The following documents were used by the planning team in the formulation of the values, strategies, and goals that are included in the plan. Some have been derived from the literature on organizational development in higher education, but most are derived from the work of a number of groups of Lane employees. These groups have worked as task forces and committees that were appointed to assess the needs of the college in specific areas and their work helped to create our vision of the future. Therefore, we have chosen to include them for the reader's further edification. 
The included topics are:

 
• A Comprehensive Community College
• Community
• Becoming a Learning College
• Governance
• Diversity
• Instruction
• Strategic Learning Initiative (SLI)
• Students First!
• The Faculty of the Future
• Work Environment and Employee Relations
• Internal Systems
• Technology

A Comprehensive Community College¹:

Lane fulfills the educational needs of a diverse community of learners whose interests, abilities, and circumstances vary appreciably. Lane serves learners by offering professional/technical and lower division transfer programs, career preparation and retraining, skill upgrading, personal development and enrichment, community and cultural education, and educational services for business and industry. All learners are important at Lane.

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Community

As a community of learners, Lane endorses six principles as essential to our concept of community: Purposeful: A purposeful community is a place where staff and students share goals and work together to strengthen teaching and learning.²

Open: In an open community, people feel safe to ask questions, to share ideas and experiences, and to express their individuality.³

Just: In a just community the dignity of every individual is affirmed and equality of opportunity is vigorously pursued.⁴

Disciplined: In a disciplined community each member of the community is committed and responsible for upholding the standards and expectations conducive to the common good.⁵

Caring: In a caring community, members value, nurture, and respect each other and take responsibility for the well being of others.⁶

Celebrative: In a celebrative community we joyfully affirm all members and their contributions as meaningful to the college and the larger community.⁷

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Becoming a Learning College

Lane endorses the concept of the "learning college" and accordingly subscribes to these six key principles⁸:

• The learning college creates substantive change in individual learners.
• The learning college engages learners in the learning process as full partners, assuming primary responsibility for their own choices.
• The learning college creates and offers as many options for learning as possible.
• The learning college assists learners to form and participate in collaborative learning activities.
• The learning college defines the roles of learning facilitators by the needs of the learners.
• The learning college and its learning facilitators succeed only when improved and expanded learning can be documented for its learners.

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Governance⁹

Lane's systems of internal governance ensure clear and direct communications at all levels of the organization and delineate well-defined decision-making processes that reflect stakeholder involvement, fully informed considerations, open discussion, and conformance with the vision, mission, and values of the college.

Mission Statement of College Council: Formulate and recommend policy to the President.

Mission Statement of Classified Council: Classified Council provides a means for classified staff to effectively influence college policy and decision making. The council seeks to build positive relationships among classified staff, and between classified staff and the rest of the college community. The Council seeks to join with other groups in the LCC Community, working together to promote educational excellence and the welfare of the college community.

Mission Statement of Faculty Council: Faculty Council is a campus-wide faculty forum, clarifying and synthesizing faculty thinking and is the primary campus-wide organization for faculty to exercise its established authority over the academic program. The Faculty Council is a component of shared governance along with the Classified Council and College Council. The Faculty Council acts in an advisory capacity to the LCCEA which represents faculty to the administration over questions of faculty interests and in establishing faculty authority over the academic program. To implement its function, the Faculty Council will actively solicit participation of full- and part-time faculty.

Article 1.1, Main Agreement and Memorandum of Agreement Between the Board of Education and the Lane Community College Education Association. 

Under the provisions of the Oregon PECBA, the Lane Community College Education Association, affiliated with the Oregon Education Association and the National Education Association, has been recognized as the exclusive representative of the faculty who work more than twenty percent (20%) of a full time equivalent departmental workload(s) in a single term or who work or are projected to work twenty percent (20%) or more of an annual full time equivalent departmental workload(s). 

Article 3.1 Contract and Memorandum of Agreement between Lane Community College and the LCCEF. The college recognizes the [Lane Community College Employees Federation] as the sole and exclusive bargaining agent for all bargaining unit members. 

Section 2, Bylaws of the Management Employees Group of Lane Community College. The Management Employees Group exists for the purpose of studying data and recommending proposals to the college president relating to management employment salaries, fringe benefits and working conditions and for dealing with other uses as may be deemed important by the group. 

