Fall Roundtable Central Themes
As part of its strategic planning process, FIT convened a series of roundtables on December 6-7 and December 15-16, 2004. There were two concurrent roundtable sessions on both dates, each of which included some 20 members of the FIT community. The roundtables were facilitated by Robert Zemsky and Gregory Wegner of the Learning Alliance for Higher Education. This summary document recounts central themes as articulated in the four roundtable sessions.
1. Who are the students FIT wants to teach?
As the industries change and the skills needed for entry and advancement evolve, FIT understands the need to engage in continuing dialogue about the composition of its student body. In the course of its planning the institution needs to take deliberate steps to shape its student body by the standards it defines through a continuing institutional conversation. In its planning, FIT recognizes the need for a balance between service to rapidly evolving industries and service to a diverse range of students. FIT seeks to become a truly cosmopolitan center of creative development and learning, preparing students for careers in fashion and related industries. FIT wants to teach creative, disciplined, self-starting learners with a passion for the industries that FIT serves - students who combine talent and initiative in their field with strong presentation and communication skills that ensure their success as working professionals.
FIT seeks to be a magnet of the most capable and promising students of New York City, the nation, and the world - students with an interest in a premier institution for attaining an education at the nexus of design, business, and technology, at an affordable price. FIT has a strong commitment to educating a student body that is characterized by diversity - in terms of race and ethnicity, gender, family income, geography, and nationality. FIT seeks to be an institution that serves as an accelerator of the most creative and promising students - including those whose creative potential finds expression though other means than traditional college entrance exams.
FIT ought to be an institution capable of offering both two-year degree programs for students seeking an entry-level credential and four-year and graduate programs for those seeking the broader foundations of knowledge in a field of study. In the years ahead, the institution seeks to develop more and stronger programs designed to meet the needs of students who seek four-year degree programs. It conceives itself becoming more selective in seeking the most promising and capable students in the programs it offers. FIT does not conceive this goal as compromising its commitment to diversity. It views the act of teaching students as building foundations of extended partnership with those who will become future industry professionals. FIT's graduates are a "brand communication" to the industries in which they are employed.
2. What needs to be taught and how?
FIT offers a dynamic range of educational programs serving students who represent a variety of backgrounds and educational aspirations - including non-degree courses, two-year associate degree programs, programs leading beyond the associate's degree to a four-year bachelor's degree, and a select set of graduate programs. In its degree programs as well as its continuing education programming, FIT's curriculum continually evolves in response to changes in the industries it serves. The institution is agile in its ability to develop programming that entails new and extended expertise, including programming that incorporates technology as a core element of instructional content as industries themselves become more technology driven.
FIT has the ability to serve students who seek four-year degree programs that prepare them for a lifetime of professional growth. It provides students with the learning skills to be flexible, to evolve in their career development and acquire new skills in keeping with the changes occurring in industries. FIT provides students with the grounding to learn and grow continuously through life, and to pursue careers that may not even exist at the time they are students.
FIT has the ability to develop creative programming that draws across existing domains to solve evolving needs of students and industry. As the industries FIT serves have become more complex, the educational needs of students often extend across academic programs and domains. Students in design programs increasingly seek a foundation in business from the recognition of how closely the two are entwined in the industries themselves. Technology now infuses virtually every industry and field of study, and it needs to be part of what students learn. Keeping pace with these developments, FIT is an institution that designs and implements new curriculum in a timely and dynamic way. FIT educates students for lives of learning and change, providing them with knowledge that helps them succeed in the current state of fashion and related lifestyle industries; at the same time, it provides students with the skills of critical thinking that allow them to build on their current knowledge and advance in their careers in years to come.
3. What is FIT's on-going relationship to New York City?
FIT wants to be a college that is of the community without necessarily being a traditionally configured community college. FIT's creative energy and its appeal to students are integrally related to the city of which it is part. FIT has become an increasingly powerful magnet to students of other states and countries who seek a rigorous engagement with the world of fashion and related industries. Part of the institution's appeal to these students is the very fact of its location in New York City.
