/ Strategic Planning/The L&C Advantage

The L&C Advantage

This is our draft plan as of September 5, 2024. Please attend one of our events to engage in dialogue and feedback about the plan, or send us an email at strategicplan@lclark.edu. Please provide any comments by Thursday, October 3.

Defining Our Advantage

Lewis & Clark develops leaders equipped to address the world’s major challenges, including climate change and the erosion of civic engagement, in pursuit of a more just society. We do this by providing immersive learning experiences that foster career-ready skills and form the foundation for lifelong success.

We can best fulfill this promise by harnessing the strengths of our three schools and bolstering our identity as one institution to become greater than the sum of our parts. Doing this will enable the institution to better serve our students and communities, strengthen the institution’s value proposition, distinguish ourselves in a competitive marketplace, and position Lewis & Clark to thrive in the years and decades to come.

The following three strategic imperatives form the foundation of the L&C Advantage, which is a combination of educational experiences and opportunities that develop leaders who possess in-demand skills and are ready to make an impact on their communities and the world.

In the coming years, we must:

Develop leaders to address climate change and the erosion of civic engagement, as well as to pursue a more just society with a focus on addressing inequities in education, the law, mental health care, and global health.
We will create a new, cross-college center for environmental solutions, infuse the curriculum and campus culture with dialogic practices, and enhance opportunities for advocacy across the three schools.

Lewis & Clark students are committed and passionate. They are committed to lives and professions that make a difference. They are dedicated to creating and living in a world that is free from environmental catastrophe and climate anxiety, to creating and living in a pluralistic and fair democracy that works in the best interests of everyone, to promoting educational, legal, health care, and other societal systems that improve lives, and to a world where opportunity and inclusivity is the experience of all people.

We are one of the few institutions in the country with top-notch liberal arts, law, and graduate schools that can provide students the depth and breadth that they are seeking in order to engage in effective environmental and climate action. These strengths, plus our location in the Pacific Northwest, provide a unique advantage that we must realize fully.

Lewis & Clark prepares its students to pursue these passions and to lead in these areas after leaving our campus. We are poised to take this to the next level—to become known as a college that prepares leaders of tomorrow who will tackle problems of climate change and environmental degradation, of declining and dysfunctional civic discourse and engagement, and of educational, legal, and other systems that too often fail to meet the needs of those who need them the most. This is both an opportunity and a responsibility.

A new, interdisciplinary center for environmental solutions will leverage the work of our faculty and programs across all three colleges, enabling Lewis & Clark to have greater impact on advancing solutions, to increase in-demand learning opportunities, and to create a signature program that prepares students to succeed in growing fields, such as the green energy sector. With our internationally renowned environmental law program, an undergraduate environmental studies program that uniquely 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 the diverse perspectives of relevant stakeholders. Working in concert with the center’s academic and community-engaged programs, we will also strengthen campus sustainability initiatives, further solidifying our role as a leader among institutions of higher education.

Lewis & Clark will also set itself apart from other institutions through its commitment to preparing students for civic engagement with the skills to participate and become leaders in a pluralistic democracy. Our liberal arts education provides students with the critical thinking and problem-solving skills, knowledge base, and global perspective that empowers them to engage civically and build communities. Our law school trains lawyers who will be leaders in the legal and political systems that underpin any democracy. Our graduate school prepares the teachers, school leaders, counselors, and therapists necessary to preserve these values in our communities and in future generations. And our institution-wide Community Dialogues initiative, which seeks to make healthy, constructive dialogue an integral part of our institutional identity, uniquely positions Lewis & Clark to be a national leader in such work. At a time when the dominant trend in American politics and society is polarization, we will build on our success in creating a dialogic campus to ensure that every student, whether at the undergraduate college, graduate school, or law school, gains the skills needed to effectively interact with people who hold diverse points of view and who are differently positioned in society. By strengthening our academic and cocurricular offerings, by providing greater opportunities for students to get out into the world to experience and to engage with others, and by assuring that our institution itself lives out these values, we will be known as a place that prepares students to strengthen and promote a pluralistic, just, and inclusive democracy.

We are also uniquely positioned to prepare students to develop, sustain, and advocate for just and equitable systems involving education, mental health care, global health, and the law. The pursuit of justice is a distinctive feature of each of our schools. Many of our students enroll at Lewis & Clark because of that ethos and those opportunities. The graduate school offers a vision of public education that is inclusive, responsive to the needs of communities, especially those that have been historically marginalized, and relentlessly focused on social justice. It offers programs in counseling and therapy that help students understand that the health and well-being of individuals and families can only be understood in the broader context of a society that does not provide the same opportunities to thrive and grow to everyone. The law school, which empowers advocates in many different areas, offers a collaborative intellectual community that provides students with the legal knowledge, critical thinking and practical skills, and values that empower them to excel and accelerate progress on important issues, ranging from environmental protection, to animal rights, to the ability of small business to lift up communities and create opportunity.

