Tuesday, July 22 to Thursday, July 24, the College of William and Mary’s board of visitors held a summer retreat at the Washington Center to discuss strategic planning for the 2025-26 academic year, the campus comprehensive plan and higher education policy changes affecting the College. While the board did not convene in its traditional eight-committee format, the full board remained together for the entire retreat, covering each committee’s business throughout sessions including fiduciary overviews, institutional strategy and emerging topics in higher education and campus development.
As the five-year strategic plan, Vision 2026, comes to a close this year, College President Katherine Rowe and board members have underscored the execution of long-standing initiatives, including current housing and dining projects, the Workday enterprise software platform and United States semiquincentennial celebrations. Rowe emphasized delivery on these initiatives to secure reaccreditation in 2026 from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges.
Wednesday, July 23, Rowe presented her core institutional goals for the next two academic years, which she says will help the College reach “national preeminence” and advance its Vision 2026 framework enacted in 2022. She emphasized that over a dozen operational priorities can be categorized under the umbrella of “maintaining strategic excellence” amid federal policy shake-ups.
Rowe addressed the wider state of uncertainty enveloping higher education in 2025, comparing the College’s need for institutional resilience to the COVID-19 pandemic while also advocating for an “evergreen” strategic plan that stays relevant as external factors change.
“My goals for the year are focused on executing these projects really well at a time of high uncertainty and a relatively low control philosophy,” Rowe said.
Rowe highlighted the implementation of Workday, the College’s new enterprise software platform, as a central strategic focus of the next year. Starting Tuesday, July 1, Workday replaced some of Banner’s functionalities related to finance and human resources with the launch of its website and mobile application. Rowe anticipates that the move to Workday, which the College has been developing in partnership with Huron Consulting Services since 2023, will be a major logistical simplification for students and faculty.
“Onboarding a new faculty staff member involves signing into eight different systems,” Rowe said. “You had to remember and use eight different platforms, now it’s one. That’s hours of human time.”
Rowe then outlined a framework created for the board by Adjunct Lecturer of Economics Peter Atwater, the Atwater Confidence Map, which she said will help the College navigate scenarios according to their level of risk and control. Concerning strategic planning in the current higher education policy landscape, board member AnnaMaria DeSalva ’90 addressed Rowe on the need for careful risk assessment, stressing the Board’s role in anticipating risk factors before they affect the College.
“The bigger point that you’re making intersects with the notion of risk in general,” DeSalva said. “I think what you’re saying is this is a high-stakes leg of what we’re doing. You have outlined some of the risks, but just an observation might be that this board may want to or need to help management stare into the risks, and that is part of our job as a board.”
Rowe touched on the board’s unique role in foreseeing external factors affecting the College due to their role as a decision-making body not enveloped in everyday affairs.
“I’ve learned from prior board members that one of the most important functions of the board is thinking outside of everyone’s head, outside William and Mary’s bubble, looking to the horizon,” Rowe said. “But the views that we have, the goals that we give, a lot of them need horizon standards in a way that those of us who are driving the operational work often cannot.”
Later that day, the board split into breakout groups by committee to cover financial execution for the upcoming fiscal year. Following these discussions, the full board reconvened to consider changes to tuition ahead of their next tuition decision in the spring of 2026. Several members of the board expressed concern over the College’s reputation for being the most expensive public institution in the Commonwealth of Virginia, even after voting to keep costs steady for five consecutive years.
“After we held tuition at zero increase for five years, we were the highest public institution in tuition before we started doing that, and after five years, we were still the highest priced public institution,” board member and chair of the committee for financial affairs C. Michael Petters MBA ’93 said. “If that’s a brand or a reputation that we want to get rid of, that’s a strategic challenge to the institution that would require a cut to tuition, a very substantial cut to tuition.”
Compared to other public institutions in the Commonwealth, the College relies more on tuition as opposed to other sources of income, such as endowments. In 2024, student tuition made up 36% of the College’s operating revenue.
Rowe highlighted the College’s small class sizes and student body as a reason for consistently having the highest tuition of any public university in Virginia. She suggested that in order to decrease tuition substantially over time, the College would need to adopt a different model comparable to much larger institutions like the University of Virginia.
