L&C Advantage Strategic Initiative Priorities 2025–26 and Strategic Imperatives Advisory Council 2.0

In May 2025, the Strategic Imperatives Advisory Council (SIAC) provided its report outlining a bold course for Lewis & Clark’s future. The report was the culmination of a yearlong effort to develop specific initiatives that would move the college toward achieving the mission and vision of the L&C Advantage, approved by the Board of Trustees in October 2024. Drawing on Big Ideas proposals from faculty and staff and other ongoing efforts in schools and departments across the institution, the SIAC report was a critical step in our ongoing and iterative process of strategic planning and implementation.

Our next step in that process is the identification of the highest priority initiatives for further development and implementation during the 2025-26 academic year. The SIAC report provides a wealth of inspiration and information about L&C’s strengths and opportunities, but we cannot do it all at once. In order to be successful, we must identify top initial priorities, focus our efforts, and develop clear and achievable goals for a realistic number of initiatives.

Beginning this fall, a reconstituted SIAC will be convened and charged with the coordination and oversight of our work on five initiatives for 2025-26. These five initiatives are our short-term strategic priorities. They have been chosen because we believe they provide the greatest opportunity for significant and meaningful progress in the coming year.

The five initiatives are:

1. Integrated Pathways Between Undergraduate, Graduate, and Law Schools (p. 36-38)

We aim to establish new academic pathways linking the College of Arts and Sciences with the Law School and Graduate School of Education and Counseling by establishing new minors in legal studies and education, while considering new majors as well. This initiative will empower undergraduate students to seamlessly transition into advanced study and careers, enriching their academic experience and enhancing professional outcomes.

Dedicated pre-law and pre-teaching professional advisors, in addition to traditional academic advisors, can best provide students with specialized guidance to optimize their career pathways, while also enhancing connectivity among our campuses. This approach is supported by evidence from our existing Teacher Pathways Program, which has successfully increased co-enrollment and collaborative interactions with the Graduate School. Replicating and expanding this model will further strengthen our institutional integration, benefiting both student experience and enrollment metrics.

Such opportunities must be heavily and strategically marketed in order to maximize their enrollment- and revenue-generating potential. In addition to creating new undergraduate programs, we must actively promote our Teacher Pathways Program with the Graduate School and the 3+3 (BA + JD) and 3+1 (BA + MSL in Environmental and Animal Law) with the Law School.

2. Albina Vision Trust Partnership, Additional Community Partnerships, and Expanded Place-Based, Community-Engaged Learning (p. 53-63)

Lewis & Clark has launched a flagship partnership with the Albina Vision Trust, a nonprofit organization dedicated to restoring the Albina District as a thriving community of families and businesses and a hub of economic opportunity. The centerpiece of the Trust’s plans is the construction of a new residential district on the current site of the Portland Public Schools’ headquarters. Through this partnership, we will anchor institutional programs, services, performances, and other offerings at the Trust’s new development, providing faculty, students, and staff with countless opportunities to teach and learn alongside our neighbors.

Albina Vision Trust and Lewis & Clark have collaboratively developed plans and an agreement for L&C to be the official higher education partner of the AVT. Over the next several years, we will work with the Trust to identify Lewis & Clark programs and services that can be delivered to the Albina community, while simultaneously preparing for the establishment of an “education hub,” a permanent facility in the new Albina development. Our reciprocal partnership with AVT will provide robust opportunities for faculty, staff, and students from CAS, the Law School, and GSEC.

While programming with AVT for the first year (2025-26) is still under discussion, it will meet several criteria:

• It will leverage available resources;
• It will provide opportunities for members of the L&C community to visit Albina, and for members of the Albina community to visit campus;
• It will represent the full breadth of the L&C community.

The medium term will require that we identify which programs at L&C are positioned to either expand their services to Albina or relocate to new locations in or near Albina. The long-term strategy is the most ambitious and far-reaching aspect of this partnership, as it will feature the creation of a physical space, where Lewis & Clark’s clinics, classes, and other offerings can be located.