One component of FIT's mission is to provide students of New York City and the surrounding counties with practical skills that enable them to gain initial employment in an industry. At the same time, FIT has come increasingly to serve students who seek a four-year degree that provides a basis for continuing professional development in a career. A significant proportion of students who seek a more thorough grounding in a four-year program come from throughout the nation and the world. The goal of serving a robust mixture of the most promising students from other regions and nations need not conflict with the institution's mission of service to New York City.
Among the most talented and promising students seeking four-year degrees, FIT tends to be more attractive to those from farther away than it is to those who live in or around New York City. One of FIT's strategic goals is to become a premier institution of first choice to more of the most creative and highest-achieving students from New York City.
Many of the fashion industries that were once centered in New York have become more dispersed. As the industries themselves become more global, FIT must extend its ties to industries in the recognition that the creative impetus for those industries emanates from many centers. Location in New York does not confer the same degree of advantage that it did 15 or 20 years ago. While there continues to be a significant industry presence in New York City, FIT must prepare its graduates for industries that are increasingly global.
4. With what industries does FIT need to initiate or foster deeper connections?
FIT offers a special kind of education to special learners interested in the fashion and creative industries. As industries evolve, FIT must strengthen its capacity to develop curriculum that addresses the current state of the industries for which it is preparing students to serve.
In 15 years, there will be industries that are flourishing that scarcely register on the horizon today; and some industries that loom large today may have diminished or evolved almost beyond recognition. FIT needs to initiate or strengthen its strategic partnerships with a range of industries.
Some of the industries are identifiable entities: * Wearable technology * Retailing * Design of technology (i.e., physical and visual design of cell phones, palm pilots) Video automation * Advertising * Industrial design * Home product design * Interior design * Merchandising (via the Web, catalog, store, etc.) * Travel industry (design of luggage, travel apparel, etc.) * Entertainment - (in its multiple aspects, particularly drama and film production; this industry vividly exemplifies the nexus of design, technology, business, and liberal arts) * Museum (visual arts management, combining a liberal arts background with business acumen and a sense of visual design: FIT's visual arts management program as an example of this)
Other areas of potential vitality were more conjectural and abstract in formulation: * "The industry of abstract thought": A mode of thinking that allows students to conceive and design products that have value * "The industry of digital literacy": Ranging from digital design to making effective use of the Internet, email, cellular technology
5. What steps must FIT take to become more student-centered?
In their general thrust, roundtable discussions indicated that FIT find their programs of study to be rigorous and engaging. The areas of student concern appear to center more broadly on the areas of facilities and services.
There is a set of definable obstacles to FIT being student centered. These include: the quality, quantity, and nature of space available for students, faculty, and for faculty-student interaction.
In some cases, becoming more student-centered requires that the spaces available to students be more accommodating to their educational needs. The library, for example, suffers both in its physical aspect and as a collection of learning materials; the space and its furnishings are not attractive, and the budget for new acquisitions is small to non-existent. Faculty generally avoid assigning research projects to students because the library's collection cannot support such work. Students have noted that to serve effectively as a common space for space for study, the library's hours need to be extended.
Another area of concern is in the quality and consistency of basic services. Students seeking to process a transaction often find themselves going from one office to another, and that they receive different answers to their questions depending on whom they ask. Improving service to students requires better channels of communication within the institution.
The quality of student advisement is a particularly important element in FIT's interaction with students; achieving a higher and more consistent level of quality in the advising process is a key aspect of serving student needs more effectively. The new student center for advisement, which will be launched this spring, constitutes an important step in this direction.
In some ways the challenge of becoming more student centered is like the challenge of another core planning goal: that is, creating a working environment that stresses mutual respect and service to faculty, staff, and administrators. The institution needs to develop a more explicit "customer focus," a sense of service not just to students but also to faculty and staff members who depend on one another in the fulfillment of their own responsibilities.
In some sense no university or college can fully succeed in addressing student demands for better service. While the institution may actively work to address a need students have identified in one period of time, it may take three to four years to implement changes yielding a given improvement, and by the time the changes are made, the students who requested them have graduated. The pace of institutional response will always lag behind students' sense of present need. While this dilemma is to some degree inevitable, it should not preclude an institutional commitment to do better in serving its students.
