President Oden's Report to Parents

bingle
Wed, 21 Oct 2009 13:17:23 +0000

Here’s a brief summary of Oden’s talk during Family Weekend:

The President noted that [Oct 18th] was the 100th anniversary of the
inauguration of President Cowling who was President of Carleton from
1909-1945 and changed Carleton into a nationally recognized liberal arts
college. He spoke about three goals of President Cowling which are
still important values of the college:
(a) environmental responsibility - Cowling purchased waste farmland to create an Arboretum and was roundly criticized for doing so. The President noted a number of environmental lists in which Carleton is currently highly ranked and said a second utility-grade wind turbine will be completed this year.
(b) creating an international student body - Early in his tenure, Cowling wrote that the future of higher education needed to be more international in scope. (In 1919 the college founded the Institute of International Education and in 1922 the Carleton-in-China program began.) 9% of the freshman class are international students.
(c) hiring the very best and most diverse possible faculty - Carleton now ranks number 3 among the top 26 liberal arts colleges in the diversity of its faculty.

The most impressive statistic he gave, however, was the result of a recent
survey that was taken by a higher education resource center, located at
UCLA, which polled faculty members as to the top factors which defined
their level of satisfaction at their institutions. The study
participants were given a list of about 25 factors (e.g. pay, benefits,
accommodating spouse’s career needs, etc) to rank. On an overall basis,
the quality of the student body was in the top 5 factors for 58% of the respondents. At Carleton, 100% of the faculty listed the quality of the student body as #1!