FLC’s strategic planning committee has proposed a new redrafted mission statement for the college and unintentionally, this has caused a large stir among current students.
Connor Cafferty, elected in April of 2016 to be the new student body president at FLC, sent out the new proposed mission statement out to all students in a mass email a few weeks ago to keep a commitment to transparency that he ran upon in the spring.
“The biggest change is that it removes liberal arts and bachelorette and replaces it with just a generic version of higher education. And then there is also a slight change up of words where we take out ‘preparing our students to solve complex issues in an increasingly complex world’ and changed that to say something to the effect of preparing our students to serve their communities,” said Cafferty.
The proposed mission statement actually reads “Fort Lewis College offers accessible, quality higher education to a diverse student population, preparing them to contribute to the advancements of the community they serve,” according to an email Cafferty sent out to the student body on Sept. 20.
Cafferty emphasizes that this proposed mission statement is a very rough draft to just get the feel for how the FLC community takes in the change and how students will be affected by this.
Mitch Davis, Public Affairs Officer for FLC, said the email sent out by the administration was not clear enough to the students in telling them that this redrafted mission statement is not official and that the survey sent out to students was intended to get their feedback so that the administration can adjust the mission statement accordingly.
“We needed to be more clear that this decision has not been made,” Davis said. “This is an idea, this is a rough draft, tell us what you think and then we will come up with something else. We will put your feedback into this and we can keep working on what this mission statement needs to be.”
The mission for the strategic planning committee in the change to the mission statement is to help turn the tide on the way things have been going with FLC, Cafferty said.
“Our alumni know what liberal arts is and they value it,” Davis said. “Our current students know what liberal arts is, for the most part, and they value it, but prospective students, high school students and their families really don’t know what liberal arts is. That is what the data and studies we have done in the past have said.”
Cafferty said FLC has had down enrollment for a few years now and the administration is hoping increase that enrollment and increase those programs that are in demand.
They want to help bring talented students here because many of those students have been forgoing the opportunity to come to FLC, Cafferty said.
The proposed mission statement has everything to do with reimaging FLC but will not change any foundational factors of the school like the Native American tuition waiver, Cafferty said.
“The waiver is not actually a Fort Lewis College program; the waiver is a Colorado program,” Davis said. “The responsibility with the tuition waiver rests with the state of Colorado. If there was any kind of reduction in the tuition waiver or it was eliminated, that would basically be a big funding cut to FLC. It would hurt us across the board.”
Going forward the FLC community needs to ask itself what exactly it is, Cafferty said.
“Essentially our mission statement and our core values and vision statement say that we want to be the best in the west in terms of liberal arts,” he said.
Both Cafferty and Davis agree that FLC has to figure out what exactly they want to be in the future, but still stick to the foundation of who they are.
But what exactly is the legacy that Fort Lewis has left? And how did a military post turn into a college?
Duane Smith, retired FLC professor and specialist in southwest Colorado history, said FLC has an extraordinary history that dates all the way back to 1878 when it was just a military post.
“Fort Lewis was originally a military post located west of Durango in Pagosa Springs, Colorado,” Smith said. “However, this location was not ideal because it was too far from the Ute and Navajo Reservation and because there were gambling hells in Pagosa Springs.”
Mona C. Charles, a former archeology professor at FLC, writes “Fort Lewis then moved just south of Hesperus, Colorado, for this location was much more fruitful and better suited the needs of the fort at the time.”
In 1890, with relative peace between white citizens and Native Americans, the troops began moving out of Fort Lewis, Smith said. It served temporarily as the Ute Indian Agency and became an Indian Boarding School after it was decommissioned in 1891.
Smith said Fort Lewis was an Indian Boarding School for about 20 years until 1911, when the land was then used for a high school.
According to Charles, this school came with two conditions though: that a learning institution would be on the land, and that Indian students would be admitted free of tuition. Both of these conditions are still implemented at FLC today, more than 100 years later.
This goes along with what Davis said about the tuition waiver. It is not an FLC program, it is a Colorado program so even if FLC wanted to eliminate the tuition waiver, they couldn’t.
Fort Lewis High school was expanded into a 2-year college in the 1930s, according to Charles.
In the late 1950s Fort Lewis moved to Durango and became a 4-year institution in 1962, said Smith.
Smith loves the commitment that FLC has towards Native American students, because it shows that FLC still remains true to its foundation, but acknowledges that significant changes have occurred since he began teaching here in 1964 , he said.
“I think we need to figure out what our niche is. What is it that FLC does really well that other institutions don’t do as well? Where can we stand out?” said Davis. “Are we the size that we want to be right now, do we want to be four thousand do we want to be five thousand? I think that is another question. Just how big do we want to be?”