At the undergraduate college, a number of departments and offices regularly offer opportunities for students to engage in advocacy work and in addressing societal problems. The Center for Social Change and Community Involvement is doing cocurricular work with local community partners; funded by the Mellon Foundation, the Center for Community and Global Health is partnering with four Portland community organizations to explore how narratives can help to heal social suffering; and the college is building on its success with the Inside-Out Prison Exchange courses. These are just a few of the pathways that give students meaningful opportunities to engage in public problem-solving. We must enhance these programs, better connect them across our three schools, and increase and deepen our partnerships to both strengthen and expand our ability to prepare greater numbers of students to tackle systemic societal challenges.
Scale our impact in Portland and the region, while increasing learning opportunities.
We will forge new community partnerships, formalize and expand the footprint of existing ones, and engage as a reciprocal community partner to amplify the impact of our collaborative relationships. We will endeavor to expand our physical presence in central Portland and establish a more accessible hub for many of our community-based initiatives.

Across all three schools, students, staff, and faculty are engaged in community-based initiatives that advance equity and justice in Portland, in the region, and beyond. Currently these programs are often housed in a particular school or office at the college and have the potential to be more impactful with deeper connections across campus.

We will reimagine our approach to community-based programs to become cross-college, and develop cross-curriculum initiatives in order to amplify our impact and provide more robust learning opportunities for our students. Our aim will be to deepen existing relationships with cornerstone community institutions and to develop new ones.

The graduate school’s Community Counseling Center provides accessible, high-quality, culturally informed mental health services to hundreds of community members annually. The center is a model training center for mental health counselors and therapists who become equipped in effective intervention techniques, gain knowledge of community needs, and achieve positive outcomes. The Oregon Health Authority recently recognized our training success through a transformative grant to facilitate the recruitment, development, and graduation of diverse, well-trained, culturally responsive, and clinically sound cohorts of mental health providers in order to help significantly expand access to health care services throughout the state. The school principal preparation program, another model of success, has partnered with Portland Public Schools to build pathways that produce leaders capable of advancing the school system’s community-developed vision, including their goals of promoting racial equity, strategic recruitment, and increasing the pool of equity-centered principal candidates. This effort is supported by a major grant from the Wallace Foundation.

The law school operates two impactful clinics located in downtown Portland: the Low-Income Taxpayer Clinic and the Small Business Legal Clinic. These organizations provide invaluable services to the community while offering substantial experiential learning opportunities for law students. A different or additional clinical space in central Portland would open up the possibility of serving Portland in new ways. Growth of our clinical and training programs will amplify our reach and increase our ability to offer educational opportunities to students across all three schools.

Programs like these are models of community-engaged reciprocity and provide a roadmap for continued development of our partnerships. We will build trustworthy relationships with the region’s preeminent organizations and seek to partner to help solve local and regional challenges.

A tangible, meaningful, and impactful step toward accomplishing these goals would be the establishment of a greater presence in central Portland, a physical location to bring us closer to our community partners. A more urban space would become a hub for productive partnerships as well as offer a living laboratory to our students, while making a contribution to strengthening and revitalizing the community to which we belong. We must move forward with pursuing such expansion with careful and deliberate urgency.
Maximize the return on investment of a Lewis & Clark education, while preparing students for purposeful lives of consequence.
We will make sure every student in all three schools has regular exposure and structured access to intentional, substantial, and immersive experiential learning opportunities, such as internships, externships, practica, on-campus work and service, research opportunities, and study abroad programs that foster career-applicable skills. We will reimagine our approach to undergraduate career preparation by adding in-demand majors, minors, concentrations, and certifications.

Our rigorous undergraduate academic preparation confers skills that are future-proof, giving our students the flexibility to adapt to inevitable changes in technology and the workforce. We must add to this a significantly more robust career preparation program and culture that starts upon matriculation and is infused across the curriculum. For the sake of prospective and current students and alumni, we must also sharpen our narrative and fluency on the immediate and lifelong career benefits and opportunities that a Lewis & Clark education provides.

