Meeting the Challenge: - The Council of Independent Colleges

Welch Suggs
“Coupling the rhetoric of claims for the distinctive effectiveness of smaller
institutions with the growing supply of data that confirm the
truth of this rhetoric seemed crucial.”
—Richard Ekman, President, CIC, 2000–present
are responsive to such terms as ‘Ivy League,’
‘The Seven Sisters,’ ‘The Mother Universities,’
and ‘Old State U.’ However, our reaction is
not so clear to the phrase ‘Small College.’
Hill and his successors were determined to make
a big splash, not just on behalf of CASC/CIC as an
organization but for the members as well. The CIC executive
directors and presidents always wrote widely, delivered
numerous addresses, and networked relentlessly with
foundations and higher education associations. As far back
as Hurley’s presidency, the Council began collecting and
publishing research on its members to help educate donors,
potential students, and other constituents about the strengths
and characteristics of small colleges.
CASC/CIC also aggressively courted the mainstream
media to tell the members’ story. In 1959, the Council
published a 16-page supplement in The New York Times titled
“Small Colleges: An Untapped Resource.” Even though it
cost $42,000, the supplement was phenomenally successful:
one college reported receiving more than 100 requests for
information, and CASC’s own office received more than 300
letters in the first week after the supplement appeared.
In the early 1980s, CIC took a different approach
to telling the story: a modern public-information campaign,
featuring advertisements and specials in a variety of media.
The goals of the “Small Colleges Can Help You Make It Big”
campaign were to increase public knowledge about small
colleges, cultivate student enrollment and private financial
support, and reach out to high school students, their parents,
guidance counselors, community colleges, alumni, religious
organizations, and others.
Over the past two decades, CIC has continued to
refine its materials to help colleges tell their own stories.
Among other programs, it has sponsored conversations
between business executives and college leaders with the goal
of developing a shared understanding of the connections
between business and the liberal arts.
1987
CIC hosts the first
Conversation Between
Foundation Officers and
College and University
Presidents.
1988
CIC and the United Negro
College Fund launch Enhancing
Black College Leadership, a
project to improve management
practices at historically black
colleges and universities.
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