Serving students more effectively means providing campus facilities that meet the requirements for effective teaching and learning. In recent years the number of FTE enrollments has increased, but the space available on campus for instruction and interaction has not kept pace with this growth. In some cases classes must be taught in rooms that were designed and equipped for a very different purpose.
Another core dimension of student-centeredness is providing students the opportunity to learn with the technologies they will be expected to use in the industries themselves. Digital technology has a central role in virtually every program FIT offers to students; students need training and experience working with current technology in order to gain entry and advancement in their chosen fields. Entire pedagogies and learning styles are beginning to evolve around the premise that all students on a campus have laptop computers and digital access to common systems and information. Part of the planning process must consider what steps are needed to provide students with technologies that prepare them for the challenges they will encounter in their chosen fields.
Some of the metrics by which FIT would know it is becoming more student-centered:
* A more direct set of linkages and better communication between the various service functions students need to access, resulting in more efficient service and greater consistency in the answers students receive to administrative questions concerning such matters as course enrollment, degree status, or costs. * Increased institutional contact and interaction with students after they graduate, which is a result of a conscious cultivation of students as future colleagues and industry professionals. * Increased student satisfaction with the quality and consistency of administrative services provided, measured by periodic student surveys. * A heightened sense of campus community and interaction among students and faculty, evidenced in part by the lively use of common spaces the institution develops for such meetings and exchanges.
6. What does it mean for FIT to become a "creative hub"?
One of the recurrent themes from the initial interviews of the FIT strategic planning process is that FIT should emerge in coming years as a "creative hub for an increasingly dispersed set of industries - a nexus for the distribution of new ideas, new techniques, and the imaginative use of new technologies." The vision of FIT as a creative hub as articulated in the roundtables includes the following elements:
FIT is an institution that addresses emerging and evolving needs of the fashion and related industries in effective ways. It is an institution that serves as an agile, interactive partner with industry, engaging in continual dialogue to determine its needs for the present as well as for the more distant future. As an institution, FIT responds in timely and effective ways to changes in the industries it serves. Many of its faculty members are in demand by other institutions, including the executive education programs of key business schools, to serve as experts in the particular workings of the fashion and related lifestyle industries. FIT's active and dynamic links with industry make it a barometer of change in the fields it serves, helping to define the state of those industries and serving as a creative force to forecast its next stages.
FIT recruits faculty by criteria that are well suited to the needs of its partner industries as well as the needs of students. The institution recruits the most accomplished faculty who are recognized as thought leaders in the industries FIT serves. Because it requires a core of full-time faculty to build and sustain the momentum of distinctive achievement, FIT achieves a steadily growing proportion of full-time faculty members while at the same time taking steps to ensure that part-time faculty members feel a strong sense of engagement with the institution. Full-time and part-time faculty members share a strong commitment to achieving FIT's strategic goals.
As a creative hub, FIT conceives and organizes some of its elements as a think tank - a generator of innovative, entrepreneurial ideas that serve and help advance the fashion and related industries. FIT as a creative hub engages in dynamic partnerships - with industry, with other higher education institutions, with its own students as barometers of new directions in the fashion and related lifestyle industries. FIT creates opportunities for its students as well as its faculty to serve as intellectual capital to enhance the workings of its industry partners. In this sense the institution serves as both a receptor and a transmitter of signals between industry and members of its campus community. FIT brings students into direct engagement with industry leaders, allowing them to hear the insights and gauge the responses of young people to current and evolving themes in fashion and design. It becomes a frequent convener of conferences that draw together leaders of innovation in the fashion industries with faculty members and students. The institution works in conjunction with major universities, such as MIT, to design and create products that define the industry and help shape its future development. It taps the creative energy of industries and people in New York City, helping provide focus and coherence to those energies and helping delineate the edge of innovation in the industries with which it is aligned. FIT serves as a sounding board, helping industry leaders identify practical applications for technologies they have developed.
As a creative hub, FIT takes deliberate steps to promote itself as a dynamic center of energy and engagement. It sees itself as a creator of products that serve the industries - not just in the form of talented well-trained graduates, but also in the form of ideas that have potential applications and potential markets in the form of technology transfer.