As part of the curricular aspects of the partnership with AVT, we will pursue a suite of new courses at CAS—and potentially new requirements, concentrations, and certificates—that allow students to take classes alongside community members, conduct research that will serve community needs, and transcend boundaries of discipline and school. This work could fundamentally transform L&C’s relationship with Portland and the broader global community and fundamentally transform our students’ experiences. These initiatives reinforce that the liberal arts, and the graduate and law schools, are relevant to the world beyond Palatine Hill.

Finally, in addition to AVT, the college will continue exploring opportunities to expand and better support community partnerships. Many faculty, staff, and students collaborate at present with community organizations in their teaching, scholarship, internships, volunteer placements, and practice.

3. Lewis & Clark’s New Career Accelerator (p. 23-26)

We seek to set a new standard for liberal arts colleges by transforming our approach to career readiness and outcomes. By reimagining our approach to career preparation, the new, comprehensive Career Accelerator will integrate best practices and our own innovations to develop undergraduate students’ career competencies and provide students access to an exceptional range of curated, paid internships. A coordinated network of faculty, staff, and industry experts—including HR professionals and recruiters—will offer this new academic programming, directly accelerating the career readiness and social mobility of all students.

Every student, across all majors and areas of interest, should have access to a systematic progression of offerings building from career competencies, to skills courses, to internships, to a variety of applied academic minors and certificates, to a network of career opportunities and pathways. From their first days at Lewis & Clark, new students should be immersed in the integration of career competencies during New Student Orientation and in first-year seminar courses.

We have secured initial, transformational funding to turbocharge this effort. This support includes a $5 million commitment toward an endowment from Board of Trustees member Heidi Hu BS ’85 and her husband, Daniel Hsieh. Additionally, Hu and Hsieh have provided an initial $600,000 in seed funding, matched by Lewis & Clark, enabling immediate program development, staffing, and curricular expansion. Joe Hewa has joined us as the inaugural director of the Career Accelerator, reporting directly to the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

4. Data Science and New Forms of Credentialing (p. 33-36)

In an increasingly data-driven world, equipping our students with robust quantitative skills coupled with the ability to creatively solve complex challenges is essential. Lewis & Clark College is uniquely positioned to integrate the strengths of a liberal arts education with advanced technical competencies. By launching a comprehensive, interdisciplinary data science major, skills-based academic certificates or other new forms of credentialing, and revitalized technologically enhanced spaces, we can cultivate graduates who are innovative thinkers, skilled analysts, and responsible global citizens. A data science major at Lewis & Clark can distinguish itself by fully embracing an interdisciplinary approach, strongly emphasizing the applications to data analysis, not just methods in the abstract or confined to narrow applications.

Unlike at our professional schools, the College of Arts and Sciences currently has no structure for academic certificates or other mechanisms for credentialing student skills or other achievements. We should build this structure and propose a new suite of academic certificates or other credentials that offer students targeted opportunities to develop concrete, practical skills highly valued in the modern economy. Unlike traditional majors or minors, this would provide concentrated, flexible pathways for students from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to gain technical competencies that directly enhance their employability.

5. Environmental Leadership: Innovation for a Sustainable World (p. 41-51)

The fifth area of short-term focus for 2025-26 is further foundation building and initial implementation of plans for the establishment of a Center for Environmental Innovation.

We are one of the few institutions in the country with high-quality liberal arts, law, and graduate schools that together can provide students an education with the depth and breadth they seek in order to engage in effective environmental and climate action. These strengths, when combined with our location in the Pacific Northwest, provide a unique advantage that we have not realized fully. With our internationally renowned environmental law program, an undergraduate environmental studies program that draws from both the sciences and humanities, and a graduate school focused on the mental health impacts of climate anxiety, we are uniquely positioned to prepare students to work toward legal- and science-centered policy innovations informed by appreciation for diverse perspectives.

The SIAC report lays out an ambitious, multi-year plan to establish a new center that prepares the next generation of environmental leaders at all three campuses to tackle the world’s most pressing environmental issues. The proposal would establish a new Environmental Innovation Lab, establish new degree programs in data science, public health, and Earth system science, establish new certificate offerings, hire new faculty in necessary areas, host workshops and symposia, foster cross-campus curricular opportunities, and enhance on-campus sustainability efforts.

