Catalyst Fund – News

Stangle family makes leadership gift to Catalyst Fund

�ֲ��ý News — Thu, 08 May 2014 03:00:18 +0000

The Stangle family, synonymous with leadership and philanthropy at �ֲ��ý, has made a significant new commitment of $750,000 to the college.

With this gift, Bruce Stangle ’70 and his wife, Emily Siegel Stangle ’72, join the multimillion dollar Catalyst Fund effort supporting major strategic initiatives at �ֲ��ý.

Emily Siegel Stangle ’72 and Bruce Stangle ’70 attend a reception at the �ֲ��ý College Museum of Art in 2012 honoring Bruce as the inaugural recipient of the Bruce Stangle Award for Distinguished Service to the �ֲ��ý Community. (Jose Leiva)

“�ֲ��ý is a jewel of a school,” said Bruce Stangle during a recent campus visit to speak in the Voices in Entrepreneurship Series. “For over 150 years it’s been training leaders. The people who graduate from �ֲ��ý make a real difference in the world, and that’s an important mission that we want to support.”

The Stangles’ gift to the Catalyst Fund, he added, is a “public show of support for what President Spencer is trying to do. She has a very tough job, and we want to lend our shoulder and financial resources to help her and help �ֲ��ý move forward.”

The Catalyst Fund supports three college initiatives:

+The Engaged Liberal Arts: Deep and sustained interactions

The “engaged liberal arts” means delivering a rigorous and highly personalized education that centers on deep and sustained interactions among students, faculty, and community. It also means engaging the forces — intellectual trends, demographic changes, and technology — that are transforming higher education and the world into which our students graduate. It means making a virtue of our scale; creating a diverse and motivated community of students, faculty, and staff; and embracing innovative and evidence-based approaches to teaching and learning.

+Purposeful Work: The heart of the liberal arts mission

Purposeful work is a college-wide initiative built on the premise that preparing students for lives of meaningful work lies at the heart of the liberal arts mission. When fully developed it will include: (1) a co-curricular program involving cycles of exploration, reflection, and skill-building; (2) practitioner-taught courses during short term, and (3) a highly-structured �ֲ��ý-specific network of internships, with the hope to guarantee every �ֲ��ý student a paid internship that is either employer- or �ֲ��ý-sponsored.

+Opportunity and Excellence: Directly out of �ֲ��ý’ history and mission

A commitment to opportunity and excellence grows directly out of �ֲ��ý’ history and mission and responds to contemporary geographic, demographic, and economic realities. It means recruiting talented and motivated students from a broad range of backgrounds, providing them with the financial aid that will enable them to enroll, and supporting them for academic and personal success once here. It also means creating a campus community and climate that capitalize on diversity and inclusion as necessary and powerful dimensions of preparing our students to live and work in an increasingly interconnected world.

“The Stangles’ gift is invaluable,” said President Clayton Spencer. “It provides much-needed support for students and faculty alike, and is an important endorsement of our strategic direction. I am profoundly thankful to them.”

Sarah R. Pearson ’75, vice president for college advancement, said that this “generous gift helps us raise our sights for �ֲ��ý and demonstrates the importance of the Catalyst Fund in providing new momentum in philanthropy.”

“Incredible value to its graduates.”

An English major at �ֲ��ý who holds a Ph.D. in applied economics from the MIT Sloan School of Management, Stangle is the co-founder of , the nation’s largest private economic consulting firm.

“I love �ֲ��ý and believe that �ֲ��ý delivers incredible value to its graduates,” he added. “Also, I think that making our philanthropy public can provide spillover benefits for �ֲ��ý by creating a demonstration effect. I’m confident that there are many others willing to give back to �ֲ��ý for the education they received.”

A �ֲ��ý trustee emeritus, he was recognized in 2011 for his many contributions to the college with the creation of the Bruce Stangle Award for Distinguished Service. Over the years, he has helped countless �ֲ��ý students and alumni navigate the business world and, among other outcomes, helped to launch the Boston �ֲ��ý Business Network.

The Stangle family’s philanthropy has included the Betty Doran Stangle Professorship in Applied Economics, named for Bruce’s mother and currently held by Professor Margaret Maurer-Fazio; a leadership gift that named, in his father’s memory, Frank’s Lounge in the student residence at 280 College St.; and the Stangle Family Fund to support research and awards in economics and law, and provide scholarship support for students.

Matt Perejda ’14 of Newry, Maine, talks with Stangle during his campus visit in March for the Voices in Entrepreneurship Series, sponsored by the college’s Purposeful Work initiative. (Sarah Crosby/�ֲ��ý College)

During his campus visit on March 5 for the Voices in Entrepreneurship Series — a program that he helped to organize — Stangle sat down with students one-on-one for a series of informational interviews, dispensing career advice and encouraging mentees to lean on the �ֲ��ý network.

In the evening, he gave a talk on “Best in Class: Investing in People and Culture at a Top Consulting Firm.”

