Background and Context

Since its founding in 1846, Bucknell University has grown from a small, sectarian regional college to a nondenominational, highly selective national liberal arts university of approximately 3,500 full-time students. The Bucknell experience now extends worldwide, from the geographic origins of students, faculty, and staff, to our study abroad and internship programs, to the residences of our alumni. For 160 years, the University has remained true to its fundamental purpose: to educate and prepare students for lives that make a difference and have a positive impact on the world.

The paths alumni have chosen to make their own impact are widely varied. For current Bucknell students living in a world of enormous possibilities, one of the major tasks of self-development is making an informed choice of a direction and purpose for their lives.

A diverse world

Our graduates today face a world vastly different from the one familiar to the institution’s founders. It is a world at once globally interconnected and interdependent, yet divided. It is a world diverse in a multiplicity of dimensions. It is a world where knowledge and information grow exponentially, and where advances in science and technology occur faster than the abilities of our social institutions to adapt. It is a world of growing complexity, driven by change and uncertainty.

To navigate this world successfully and lead lives that are personally fulfilling and contribute meaningfully to society, Bucknell graduates now require a different set of skills and abilities. They must be able to appreciate different perspectives; question established wisdom as independent and critical thinkers; imagine new possibilities; communicate effectively; efficiently manage people and resources; and be guided by personal integrity and a strong ethical compass.

What are the optimal conditions for nurturing such 21st century skills? From its inception, Bucknell has provided wide resources — both curricular and cocurricular — to encourage students to explore, do, and become many things. The students who choose Bucknell are characteristically well-rounded and intellectually gifted, with high school successes in academics, service, leadership, and athletics. Their college experience must enrich and expand those accomplishments. The opportunities for transforming experiences are enhanced within a highly engaged, residential learning and living community of students, teacher-scholars, and staff.

Deep, sustained, and highly transferrable learning

As a learning community, Bucknell fosters deep, sustained, and highly transferable learning. Faculty and staff collaborate to create an environment in which students develop intellectual maturity, habits of critical self-reflection, and aspects of character that are required for making wise and informed choices for their lives.

In the curriculum, one area of exciting opportunities lies at the intersections of different fields, where the juxtaposition of ideas and disciplinary perspectives can create new insights and new possibilities.

With its wide offerings in the liberal arts and professional programs, Bucknell provides fertile ground for crossdisciplinary initiatives that complement and enhance traditional disciplinary perspectives. This diverse curriculum, representing a fundamental institutional commitment to supporting both liberal arts and professional studies, bridges the theoretical and the practical, the abstract and the applied.

Students benefit as well from the Bucknell faculty’s commitment to original scholarship. Through exposure to the most current thought in their fields of study, students are educated in creative modes of analysis. Across the University, faculty research also creates many opportunities for students to pursue undergraduate research.

As a close-knit residential community, Bucknell is a place where undergraduates develop lasting friendships with classmates, and enduring relationships with faculty and staff which sustain them personally and professionally over a lifetime.

Bucknell basketball player signing autograph

Challenges of the 21st century

To continue to fulfill its historic purpose and provide the highest quality preparation for students who will face the challenges of the 21st century, Bucknell will require a new agility. The University will have to adapt its programs and services, augmenting traditional modes of instruction with innovative pedagogies where appropriate. On campus, cocurricular activities must support and complement in-class learning, so every teachable moment contributes to student growth and development. To be most effective, the composition of the student body, faculty, and staff must reflect the many forms of diversity that characterize American society and an intercultural world. Supporting these initiatives will require careful stewardship of existing financial and physical resources, and determined efforts to expand the University’s resource base.

Campus-based resources alone are no longer sufficient, regardless of their quality and abundance. Bucknell must utilize local, state, national, and international venues that can serve as extended laboratories for active learning. By actively engaging the world in which they will ultimately live and work, students will learn more powerfully. The University must cultivate partnerships, relationships, and opportunities to place students in structured situations with high potential for learning and growth.

Institutional commitments

Looking ahead to the requirements for a 21st century higher education, this strategic plan thus begins with a re-affirmation of certain historic institutional commitments:

To undergraduate liberal arts and professional programs in a residential college setting;
To the academic core and its centrality to the institution’s historic mission and continuing vision;
To the teacher-scholar model, which values excellent teaching and the creation and dissemination of new knowledge and other scholarly and creative works;
To a personalized education involving close student-faculty interaction;
To service to society and the preparation of students for positions of leadership and engaged public citizenship;
To the academic freedoms that encourage creative exchanges and diversity of thought;
To diversity in all its forms;
To the value of an enduring, strong and supportive community, including a residential, developmental learning environment within which students, faculty, and staff put into practice the goals of a Bucknell education every day.

The strategic planning process builds upon these historic institutional strengths and values to achieve even higher levels of quality and prominence for Bucknell. The narrative that follows presents the University’s Mission and Vision, the rationale for each of its five strategies, and the specific initiatives through which each strategy will be advanced. The key to Bucknell’s future is sustained focus on and commitment to these strategies.