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Diversity¹⁰

Lane Community College is committed to valuing, promoting, and supporting diversity, including diversity related to age, gender, ethnicity, cultural origin, national origin, source and level of income, familial status, marital status, sexual orientation, religion, or disability. The college will do this by providing the resources, including funding and staff, for relevant:

• Curricula
• Student recruitment, retention, and support services.
• Community services and events
• Staff recruitment, training, and retention
• Partnerships with the community

Lane is committed to serving under-represented populations and to providing services that result in equitable outcomes within the college and the community it serves. The college recognizes and celebrates diversity as a benefit to all.

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Instruction¹¹

Lane is a community of learners, dedicated to providing the highest quality learning opportunities possible within available resources to the people of the district and others who may seek them.

Lane has a commitment to excellence in education. We value the leadership of faculty in teaching and instructional planning. We believe in providing a learner-centered environment sustained by highly qualified faculty and support staff who are employed on the basis of outstanding professional merit with the cultural diversity of the college in mind. 

Lane supports the work of the Strategic Learning Initiative, a faculty led partnership involving faculty collectively through their union to engage in strategic, systemic, improvement of instruction.

Lane provides life-long learning opportunities. This means providing a continuum of learning experiences for individuals to improve their perspective, knowledge, technical expertise, and ability to communicate and to express themselves. Our responsibilities include assisting people by providing as many of these opportunities as possible within the mission of the college, and participating actively in learning opportunities ourselves to continuously improve our own professional expertise.

In designing programs that lead to degrees or certificates, Lane supports the belief that a broad, general education is an essential element of career training and citizenship, and that the humanities offer all students opportunities to learn skills that enable them to manage more skillfully the transitions between jobs and life-stages that are inevitable in these times.

Lane's programs will integrate the teaching of technological skills and interpersonal skills so students will be prepared for continuous learning in ever-changing circumstances. 

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Strategic Learning Initiative¹²

The Strategic Learning Initiative seeks to engage faculty throughout the college in strategic, systemic efforts to bring instruction and the learning environment up to and maintained at their full potential, by having fully and vigorously: 

• applied advances in understanding of the student learning process and student motivation to learn;
• applied advances in technology; 
• fit the format of instruction, instructional programs, and instructional delivery systems to the changing needs of our current students and created educationally sound formats, programs and instructional delivery systems to meet the needs of students not previously served by the college;
• created a college-supported practice of learning scholarship among the faculty to create and assess ongoing improvements in instruction; and
• through the above, achieve cost efficiencies and increases in education effectiveness which maximize resources to advance learning and instruction.

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Students First!¹³

Process Redesign seeks to translate Lane's mission, vision, and goals into results using new and strengthened cross-functional linkages ensure the focus of the redesign is on process rather than traditional organizational structures. 

• Service providers have the authority, responsibility, and accountability to disseminate accurate information and to make decisions 
• Design processes so that service requests are processed once at the point of origin
• Provide technology and training to enable easy access to timely and accurate information 

Why then does Lane need to improve services to students now? There are several compelling reasons to take action at this time: 

• Staff are working very hard to buffer students from inefficient and unnecessary processes
• Students expectations are changing, and they need to be served quickly and efficiently to remain satisfied customers 
• The higher education marketplace is increasingly competitive, requiring that lane enhance services to students to remain competitive 
• Funding patterns indicate the potential for an impending budget shortfall, requiring that lane use its resources as efficiently as possible 
• Lane faces a unique window of opportunity, with the passage of the 1995 construction bond measure

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The Faculty of the Future¹⁴

The faculty is a learning community. As members of discipline-based professional communities, faculty are self-directed and self-regulating. At the same time, within the college, faculty form a community of the whole. 

The faculty is integral to college governance. Shared governance utilizes the collective talent of all employees to promote academic excellence and justice. In this shared governance environment, authority is delegated to each party to make decisions appropriate to its responsibility and to accept consequences of those decisions. 

The faculty reflects the diversity of our larger community and society. The faculty plays a leading role in the continual process of creating amore diverse teaching staff. A diverse faculty also serves as a model of commitment and action for students and provides individual role models. 

The faculty is substantially full-time. Our commitment to students and to each other is reflected in our description of the future faculty, which is a substantially full-time faculty, able to work together to meet the challenges of the changing educational environment over time. 

Desirable Characteristics of Future Faculty include:

• Discipline Preparation
• Commitment to Enhancing Student Success
• Innovation and Creativity, 
• Communication, Collaboration, and Interpersonal Skills, 
• Leadership, 
• Commitment to the Community College, and
• Community Service. 

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Work Environment and Employee Relations¹⁵

Lane is always improving the quality of its work environment, its relations with employees, and its organizational structures in order to better serve the needs of its students. Adaptability, flexibility, and responsiveness are among the highest values of Lane's work ethic.