Regularly named one of the by The Boston Globe and other media outlets, Analysis Group gets high praise for maintaining a work culture that prizes both collaboration and leadership, without putting the two at odds.

That culture, Stangle says, was imported straight from �ֲ��ý.

“�ֲ��ý entrepreneurs know how to create good work environments because it matters to us how we motivate, reward and incentivize people,” Stangle says. (Sarah Crosby/�ֲ��ý College)

“�ֲ��ý entrepreneurs know how to create good work environments because it matters to us how we motivate, reward and incentivize people,” he said.

“The �ֲ��ý culture produces people with the ability to lead, take personal responsibility and work as a team, and those personal characteristics are what my firm also tries to encourage.”

He added that the �ֲ��ý culture “made an imprint on me, as I know it has on so many other alumni. The values around hard work, inclusion, caring and excellence have been with me my entire life because of the experiences I had at �ֲ��ý and continue to have with the wider �ֲ��ý community.”

President Spencer attends today’s White House summit on college opportunity

�ֲ��ý News — Wed, 15 Jan 2014 15:42:34 +0000

�ֲ��ý President Clayton Spencer

�ֲ��ý President Clayton Spencer joins fellow U.S. higher education leaders at a White House summit on college opportunity hosted by President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama today, Jan. 16.

The event is bringing together college and university presidents and leaders from nonprofits, foundations, state governments and businesses across the country.

It is livestreamed at .

Senior administration officials scheduled to join the discussion include Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

In her first year at �ֲ��ý, Spencer announced the Excellence and Opportunity initiative, to be funded in part by the $11.5 million Catalyst Fund gift from current and past members of the �ֲ��ý College Board of Trustees.

The initiative reflects the college’s founding commitment to excellence and opportunity. “It is central to our mission and history,” Spencer said.

Established in 1855, �ֲ��ý was from its beginning open to both men and women, recruiting students of limited means and matriculating African American students from the Civil War onward.

“Today this commitment means attracting and enrolling the very best students from a broad range of backgrounds and marshaling the resources to provide generous financial aid to support their education,” says Spencer. “Our current financial aid program of more than $30 million in �ֲ��ý-funded grants per year reflects our resolve to uphold these values.”

�ֲ��ý President Clayton Spencer, who led the establishment of Harvard’s Crimson Summer Academy, speaks at the program’s 10th anniversary event on Oct. 30, 2013. (Rose Lincoln/Harvard)

Forty-four percent of �ֲ��ý students receive financial aid, and the average �ֲ��ý financial aid package (grant, loan and student employment) is more than $40,000.

Counter to national trends in student debt, �ֲ��ý financial aid is largely composed of outright grants, and students with loans graduate with an average debt load of approximately $17,000, compared to the national average of approximately $27,000.

“Any excellent liberal arts college, particularly one like �ֲ��ý that has the advantage of a strong tradition of diversity matched by equally strong resources, has an ethical obligation to provide access to people who can’t afford the very high cost it takes to mount a highly personalized residential liberal arts education,” Spencer said.

Spencer, who has served as �ֲ��ý president since 2012, is the former vice president for policy at Harvard University, where she played a central role in the reshaping and dramatic expansion of Harvard’s financial aid program and in the creation of the Crimson Summer Academy, a program that brings high-achieving, economically disadvantaged local students to study at Harvard for six weeks each summer.

Prior to Harvard, Spencer was chief education counsel for the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources in the mid-1990s under its chair, the late U.S. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy.

$11.5 million Catalyst Fund will support ‘transformational change’ at �ֲ��ý College

�ֲ��ý News — Mon, 28 Oct 2013 15:34:19 +0000

A gift of $11.5 million from current and past members of the �ֲ��ý College Board of Trustees will empower the college to strengthen core academic programs and “to position �ֲ��ý to embrace transformational change,” in the words of �ֲ��ý President Clayton Spencer.

Called the Catalyst Fund, the gift was announced Friday afternoon at a special campus gathering in Chase Hall by Michael Bonney ’80, chair of the Board of Trustees and chief executive officer of Cubist Pharmaceuticals.

Faculty members Lillian Nayder (English), Jane Costlow (environmental studies) and Tom Wenzel (chemistry) applaud the announcement of the Catalyst Fund gift. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

The Catalyst Fund, Bonney told �ֲ��ý faculty, staff and trustees who filled Chase Lounge, represents “new financial resources that �ֲ��ý can spend, over and above our annual operating budget, in the next five years to move forward on key college initiatives — not tomorrow, not next year, but now.”

He said the Catalyst Fund is proof that donor families “understand and embrace the institutional priorities that have emerged in the last year. Their remarkable, collective generosity comes…from a singular excitement and enthusiasm about the direction that �ֲ��ý is taking.”

Video: Catalyst Fund announcement

Bonney praised the donors of the Catalyst Fund for their “eagerness, almost an impatience, to get going.”

In her remarks at Friday’s event, President Spencer said that “we have urgency, we have ideas, and we have ambition.”

