tensions of ongoing debate and disagreement. Moreover, we must adjust our curriculum to a recognition it already partially reflects-that at PLU professional and liberal education in all schools and departments is combined so comprehensively and profoundly that we are hard pressed to find among our colleagues narrow partisans of either.

The following narrative of the traditional, but largely un-mapped relationship between liberal and professional learning is intended to establish the significance of this comprehensive combination, and to draw out its implications for the reform of the campus community.

Beyond Liberal versus Professional Education
Almost from its inception, American higher education has been caught in an argument: is its purpose to produce a liberally (i.e., generally) educated citizenry for life in a democratic society, or to prepare individuals for a continually expanding list of professions? The earliest American colleges provided a basic education on the foundation of which they or others could form teachers, ministers, and lawyers. This model guided the founding of the frontier institutions.

Industrialization and the new requirement for technical competence bifurcated American higher education: the land-grant colleges were assigned the primary task of developing new skills for agriculture, engineering, and business; liberal arts colleges stuck primarily to general or preparatory education.

Even so, industrialization, in concert with the emergence of new interest and knowledge in the applied sciences and the founding and development of the social sciences, turned even small liberal arts schools away from general and liberating education and toward the preparation of students for graduate work in ever more specialized fields.

This carried many of the modern apologists even of the arts and humanities toward a "depth rather than breadth" position, and thus weakened the liberal view that undergraduate education should broaden the range of the student's intellectual experience and interest and thus enlarge the deliberative and managerial talent available to the society. It favored, instead, the view that penetration of a single specialized discipline is an indispensable element of a liberal education. This precipitated competition rather than collegiality among faculties, and, over time, weakened general curricular requirements aimed at breadth rather than depth.

In the early years of professional education, the liberal arts were welcomed as an introduction to and foundation for the new fields. In time, however, the growth of technical knowledge encouraged curricular specialization even at the undergraduate level. This compounded interdepartmental competition and shifted the responsibility for undergraduate advising to department and professional-school partisans and away from figures guided by the concepts of either general or liberating education.

These trends have been powerfully reinforced by the conversion of higher education after the conclusion of the war in Vietnam into a vast job-training program. This conversion is reflected in the fact that, since the mid 1970's, the defense of liberal education has usually been stated in economic rather than intellectual and moral terms. Among older and part-time students (whose numbers have risen steadily since the 1970's), the interest in jobs and career enhancement has been especially pronounced. From 1977 to 1987, the number of freshmen planning to major in business increased from 19% to 27%; in engineering, the number rose from 8% to 12%. At PLU today, fully one-half of our students study some business or education. Between 1974 and 1984, the number of business and management degrees and the number of computer and information science degrees increased by 36% and 32%, respectively. During the same period (when the total number of bachelor's degrees rose by 4%), degrees in the humanities and social sciences dropped by 27% and 13% respectively.

The dramatic increase in the number of undergraduates who receive their first degrees from professional schools means that a very large portion of the audience for arts and sciences courses at places like ours is acquiring diversification perforce. The requirements for diversification are regularly under pressure both from accrediting bodies as well as departmentalized faculty. Hence, in most institutions they have tended to erode. As early as 1988, a student could graduate from 80% of the four-year colleges in the U.S. without a course in American history; from 37%, with no history at all; from 77%, with no foreign language, and from 45% with no American or English literature.

These trends, along with our solid institutional conviction that the only useful education for modern times includes a core of liberal learning, push us past the old debate between liberal and professional education. Our task is to describe the elements of a PLU education which will permeate all programs, professional and liberal arts, at all levels. Such a description should include at least the following:

1. Knowledge and appreciation of our own and others' cultures, both their histories and their contemporary configurations. Such knowledge and appreciation, which require development of historical consciousness, constitute a personal grounding for individuals and a resource for grappling creatively with the challenges of the twenty-first century.
   
   
2. Ability to conceptualize in powerful ways the intellectual and humane value of rigorous philosophical or scientific methods. Philosophy and science have provided powerful tools and methods for understanding the world. Especially important here is the capacity for symbolic processing (as distinct from a mechanistic "data processing"). The quantitative reasoning of advanced mathematics strengthens symbolic reasoning.
   
   
3. Ability to express our own and others' ideas accurately, empathetically, and critically. Good writing, not only expressive but persuasive, is essential for conceptualizing, evaluating, and achieving human ends. The knowledge and use of languages other than English is crucial to understanding others' ideas and to developing discrimination in self-expression. Language study also supports PLU's other initiatives towards appreciating diversity. Learning to express one's own and others' ideas in written and oral form is one crucial way that humans learn to stand outside of themselves and to feel what others feel.
   