We will significantly scale-up our internship placement through a collaboration between Career Center staff and College of Arts and Sciences faculty to ensure better alignment between career services and the academic enterprise. We will expand internship classes offered through the Bates Center for Entrepreneurship and Leadership and elsewhere. Every undergraduate will be guaranteed access to intentional, substantial, and immersive experiential learning opportunities while pursuing a degree from Lewis & Clark: internships, study abroad opportunities, research experiences, and service learning projects. These experiential offerings will become part of our culture, with the expectation that students will participate in more than one deep and meaningful opportunity.

The development of a global perspective is infused across our culture and part of the fabric of a Lewis & Clark education. Our study abroad experiences are at least a full semester in length, primarily led by our own faculty, and enhanced by both pre- and post-trip curriculum. Our alumni regularly report that their overseas experiences were life changing and among the most valuable of their education. We must build on the success of these programs, ensuring more students have access to them and that they continue to evolve and grow.

It is essential that more undergraduate students also have access to long-term research experiences like those offered through the Rogers Summer Science Program. We will broaden the types of research experiences available across disciplines, including in the social sciences and humanities. We will also build on the professional arts experiences offered through partnerships with fine and performing arts organizations across the city, region, and beyond.

As part of this effort, we will consider new undergraduate majors and speciality areas driven by our academic and institutional strengths and the needs of students and employers. For those who seek it, we will develop stronger pre-professional tracks that lead to careers in medicine, law, education, and business. We will also build even stronger pathways to the graduate and law schools, and strengthen alumni connections to create more intentional professional networks. The L&C Advantage is a journey for our students: building skills, opportunities, and relationships to become better people, to advance their social mobility, and to make contributions to society and in their chosen fields when they graduate.

The law school and graduate school have always been leaders in experiential learning. As professional schools, employability is a built-in focus area. Still, there are opportunities for both schools to expand and sustain stronger connections to local and regional employers. Both professional schools will continue to develop new certification programs in subject areas that are in demand, as they have successfully done.

Legal education in America is experiencing a period of significant change, with growing emphasis on skills-based and real-world training. Our ability to be a leader in this changing environment, and to accomplish this institutional imperative, relies to a significant degree on strengthening and growing our legal clinics. Programs such as the Animal Law Clinic, Crime Victim Litigation Clinic, Criminal Justice Reform Clinic, Earthrise Law Center, Global Law Alliance for Animals and the Environment, Low-Income Taxpayer Clinic, and Small Business Legal Clinic require philanthropic support and greater institutional commitment. Already a source of robust experiential learning, these programs will be positioned to serve more students and provide opportunities that extend beyond the law school. Skills-based and real-world legal training will only increase in importance to the law school as Oregon’s Supervised Practice Portfolio Examination (SPPE) is implemented as an alternative to the bar exam. We must be a leader in this work.

The graduate school’s programs combine rigorous academic work with unparalleled hands-on and field-based experiences. In practica and internships, our education, counseling, and therapy students spend nearly 200,000 hours working in Portland-area schools and mental health agencies each year, beginning the first semester of study. Our reputation for producing exceptional teachers, educational leaders, and mental health professionals means that graduates are highly sought after, and the majority of our students receive a job offer just before or shortly after completing their program. Beyond offering degree programs, licensure, endorsements, and certificates in the fields of education and counseling, continuing education opportunities are available through our Center for Community Engagement.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)

As an institution, we have a long history of upholding and enacting diversity, equity, and inclusion ideals across all three schools. We identify strongly as a caring campus that holds community as an essential value. Our students, faculty, and staff join us to be a part of a larger community: to learn together, to become better people, to contribute to society. Diversity, equity, and inclusion have been and will continue to be fundamental principles that guide our campus. Each of the three imperatives will be developed with intentional diversity, equity and inclusion priorities in mind. By embedding these priorities into the L&C Advantage, we demonstrate our commitment to building an environment where students feel respected, valued, and empowered to reach their full potential, ultimately leading to more innovative, just, and future-oriented outcomes.