“We could radically change our financial position, we could lower tuition if we tripled in size,” Rowe said. “The big difference between the public universities that are lower cost than us and high-profile is that they’re three times as large as we are. That has been a non-starter for the board for a really long time.”
Board member Laura Keehner Rigas ’01 suggested reorienting the College’s financial planning towards zero-based budgeting, a method of budgeting where the expenses for every operational cost are justified each new financial period. However, several board members raised concerns over the increased workload that zero-based budgeting would require for the administration, placing additional strain on operational efficiency.
“I think zero-based budgeting is a great tool, but it’s also one of those things that would be consuming,” Petters said. “It would be a consuming effort on the part of finance and the organization to go off and do that.”
Student Assembly President Zoe Wang ’25 MPP ’26 spoke on behalf of students concerned about a potential tuition increase, advocating that the board consider a decrease in the future.
“I might be saying the obvious when students obviously want our tuition to be lower,” she said. “I also want to say that I think students are kind of already feeling the financial impacts, I know, at least in the MPP degree, our graduate assistantships went from 20 hours to 10 hours, which has an effect on how much aid they’re receiving.”
Chief Business Officer Sean Hughes and Chief of Staff of Business Affairs Taylor Brings Ph.D ’23 presented the Campus Comprehensive Plan to the board, a plan that guides ongoing and future construction projects at the College’s multiple campuses. In September, the board will vote on whether or not to officially adopt the plan, which outlines several potential projects that would renovate existing spaces on campus as well as add new structures.
“It’s changing quickly and evolving. We need to be able to respond to challenges that we don’t know exist today, opportunities that we don’t know exist today,” Brings said.
The plan is based on student feedback as well as geological surveys of the land the College is built upon. Brings and Hughes highlighted the importance of improving accessibility and environmental sustainability. The plan introduces a “100-year vision,” which aims to address the environmental challenges brought on by climate change.
“We’re going to have to think a lot more about coastal resiliency than our colleagues who might be in the Piedmont region,” Brings said.
Proposed projects include expanding Boswell and Jones Halls, constructing additional parking facilities in the area, and creating more pedestrian-centered spaces along James Blair Hall and Landrum Drive. The presentation did not include an estimate of the costs of the proposed projects at the Williamsburg campus.
Hughes then presented schemas for development at the Batten School for Coastal and Marine Sciences at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, which he emphasized faces heightened flood and hurricane risk in tandem with sea level rise. According to Hughes, potential expansions to the Gloucester Point campus by 2040 could include new academic buildings, an administrative complex, a riverwalk and an amphitheater.
Later that afternoon, the board transitioned into a discussion on institutional strategy, with the overarching goal of reaching “national preeminence” in the future.
After recapping the College’s milestones toward accomplishing Vision 2026, board members and administrators engaged with a set of five “problem statements” developed by Rowe that relate to shaping the College’s next five-year strategic plan. Before the exercise, Rowe underscored the importance of using positioning data — metrics used to assess an institution’s strengths and weaknesses — as a tool for strategic planning.
“Strategy has to be shaped by positioning data,” she said. “And what’s new is that we now have multiple cycles of positioning data, and that hasn’t been a part of strategy development for William and Mary before. And really listening to our students, especially to our undergrads, and what they say they want.”
Following group discussions on the problem statements, several board members suggested edits which they argued would better reflect the College’s history and current trajectory on topics such as innovation, artificial intelligence and civic leadership. Provost Peggy Agouris suggested that the College focus on expanding the societal impact of professors’ research through publication in well-known academic journals, which she said could require creating new Ph.D programs to become more competitive.
“If you want to recruit somebody in biology, it’s great, and there’s a lot of research to be done, but they don’t have a Ph.D program. So a person who wants to do extremely solid things [in biology research], they’re not going to come to William and Mary.”
Chief Marketing Officer and Associate Vice President for University Marketing Heather Golden announced that 2026 will be the “Year of Civic Leadership,” following the “Year of the Environment” in 2025.
