The L&C Advantage

Defining Our Advantage

Lewis & Clark develops leaders equipped to address the world’s major challenges, including environmental degradation, a changing climate, and the decline of constructive dialogue and productive civic engagement. We do this 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 economic opportunity and lifelong success.

We can best fulfill this promise by harnessing the strengths of our three schools and bolstering our identity as one institution. Doing so will enable us 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: a combination of educational experiences and opportunities that develop leaders who possess in-demand skills and who are ready to make an impact on their communities and the world.

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In the coming years, we must:

1. Invest in programs that develop leaders to address global challenges. In particular, the most promising focus areas for Lewis & Clark are:

• environmental solutions and climate action
• strengthening constructive dialogue and productive civic engagement, and
• the pursuit of a more just society in areas of institutional strength, such as education, the law, and mental health care.

We will create a new, cross-college center for environmental solutions, infuse the curriculum and campus culture with practices that promote constructive dialogue, and enhance opportunities for advocacy across the three schools.

Lewis & Clark students are committed to lives and professions that make a positive difference in the world. They are dedicated to creating and living as part of a planet that is spared from environmental catastrophe, to creating and living in a pluralistic and fair democracy that works in everyone’s best interests, 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.

Environmental Solutions and Climate Action

A new, to-be-developed 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.

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 must realize 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.

Working in concert with the center’s academic and community-engaged programs, we will also strengthen campus sustainability initiatives, solidifying our role as a leader among institutions of higher education.

Constructive Dialogue and Productive Civic Engagement

Through its commitment to preparing students with the knowledge and skills to participate effectively and become leaders in a pluralistic democracy, Lewis & Clark will set itself apart from other institutions.
Our liberal arts education provides students with critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, a knowledge base, and global perspectives. 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 conversations an integral part of our institutional identity, uniquely positions Lewis & Clark to be a national leader in such work. We give students the capacity to see the world in all its diversity through critically examined frames of reference. We empower them to build better communities.

At a time when the dominant trend in American politics and society is polarization, we will build on our success in creating a campus where dialogue, even among those who disagree, is characterized by listening, respect, curiosity, and compassion, ensuring that every student gains the skills needed to effectively interact with people who hold diverse points of view. By strengthening our academic, experiential, 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.

Advocacy for Justice

We are also uniquely positioned to prepare students to develop, sustain, and advocate for just and equitable systems involving education, mental health care, and the law.

The pursuit of justice, in its many forms, 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 a variety of specialties, offers a collaborative intellectual community that provides students with legal knowledge, critical-thinking and practical skills, and values. This education empowers them to accelerate progress on important issues ranging from environmental protection to animal rights to the ability of small businesses to lift up communities and create opportunity.

At the undergraduate college, departments and offices 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, and the college is building on its success with the Inside-Out Prison Exchange courses. These are just a sample 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. In doing so, we will strengthen and expand our ability to prepare greater numbers of students to tackle systemic societal challenges.

2. 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. With deeper connections across campus, they have the potential to be more impactful.

We will reimagine our approach to community-based programs to become cross-college, and we will develop cross-curriculum initiatives 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 provided a transformative grant to facilitate the recruitment, development, and graduation of diverse, well-trained, culturally responsive, and clinically sound cohorts of mental health providers who 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 vital 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. Greater clinical space in central Portland would make it possible to serve 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.

Our Center for Community and Global Health, funded by the Mellon Foundation, is partnering with four Portland community organizations to explore how narratives can help to heal suffering.

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 offer a living laboratory to our students and become a hub for productive partnerships, making a contribution to strengthening and revitalizing the community to which we belong. We must consider and pursue such an expansion with careful planning and deliberate urgency.

3. Maximize the return on investment of a Lewis & Clark education, while preparing students for economic opportunity and purposeful lives of consequence. 

We will make sure every student in all three schools has regular exposure and access to structured, substantial, and immersive experiential learning opportunities that foster career-applicable skills. These include internships, externships, practica, on-campus work and service, research opportunities, and study abroad programs. We will reimagine our approach to undergraduate career preparation by adding in-demand majors, minors, concentrations, and certifications. In all three schools we will consider new programs driven by our institutional strengths and the needs of students and employers.

A Lewis & Clark education confers future-proof skills, 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 our education provides.

A degree from the College of Arts and Sciences is an investment in cultivating the full person. The critical-thinking skills and key habits of mind that a liberal arts education provides form the foundation for lifetime of development, growth, and purpose. However, every undergraduate should also 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. 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. Our strategic location in Oregon’s largest urban area, the leader in the state’s delivery of health services, banking, legal practice, high technology, and other pivotal elements of the region’s economy, provides great opportunity to expand internships and real-world experiences for students. These experiential offerings need to become part of our culture, with the expectation that students will participate in more than one deep and meaningful opportunity.

The development of global perspectives and global engagement are part of the fabric of a Lewis & Clark education. Our study abroad experiences are at least a full semester, 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 they continue to evolve and grow and that more students have access to high quality, faculty-led overseas experiences.

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 creative and professional arts experiences offered through partnerships with fine and performing arts organizations across the city, region, and beyond.

Our Center for Community and Global Health demonstrates how the liberal arts and sciences provide an ideal foundation for health-related careers. CCGH offers pre-health and pre-med advising, coursework, internship experiences, community collaborations, and scholarly activity to Lewis & Clark students with an interest in health and healing.

For undergraduates, we will develop stronger pre-professional tracks that lead to careers in medicine, law, education, and business, as well as stronger pathways to the graduate and law schools.

At the law school and graduate school, employability has always been a built-in focus. 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 and align with their missions.

Legal education in America is experiencing a period of notable change, with growing emphasis on skills-based and real-world training. Our ability to be a leader in this environment 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 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.

In all three schools we will consider new majors, programs, and certificates driven by our academic and institutional strengths and the needs of students and employers. We will strengthen student opportunities to meet with our supportive network of alumni who can share their career connections and experiences of what purposeful lives of consequence can look like. 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.

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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.

We have long recognized and valued the contributions of diversity within our community as a source of strength and an opportunity to reflect on our past and present and to propel our future. These include many aspects of identity, representation, perspective, and intersectionality. 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, 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. It is also important that data reflects an inclusive variety of feedback and outcomes and takes steps to address potential bias inherent in assessment measures.

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. This will require listening and learning, affirming students’ personhood 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.

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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 had 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 October 2024, Executive Council completed an initial review and assessment of Big Ideas proposals and used them to inform a first draft of the strategic imperatives that was shared with faculty and staff and the Board of Trustees in September. Community feedback and discussion events were used to help revise the document in late September and early October.

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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, a global focus with distinctive overseas study programs, 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.