Of History, Sagas, and the “k Plan”: in Quest of a Usable Past

Writing a college self-study can have two personal outcomes for the author. One is to cheer that the damn thing is over and cleanse the mind by turning to radically different matters. But the other is to get hooked on making sense of the place, where it’s come from, where it’s going, and why. For some pieces of the self-study, I found that the former outcome applied in spades. But for others, perhaps perversely, I was hooked. Most importantly, I had grown intrigued with the various indications in the self-study that our institutional identity was getting pretty fuzzy, and I wanted to learn more about why that had happened and whether it even mattered. This led to a series of questions. How did we think of ourselves prior to the K Plan? How salient was the K Plan as a source of identity in its early years, and how radical a departure was it? To the extent that the K Plan was salient, why the current fuzziness? And more broadly, what is the relationship between a strong college identity, on the one hand, and both the extent and quality of community at the college and the college’s reputation, on the other?