Lane is committed to building and maintaining a high performance work environment. Values within this environment include:

• Respect for all people and their capabilities.
• Integrity in dealing with people and issues.
• Providing excellent service to all constituents (students, co-workers, customers, and clients).
• The value of working in teams. 

New roles for managers and employees will evolve in the new work environment. Values related to these new roles are:

• Every employee at Lane can provide leadership in the achievement of Lane's goals given the opportunity to develop and use leadership skills and the willingness to assume personal accountability for the success of the organization. 
• Managers will engage in collaborative activities that assure that all work within the college is focused on maintaining excellence. Those activities include working with teams, in teams of managers, in cross-functional teams, and as individuals on special assignments.
• The team and each individual team member will be engaged in those activities that assure that the daily operating requirements and/or objectives are achieved. The team will be fully accountable for the daily operating system within established guidelines. Team members can be drawn from any employee group.

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Internal Systems¹⁶

Above all, Lane must put the learner first by shifting more and more to a learner-focused organization.

We need to enhance our service to each other; internal customers are as important to our success as students or community members. 

Change must be built into our organization. Organizations that move routine decision making and problem solving to work teams are better able to adapt to continual change.

We must organize around teams and groups that support each other without encouraging territorial barriers. In reorganizing, we must reassess workloads and reallocate personnel to balance current resources with the needs of the organization.

Our concept of a "job" must change. As we move away from narrowly defined jobs, workers will be empowered to expand their roles.

We must put more emphasis on training and socialization of Lane employees. The new Lane will require ongoing education for new knowledge, expertise and skills. 

Our ideas of management and supervision must change. As employee groups are empowered to problem-solve and make decisions in their work areas, managers must learn to be coaches, advisors and consultants.

We must rely more and more on technology to help us do our jobs. Therefore, we must facilitate cooperation and collaboration among the various units that provide and support the use of technology.

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Technology¹⁷

Lane supports the belief that technology should act in service to learning. Therefore, all components of technology planning should be measured against their impact on learner success.

The use of technology should: enhance human potential; support expanding access to educational and information services; be grounded in an awareness of social, organizational, legal, and ethical issues; and should not compromise the privacy or other rights of individuals.

Technology planning should: be a component of all college planning; include appropriate processes for ongoing evaluation and assessment; be guided by knowledge of current state-of-the-art and consideration of future trends; foster unit coordination and sharing of resources among units; include processes that maximize participation of students and staff at all levels; and at the unit level, be done in the context of college-wide planning.

Decisions about resources for technology should: be made within the framework of a 5-year strategy and annual plans; reflect the understanding that technology is a long-term investment rather than a one-time cost; recognize and address the issues of support, maintenance, and replacement as ongoing activities; and make a portion of technology resources available to encourage creativity and experimentation.

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FOOTNOTES

¹ From the work of the Strategic Planning Project Team (1998) and the founding charter of the college (1964). (Back to A Comprehensive Community College)
² Campus Life: In search of community, (1990), The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press. (Back to Community)
³ Campus Compact: A statement of vision, values, and committments, (February 1997), Student Affairs Office, Oregon State University. (Back to Community)
⁴ Ibid. (Back to Community)
⁵ Ibid. (Back to Community)
⁶ Ibid. (Back to Community)
⁷ Ibid. (Back to Community)
⁸ Terry O'Banion, Creating more Learning-centered Community Colleges, League for Innovation in the Community College, (1997). (Back to Becoming a Learning College)
⁹ From the work of the Strategic Planning Project Sub-committee on Meaningfulness. (Back to Governance)
¹⁰ From the Lane Community College Diversity Plan, (1995). (Back to Diversity)
¹¹ From the work of Instructional Services Strategic Planning and the Strategic Learning Initiative. (Back to Instruction)
¹² From the SLI Memorandum of Agreement, (1998). (Back to Strategic Learning Initiative)
¹³ From the Students First! Final Report, (1996). (Back to Students First!)
¹⁴ From the Future Faculty Task Force Report, (1995) (Back to The Faculty of the Future)
¹⁵ Based on the work of the Work Roles and Relations Summit (1997). (Back to Work Environment and Employee Relations)
¹⁶ Originating from the President's Restructuring Memorandum of May, 1994, these principles have guided the work of the Process Redesign Team and been re-affirmed through the work of the Strategic Planning Project Sub-committee on Meaningfulness, (1998). (Back to Internal Systems)
¹⁷ Based on the work of the Technology Advisory and Coordinating Team (TACT), (1997). (Back to Technology)