   
4. Capacity to discuss and to state personal and communal positions on human values. Human values are vital to peoples' identity, meaning, and purpose. As a church-related school, PLU can admirably fill the void of public education in offering opportunities and critical frameworks for the discussion of human values.

By consciously embracing this view as the organizing principle of our curriculum, we distinguish Pacific Lutheran University among private institutions of higher learning in America. Such an embrace helps make us the prototype of the new American college by firmly acting upon the axiom advanced by Alfred North Whitehead in 1932: "[T]he antithesis between a technical and a liberal education is fallacious. There can be no adequate technical education which is not liberal, and no liberal education which does not impart both technique and intellectual vision" (p. 74). For him, and for us, the fundamental objective of education is to acquire "the art of the utilization of knowledge" (p. 6).

This new -- or redescribed -- position requires adjustments (some of which are now being made) by both the College of Arts and Sciences and the professional schools at PLU, and in respect to transfer and graduate students as well as four-year undergraduates. The professional schools may need to enlarge the arts and sciences portion of the study required of their students, and the faculties of the college may very well be invited to contribute to the instruction of professional degree candidates under the auspices of the professional programs as well as in diversification courses provided by their "home" departments. Jointly-taught interdisciplinary courses may grow in number. Because the fusion of liberal and professional education brings the world and the classroom into constant contact, dialogue and collaborative education need to be used in new and creative ways.

The New Learning Community
These reforms bring PLU closer to our unique excellence as a learning community. PLU strives to be a purposeful community where intellectual life is central. It also strives to be a place where the intellectual enterprise is not divorced from the university's service orientation, its interest in and engagement with the communities in which it is physically located, or its commitment to diversity and internationalism. The External Relations Commission elaborated on these latter elements of PLU's excellence as a community of learners when they described the university as:

1. A community of teachers and learners who accept the challenge of facing and engaging the world beyond the one in which they have previously found themselves, recognizing its full richness, complexity, and value;
2. An open and just community of active participants in the education of the whole person who will become involved in the extra-curricular and in the worlds beyond the campus and the college years, and who accept the lifelong role of leader and servant within those broader communities;
3. A caring community responding to the call of the gospel to affirm the value and well-being of each member and the call to social responsibility within the broader communities beyond the campus; and,
4. A mythic and legendary community, made so in part by the conscious cultivation of ceremony, the regular use of symbols, and the celebration of tradition.

Financial exigency has altered the nature of job security at the University, and the cost-control and resource reallocation strategies of Project Focus have raised the level of work responsibilities across the board, and dramatically increased the breadth and frequency of the consultation and cooperation required for the successful accomplishment of tasks.

On these points there is no turning back, and the reform of the PLU community must discover and develop ways of incorporating and legitimizing these changes. It must convince the capable, creative, and ambitious that they are valued -that losing their services would deplete us; that we will find new responsibilities and opportunities for them when they outgrow or tire of old ones; that we expect to receive their service in exchange for fair compensation and do not expect it as sacrifice. Moreover, we must replace the notion that job security rests upon exclusive expertise and seniority with one that favors cross training, broad and routine interdepartmental consultation and cooperation and rests upon two principles that acquire the force of cultural assumptions -- that we are all in service to the educational enterprise, and that no one or group of us can do our work without the others.

Indeed, many members of our staff spend as much time with our students as do faculty -- as employers, coaches, and service providers -- and are thus ipso facto full partners in the central business of the University.

This points toward greater care of ourselves as employees -- better pay, the enlargement of benefits and flexibility in the choosing of them, more promotions and job transfers, greater access to training. But most of all, we require the development of a culture in which the individual, regardless of rank and job, is regarded as a citizen of the community whose insights, proposals, and criticisms are warmly invited as the richest available source of our improvement in the great undertaking to which we are dedicated.

The Campus and the Neighborhood
The community whose reactivation and reform is proposed in the PLU 2000 documents is distinctive in respect to its relationship with the neighborhoods within which we are located. For us, these neighborhoods are not mere data. Nor are they interesting simply because they supply the bulk of our enrollment, or because their appearance affects our reputation and influences the impact of our marketing. They constitute the residential neighborhoods of our colleagues and -- perhaps most important -- they constitute the most proximate representation of the world for which we are preparing our students and to the welfare of which we are obliged by our Lutheran heritage.