Chair of the Board of Trustees Michael Bonney ’80 announces the $11.5 million Catalyst Fund gift as �ֲ��ý President Clayton Spencer applauds. (Sarah Crosby/�ֲ��ý College)

But, she told the audience, “you won’t be surprised to hear that it takes resources to achieve ambitious goals. It takes resources to bring strength to strength and to position �ֲ��ý to embrace transformational change.”

Trustee Darrell Crate ’89 concluded the announcement with a champagne toast, noting that the goal of the Catalyst Fund is “relevant, pragmatic and inspired.”

In his toast, he said, “Here’s to �ֲ��ý, to the Catalyst Fund and to what is a materially stronger future for our college.”

Darrell Crate ’89, a member of the Board of Trustees, talks with Michael Murray, the college’s Charles Franklin Phillips Professor of Economics. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

The $11.5 million Catalyst Fund will be spent on programs in three areas: the Engaged Liberal Arts, Purposeful Work, and Excellence and Opportunity.

The Engaged Liberal Arts

The Engaged Liberal Arts, Spencer said, “means delivering the best possible version of the personalized, residential model of liberal arts education.”

“Students learn along the way that while information may be a click away, mastery and meaning are not.”

In this model, “professors who are active scholars teach students to interpret, experiment, imagine, analyze, explore and explain. Students learn along the way that while information may be a click away, mastery and meaning are not.” At the same time, she added, “we will embrace innovative pedagogies and strategically use new faculty appointments to shape a forward-looking curriculum that prepares students for the changing ways we experience the world.

“Innovation takes many forms,” Spencer said. “The availability of massive amounts of primary content online, advances in brain science and the ability to measure the learning process are revolutionizing the experience of teaching and learning. And technology, writ large and small, is a cultural force that is altering the way we live our lives.”

In the face of such forces, Spencer said, “�ֲ��ý will be a leader in recognizing ways that technology can bring innovation to teaching and research.”

Spencer highlighted the work of Associate Professor of Classical and Medieval Studies Margaret Imber, who is leading a project that supports faculty as “they make the critical investment of time and energy so they can engage the future right now,” Spencer said.

In collaboration with Michael Hanrahan, assistant director of curricular and research computing, Imber recently led a symposium that brought leaders in the digital humanities to campus to work with �ֲ��ý faculty “and to share the extraordinary developments available to them,” Spencer said.

“For our faculty, embracing technology requires an investment of time, which costs money, and a great willingness — which our professors possess — to master and deploy technology in ways that most help our students.”

Another force affecting higher education is the looming retirements of faculty born during the baby boom. In fact, she said, half of the �ֲ��ý faculty are eligible to retire over the next 10 years.

“Our central task as a college is to shape a forward-looking curriculum and hire the faculty to teach it,” Spencer said. “Similarly, we approach new developments in knowledge and pedagogy with zest and openness, as well as with a critical eye.”

Purposeful Work

“The goal of the Purposeful Work initiative is to embrace the reality that building a sustainable structure to help our students explore, understand and strengthen their relationship to work — in college and beyond — lies at the heart of the liberal arts mission,” Spencer said.

College graduates face the challenge of a highly competitive world where entering the work force is difficult, she said, to say nothing about finding work that connects with their interests and draws upon their best skills.

“All students…will have access to a wide range of work-relevant knowledge, connections and possibilities.”

Accordingly, �ֲ��ý will develop programming geared to the arc of its students’ four years that will help them to develop and discern their interests. Students will be able to link that process to an expanded suite of internships and other experiences that will increase their self-awareness, sharpen their skills and make them more marketable as graduates.

To support these goals, “�ֲ��ý will offer practitioner-taught courses and multi-year mentoring communities; strengthen job shadowing and apprenticeship opportunities; and create a robust internship program drawing on the interests and talents of alumni and parents,” Spencer said.

The Purposeful Work initiative, said Spencer, adds an important element to the college’s commitment to equity. It ensures that “all students, not only those with inherited networks of advancement, will have access to a wide range of work-relevant knowledge, connections and possibilities.”

Excellence and Opportunity

The commitment to Excellence and Opportunity is central to �ֲ��ý’ mission and history. “It means attracting and enrolling the very best students from a broad range of backgrounds and marshaling the resources to provide generous financial aid to support their education,” said Spencer. “And our current financial aid program reflects our commitment to these values.”

Forty-seven percent of �ֲ��ý students receive financial aid, and the average �ֲ��ý Grant is more than $35,000. Counter to national trends in student debt, �ֲ��ý financial aid is largely composed of outright grants, and students with loans graduate with an average debt load of approximately $17,000, compared to the national average of approximately $27,000.

“Any college, particularly a college like �ֲ��ý that has the advantage of having a strong tradition and strong resources, has an ethical obligation to make this experience available to people who can’t afford the very high cost it takes to mount a highly personalized residential liberal arts education,” Spencer said.