Each imperative will include processes that invite a collaboration of perspectives, voices, and input. It is important that diverse representation is abundant and that opportunities to be heard, recognized, and included are readily available.
Each imperative will incorporate the use of best practices and strategies to meet the needs of a diverse student body and community. Understanding and adopting proven and reliable practices that reach across many needs is essential for enhancing overall student success. Ultimately, leveraging best practices helps create a more dynamic, supportive, and adaptable learning environment within our campus community.
Each imperative will include diversity, equity, and inclusion measures of assessment and evaluation. It is critical that initiative and project objectives and outcomes consider the impact on participants, organizers, and the communities we serve. Data that reflects an inclusive variety of feedback and outcomes and also takes steps to address potential bias inherent in assessment measures, is holistically important.
Each imperative will account for the ways its diversity, equity, and inclusion commitment is reflected in its investments in specific resources and outcomes. Aligned with the institution’s mission, efforts could include creating inclusive learning environments, providing culturally responsive support services, partnering with diverse community organizations, or increasing accessibility and opportunity for students. These investments not only enhance the campus climate but also cultivate a sense of belonging and equity for all community members to thrive.
Each imperative recognizes that the world is changing rapidly and new challenges related to diversity, equity, and inclusion are constantly evolving. We find ourselves contemplating more and more complex and intersectional moments—whether we are individuals, communities, or institutions. As a college, we will be called to continually respond to and steward our students through these times. It will require listening and learning, affirming students’ personhoods and humanity, and seeking solutions that promote opportunity, optimism, and empathy. It demands that we never stop seeking to understand each other, and that we provide students the most diverse, equitable, and inclusive educational experience possible.

How We Got Here

These strategic imperatives are the result of over a year of engaging with the Lewis & Clark community:

In early 2023, the Board of Trustees discussed Lewis & Clark’s distinctive strengths among peers, how we might advance a strategic vision, and the role of shared governance in achieving success.
In October 2023, Executive Council discussed the current strengths and weaknesses of the institution while also looking ahead at future opportunities and threats. Also, EAB presented to and led a broad conversation with the Board of Trustees on the state of the higher education sector and best practices in dynamic strategy planning.
In December 2023, a group of faculty and staff participated in a workshop facilitated by EAB to address the question, “Why would a student choose us over competitors?”
In January 2024, a group of faculty and staff participated in a presentation and exercise, led by EAB, on how the best practices of futurists can be applied to strategic planning.
In March 2024, we hosted a Big Ideas Workshop with faculty and staff. This kicked off proposals for new initiatives or for the enhancement of existing activities, with a focus on potentially transformative ideas that will resonate with donors and advance the key themes identified in the strategic planning process. Our new strategic plan will form the framework of our next comprehensive fundraising campaign, so we must think about how our themes and ideas will appeal to our prospective donors.
In April 2024, we held an in-person Strategic Plan Big Ideas and Initiatives Workshop, facilitated by EAB, for faculty and staff who’d begun formulating new plans or thinking about the enhancement of existing activities. This was an opportunity to work on translating ideas into strategic proposals due May 31.
From June to August, Executive Council completed an initial review and assessment of Big Ideas proposals and used them to inform a first draft of the strategic imperatives to be shared with faculty and staff in September.

Moving Forward

By identifying three areas of focus and investment for the institution, these imperatives lay the groundwork for us to achieve success. These are the things we must do differently or with greater scope and intensity. They are, however, only a portion of what we will achieve.

We will continue to do the things we have long done well: in-person teaching, mentoring, research and scholarship, creative endeavors, distinctive overseas study, professional education, and more.
We will continue to focus on improving key metrics of student success, such as graduation rates, retention rates, social mobility (e.g. increasing enrollment and graduation rates of students awarded Pell Grants), bar exam passage, career placement, and similar measures of student outcomes.
We will continue and expand investments in our physical infrastructure, as guided by the campus facilities plan.
We will sharpen and better promote our institutional brand. Enhancing our overall reputation will help us better achieve all of our imperatives and objectives, including increased student enrollment and retention, as well as external influence and fundraising.

Among our next steps to achieve these three imperatives:

We will finalize the Big Ideas process we launched earlier in 2024. Developing, refining, and supporting proposals that advance these imperatives will be key to our success and will frame the essential components of our next fundraising campaign.
We will launch a new comprehensive philanthropic campaign, the most ambitious in our institution’s history.

Together, we will enhance our position as a place of opportunity and connection. We will amplify our impact. We will reimagine and recommit to fulfilling our mission and values.

Our Mission

Lewis & Clark is a premier private higher education institution offering an exceptional education in an inclusive environment. By fostering critical thinking, innovation, creativity, civic engagement, and leadership, both inside and outside of the classroom, we prepare our students for lifelong success in a connected, rapidly evolving world. Lewis & Clark’s educational programs, including meaningful engagement with research and scholarship, equip students with the knowledge and skills to advance their careers, promote justice, and address urgent societal challenges facing our communities and the world.

Our Values

We believe in the power of higher education as both an individual benefit and a public good.
We strive to be a driver of socioeconomic mobility, improving opportunities for economic and social advancement, through individualized educational programs that support students from enrollment through graduation.
We are guided by a commitment to diversity, sustainability, global-mindedness, and the pursuit of a more just society.