The service and neighborhood aspects of our mission require the development of an education simultaneously liberating and useful, not first one and then the other; certainly not one instead of the other.

CONCLUSION
The reforms mentioned here and recommended under this head in Part III of this document would contribute directly to the development of PLU as a purposeful learning community focused on intellectual excellence with attention to service in the local neighborhood and the world. They complement our mission and are consistent with our church relationship and the values of Lutheran higher education. These reforms suggest important tenets of PLU's self-definition as a church-related new American university.

The simultaneous growth of non-traditional, evangelical congregations, and the decline of traditional church affiliation constitute both a challenge and an opportunity for the University. At the same time, the spirited University-wide deliberation on the mission statement indicates that the institution is even more interested in defining its educational objectives in Lutheran terms than at any time since the move to University status in 1960. This concern interacts with the growing appetite in society for a value-laden life and for an education that includes consideration of moral and ethical issues. One of the most distinguishing aspects of PLU to those applicants we accepted for the fall of 1992 was the availability of religious activities. It is widely understood that we provide an unusually broad array of opportunities for religious expression and experience; that our faculty is keenly sensitive to the value dimension of inquiry; that we offer an especially fine curriculum in the academic study of religion, fostering literacy in biblical, theological, and world religious traditions; that our campus pastors are central figures in spiritual care, counsel, and guidance; and that we concern ourselves with peace and justice issues both locally and globally. Not so widely understood, but equally relevant is the fact that twentieth-century shifts in the understanding of science and other cognitive disciplines also support this same concern for commitment and perspective in academic discourse.

The University is owned by the member congregations in Region One of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, but enjoys with the ELCA a relationship much more in the nature of a partnership than an ownership. "On the one hand, PLU is a servant of the church," according to Harvey Neufeld, Vice President Emeritus of Church Relations. "It is dependent on the church. It must respect the church's expectations and promise to deliver on those expectations. On the other hand, PLU is at times a pace setter for the church, willing to challenge the frontiers of knowledge and to wrestle with deep matters of faith and reason. The church must allow the University freedom to discover, to venture into the unknown. Searching will lead to new understandings of the world in which we live."

As for the church nationally, the ELCA Division for Higher Education and Schools sees its colleges and universities as responsible for what it calls an "education of the heart," the distinctive traits of which seem consistent with the principal initiatives of our strategic plan. Each is to provide:

1. Learning which is intellectually free.
2. Excellence which embraces every field of knowledge.
3. Education which brings the Christian theological heritage, particularly its Lutheran expression, into an academic setting.
4. Education which builds community.

Luther conceived of the Christian life as lived out in the world. He regarded the life of the mind as in the service of faith and faith as liberating the mind for worldly service. In the context of a Lutheran university, the university is the place where faith informs the use of reason and reason challenges the false uses of faith. Just so, the interaction of our Lutheran heritage and the rational enterprise shapes an ongoing dialectical tension. Accordingly, PLU is the place where the ongoing dialogue between faith and reason, between Athens and Jerusalem, is celebrated and sustained. Conversation with the wider Christian community and with world religions and other faiths also enables us to order and manage the affairs of the world wisely. Faith gives an ultimate orientation within the world, an orientation which is in dialogue with other deep human commitments.

PLU stands within a distinctive Christian tradition that has made important contributions to the founding of the modern university. We take faith seriously, but we neither produce nor require it. The University's task is to study the world given to us and its possibilities. We affirm that, while doing so, this University honors its special obligations of bringing that world into dialogue with the Christian perspective.

The Lutheran tradition esteems a liberal and professional education highly; an education in the affairs and matters of this world is as demanding and as important as education for leadership in the institutional church. For example, Martin Luther argued that in civil offices and government humans must be guided by reason. The education Luther advocated for this world supposed that "the highest welfare, safety, and power of the city consists in able, learned, wise, upright, cultivated citizens, who can secure, preserve, and utilize every treasure and advantage" (Eby, pp. 56-57).

Luther's argument for higher education is consistent both with liberal education in its classical form -- "the fine delightful satisfaction a man derives from being educated even if he never holds an office" (Plass, 1948,p. 450) -- and also with practical or professional education: "Now although there were no soul, as I have said, and no need at all of school and languages for the sake of Scripture and of God, one consideration should suffice to establish everywhere the best of schools for both boys and girls. It is this: In order outwardly to maintain its temporal estate, the world must have good and skilled men and women . . . ." (Plass, 1948, p. 448).

