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Media Relations Project Refines ANAC "Message"


In launching a national media relations project, ANAC engages the twin challenges of articulating a clear message about colleges and universities that represent a premier institutional model of higher education and creating the campus organizational frameworks that embody markers of excellence inherent to this message. The challenge begins with students, consistent with the assertion that ANAC institutions combine a commitment to student learning outcomes with the hybrid advantages of liberal arts college educational intimacy and large university student and program diversity.

The ANAC paradigm asserts further an intimately responsive relationship with the regional community around campus, borne of decades of symbiotic evolution as the campus provided new educational services to an increasingly diverse student population spawned by community economic and demographic growth. In developing graduate, professional, and liberal arts faculty expertise—yet remaining of manageable institutional size—ANAC members have become critical community resources, able to respond flexibly in using the community as a laboratory for education, research and service, while contributing ever-more powerfully to community social and economic development.

The integrative nexus of the ANAC world view enables the institution to be intentional about mobilizing its resources for the education of each student, asserting that the full range of academic, work, cocurricular, and residential experiences are contexts for learning, and searching for places where intellectual, social, cultural, political, and service dimensions of campus life intersect in ways that nurture the vitality of institutional community. Such a focus on connections encourages a scholarly professional model that combines faculty teaching, research, and service in complementary ways most beneficial to students, the institution, and the community; a curriculum conducive to integration of liberal and professional studies in ways that advance student competence and reflective capacities; and the view that liberal learning incorporates career preparation—indeed, that the liberal learning of the new century demands such integration.

The fertile seedbed for the ANAC institutional model has its origins in the imperatives of our times—a time of profound transformation in all sectors of society arising from the information revolution and a shrinking globe. To survive and thrive, institutions must learn how to raise quality, become more service responsive, and increase their cost-effectiveness simultaneously. Strategic partnerships, collaborations, and joint ventures have become the order of the day. ANAC's responsiveness and integrative strategy are made to order for this environment. All we lack is the shorthand message that will differentiate us favorably among other educational models and communicate the kind of immediate recognition that liberal arts colleges and research universities elicit by their very name, i.e., a branding akin to the transformation from "ugly duckling" to the Swan.

Understanding and communicating the message about our institutional model has implications not only for our relationships with students, donors, and the larger public. Mary Burgan's Institute admonition regarding the road to Damascus should ring in our ears. If those of us at the hundreds of comprehensive institutions around the country feel that we are really building a liberal arts college or a research university, we may not only be living an illusion, but depriving ourselves, as well, of the robust outcomes and institutional development of which our model is capable.