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Collaboratively Thinking
Reflections at Fifteen Years When the Colleges of the Fenway was founded in 1996, five college presidents had a vision of collaborating and sharing resources to enhance opportunities for students while slowing down the escalating costs of higher education. Then, as now, there was tremendous pressure to increase enrollments and save money. Working collaboratively offered a new approach to these challenges. At one of my very first meetings of Chief Financial Officers, Chief Academic Officers, Deans of Students, Registrars and a few others. Marjorie Bakken, then president of Wheelock College, told the group that the presidents had planted a seed of collaboration along the Fenway….now it was up to all of us to see what would bloom. Grants from the Davis Educational Foundation, the Fidelity Foundation for Non-Profit Management and the Department of Education nourished the soil, supporting collaborative faculty mini-grants in the early years, the construction of the Colleges of the Fenway Area Network, the use of BlackBoard Vista, emergency planning, and most recently the start of the Teaching and Learning Collaborative. This is a community garden and many from across the colleges have served as landscape architects and planters with the important task of tending as well as weeding. We extended our plot in 1999 to include MassArt and the collaboration between MCPHS, MassArt and Wentworth has expanded to include bookstores, dining halls and a soon-to-be finished shared health center in MassArt’s new residence hall. To be sure, there have been ideas that grew in ways we haven’t envisioned and others that have died on the vine, (or as is the case with the tomatoes at my house, the chipmunks and squirrels attacked before they could mature). Some ideas have taken more time to cultivate than others and the external environment has shifted both dramatically and subtlety in the past 15 years. The total student enrollment 15 years ago was under 10,000 students. Today it is over 18,000. The opportunities available through this collaboration have helped cultivate student interest in the member colleges. The landscape, too, has grown and changed; the Yawkey Center and the Wilkens Science Center at Emmanuel, the School of Management and Academic Building and One Palace Road at Simmons, the Brookline Campus and the Campus Center and Student Residence at Wheelock, the Matricaria Academic and Student Center and the Griffin Academic Center at MCPHS, 555 Huntington and 610 Huntington at Wentworth…and the aforementioned new residence hall at MassArt, all bringing a new look to the neighborhood. I am thrilled when I talk with both students and parents of high school students; they know what the Colleges of the Fenway is and what colleges are involved. I am heartened when the most frequent response to my describing COF to these groups and many others, is “what a great idea, more colleges should be doing things like this.” In some cases, tending this garden was as simple as opening the gates and inviting students and faculty to cross the street. It is somewhat surprising to consider that the youngest of the COF colleges, Emmanuel, was founded in 1919; that these colleges sat shoulder to shoulder, each within their own plot of land, and have only formally collaborated for 15 years. As I look at the image of our collective garden, while the work isn’t always easy, the results of the all weeding, tending and watering are well worth the effort. It also makes me wonder what new crops have yet to be realized; what new ideas will take root and grow; what new opportunities for collaboration will be cultivated in the next 15 years. As Benjamin Zander notes in The Art of Possibility, “much more is possible than people ordinarily think”. As a gardener, I am reminded of the importance and necessity of cultivating the soil as the foundation of our work to ensure a vibrant garden that will grow, change and contribute to the sustainability of the colleges for the future. Claire Ramsbottom |
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