The distinctive Lutheran concept of vocation informs our understanding of our work at PLU. All persons are called to understand whatever work they undertake as a calling dedicated to a greater good than themselves. Luther understood vocation as applying to all people, both to those who interpreted it as a word from God and to those who feel moved only by compelling needs of the neighbor. All persons at PLU, whether faculty, students, administrators, or staff, are called to understand the daily routine of their work as their instrument for serving others.

In addition, PLU has a special responsibility to remind students that as students they are both called to study and to prepare themselves for their future vocations. All occupations are opportunities for service. We honor academic study in and of itself as service. Our interdependencies and exchanges in the process are serving opportunities. We see every activity and occupation as part of a web which seeks to serve the neighbor and foster the life of the community. We are engaged in the graduation of vocationally oriented citizens committed to lives of "thoughtful inquiry, service, leadership, and care -- for other persons, for the community, and for the earth" (Draft Mission Statement, 1993).

Preferring the idea of vocation to "career" or to "profession," PLU goes well beyond those places that encourage students and employees to include service work among the regular routines in teaching, research, and study. A vocation is the work in behalf of the world's needs to which one is called and for which one is fit by several gifts, including education. Such work is preoccupied with the idea of service, and service includes -- is not in addition to -- teaching, research, and study.

Today, PLU educates for lives of service in three carefully organized and institutionalized ways. The first is by way of the practica required in its professional schools. At PLU, the education which precedes these experiences is distinguished both by liberal learning and exploration of the role of vocation in professional excellence. This lends a special character to the work of our students, and the University enjoys an enviable reputation among employers as the preferred provider of serious, sensitive, and mature interns. According to Alexander Astin, the kind of education which produces this reputation "goes far beyond just teaching the student how to be a doctor, a lawyer, a diplomat, or a business executive." This learning "is really about encouraging the students to grapple with some of life's most fundamental questions" (LeJeune, 1993, p. 18). While the primary goal in providing these practical experiences is the refinement of competency, the ultimate -- and intentional -- goal is to uncover and develop among our students the idea of vocation and the commitment to service. This intentionality is a hallmark of professional education at PLU.

The second way in which the University educates for lives of service is evident in the faculty's employment, often in the arts and sciences, of a "service-learning" pedagogy which extends and applies the subject at hand to life as it actually appears. This is what happens when a student enrolls in the Interim on the Hill class in the Hilltop area of Tacoma, or undertakes volunteer counseling with a local parish as part of a religion class, or provides assistance at a shelter for battered women as part of a class on gender, or documents water pollution for a report eventually rendered to a state agency as part of the work in an environmental sciences class. At root, the courses which are extended by the service learning pedagogy seek to penetrate social problems and relationships. The pedagogy both supplements that effort and applies its results. In so doing, it capitalizes upon and advertises the excitement deriving from the purpose of the learning; it links the learning and the subject by means of service.

The third way in which service is taught at PLU is by the provision of volunteer experiences, like those facilitated by the Center for Public Service. These experiences lead to direct immersion in the affairs of the neighborhood communities, often by way of the broad array of public service programs housed in East Campus -- the Wellness Center, Second Wind, Marriage and Family Therapy, the Center for Metropolitan Development, Tacoma-Pierce Health Department programs, and at least two Head Start programs.

It is significant that these and other volunteer opportunities are seized not only by students, but by faculty and other members of the campus community. Together, students and faculty or staff often engage in volunteer work at East Campus and elsewhere. A significant part of campus governance is animated by the principles of volunteer service -- and is clearly possessed of an educational component. Our management of environmental, safety and health, and conduct and grievance issues is clearly illuminated by the general orientation to service that is characteristic of the institution.

This orientation seems evident in the activities of advised student organizations and in the heavy participation of PLU faculty and staff in local business associations, civic groups, and other community organizations. Professor Rowe described this in a study paper: "This commitment to service endures among PLU's alumni, some of whose accomplishments have had global impact in fields ranging from science to sport, from medicine to music. Countless others regularly serve humanity in ...the family, the church, and the local neighborhood. PLU creates an expectation for such service. Fulfillment of that expectation is another factor that sets products of PLU apart."

Luther's call for the establishment of institutions of higher learning makes educating for lives of service the fulfillment of the human obligation to rightly manage the affairs of this world. A serious effort on the part of the University to follow this calling would therefore establish as our primary objective the rendering of service to our students without respect to their means or capabilities. "Now the welfare of a city does not consist alone in great teachers, firm walls, beautiful homes, and munitions of war; indeed, where all these are found, and reckless fools come into power, the city sustains the greater injury" (Eby, 1931, pp. 56-57). Therefore, says Luther, "promising children should be instructed, especially the children of the poor; for this purpose the revenues of endowments and monasteries [are] provided....For in a good building, we need both large and small timber" (Eby, 1931, p. 122).