This planning work has been impressive. It is also the most extensive and long-term of the initiatives proposed by SIAC. In 2025-26, we need to establish leadership for this initiative, sharpen the vision, and better confirm and articulate the market-based rationale for this investment and the potential for fundraising success. We will further explore the case for new curricular offerings in public health and Earth system sciences (in connection with data science, which is already discussed above), as well as cross-campus curricular opportunities, and we should lay the groundwork for community-facing starter projects to prove the concept behind an Environmental Innovation Lab.

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Although the five priorities identified above are to be our specific areas of targeted institutional focus over the coming year, this is not to the exclusion of all other priorities, including other initiatives discussed in the SIAC report.

For instance, stable and ongoing funding for the Law School’s clinics is a top college-wide priority for the institution in part because the law clinics are central to the success of initiatives 2 and 5 and provide infrastructure, expertise, and community partnerships that will make these initiatives possible. And maintaining the success and momentum of the Community Dialogues program, and exploring opportunities to build it into something larger, will help advance several of these initiatives and will remain an ongoing effort.

In addition, some of the initiatives included in the report might be pursued at the school- or division-level. For instance, the Transcendence Project or York Summer Institute proposals might be worthwhile additions to programming that would help specific areas within Lewis & Clark realize their mission and attract and retain students. We can also continue to envision other new undergraduate minors and certificates. Schools, divisions or departments within the institution are encouraged to further explore those opportunities.

Next Steps

The work on each of the five initiatives will be led by a team of faculty and staff, with a team leader for each initiative. The team leaders will be members of a reconstituted Strategic Initiatives Advisory Council, which will provide coordination and oversight of the overall effort.

The initiative team leaders are:

Integrated Pathways Between Undergraduate, Graduate, and Law Schools (coleaders)

• Kathy FitzGibbon, Professor of Music and Director of Choral Activities
• Maika Yeigh, Associate Professor of Teacher Education
• David Schraub, Associate Professor of Law

Albina Vision Trust Partnership, Additional Community Partnerships, and Expanded Place-Based, Community-Engaged Learning

• Sarah Warren, Associate Professor of Sociology and Latin American Studies

Lewis & Clark’s New Career Accelerator

• Joe Hewa, Director of the Career Accelerator

Data Science and New Forms of Credentialing

• Ellen Seljan, Professor of Political Science and Program Director of Data Science

Environmental Leadership: Innovation for a Sustainable World (coleaders)

• Janice Weis, Associate Dean and Director of Environmental, Natural Resources, and Energy Law
• Elizabeth Safran, Associate Professor of Geological Science

Additional members of the SIAC may be appointed by the president. The SIAC will again be cochaired by Kathy FitzGibbon, Liz Safran, and Janice Weis.

Each of the initiative teams will include faculty and staff from across Lewis & Clark, including other members of last year’s SIAC, faculty from various academic departments, advancement staff, and others necessary to make these initiatives a reality. There will be multiple ways for faculty and staff to fit into these initiatives.

Each initiative team will be responsible for planning and spearheading implementation of their initiative, which will occur through established governance structures. Each team will develop a work plan for their initiative, which includes specific goals for the academic year, a timeline of milestones toward achievement of those goals, suggested metrics for measuring success on each initiative (looking out 3–5 years), and an assessment of fundraising opportunities.

Recognizing that the initiatives overlap and our overall strategic vision is greater than the sum of its parts, the SIAC will help to coordinate the work of the subgroups, identify and address gaps, and will provide status reports over the course of the year as requested. In May 2026, we will provide a report to the Board of Trustees regarding our progress on each of the initiatives, along with interim reports about progress over the course of the year.

Separately, we will be working on finalizing priorities for our next philanthropic campaign and identifying our highest priority capital projects. That work will be informed by these strategic priorities as we work toward achieving the vision of the L&C Advantage.

Thank you for the hard work that has gotten us to this point and for your ongoing commitment to Lewis & Clark’s future!

Executive Council
September 4, 2025