“We really want to be aligning ourselves around the [nation’s] 250th anniversary,” Golden said. “We know that faculty, students and staff really value our identity along the lines of civic leadership, and this is something that we can own based on our founding.”
Later that afternoon, Assistant Vice President for Government & External Affairs Ashley Hood introduced Julia Jester as the College’s new director of federal affairs. Her position entails strengthening relations with the federal government and advocating for federal research funding. Jester will be based full-time at the Washington Center starting this fall, after most recently working as Deputy Vice President for Government Relations and Public Policy at the Association of American Universities.
“What I’m most excited about is the key role that she’s going to play partnering with our Vice Provost for Research, Alyson Wilson, with faculty, staff and administrators across the campus, helping us to emphasize our research strengths and explore opportunities as a newly-minted R1 institution,” Hood said.
The board then passed a resolution approving the hiring of Christopher Crawford ’07 MBA ’21 as the College’s new director of internal audit, followed by three more resolutions approving the acquisition of the Matoaka Dam, law school project funding changes and amendments to the campus capital plan.
July 24, the board reconvened to discuss the College’s stance on institutional neutrality, strategic communications and navigating shifts in the higher education landscape. DeSalva addressed balancing stakeholders’ expectations through deliberate communication efforts, including those of the College’s president.
“I often define reputation as being the difference between what your stakeholders expect of you and how you’re performing against those expectations,” DeSalva said. “If your stakeholders have the wrong expectations, you’re immediately in trouble.”
Senior Associate Vice President for Communications and Chief Communications Officer Brian Whitson described Rowe’s communications strategy as a “second-day responder,” outlining her process for issuing statements on current events affecting the College.
“Any time that we’re putting out a campus-wide message, especially on something that is a sensitive issue, it’s probably come through 25 iterations,” Whitson said.
DeSalva touched on the current moment in higher education, highlighting the need for a cohesive brand strategy at a time when external factors are susceptible to change.
“This moment, this era for higher education is fascinating and extraordinarily intense because we are under a microscope,” DeSalva said. “There is so much pressure on higher education right now. But also, we have the demographic cliff, the market is changing, it’s becoming intensely more competitive.”
Later that morning, the board went into a closed session to discuss Rowe’s performance. After the closed session, the board received a presentation on the Freedom of Information Act. As a public institution, board members are subject to FOIA laws and are required to undertake regular educational sessions on the matter.
FOIA generally requires that all meetings be open to the public and that all documents are accessible. Any Virginia citizen is entitled to attend open meetings and inspect public records, including texts, emails and voice messages.
Hughes delivered a presentation on the structural needs of the President’s House and potential future uses for the space. Built in 1732, the President’s House has historically served as the official residence of the College’s president. Rowe, however, has not resided there for the past two years due to safety concerns and structural issues of the building.
Hughes expressed the need for major repairs to the President’s House. Before becoming the home of the president of the College, it served as a hospital, a library and student housing. Multiple fires and a tornado have also degraded most of the original colonial craftsmanship of the structure.
“We have a long history of fires at the President’s House,” Hughes said.
Renovation needs include repairs to the exterior stairs, gutters, floors and interior stairs. Hughes also described structural and mechanical issues, such as sagging door frames and pumps that must be replaced or repaired. The building is also not currently ADA accessible.
“It’s a significant amount of work considering the size of the structure. Everything needs to be removed and replaced, essentially,” Hughes said.
Hughes mapped out future potential uses for the President’s House and their estimated costs. To retain the structure as the residence for the president of the College, it is estimated to cost $16.6 million. Turning the space into an office or an event space would cost around $13-14 million. Hughes clarified that the actual costs will most likely be higher as the estimated figures are just based on a visual inspection of the building.
In response to Hughes’ presentation, the board passed a resolution to take steps to renovate the space. The Resolution to Preserve and Reimagine the President’s House will seek to initiate a preservation effort for the first floor of the President’s House and transform it into an event space. The board is expected to take further votes at a later date on what to do with the second floor of the building.
The board’s next meeting will be held from Wednesday, Sept. 24, to Friday, Sept. 26, in Blow Memorial Hall.