Hence, both Luther's and Pacific Lutheran's emphasis on vocation and service points toward the fourth consensual theme in the PLU 2000 documents, viz., the need for an effective commitment to greater diversity in the institution.

We confess no doubt about the propriety of our heritage, or about its consistency with the new commitment to diversity, when we acknowledge that we have been too narrow in ethnic, gender, cultural, and economic representation. This narrowness is reflected in our enrollment: In 1990, when the enrollment of African-American, Asian-American and Hispanic students in America's universities and colleges had risen to 12%, 3%, and 9%, respectively, PLU's enrollment of these groups was 1%, 4%, and 1% respectively. Of our 430 staff and administrative employees, only 12% are ethnic minorities; 62% are women. Of our 237 full-time faculty, only 6% are ethnic minorities, and 37% are women. Of our 79 part-time faculty, again 6% are ethnic minorities, and 48% are women.

We have achieved an enviable reputation in respect to our accommodation of students with disabilities, and have agreed to spend about $1.5 million over the next several years to provide access according to the recommendations and requirements of ADA legislation.

We are uncomfortable with proposals to specify the proportion of our students or employees belonging to such minority groups. Certainly, we should not take as our goal the reproduction at PLU of the national (or any other) statistical demographic profile. We affirm that we will try to enlarge such representation above current levels, even as we notice that the current levels reflect significant gains made in recent years as a consequence of hard work by the several departments of the University.

The new commitment to diversity requires that we adjust two aspects of our profile: the demographic constitution of both the enrolled and employed constituencies, and the shape of the curriculum. Adjustment of the first, by increasing the number of representatives of each minority group enrolled or employed here, will help us create a climate of full welcome to minority individuals by providing both "critical mass" and role models. Adjustment of the second will require reliance upon pedagogies that enlarge the level of collaboration so as to draw diverse perspectives into dialogue in the classroom. Curriculum reform aided by such pedagogies will help us to combat the tendencies toward cultural and intellectual separatism that are endemic to the movement in much of modern academe.

To accomplish these adjustments, we shall have to raise our financial aid levels and our faculty and staff salaries, and address and perhaps reapportion our curricular investment in programs. Since the richest source of diversity for us is probably the graduates of the community colleges, it may also mean that we must allow the proportion of transfers among new students to remain close to the 41% achieved in 1994-95.

The commitment to diversity includes an initiative for the planning horizon which has been broadly recommended in the PLU 2000 process, viz., to enlarge the education of our students in global perspectives. This objective reflects the conviction that national political boundaries are losing relevance in the cases of the economy, the environment, and the phenomena of ethnic and cultural diversity. We are called upon to recognize that our graduates are already living in and will undertake or extend careers in a global society. To meet the obligations implicit in this recognition, we must aim at the recruitment of a larger number of foreign nationals both for the student body and the faculty. (Foreign student enrollment has averaged 4.5% over the last five years.) We must use overseas exchanges of faculty members more effectively and enlarge the number of students studying abroad. We must make curricular adjustments that increase the sensitivity to and knowledge of global trends. The specific focal points of these reforms are yet to be selected, but the emergent consensus suggests that they should be chosen in view of the University's location on the Pacific Rim, in view of its Scandinavian and Germanic roots, and in light of the patterns of immigration into our critical markets.

We agree that recruiting and retaining students be accomplished primarily by marketing our curriculum and programs, our culture, and our purpose. Our price should reflect the value of what we provide in exchange and be within the means of those attracted here; our campus should, in appearance and function, reflect and reinforce our purpose, and our location provide an inventory of opportunities from which we might learn and to which we might apply our learning -- but none of these should constitute the leading elements of our appeal.

We agree that our primary recruiting effort should continue to focus on 4-year undergraduates so as to maintain stability in our enrollment levels and in our community; that it should extend the geographical reach of the University so as to shrink our too-heavy dependence on our region; and that it should seek to raise the level of academic prowess among our students. We must also strengthen our appeal to graduate students to sustain our successful programs; expect, welcome, and accommodate a rising number of adult learners, transfers and commuters; cultivate the enlargement of diversity and international representation among our students; and employ our advisory services to increase the number of credit hours taken, on average, by our students so as to bring them to graduation after an aggregate of four years of study.

