The strengths of the educational experience provided by America's best liberal arts colleges are real and demonstrable. For a variety of social and economic reasons, however, especially in our region, access to that experience is not as widespread as it needs to be, and there are concerns about maintaining those strengths in the twenty-first century and beyond. On the other hand, there are good reasons to believe our liberal arts colleges can successfully address these issues by building on historic strengths while adapting to current and future realities. They can, in short, continue their tradition of maximizing the intellectual development, personal growth, and professional success of their students, and in the process, continue their vital contributions to our regional and national well-being.

There is no single issue, program, or opportunity that will alone determine the future vitality and relevance of Trinity or the liberal arts college. Rather than a discrete, over-arching challenge, we must address a set of interrelated "critical success factors," and we must do so with multiple initiatives.

Trinity has, in consequence, undertaken integrated, multi-year and multi-pronged initiatives. These initiatives will strengthen Trinity even further and increase its attractiveness and accessibility to a greater variety and number of potential faculty and students. In so doing they will insure a robust future for Trinity and for liberal arts colleges, which will benefit from Trinity's leadership and example and, less directly, from our initiatives themselves.

The principal initiatives are well known to members of the Trinity community. They include (1) revising the common curriculum to take full advantage of Trinity's great academic strengths and its special combination of liberal arts and professional curricula; (2) focusing on the quality of student life and insuring the greatest possible inter-animation of academic and co-curricular experiences; (3) realizing fully the educational and operational promise of advancing technology; (4) recruiting and retaining the most talented and most diverse community of faculty and students possible; (5) developing an integrated marketing/ communications plan to tell our story to the audiences most important to us and to higher education.

Underlying these initiatives are three implicit imperatives:

Above all else, the success of Trinity University and other outstanding liberal arts colleges depends on people. It is critical, therefore, that we (1) assure ourselves a continuing, expanding supply of faculty and students who want to work and study at Trinity University in particular and at liberal arts colleges more generally.

The traditional liberal arts have long, durable historical roots. They have "withstood the test of time," in part because they transcend the historic moment and in part because they have evolved as society and science have evolved. To insure their continuing vitality and relevance at Trinity and elsewhere, we must (2) preserve and nourish the timeless centrality of the liberal arts while fostering their evolutionary progress.

No liberal arts college will be entirely secure or successful if there is not a healthy sector of liberal arts colleges in American higher education. As a result, in addition to creating template programs that can be-and we believe, will be-emulated widely among America's best liberal arts colleges, (3) we must encourage critical discussion of the evolutionary possibilities in the liberal arts and the tensions- intellectual, educational, axiological-deriving from those possibilities by focusing on the liberal arts' relationship to the real world of thinking, living and working.

To have maximum effect, these will need to be ways that complement and enhance the ongoing strategic initiatives that are designed to strengthen even further our academic standing and our position within the higher education community, ways that will add to and will in turn benefit from the broader efforts to realize our institutional aspirations.