We have agreed that financial stability -- understood as a function of stable enrollment and expense levels, but defined as the elimination of negative fund balances, the accumulation of reserves, and the development of an endowment in the range of $50 million -- constitutes an essential objective. We think it will help us in the achievement of all our purposes to target, as an appropriate size for the University, a stable enrollment of between 3600 and 3700 students. This will require additional cost reductions because the net revenue growth flowing from rising enrollment will be limited by higher financial aid expense.

We are in the process of emerging from a circumstance characterized by a 5-year string of operating losses totaling $4.5 million, the accumulation of $18.5 million in long-term debt, and the inheritance of a deferred maintenance liability estimated at $6 million. The most serious operating consequence of this circumstance is our lack of flexibility. We are obliged to our principal creditor to eliminate an accumulated deficit (now standing at $3.8 million) by the fiscal year 2000, and to do so by a steady stream of operating surpluses. (The only kind of windfall that can help us do this is unrestricted giving above projected levels; we must earn our way to financial stability by annual surpluses that are in addition to the $2 million required each year to service our long-term debt.) Given our deferred maintenance bill, we must produce these surpluses at the same time that we must lift our investment level in plant and equipment.

Our inflexibility also grows, in some part, from the fixed nature of our principal assets: the long term nature of our program and personnel commitments; the huge percentage of our assets invested in plant; the illiquidity in our inventories and other current assets-all these prevent us from changing our business strategy rapidly or quickly adjusting our expenses to respond to volatile enrollments or registrations.

Since this inflexibility prevents us from achieving financial stability by quick adjustments of business strategy and cost, we are forced to seek a steady and predictable flow of revenue from enrollments and unrestricted giving. Such a revenue base is available only to institutions which are clear and articulate concerning their competitive advantages and which have reduced their cost structures far enough below the revenue base to generate the resources required by carefully focused and rising investments in their principal earning assets -- in our case, the faculty and the campus itself.

As soon as we are able, we must begin adjusting the salaries of faculty and staff to levels provided by similar and competing institutions, and we must manage and develop our physical assets in consonance with our educational mission, a prudent concern for the environment, and maintenance of our leadership position in the accommodation of students and employees with disabilities. This will require that we construct and follow both a campus master plan and a long-range financial plan. We expect that neither plan will emphasize the construction of new plant, but that both will aim primarily at the reduction of our accumulated deferred maintenance liability.

Both the financial and campus master plans must define and schedule the reduction of what has come to be called our "technology deficit." Regarding the role of computers and other highly sophisticated technology in the educational process, two things are certain: that it will only continue to increase in importance, and that the extensive reach of its application will profoundly alter the methods of teaching and learning as it dissolves barriers of place, time, and personal status. In recent years no other single event has changed educational delivery systems as much as the advent of the personal computer and its legion of digital offspring. Where a single telephone once sufficed in each dormitory hallway, long distance service to each room is now assumed and easy access to Internet is nearly a prerequisite of emerging educational practices.

Some schools are courting the best and brightest with recruiting materials-print, graphics, and sound-on CD-ROM. In a matter of months, Internet has become a common tool for class projects at PLU, such as gathering data on local temperatures and sun conditions for use in a solar engineering assignment. Linking geographically distant computers is allowing collaborative, interactive problem-solving among faculty and student groups. While it is beyond the scope of this document to produce the financial and master plans themselves, the contributors to PLU 2000 have suggested a group of critical observations to those who undertake the tasks:

1. Although a growing proportion of our students are part-time and non-resident transfers and these trends are going to continue due to market and demographic forces, we ought to have a strong residential component to provide vital ballast to the campus community.
2. Although we would like to increase the proportion of 4-year enrollees, the growth potential may be better in respect to transfers, adult students, and part-timers, particularly in light of our commitment to increasing diversity, and we should try harder to draw these students into the campus community and through the liberal experience at the core of the PLU curriculum.
3. Although student services are often expensive, our reputation depends upon a ready supply of these to convey our interest in the personal welfare, curricular choices, and spiritual experiences of our students.
4. Although there is no easy way to capture the economic value of our Lutheran connection and our dedication to education for service, our financial strategies must protect and cultivate these aspects of the PLU tradition.
5. Although restructuring, including program and personnel refocusing, reduction, and substitution, must continue for the sake of financial stability, these actions can be managed effectively only by frequent and candid communication to the campus community concerning our financial circumstances and emerging organizational plans, and by acknowledged recognition that financial stability achieved through restructuring will require an amended campus culture.